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Back in the Alternative Futures class that my dear friend Kent Hoffman taught to a gaggle of us little ten-year-olds back in 1968, he taught us that word ‘juxtaposition,’ along with a lot of more important things. I think often of a little game we’d play there: pick two words, as unalike as possible. Say, for example, ‘lawn mower’ and ‘cancer.’ ‘Brainstorm’ (another everyday term I heard for the first time in Alternative Futures) about ways they might in fact be linked, until you’ve come up with a new idea that emerges from their unlikely ‘juxtaposition.’
Okay then. Picture a page of Talmud: Rabbi Alef says, “It’s a beautiful late spring morning, and my sweetie is about to mow the lawn.” Rabbi Bet says, “The world is increasingly toxic, and I know a dozen people who have cancer.” Rabbi Alef says, “We start the morning service with Ma Tovu (“How good are your dwelling places…”) Rabbi Bet says, “We conclude the service with the mourners’ Kaddish, which itself ends with a plea for peace in our fractured world.” Rabbi Gimmel (how many of you remember Gabe Shapiro’s davar Torah at his bar mitzvah, spoken through the mouth of his dummy, Gimmel? This isn’t the same guy) says, “It is a sinful waste of water to have a lawn in a time of global warming.” Rabbi Dalet says, “How can anyone be fooling around here writing about lupine and lawn mowers when there is so much suffering in the world?” Rabbi Alef says, a bit defensively, “We didn’t plant the lawn – God gave it to us! And it’s mostly dandelions anyhow.”
Somewhere many years
ago I heard a
sentence attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. I’ve written and
quoted it over and over a million times, no longer remembering, if I
ever knew, where he said it, or even if he really did. I’ve put it
at the front of the Amidah in every siddur I’ve cut and pasted
together over the years. And so this fictitious page of Talmud
continues:
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav says, or maybe he says,
or he would have wanted to say, “The essence of everything is
joy.”
The fictitious rabbis protest: “Whatever can he mean by, ‘The essence of everything is joy?’ He wouldn’t dare say that in the face of a person who is wasting from a degenerative illness!”
Rabbi Heh says timidly, “Well, maybe he means that suffering makes you stronger.”
The rabbis groan and say, “Oh, please!”
Rabbi Vav says,
“Even when there is a
loss of life or health or livelihood, the sorrow that these bring is
the mirror image of the joy of life, health and livelihood
themselves.”
Rabbi Heh whispers, “Maybe you appreciate life even more when it is fragile.”
Rabbi Alef introjects, “I just got another one of those phone calls. This stuff sounds pretty damned abstract in the face of intractable physical pain.”
Rabbi Zayin says, “Nobody who hasn’t been through these losses can say anything good about them.”
Rabbi Het says, “There’s nothing either good or bad about illness, death or loss of livelihood. These are all just things that happen in life. The essence of all of them is their lack of essence.”
Rabbi Alef says, “I just got another phone call, this time from someone trying to figure out a right position about Israel and Palestine.”
The rabbis begin to groan and quarrel among themselves. The question arises: “There may be an essence of joy in the natural progression of life and death, even including illness and debilitation. But how can one possibly find any meaning in the injuries that humans inflict on one another?”
Rabbi Tet says, “This is a kal v’chomer (from the easy case you can infer the harder one.) If illness, poverty and death mirror the joy of health and sustenance, then all the more so the passion of violence mirrors the love of family, home, land and safety. If people did not find joy in these things that they love, why would they fight when they feel that what they love is threatened?”
Rabbi Yud blows up and says, “This conversation is getting ridiculous. Our ancestors have been trying to answer these questions for as long as humans have lived on God’s earth. There is no answer and no point in asking.”
Rabbi Vav says,
“You’re probably
right. But I still wonder about that essence of joy. I can’t
exactly explain it. But I can feel that it is in there somewhere.”
************
Summer / Tisha B’av. Ease / siege. Holy mountain / devastation. “The essence of everything is joy.”
Wishing you a joyous
summer, my dear
community.
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Updated 06/30/2009 (rge)