I've already posted my commentary on the first weekly portion in the Torah, but I want to add a few quick thoughts.
It's often said that the story of the fall from Paradise is the story of the loss of innocence. And so it is, but I would suggest that it is the loss of "innocence" in the political sense, that is, a negative kind of innocence. What is lost is the "innocence" of the slave, that is, one without the freedom to make moral choices. It is an innocence of ignorance, an innocence of powerlessness, an innocence of victimhood.
But this innocence is not merely lost - it is actively rejected. For better or worse, this is the kind of creature we are: we insist on making our own decisions, even at the risk of making bad ones. We want to be like the Divinity in this way, "knowing good and evil". And it is indeed a mixed blessing, because the Tree of Knowledge is described as "the Tree of Knowledge - good and evil". Not "the tree of knowledge of good and evil"; that is a mistranslation. (In that case, the Hebrew should read "etz da'ath ha-tov ve-ha-ra'." But that's not what it says; it says "etz ha-da'ath, tov ve-ra'.")
With power comes responsibility. It is in our nature to seek both. To shirk the burden of justice is the worst kind of cowardice. As human beings, we are born into a covenant: we must act as creatures who know good and evil, and not close our eyes.
2004-10-10
2004-10-05
The Rose of Paradise
The Rose of Paradise: fiction by Asher Abrams
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and your desire shall be for your husband
The Shadow
With the first shafts of light piercing the land and the sky, even before she can make out the shape of the land, already there is a silent rushing, and a feel of something taking flight. And as the morning breeze begins to rustle its feathers in the treetops, she thinks that, for a moment, she can still see the Void, endless and pure, hiding behind the dome of the still-dark sky in the west. And now she can see the shadow of its wings, vanishing into the land beyond the sky. And the day comes.
From the hilltop, looking into the abyss above, she can see with her inner sight, and she can see past the veil that shrouds the world. In the form of a flower, she sees the rhythm of things: creation, emergence, communion, culmination, and rebirth. She sees all of the land, and the living things on it. She can see beyond the land to the great ocean far away, and she can see all the creatures in its depths: the fish, the whales, and the Great Serpent, Tahmatu, who has made her home in the sea-bed since the beginning of time. Looking at the moon, she sees its form reflected in the round shape of an apple hanging from a branch, and in an instant grasps the mystery that holds the apple and the moon in their places. She sees how the stars came to their places in the sky, and the secret codes they spell out in the night. As the lights in the sky travel in their courses, she counts their cycles, and their patterns grow into a glowing tree in her mind; and sometimes she can hear the tree singing to her. And beyond it all, outside and inside, wrapped in layer on layer of mystery, she sees the gateway to the Void and to the only feeling of peace she knows.
This is the story of how it all happened -- the woman and the man and the garden they left behind. And though you may have heard this story before, there are still some parts that need to be told. For storytelling is only the memory of creation: the different arts by which storytelling is practiced are changes, not from the unknown to the known, but from the unremembered to the remembered. And so it was with Eve in these early days: for there was no one to tell her stories, and all she knew was what she saw around her, and what she dreamed. And there was that which she remembered, drawn from her fading memory as from a dream, brought forth from the Wells of Silence the way a bird draws a fish from the still waters of a lake. And so, with the morning sun and the waning of the night’s mystic trance, she remembers dimly how things were at the beginning: the chaos of elements, space and time, matter and energy. This chaos gathered into a great and hollow sphere, a vessel awaiting its moment of bursting. And then the light came, and then the light became the world. And the world would always rejoice in the coming of light.
But the darkness was already there.
The Garden
The land is called Ediin. You pronounce the word with a catch in your throat, as if you are choking on dust. It’s a land of sand and mud, mountains and rocks. Stand here and you will remember that the earth is your origin, the Gate of Mercy through which you came to exist. Stand here, and you will remember that the earth is also your Gate of Mystery, that aperture through which you will pass and be seen no more.
