[Headpost; always first]
















My Lord God
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think
that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.
Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude"

And that about covers it. I do know it's one prayer that I can say with all my heart, my soul and my mind. [Originally posted Erev Rosh Hashanah 5771]

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More (HQ Video)

WOW! Been forever since I did a post. I'm in another place. more to say later.

Fragile

A challenge to suicidal student I remember from some really bad 90s TV show about a high school in California - "But if you did it, you miss out on all the wonderful struggle and tragedy that life is, don't you see?...like a really impressive, sad movie! Because...this is all there is!.." Ok, that's sick. That is a sad excuse for living, let alone not dying. So we cultivate an "objective" vantage point (that we know is only a pretense, a role-play), overlooking the only life you have, foster a quasi-Buddhist detachment from the very kishkas of the only life you have?...like serial victims of trauma describe as how they weathered their assault? In a self-saturated, technology-mediate world in increasing offering ever more dimensions to find "entertainment" by using a coping mechanism of trauma victims! (random example of recent news; high school kids engaging in ever-more impersonal sexual relationships and entanglements for fun, profit and acceptance). The capacity to "see" life from "the outside" - something materialists intuit can only be a delusion, is becoming the very, the only, privileged position offered in response to the only serious question left (as so many have pointed out) ; "Why stick around?".

About Mordechai Elon
From an email exchange with a former HaKotel student;

Understand how this looks from the outside; the rabbi is simply and clearly bisexual. End of story. BUT NO!...Insiders see someone torn by 'temptations', who just needs direction and time for reflection...which, understanding that people actually live normal lives outside, sounds almost comical in its denial (as TRUE as it might be spiritually) - since the outside world has a definition for such people - bisexual!- and a place for such people - anywhere!

From the outside, from general society, which increasingly has no parameters on sexuality aside from 'consent' and constructs of age when 'consent' is possible - Elon's situation is as simple as that; it is Orthodoxy where they complicate it all, until it is unrecognizable from the lived life of a human being, paints a life I doubt he actually lives. "Bisexual" would account only one facet of this multi-faceted person; outside of Judaism, he would simply be - and not be or have gotten into the trouble he is in. I completely understand the temptation to remove oneself from dimensional rubrics, to deny more than matter.
But does all reasoning to some degree obfuscate reality this way, is that why increasingly society claims it is impossible or pointless to quest after such higher abstractions? Of course that's a claim of Postmodernism, but an aspect of "without foundations" that's still around after post-Postmodernism is "Unthinking"; virtually anything is reasonable and justifiable by such secular, "pareve" ethics without foundations - but very few people actually think it through to that end or try - and that's just the point; you should not try to think that far - you do other things that far; feel, act, "intuit", whatever, but don't try to apply reason to something you are told is so big, anonymous, innert and impersonal as yourself and everything and everyone else...
there's nothing there to reason to - or I'd say you might risk realising how much you can realise, and then you've already dropped the red pill and there's no coming back un-tainted by redemption.

Knowing Before Whom you Stand By Knowing Where you Stand
The Divine Intellect, free of all infirmity, knows things both in their succession and in their simultaneity; it beholds the logical unfolding of things as well as their global possiblity; knowing the substances, it knows as the same time the accidents, at the level of reality - or unreality - that is theirs. Some man in the Middle Ages is walking in some town and thinks he is living "at this present moment," in which supposition he is not more deceived than ourselves of course; now if that man while crossing his street thinks deeply of God, he will immediately shed the aspect of temporal and spacial illusion that separated him from us; the street, in it's false "actuality," limits him no longer, he has come out of the deceptive instantaneity of his corporeal, spatial and psychological situation; while thinking of God he is at our side, and not only that: he is everywhere, at the side of all men, in all worlds; he is in a sense wherever one has thought of the Absolute [Footnote; This could refer to an Absolute {seemingly any viable conception of "the" Divine} still relative in itself; but this "relative Absolute" - creative and saving Being - is absolute in relation to man as such; it is relative only in divinis and in the Intellect] and wherever It will be thought of; and thus maintaining himself in the center, he is like a witness of all things; any question of unconsciousness - or of "lack of imagination" - then no longer counts, for it is as if he were endowed with a consciousness of everything, from the moment that his mind is directed on the divine Void and that thereby he becomes situated at the center of space and time.
Treasures of Buddhism, pp. 40-41

Where does the Temple begin - and where does it end?

