In his recent Calling All Artists course, Rabbi Harry Brechner of the Temple Emanu-El, Victoria, BC, presented a five-session seminar on the Biblical episodes of human-divine interaction. The writers and artists responded to the discussion in their respective arts. The following is my poetic overview of the subject.
Angling for Angel: The Movie!
Fade in. (Don’t we all?)
Reel I
Up in the gods
—third balcony, the cheap seats,
the salt of the earth,
the children of paradise —
the angels sat around debating:
How many filmmakers would it take to make
a pin they could hold their dance on?
An epic challenge, that. For people of grand vision.
Faith. Conviction. Design.
Not your run of de Mille directors.
But Hark, the herald angels … sat?
Do angels sit?
We know they don’t stand because they have no feet.
What need feet when one can … waft?
But can they sit?
At just what point
does their corporeal absence begin?
Just where do they appear
to disappear?
And that’s the film, Boss. Right there.
Our life of corporeal absence.
The human con tra diction.
We feel that absence there, a phantom limb,
that’s gone but still itches.
Even when we’re feeling up to scratch.
Absent the divine, nothing is eternal
or even real: there is only us
and we are gone.
So we imagine that fuller being
our ruach, our spiritus mundane, the wind in our sails — our soul.
For that matter,
where do we start our ephemeral presence?
Where our ephemeral presence
meets their corporeal absence:
That’s where the joint is jumpin’
Reel II
In the beginning was the name.
Yahveh.
Four Hebrew letters denote the divinity.
But we read those four letters as “Adonai.”
We abandon the structure for the spirit.
Outside the temple, another remove away: “Hashem.”
For our deity is not to be sounded, measured alive.
The name falls short of the presence.
Yahveh is in, Yahveh is between, Yahveh is around
those four letters —the thing of that word, but not caught in it.
The letters point to Yahveh beyond language.
Like all the things and narrows of outrageous fortune
our life of flesh is heir to.
Beyond the airs we sing, the airs we put on,
even the airs we breathe.
Yahveh is the wind that blows through and between
the pillars on the page
adumbrated by our “Adonai.”
Written Yahveh but sounded Adonai
the divine the depth we cannot sound.
Reel III
The plot is familiar.
Man feels God. Man forgets God. Man finds God.
They live happily ever — after.
You can certainly doubt the ancients, the primitives.
What did the savages know?
No science. Scripture. Dictionary. Nothing half Siri-ous.
When their scarlet heavens erupting into light
seemed like some home of some gods.
You can doubt it — till you see it.
Pause before that raging sky
and the rays that blind and bind —but pause —
and you’re a believer.
Reel IV
Abraham met God.
Met our Av in the flesh.
Well, Abraham brought the flesh.
Yahveh was … The Voice.
Nothing stentorian, mind.
No James Earl Jones, He.
“This Is C N N.”
As if it were.
No, Hashem sounded still and small.
A weightless gravity.
Still still and small.
You know Abraham, those stories, you’ve heard them.
Yahveh sent him to Canaan to father many nations.
The rest — as they say —is histories.
Many histories. Wars and pieces.
For openers, in Der Momme Loshen:
Avraham, Itzchak und Yaakov
To find Hamacom Jacob had to leave the towns.
Eschew civilization for the wilderness.
Yeah, like Easter break.
For Adom is in the wild — the energy to tap.
The primeval contains evil?
Taint nec-ess-airily so.
Not if we don't let it loose.
Fain rein it and it’s fine.
To meet Elohim Jacob had
to sleep perchance to dream.
To prepare for Shekhinna
he curled up inside a circle of stones.
Like, to be born again? In a womb of girdling gravel?
It was more like a wall, ankle high:
a fortress as meek as he could make.
He needed — not so much protection — as
the idea of protection; the art of protection.
The art admits the dream.
Took one stone for his pillow. A stone under his head.
He had to court discomfort to connect to Shaddai?
He slept on that — idea of protection.
The hardness is all.
As he dreamt on a stone Jacob’s vision became material.
The distance between man and divine
congealed into ladder.
The angels could go up, the angels could go down,
but man would only fall.