The garden isn’t like any place you’ve ever been. Set in the wilderness of Ediin, it’s a place that speaks its own language. Outside, the land stretches into sparse grass, shrub, and ultimately desert in one direction; and in another, trees become a forbidding forest. Inside, there is comfort and fertility; the garden is a part of Ediin, but it is also apart from it. It is its own world. There is a presence that envelops the garden and gives it life, an invisible mist that spreads from the center of the garden the way the scent of a rose spreads from the blossom. The garden itself has a kind of design, even an intelligence to it. It is not a geometric plot, like the gardens you might see in a city today; it has the complexity of an organism, and it seems even to have its own mind. Its own soul.
From the far wastelands of Ediin there comes a river, and it spreads from the garden to the four corners of the world. These will trickle into streams and lakes and wetlands far away. The garden is a crossroads, a place of meetings and a link between this world and the other. To live there is to live suspended between worlds.
Eve has discovered something in the garden. It is not beautiful: it has an ungainly size and shape, and a certain unfinished feel about it. But it is human, like herself: its face seems to say I can dream, and its hands say I can do. Because it is part of what is human, she calls it Man. The man wakens, and begins to speak. I am like you, he says, and from then on his name is Adam. She is not sure, but she thinks she has dreamed the man. She wonders if she will ever wake up.
She thinks she has dreamed the man, and he thinks he has dreamed her. They call their world Paradise, which means orchard or sacred space. They listen to its voice, which does not speak in words and perhaps comes through the garden from some place far beyond. They understand that the garden is theirs, to tend and to protect. But to protect from what?
Now you should know that there were other people in the world then, too, but they were not really there, which is to say, they were not alive inside the way Eve and Adam were. So while Adam and Eve were not the only people, they were alone.
They walk for miles. They walk for days at a time, sometimes together and sometimes each alone, around the fertile land that is bounded by plains, forests, and rivers. They find a great river, too big to cross. Eve looks across it, wondering what is on the other side. Adam looks down it, wondering where it flows. She turns away, he lingers. He has seen something: a footprint, as large and as heavy as his own. Then he goes.
No one, from that time until today, has ever been so full of wonder and joy as they were in their world. Adam loves the distances, he wanders far beyond the garden into the wasteland, dreams of the day when he can scale those mountains. Eve studies the colors of the garden: red, rooted and earthy, and the blue that speaks of the sky; the warm passion of yellow and the bliss of violet. And all around, the green heartbeat of the garden, and the faint azure glow that surrounds it like an intangible membrane, visible only at the edges of sight.
Far down the river, Adam has discovered other people. He has seen them, heard them, walked among them in one of their villages. He has seen women, men, and children. He has seen people dying and giving birth. Yet they have not seen him. He has walked unnoticed, like a specter. He has spoken, shouted and cursed, stolen from them, all to no effect. So he accepts his life as a spy and learns what there is to know about them.
He learns that they are simple people: their way of seeing the world and moving in it is not like his own. They move like water, leaving no trace or disturbance, seemingly impelled by some subtle force. The animals do not fear them. For a moment, he wonders how he himself can frighten animals while remaining invisible to the villagers. Then he understands that they do not see him because they choose not to.
They live in dwellings of dried grass, with roofs of leaves and branches so insubstantial that you can see the sky through them. He can understand their speech, but it is a crude dialect of the language he speaks with Eve. They have no numbers, they can only say “one” and “many.” They know little of building, cooking, or tending plants. They do not venture beyond the boundaries of their settlements, and though they live in the wasteland, they show no inclination to explore the orchards of the land he shares with Eve. (Except, he thinks, that one who left his footprint in the mud so near our home.) They lack ambition. There is a childlike innocence about them, and they fear the dark as children do. Their presence troubles him, and he says nothing of them to Eve. Eventually he loses interest in the villagers. They have nothing to teach him.
The Night
The Spirit Throne rests in a sacred chamber in the highest heaven. It is shaped like a cube with thirty-two sides, six feet wide on the outside and six billion light-years wide on the inside. Its radiance cascades down from the most recondite reaches of Mystery into the worlds below. All of the powers and energies of the universe, and all the human souls and all the angels, emanate from it.