I'm at the bottom of a ravine, having fallen from above. Multiple critical injuries, weathers nice though so I have maybe a day more than most in such straights. So I pray and pray and pray, and God comes around to offer his 'comforting presence'. I ask him; did you bring a stretcher and some way to get me out of this? Anything? He Responds, "I'm omnipotent, etc, etc - I came to do the best imaginable - nay, unimaginable - thing for you; what you really need, what you really want if you knew what I know - and that's the feeling that I'm present. I see that you have a severe infection; I'll see to it that it continues along with all the other natural processes that sustained you and challenged you to this point. Oh and you've a hole in your lung through the back. Just thought you should know".

Gee thanks I think, though the conversation contradicts the value He placed on lived human life, on life itself, on His own claims for intervention in the world from the Psalms to now. And then I think, perhaps I've thought this Godly presence to be; after all, it's a presence I merely "sense" just as so many other people sense realities in error and are thus the butt of pranks galore. Agency detection and all that; my mind is in panic mode and incapable of facilitating one of the three cardinal Fs - fight, flight or reproduce - it turns inward, fostering fantasy. Why not? Will God correct me? Will God 'get' me out of this?

The absent, unresponsive God whom so many appeal to in prayer and pain, suddenly has become, in the mouths of liberal (closeted and open) theologians, a "God" who supports precisely the thing 21st Century moderns are obsessed with - human freedom - by leaving us to every last one of our own devises and the whims of a disinterest blindly idiotic nature, while filling our minds with fantasies of HIS own devising about the efficacy of appeals to Him, leaving us only with "his fatherly, comforting presence". Isn't it so fine-tuningly-amazing that how people view this benevolently-non-relating governmental God fits so well with the very expectations that want from the world? AND YET the traditions they claim to represent or even be sanctioned by asked more of God than this God - or...thus far any God - has delivered? Can't help but suppose we're merely contort our own experiences and perceptions around these generationally shifting God views, "accommodating" fact to fantasy.

Fathers - if they're good fathers - don't leave their children to pain, suffering, even their deaths to 'teach them a lesson' if they'd gotten there by their own devising - especially not if it accidental or incidental. He moves in to save them, putting himself in harms way before they're permanently damaged or permanently inaccessible to Him, unavailable to his desired goals and aspirations for them. THAT is a father. Anything else is a smarmy, fucked up metaphor we SHOULD outgrow.

The absent, unresponsive God seems strangely like the Baby Boomer absent parent, irresponsible 'parent' who leaves their child to their own 'up-bringing' and fitting precisely what immature adolescents desire from their parents before life happens and they begin to know better. It is not - as God should know if He is who Bibles and religions say He is - either/or; the absent, lackadaisical parent or the oppressive, meddling patriarch, as much as liberal theologians may hint. They're human beings, they know better. Even those without degrees know this - without revelation. And screw this. All bets are off until those aspects of my life and my hopes and prayers are answered. You'll get nothing but rote behaviorism from me until YOU change things that I can't. God day to You, Sir.

Unanswered Prayer, Who Shall Live/Die, etc.
One response to unanswered prayer I always wait to here in any Jewish discussion is "and sometimes the answer is no". I don't know that the speaker/'audience member' who presents it cares who else may be present - the terminally ill person with a world of responsibilities left behind that go unaddressed ('ripple effect' of what was before primarily their suffering, at times for generations), the adolescent in a physically/sexually abusive home, predated on by family. One could go on and on - "sometimes the answer is no". B'emet?...that's your response?...

