kippur 5778: a modern piyut for kedusha

My community has the custom of breaking up the prayers of the days of awe with short, meditative reflections offered by members on parts of the prayers. Here is a transcription from my offering, inspired by -who else- Leonard Cohen who is still singing his broken psalms to soothe, to bother and provoke, and to open doors for the mind and heart.

There is a long running debate throughout the writings of  חז׳ל as to the who is greater- the angels or humankind?

In the end, in their usual counterintuitive way, the Rabbis show how people, with their limitations and passions and messiness, are superior to Angels in their static purity and spiritual rigidity.

Yom Kippur is a day which has it both ways, we are like Angels- not eating or drinking or making love like humans do-- seemingly nodding to the superiority of the heavenly creatures. We shout out the line spoken by the Angels-

Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuto Leolam Vaed—

Instead of our usual, mortally inflected whisper

We spend our day like the angels, praising and basking in the divine presence.

And yet, we know that we are not angels, we are only playing like angels. Our white shawls and kittels are a thin costume barely hiding the hard truth that yom kippur only gives us a taste of the angelic, the pure, of what living life unencumbered by passions and limitations feels like. In the incessant rounds of confession, declarations of being purified in the divine waters of the God’s mikveh, of calling out the secret identity of God’s true self, that which was revealed to Moshe Rabeinu from behind the cleft of the rock on Mt. Sinai after the depth of the Children of Israel’s depravity-

Hashem, Hashem, Compassionate Lord, a God who is long in patience, of great Kindness and Truth, who stores up kindness for millennia, who lifts up sins and evil and errors and purifies

With each passing declaration its like we rise up for air, gasping the sweet oxygen only to remember that it’s a moment of truth, of wisdom, of insight that allows us to see our lives anew, as people committed to growth, to change, to pushing ourselves and becoming who we know we can be.

And yet we also know that after the final triumphant shofar blast tonight when we begin Ma’ariv we will all declare that we are happy to be praying to a God who is compassionate and atones for sins

The cycle will begin again and we will fall again into our negative patterns, slip into our small mindedness and worse

And yet and yet: today we were higher than the angels.

I thought about this when reading Leonard Cohen’s עה׳ש poem #43 from his Songs of Mercy. (this is a precious collection of 50 modern psalms/prose poems that Leonard wrote, I believe around the time he was deep into his practice of Zen Buddhism. I read through it most years during Ellul)

I believe this can function as a modern reshut, or introduction to the kedusha like the ones composed by the great Paytanim of old to open up the prayers for their listeners.

43

HOLY IS YOUR NAME, HOLY is your work, holy are the days that return to you. Holy are the years that you uncover. Holy are the hands that are raised to you, and the weeping that is wept to you. Holy is the fire between your will and ours, in which we are refined. Holy is that which is unredeemed, covered with your patience. Holy are the souls lost in your unnaming. Holy, and shining with a great light, is every living thing, established in this world and covered with time, until your name is praised forever.

The one line I wish to consider is:

Holy is that which is unredeemed, covered with your patience.

We are not angels- we carry with us much which is unredeemed and thanks to God’s patience- erech apayim- those parts are still with us, they are part of us. Even with all that unredeemed “stuff”  we continue to grow and unfold under His wisdom, with the life energy of the world pulsing through us, giving us breath every moment- Gods patience.

We need God’s patience and we need to share it with each other, we need to share it next time anyone- but especially those close to us- bother us, hurt us, confuse us- to have patience with them, to tap into God’s patience and see them as unredeemed but part of the divine universe, just like us

I love this book and here are a few reasons: First of all the pleasure of holding a well crafted book in my hand; the ridges of the book jacket and the small size invites me to take it along, slip it in a coat pocket and read it in short sweet bursts. And then the actual content had me from its opening lines.

Djudio

Djudio is what the speakers of Ladino or Judeo-Spanish called their mother tongue, their intimate language.  This is similar to Ashkenazim referring to their “mamaloshen” as Yiddish, its what Jews speak.

Cohen lays out his central animating point right at the outset. He writes his Spanish friend in the language that was taken out of Spain by his ancestors, almost returning it to life, to the cycle of dialogue of the back and forth of conversation between native speakers even as there are words that his friend, the artist Antonio Saura can never understand, words that point to Djudio’s twisted path through history:

Karo Antonio,

Kyero eskrivirte en djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves, Antonio, lo ke es morirse en su lingua. Es Komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikeleoso sin saver porke.