Before time began, there was a certain emanation from the Spirit Throne. This emanation would not seek the higher places as the other angels did; it sought the lower reaches, which all the others despised. It sought, it circled, it flew in a spiral around the sphere of the universe from one pole to the other. Like an angled serpent, a twisting serpent, it went in search of the lower worlds. And when time began and the womb of the universe burst with being, this angel was expelled through the Gate of Mercy and descended into flesh. Long before Eve walked the earth, even before the sleepwalking villagers, this angel took form as a woman. The first woman: the angel of the night, and her name was Lilith.
Night comes, spreading its net over all the living. It shields the world from the brightness of the sun and subdues the light of the numberless stars. If you have ever been in a desert on a clear and moonless night, you know how the light of the stars can frost the surface of the land with a shadowless, silver crust, how it can take you out of your senses and make you forget who you are. And as the moon walks its course, forever falling back towards the sun from night to night, you can reach out to it and feel it pull you away from the world. Eve can feel the pulse of the moon as surely as Adam feels the sun’s heat, and she has named every one of the six thousand stars her eyes can see. By the black light of the unseen maiden moon, she bathes in the water of the longest river, the one that flows from the barren heights of Ediin, and branches out and nourishes the world.
This is the part Eve never tells Adam, the part she will spend the rest of her life trying to forget.
She has seen another woman in the garden at night. The woman is an angel, tall and strong, with long dark hair and powerful shoulders and wings. She is naked, like Eve, but around her waist she wears a sword, something Eve has never seen before, and on her body she wears gleaming golden jewelry and gemstones.
At first, Eve only sees her once or twice in a moon, and by accident. But something begins to grip Eve by the heart, pulls her out of her pallet late at night, drives her deep into the forest. Now she’s looking. She can find Lilith by her scent, wild and raunchy like a herd of animals. Some nights Eve stumbles blindly through the brush, being careful not to fall because how would she explain the bruises? Eve is as nimble as a deer and more helpless. Sometimes she has tears in her eyes when she finds her. But she always finds her.
When Lilith doesn’t appear, Eve dreams of her, prays for her to fly down from the chamber of the Spirit Throne, to come and stand beside her like a comrade. Lilith belongs to another world, and Eve tries to imagine it. It is a world on the other side of the veil, a world of peace amid the chaos like a rose among thorns.
Dimly, Eve knows that Lilith could find her if she chose, but that she prefers to make Eve come to her. Eve doesn’t care. They meet each other’s eyes, look away. And is it Eve who reaches out for the first time? Eve who touches Lilith on the arm, and then pulls back? Yes, and it is Eve who touches Lilith again, again on the arm just below the elbow, and then Lilith returns the gesture, and they stand like that for a moment, arms locked, eyes locked, scarcely breathing.
They begin to talk, slowly at first, then quickly and easily. Eve learns that Lilith is an angel, and asks her about her home in the heavens. Lilith teaches Eve many things about the earth. She knows how to melt rock into metal, the stuff jewelry and tools and weapons can be made from. “If you do it right,” she says, “you can make something that will last a thousand years.” She tries to teach this to Eve, but it is difficult. She teaches her the uses of plants and rocks, how to flake stone into tools: these things Eve remembers. The night becomes many nights.
Once Eve asks Lilith to tell her about her sword. Lilith draws its shining blade from the sheath. The blade seems to turn within itself, the way a kaleidoscope turns inside out before your eyes. “Don’t touch,” she warns.
Eve reaches out and puts her fingers on the blade. She stifles a howl, as the pain sears her fingertips burns her arm.
“This sword will not kill you. This is the blade that comes to you in sleep, to stop you from going too deep, so that you won’t be drawn into the void. Without it, you would be sucked into the land beyond.”
Eve wonders about the land beyond. Is it better than this one? She looks at Lilith, but says nothing.
How does Eve look to Lilith?
Slender and soft, like a fertile field before the rain has touched it. Her hair is fine and delicate, like the fabric the angels weave. She smells like moss and flowers and growing things. Her eyes are the eyes of a child who will never see its mother again and must find comfort in the arms of a stranger. Her lips tremble as if praying, as if asking a question, as if crying. This creature is not ready, Lilith thinks, but even the angels can lust ... yes, she must have her.
And how does Lilith look to Eve?