Weighed by those flat rankling soles.
They built a stairway From Paradise.
At that our muses meretricious
have failed us ever since.
To man — the cost of feet.
Treading on his retread sole.
That’s the trip. The journey is the fall.
Now, the thing about stone.
It may be too hard for a pillow. A good pillow.
But soft enough for a monument.
Jacob’s story, Jacob’s night
lasted like stone
absorbing the imprint of the ages.
For Shakespeare, “stone” could mean a mirror.
Reflect on that.
Funny thing about God speaking to Jacob in a dream.
Making those big promises. To Jacob, to his seed.
That story happens between two other pacts,
these between Jacob and men.
First Esau steals Abraham’s blessing.
Then Laban palms off his older, plainer Leah,
in place of his promised Rachel.
Look to man for betrayal, Yahveh for fidelity.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
“He saw Esau sittin’ on a seesaw.”
Singin’ that country tooooon.
Reel V
The burning bush Moses could confront,
it was merely miracle.
But by instinct he knew he had to hide his face,
not to look at God.
You don’t see God till you die.
That’s what dying is — seeing Hashem.
Finally. Returning to our divinity.
Leaving our “life” of illusions, the veils of tears and material.
Shaking off our mortal coiled unreal.
That’s our time here, in this: from time to time
our doing time, our undoing.
Till we leave our… door …for the DOOR.
For we are such stuff as
what detachment from God is made of
rounded with the sleep that is our awakening.
That’s when the joint is jumpin’.
Te shu …. vah.
They talked a lot, God and Moses.
For Moses was slow of speech.
Fast in faith but slow of tongue.
Had to be fed a script. Then another.
Regular rewrite, man.
Had to be given some nifty tricks too
to strengthen his hand.
What we in the trade call Special Effects.
The rod, the plagues, the partly inundating sea, the tablets.
Moses had all that power, channelled that Energy.
yet was slow of speech.
Your mean like an Alabama drawl?
Like my old friend Don who’d unreel three syllables out of — “film”?
No, more like a limp,
a stumbling out of broken braking consonants
that can’t flow.
Moses’s’s stuttering mutter matters.
Yahveh fielded that flaw
to remind him —and us — he was but the instrument.
Let there be no mistaking the dancer for the tune.
Dancers come and go, frolic, fall and die. The sung air is eternal.
Reel VI
While a poem is writ by a sap like me,
just God’s word impels the tree.
Jehovah’s Word becomes the Thing.
Ours dies in the breeze or in echo.
Except in prayer.
Nothing Hannah did proved fertile
— all her words, ideas, hopes inconceivable —
until she prayed.
Then God gave Hannah a son to speak through.
Shmuel means “hearing Hashem.”
We are — how we serve.
So the last can come first. The sterile can do fertile.
And the devoted can sire the damned.
Pure old Eli bred impurity —
two corrupt sons, poor man.
Unbearable Hannah bore the ear to the Eternal’s voice.
She won Eli’s support — only to convey his loss.
The destruction of holy Eli’s unholy house was
the word
Samuel came through Hannah to deliver.
The things we make are owned by the koneh.
In what we make of ourselves we bare ourselves.
Amen to the mother.
Reel VII
Eliyahu hanovi, Eliyahu hatish'bi
Eliyahu, Eliyahu, Eliyahu hagil'adi
Eliyahu, Eliyahu, Eliyahu hagil'adi
Elijah — three IDs there but he’s really one —
Dedicated to Jehovah.
Elijah the ubiquitous. The interdenominational.
He strides through the shabbes Havdallah, the seder, the bris,
on through Christianity, on through the Quran, on on through.
Time and again Elijah confronts Ahab.
But it’s not mano a mano.
It’s not Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode.
It’s Yahveh having a Baal.
Elijah is faith.
He alone follows the Moses footpath
feels the breath whispered across his face.
The full heart, the empty chair,
as he moves across the centuries,
we wait for him still.
***
In the beginning was the credits. Again at the end.
The rest is
for all practical —and perhaps poetic —purposes
silence.
Fade out. (We will? We will … see.)
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