Dear Antonio,

I’d like to write to you in Djudyo before the language of my ancestors is completely extinguished. You can’t imagine, Antonio, what the death agony of language is like. You seem to discover yourself alone, in silence. Your sikileoso without knowing why. (Translation by Raphael Rubinstein of Marcel Cohen’s own translation into French.)

Cohen includes a glossary at the back of the book to help his reader figure out the "foreign" words embedded in ladino. The glossary is more like an atlas of Sephardic wandering and a collection of the little things which give color and scent to everyday lives. there are words for grilled meat and flowers and steam boats and for wise men and good luck and for foolish looking foreigners.

These words Cohen leaves as they are and does not translate them when he rendered his original into French and Rubenstein the translator of the text into English follows the wisdom of this pattern. They remind the Spanish reader of their distance from a language which they can nonetheless still enjoy.

I would like to hear Saura’s response to Cohen, at least his response beyond the abstract drawings that separate the chapters of the book. Not that Cohen directs any particular questions to him or is looking for a particular response from his addressee. These are thoughts and memories that require an addressee for them to be conjured up. They take shape int he act of dialogue, by sharing them with a particular reader, especially one he respects and with whom he shares a bond, a bond to the soil and streets of Spain and to the imaginings and re-imaginings of those places and the people that lived there.

Cohen does a masterful job evoking the gradations and textures of pain, of loss and of the cloud that fills the mourner and the dreamer as they look back. He does this particularly well with his descriptions of his uncle. He was a survivor of Auschwitz who would walk around the family apartment on the outskirts of Paris in his underwear singing romanceros recounting the loves and losses of kings and queens and sailors and knights and ardent maidens. Figures that once lived in the imaginations of the woman folk of Castile, the women who would chant these ballads while kneading dough or rocking a baby to sleep. These songs were constantly re-worked by their singers and the Jews took them with them to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean where they evolved into the ballads that this dislocated man kept with him in his double or triple exile.

Again I need to thank Peter Cole for gifting me this book which he and his wife Adina Hoffman lovingly shepherded to print.  

We read this book as our final text in my summer class, “The Phoenix and the Fire: Sephardic reactions to persecution and expulsion”. The students appreciated the way that so many of the big themes of the course resonated and were reworked in this modern or post-modern essay.  I decided to end the class with Yehoram Gaon singing one of the most poignant of the popular Ladino ballads- Arboles Loran por Luvias- the trees cry for rain, and the mountains for air, but I , but I what will come of me, I will die in a foreign land. It is said that the Sephardim sang this song in Auschwitz, longing for lost homes and lost loves.

https://youtu.be/R1VAbUqJPQ4

Using a Samovar to Think about Edna

At last week’s LAJSA NYC 2018 (a bienniel regional conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association http://www.lajsa.org/fifth-regional-research-conference-2018/ ) we concluded two exciting days exploring Jews and Race in Latin America with an intimate memorial to our colleague, our friend, our teacher and mentor Edna Aizenbeg who passed away recently. Her husband and spiritual partner Yehoshua came and talked about Edna, her path towards a life of scholarship, her courage to push through intellectual boundaries and overcome obstacles. He shared great stories of a day they spent with Borges in Manhattan, taking him out to lunch and watching him gleefully eat Borscht. 

Many of her close colleagues and friends sent personal reflections and several of the participants in the conference spoke movingly of her kindness toward them, of how she would push them to write better and to think better, of her toughness and sharp eye.

I would often run into Edna and Yehoshua in New York, often I was with my kids at some cultural event. The last time was on Christmas; we met like good Jews meet on Christmass, at the the Jewish museum. She recommended the Modigliani exhibit and said she wanted to talk about an idea for a panel on Race and Colonialism for the upcoming conference. And a few months later she was no longer with us. 

We decided to read a few excerpts from Edna’s writings- we chose a short but innovative and provocative piece from 1999, “How a Samovar helped me Theorize Latin American Jewish Literature”

Prooftexts May 1999

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689545

I shared the following short reflection before reading some of the most salient parts of that very tightly conceived essay.

.  .  .