Beautiful and mighty, with strong arms and legs. Rich and full as a ripe fruit -- strange that one never meant to bear children should have such wide hips and full breasts. Lilith is tall, with long, thick hair -- strange, too, that a creature of heaven should have so much of earth about her. The smell of her sweat and her sex. The musty, musky odor of her wings as she moves them slowly, like the boughs of a tree in a gentle breeze. Her strong, soft fingers. Her face like an ever-changing plain and her eyes like the deeps of space. Her voice like the ocean, her touch like the wind.
Once, when the moon is dark, Lilith touches Eve’s face. “Be mine,” she says. “Come with me to a place I know. No mortal may go there, but you will be safe with me.”
At this, Eve trembles but says nothing. Something is twisting inside her, like Tahmatu beneath the waves, not breaking the surface.
And Lilith says, “Even in the darkness, you are beautiful. Come with me and be my beloved.”
And Eve still says nothing, but she feels something impossible is happening, as though the earth is swallowing her up and giving birth to her again. She looks up to the sky for answers, but the vault of the night is only a silent wall.
Now Lilith raises her hand and the garden around her seems to fade, and Eve is standing someplace else, someplace she’s never seen before, but a place that looks somehow familiar. There is a grove of apple trees with their luscious red fruit and juicy fragrance. The whole place is shadowed with roses, and a living spring bubbles from deep within the earth.
Here the evening breeze blows warm as Lilith comes into view, bearing two golden goblets, one in each hand. She kneels down and fills these from the spring. Eve feels her fingers cup around the smooth bowl of the vessel as she accepts it, trembling, from Lilith.
“Drink this and come with me,” Lilith is saying in the vision. And Eve holds the cup before her for a moment and looks into it, scrying the crystal water. The cup is full of stars.
Eve raises the cup to her lips, still gazing into it. But at that moment the vision fades. Now she is gazing into Lilith’s eyes. “Come with me,” she is saying.
“Yes,” she murmurs, barely audible, and Lilith says, her voice now low and commanding, “I can’t hear you!” and the trembling figure says again, louder, “Yes!”
But when Lilith takes one step closer, Eve runs.
The next morning she is covered with scratches, tired, and very quiet.
The Tree
Just as he is turning away from the village for what he is certain will be the last time, Adam sees a pair of eyes looking at him. There is a man standing in the bushes by the river. The man motions to Adam to join him on the riverbank. He seems to be kin to the villagers, but he shows no interest in them; perhaps he is an exile. They look at each other and Adam thinks: He is like them, but he is different too. He is like me, but he is not like me. Following the silent stranger, Adam notices his agility, and the softness of his hair. They meet each other in the afternoon, in the hot part of the day. Deep in the woods, the man shows Adam things that he has missed somehow, plants too small to see and trees too large to see. Adam, following him, can see and touch the animals that used to flee from his presence. They speak as men do, without words.
Although the man is an outsider, Adam raises no protest to his presence within the garden. Yet after a time Adam becomes uneasy: after all, it is his garden. He keeps meaning to say something, but somehow, around the man with no name, Adam forgets how to speak. And then one day he comes upon the stranger picking a plant from the garden, and this violation incenses him. With a shout, Adam rushes at him and grapples with him, arm to arm. By the side of the river they struggle. As the sun lowers and the earth becomes ruddy, the stranger sinks to his knees -- not defeated, simply surrendering. Adam stares down uncomprehending as the other man extends his right hand. He stands for a moment, then turns his back and limps away.
That night, sleeping fitfully while Eve is away on one of her lengthy walks, Adam becomes aware of something moving near him, but though he strains his eyes looking, he sees nothing. In the morning, he goes back to the river bank. There on the ground he sees something, and he understands what his silent friend was doing in the garden the day before. It is a bouquet of flowers, exquisitely arranged in a rainbow of colors and tied with a length of vine. He picks up the gift and takes it to Eve, who has been very moody lately; she is delighted. The next day he tells her he doesn’t feel like going out exploring, he’s going to stay in the camp with her. And the day after that, he goes back to the river, he’s not sure whether he’s looking for his friend or avoiding him, but it doesn’t matter. Adam never sees him again.