A Jewish answer is often that "Prayer is for changing our minds, not God's mind", which makes, well, bullshit out of all the petitionary prayers that appear in Tanach (you know...nevuah?...), in our siddurim, the now-pointless email requests for prayers and tehillim for peoples recovery...it's allllll now about "changing our selves" and not reality. And wasn't Judaism about "this world", and transforming this world? Wasn't it about God Creating and Entering this world at Sinai, Speaking to us? some will say "that was then, this is now", that kind of relationship has ended, etc. And now due to sins that were not ours, people continue to die and suffer by the billions since Korban Beit ha Mikdash, begging and pleading to their Creator and "the answer is no".

A Christian answer is from Karl Rahner - b'kitzer; if you have questions of theodicy, unanswered prayer, look to the crucifix. God sees to the torturous death of his Son, 1/3rd of himself as it were (I know Christians see it as more complex), refuses to answer his own prayers (in Gethsemani, Jesus prayers twice that God take the "cup" from him, pass the responsibilty on to another and is obviously refused, being then taken by authorities to be judged and crucified). That being said...wouldn't Jesus know what it's like to go unanswered, to hear the answer "no", to not simply experience continued persecution but torturous mutilation, public display and public death. So...if he is who he said he is - should he...well...NOT AID AND ABET EVIL in this world - the world that came out from him, the "new creation", two millenium of women, children, orphans, et al?...What happened to having "prevailed against the gates of hell" and all that? "Now they're working together?"...(Orthodox Judaism of course says "they always have been", since Christianity is Edom/Esav [though Christians were first unrelentingly persecuted by THE ROMANS...], Christianity is avodah zarah, etc, etc).

One could say "Maybe it is that he continues the tradition of answering 'no', since having experienced abandonment himself - he knows the Ultimate Plan of God's Will should go un-challenged by our...well, the petitionary prayers of his littlest and most desperate children that he act like he says he should in his own teaching and direct words...". hopefully the speaker finds his or her self trapped by defending the suffering of millions of others and evil in both the abstract and concrete. Maybe they respond with that infuriating quiet, staring, listening to suffering of others and making some "I don't have the answers" Jewish-mother facial expression and perhaps say "but I'll cry with you".

Save it. After centuries of it, it is now impotent, barren, simpering, disgusting acquiescence to evil and I'm sick of watching and living with it.

SO....Both of them - and often religion in general - now respond with "There'll be pie in the sky when you die", an adoption of the earlier heresies of Manicheanism or Gnosticism or the recourse to later lifetimes of karmic reconciliation and previous lifetimes for which one now does penance - either way, every aspect of this world is downgraded to emphasize the "veil of tears" sense; the imminence and emanance of death should be always in mind one way or another, the afterlife/next life and eternity you should look to - all in refutation and denial of core and central principles of each - and every - of their faiths ("On earth as it is in Heaven", "Judaism is about changing this world", "Dharma is about acknowledging suffering and the transcence of that which is not suffering", etc, ) to explain how so many of their faithful, despite each participating in the true faith/dharma, in true relationship to God/Divine/Satori suffering needlessly, senselessly, perennially. Without "growing" from suffering, simply dying in their resignation, desperation and despair - or worse, living in them.
Zeh hu.

More than anything, I would like to be proven and shown wrong in my life and the life of others.

And sometimes the answer is no.

And yet, the whole "changing the world" scenario of Judaism - Judaism has indeed done so. Many would claim it's the mark of something special about it. But Christianity makes the same claim about the Resurrection - and I have to come to admit, the claim of the event (who can concretely speak for its reality?), has truly transformed the world, followed by Islam. YES a world of nastiness and pain and suffering "in the name of God" came about - and Jews are quick to add "what they did to 'us'" - understandably so - but nothing compared to the anti-semitism and anti-humanism of the mass-murdering Nazi and Communist regimes.

The narrative of Israel that includes the senseless, unanswered suffering and exile of Israel over time has transformed the world.

And the narrative of the Gosple that includes the senseless, unanswered suffering of JC - and his essentially-unexpected claimed Resurrection - also transformed the world.

And I have no thought/feeling/primal scream to answer with.