This essay is one of the first things I read by Edna, I stumbled upon it as a young grad student.  – I was studying at NYU’s dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, and although I felt welcome by my colleagues and professors, my personal religious orientation, my time spent in Israel and my lack of formal training in a classical program in Spanish lit. set me apart – at least in my own mind.

Stumbling on this essay was anchoring and energizing:

the center needs the periphery,

 the canonical can be read best, sometimes, by reading otherwise

And where is the center anyways?

These were all questions and sensibilities expressed in many of my graduate seminars, especially the most exciting ones – but Edna helped me think about these ways of reading in light of Jewish culture.

Do the jarchas belong to Spanish literature or Hebrew- are they the provenance of a Jewish studies department or a Spanish dept. – Thankfully they belong to no one; they invite multiple, polyvocal readings

Latin American Jewish Studies can speak across disciplines, it is both inside and out, and it can be a place that embraces the multi-lingual and the rich, fractured legacies that are the inheritance of a Jewish author.

Edna was a great translator of text and ideas into English. She made the particulars of a story, the nuances of a community in its historical moment come across clearly and evocatively.

I have the great honor at Yeshiva to teach a course on Jews in Latin America – almost all of my students are curious gringuitos- with nary a word of Spanish or Portuguese. I look at the syllabus and realize that I assign a lot of Edna.  I use so much of Edna’s work because it is such an eloquent interrogator of the classics—Gerchunoff and Borges- but also lesser known figures like the debauched poet of the seaside Venezuelan town of Coro- David Elias Curiel- linking (but not conflating) different eras and voices.

She also never forgot that literature is written in real time, for real people, the political and the social are never elided by literature, they pulse through the veins of even the most fantastical literary works.

“Books” AND “Bombs in Buenos Aires”! Both are real, both inform each other.

Quiero a todos los Gringos: Or how a Mexican dressed the stars of country music (and Ronald and Nancy Reagan) like Mexican vaquero divas

A block from my hotel in Nashville was a small corner boutique with a simple but oh so stylish sign in the window: Manuel. Manolo/Manuel was my dear uncle’s name, it’s a name that I love intuitively. So the name got my attention but then I looked inside and was amazed by the colors, the stitching, the curves and whirls of the jackets, and blouses and dresses in the window. The rhinestones and piping and stitched flowers fluttering on the lapels tailor-made for the stars, living, dead and striving of country music. 

I first saw the window when I went out for a quick run in the morning, the store was not yet open and I hoped to return later before the store would close- not sure of what I would find inside.

I made it a few minutes before closing, I walked inside and was greeted warmly by a young man, long blond hair, nose ring, urban-cowboy mustache. At first I just wanted to wander and then we got to talking. He brought me to the back room were all of the duds are hand sewn. I met two of the craftsman, one a young Nashville local and the other an older man from Michoacán (if I remember correctly). I found out that Manuel, the designer behind this store was also from Mexico. He began designing clothes in Los Angeles and then moved to Nashville for the more relaxed southern rhythm and in order to be even closer to the celebrities he would dress. I loved reading the framed letter from Ronald and Nancy Reagan thanking him for the ranch wear that they enjoy while on the Reagan ranch. 

It was next to a picture of Loretta Lynn in a white rhinestone Jacket receiving a presidential medal from Obama.  

Walking around this little shop I got to thinking about that most stereo-typically American style of music- country and western- and relishing in the irony that its stars knowingly or not were strutting onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and a 1,000 other stages wearing reimagined ranchero outfits, dreams of mariachis remade across the border.

The clothes are dazzling, kitchy and so much fun! There is grace and energy in the matching his and her suits and in the jackets of many colors and “nudy suits”. If I had more courage, or panache or money perhaps I would buy one of those suits- just for the thrill of it. I was tempted to buy a party of a t-shirt that was closer to my budget: rhinestone stars and stripes as backdrop Manuel declares: Amo a todos los Gringos! I love all of the Gringos. Times like these we could all use more Manuel!

I want to thank Julia Phillips Cohen and the Jewish Studies department at Vanderbilt University for hosting me in Nashville and gave me a chance to explore this fantastic city. It was wonderful to encounter passionate students and scholars interested in speaking across disciplines about big ideas in such a warm and welcoming setting. Perhaps some of the discussion of blood, race and faith in the first global age that afternoon informed this brief meditation.