The garden has begun to change. Or maybe it is they who are changing. The wild places within the garden no longer call to Adam; instead, he turns his attention to the making of stone tools: hammers, axes, knives. He learns how to make a blade sharper. Eve spends more time learning how to cultivate crops: she likes things that grow where she can watch them. She begins going to bed early, but she cannot sleep. Their conversation with one another is short and functional, as it has always been, but now there is an impatience to it. They are restless, as if their thoughts are elsewhere. As if they are now visitors in this place, as if it is no longer their home.
The Tree of Knowledge stands in the eastern part of the garden. It is easy to see from afar, harder to see from close up. It is unlike anything else in the garden. Its trunk is shiny, as if made of metal or stone, and deep bronze in color, the color of flesh. Its boughs fork into branches, each bearing leaves, and each branch bearing smaller branches as well. The smallest branches of the Tree of Knowledge are like the fibers of a spider web; in fact, the tree appears surrounded by mist. It seems to be a union of opposites: earthly and heavenly, good and evil. There is something forbidding about it: it seems to say Do not eat me, do not touch me. Yet it is beautiful, and by its five leaves they know it is good to eat. And this is where Adam is standing when he looks up and sees Eve there too. And now someone else is there, too, looking at them.
Eve is looking at the tree, thinking of something she’s lost -- she’s lost something but she can’t say exactly what, except that it had something to do with life, and something to do with wisdom. Perhaps it even had something to do with death. All she is sure of is that it is missing, and now, in the fruit and in the eye of the serpent, she sees it.
The Rose
The serpent is naked, unlike all the beasts of the field: like the woman and the man, it is hairless. And it knows what none of the other animals know: that though they may be warm-blooded, yet there is something about them that is cold, cunning, and reptilian. They know how to desire, and they know how to change the world to get what they want.
Now some will tell you that the serpent spoke, but it didn’t have to: the look in its eyes was enough. Yes, the serpent is looking at that fruit, first with one eye and then with the other, while its tongue flicks in and out to taste the scent of the fruit. That round globe of delight nestled in the bushy leaves and tawny limbs of the tree, that fruit contains the universe, and the serpent knows it. And Eve knows it too.
She feels the fruit burn all the way down. It will never stop burning. The memory of the strange face in the starlight fades, and now she will only remember the undulating coils slipping through the grass. And now, and forever, this is the shape of desire.
They have both eaten, and the radiance of the Tree of Knowledge spreads from them like the glow of a new fire. Things stand out in sharp detail, and take on new meaning. They see something they have somehow overlooked all this time, right in the center of the garden. It is another tree, not like the first: it is not pleasant or desirable, and until now it would never have occurred to either of them to pay it any attention. It is a small, scrubby thing, with twisted, dark, knotty limbs and an earthy odor. Its fruits are brown and small, scarcely more than berries. But there is a potency to it, an energy that suffuses the garden like the evening mist. Unnoticed and almost unseen, it sustains the garden. Eve knows that it is the Tree of Life, and who eats of its fruit will live forever. It is the doorway to eternity, the Gate of Mercy and the Gate of Mystery. Yes, this is what she wants: to live forever in this beautiful world. She takes the fruit into her hands, and she hands it to Adam. As they touch it, they are enveloped by its fragrance -- and then they drop it to the ground as if it were a hot coal, for suddenly and too late they understand its full meaning. To live forever, yes -- but not here. To live forever, in the next world.
The fruit of the Tree of Life is death.
The fruit grows before their eyes, like a sun exploding, and its round surface becomes grooved like a pinecone. The fruit is now a great black flower, a rose whose petals reach out to devour them. They run, but the black rose keeps growing. They smell it on their bodies, they feel it behind them. Without stopping, they glance behind them and they can see its giant petals over the treetops, stretched thin and phantasmic like smoke. They run, and they know that the smell will never leave them, it will stay on them like a slow-acting poison, in their blood and in their sweat. When they look again, the Rose of Paradise is gone, and in its place, in the distance, is an angel with a sword that flashes like lightning. Eve turns, but Adam grabs her arm. They keep running.
The angel stands there watching them for a long time.
"The Rose of Paradise" copyright (c) 2004 by Asher Abrams
All rights reserved.
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and your desire shall be for your husband
The Shadow
With the first shafts of light piercing the land and the sky, even before she can make out the shape of the land, already there is a silent rushing, and a feel of something taking flight. And as the morning breeze begins to rustle its feathers in the treetops, she thinks that, for a moment, she can still see the Void, endless and pure, hiding behind the dome of the still-dark sky in the west. And now she can see the shadow of its wings, vanishing into the land beyond the sky. And the day comes.
From the hilltop, looking into the abyss above, she can see with her inner sight, and she can see past the veil that shrouds the world. In the form of a flower, she sees the rhythm of things: creation, emergence, communion, culmination, and rebirth. She sees all of the land, and the living things on it. She can see beyond the land to the great ocean far away, and she can see all the creatures in its depths: the fish, the whales, and the Great Serpent, Tahmatu, who has made her home in the sea-bed since the beginning of time. Looking at the moon, she sees its form reflected in the round shape of an apple hanging from a branch, and in an instant grasps the mystery that holds the apple and the moon in their places. She sees how the stars came to their places in the sky, and the secret codes they spell out in the night. As the lights in the sky travel in their courses, she counts their cycles, and their patterns grow into a glowing tree in her mind; and sometimes she can hear the tree singing to her. And beyond it all, outside and inside, wrapped in layer on layer of mystery, she sees the gateway to the Void and to the only feeling of peace she knows.
This is the story of how it all happened -- the woman and the man and the garden they left behind. And though you may have heard this story before, there are still some parts that need to be told. For storytelling is only the memory of creation: the different arts by which storytelling is practiced are changes, not from the unknown to the known, but from the unremembered to the remembered. And so it was with Eve in these early days: for there was no one to tell her stories, and all she knew was what she saw around her, and what she dreamed. And there was that which she remembered, drawn from her fading memory as from a dream, brought forth from the Wells of Silence the way a bird draws a fish from the still waters of a lake. And so, with the morning sun and the waning of the night’s mystic trance, she remembers dimly how things were at the beginning: the chaos of elements, space and time, matter and energy. This chaos gathered into a great and hollow sphere, a vessel awaiting its moment of bursting. And then the light came, and then the light became the world. And the world would always rejoice in the coming of light.
But the darkness was already there.
The Garden
The land is called Ediin. You pronounce the word with a catch in your throat, as if you are choking on dust. It’s a land of sand and mud, mountains and rocks. Stand here and you will remember that the earth is your origin, the Gate of Mercy through which you came to exist. Stand here, and you will remember that the earth is also your Gate of Mystery, that aperture through which you will pass and be seen no more.
The garden isn’t like any place you’ve ever been. Set in the wilderness of Ediin, it’s a place that speaks its own language. Outside, the land stretches into sparse grass, shrub, and ultimately desert in one direction; and in another, trees become a forbidding forest. Inside, there is comfort and fertility; the garden is a part of Ediin, but it is also apart from it. It is its own world. There is a presence that envelops the garden and gives it life, an invisible mist that spreads from the center of the garden the way the scent of a rose spreads from the blossom. The garden itself has a kind of design, even an intelligence to it. It is not a geometric plot, like the gardens you might see in a city today; it has the complexity of an organism, and it seems even to have its own mind. Its own soul.
From the far wastelands of Ediin there comes a river, and it spreads from the garden to the four corners of the world. These will trickle into streams and lakes and wetlands far away. The garden is a crossroads, a place of meetings and a link between this world and the other. To live there is to live suspended between worlds.
Eve has discovered something in the garden. It is not beautiful: it has an ungainly size and shape, and a certain unfinished feel about it. But it is human, like herself: its face seems to say I can dream, and its hands say I can do. Because it is part of what is human, she calls it Man. The man wakens, and begins to speak. I am like you, he says, and from then on his name is Adam. She is not sure, but she thinks she has dreamed the man. She wonders if she will ever wake up.
She thinks she has dreamed the man, and he thinks he has dreamed her. They call their world Paradise, which means orchard or sacred space. They listen to its voice, which does not speak in words and perhaps comes through the garden from some place far beyond. They understand that the garden is theirs, to tend and to protect. But to protect from what?
Now you should know that there were other people in the world then, too, but they were not really there, which is to say, they were not alive inside the way Eve and Adam were. So while Adam and Eve were not the only people, they were alone.
They walk for miles. They walk for days at a time, sometimes together and sometimes each alone, around the fertile land that is bounded by plains, forests, and rivers. They find a great river, too big to cross. Eve looks across it, wondering what is on the other side. Adam looks down it, wondering where it flows. She turns away, he lingers. He has seen something: a footprint, as large and as heavy as his own. Then he goes.
No one, from that time until today, has ever been so full of wonder and joy as they were in their world. Adam loves the distances, he wanders far beyond the garden into the wasteland, dreams of the day when he can scale those mountains. Eve studies the colors of the garden: red, rooted and earthy, and the blue that speaks of the sky; the warm passion of yellow and the bliss of violet. And all around, the green heartbeat of the garden, and the faint azure glow that surrounds it like an intangible membrane, visible only at the edges of sight.
Far down the river, Adam has discovered other people. He has seen them, heard them, walked among them in one of their villages. He has seen women, men, and children. He has seen people dying and giving birth. Yet they have not seen him. He has walked unnoticed, like a specter. He has spoken, shouted and cursed, stolen from them, all to no effect. So he accepts his life as a spy and learns what there is to know about them.
He learns that they are simple people: their way of seeing the world and moving in it is not like his own. They move like water, leaving no trace or disturbance, seemingly impelled by some subtle force. The animals do not fear them. For a moment, he wonders how he himself can frighten animals while remaining invisible to the villagers. Then he understands that they do not see him because they choose not to.
They live in dwellings of dried grass, with roofs of leaves and branches so insubstantial that you can see the sky through them. He can understand their speech, but it is a crude dialect of the language he speaks with Eve. They have no numbers, they can only say “one” and “many.” They know little of building, cooking, or tending plants. They do not venture beyond the boundaries of their settlements, and though they live in the wasteland, they show no inclination to explore the orchards of the land he shares with Eve. (Except, he thinks, that one who left his footprint in the mud so near our home.) They lack ambition. There is a childlike innocence about them, and they fear the dark as children do. Their presence troubles him, and he says nothing of them to Eve. Eventually he loses interest in the villagers. They have nothing to teach him.
The Night
The Spirit Throne rests in a sacred chamber in the highest heaven. It is shaped like a cube with thirty-two sides, six feet wide on the outside and six billion light-years wide on the inside. Its radiance cascades down from the most recondite reaches of Mystery into the worlds below. All of the powers and energies of the universe, and all the human souls and all the angels, emanate from it.
Before time began, there was a certain emanation from the Spirit Throne. This emanation would not seek the higher places as the other angels did; it sought the lower reaches, which all the others despised. It sought, it circled, it flew in a spiral around the sphere of the universe from one pole to the other. Like an angled serpent, a twisting serpent, it went in search of the lower worlds. And when time began and the womb of the universe burst with being, this angel was expelled through the Gate of Mercy and descended into flesh. Long before Eve walked the earth, even before the sleepwalking villagers, this angel took form as a woman. The first woman: the angel of the night, and her name was Lilith.
Night comes, spreading its net over all the living. It shields the world from the brightness of the sun and subdues the light of the numberless stars. If you have ever been in a desert on a clear and moonless night, you know how the light of the stars can frost the surface of the land with a shadowless, silver crust, how it can take you out of your senses and make you forget who you are. And as the moon walks its course, forever falling back towards the sun from night to night, you can reach out to it and feel it pull you away from the world. Eve can feel the pulse of the moon as surely as Adam feels the sun’s heat, and she has named every one of the six thousand stars her eyes can see. By the black light of the unseen maiden moon, she bathes in the water of the longest river, the one that flows from the barren heights of Ediin, and branches out and nourishes the world.
This is the part Eve never tells Adam, the part she will spend the rest of her life trying to forget.
She has seen another woman in the garden at night. The woman is an angel, tall and strong, with long dark hair and powerful shoulders and wings. She is naked, like Eve, but around her waist she wears a sword, something Eve has never seen before, and on her body she wears gleaming golden jewelry and gemstones.
At first, Eve only sees her once or twice in a moon, and by accident. But something begins to grip Eve by the heart, pulls her out of her pallet late at night, drives her deep into the forest. Now she’s looking. She can find Lilith by her scent, wild and raunchy like a herd of animals. Some nights Eve stumbles blindly through the brush, being careful not to fall because how would she explain the bruises? Eve is as nimble as a deer and more helpless. Sometimes she has tears in her eyes when she finds her. But she always finds her.
When Lilith doesn’t appear, Eve dreams of her, prays for her to fly down from the chamber of the Spirit Throne, to come and stand beside her like a comrade. Lilith belongs to another world, and Eve tries to imagine it. It is a world on the other side of the veil, a world of peace amid the chaos like a rose among thorns.
Dimly, Eve knows that Lilith could find her if she chose, but that she prefers to make Eve come to her. Eve doesn’t care. They meet each other’s eyes, look away. And is it Eve who reaches out for the first time? Eve who touches Lilith on the arm, and then pulls back? Yes, and it is Eve who touches Lilith again, again on the arm just below the elbow, and then Lilith returns the gesture, and they stand like that for a moment, arms locked, eyes locked, scarcely breathing.
They begin to talk, slowly at first, then quickly and easily. Eve learns that Lilith is an angel, and asks her about her home in the heavens. Lilith teaches Eve many things about the earth. She knows how to melt rock into metal, the stuff jewelry and tools and weapons can be made from. “If you do it right,” she says, “you can make something that will last a thousand years.” She tries to teach this to Eve, but it is difficult. She teaches her the uses of plants and rocks, how to flake stone into tools: these things Eve remembers. The night becomes many nights.
Once Eve asks Lilith to tell her about her sword. Lilith draws its shining blade from the sheath. The blade seems to turn within itself, the way a kaleidoscope turns inside out before your eyes. “Don’t touch,” she warns.
Eve reaches out and puts her fingers on the blade. She stifles a howl, as the pain sears her fingertips burns her arm.
“This sword will not kill you. This is the blade that comes to you in sleep, to stop you from going too deep, so that you won’t be drawn into the void. Without it, you would be sucked into the land beyond.”
Eve wonders about the land beyond. Is it better than this one? She looks at Lilith, but says nothing.
How does Eve look to Lilith?
Slender and soft, like a fertile field before the rain has touched it. Her hair is fine and delicate, like the fabric the angels weave. She smells like moss and flowers and growing things. Her eyes are the eyes of a child who will never see its mother again and must find comfort in the arms of a stranger. Her lips tremble as if praying, as if asking a question, as if crying. This creature is not ready, Lilith thinks, but even the angels can lust ... yes, she must have her.
And how does Lilith look to Eve?
Beautiful and mighty, with strong arms and legs. Rich and full as a ripe fruit -- strange that one never meant to bear children should have such wide hips and full breasts. Lilith is tall, with long, thick hair -- strange, too, that a creature of heaven should have so much of earth about her. The smell of her sweat and her sex. The musty, musky odor of her wings as she moves them slowly, like the boughs of a tree in a gentle breeze. Her strong, soft fingers. Her face like an ever-changing plain and her eyes like the deeps of space. Her voice like the ocean, her touch like the wind.
Once, when the moon is dark, Lilith touches Eve’s face. “Be mine,” she says. “Come with me to a place I know. No mortal may go there, but you will be safe with me.”
At this, Eve trembles but says nothing. Something is twisting inside her, like Tahmatu beneath the waves, not breaking the surface.
And Lilith says, “Even in the darkness, you are beautiful. Come with me and be my beloved.”
And Eve still says nothing, but she feels something impossible is happening, as though the earth is swallowing her up and giving birth to her again. She looks up to the sky for answers, but the vault of the night is only a silent wall.
Now Lilith raises her hand and the garden around her seems to fade, and Eve is standing someplace else, someplace she’s never seen before, but a place that looks somehow familiar. There is a grove of apple trees with their luscious red fruit and juicy fragrance. The whole place is shadowed with roses, and a living spring bubbles from deep within the earth.
Here the evening breeze blows warm as Lilith comes into view, bearing two golden goblets, one in each hand. She kneels down and fills these from the spring. Eve feels her fingers cup around the smooth bowl of the vessel as she accepts it, trembling, from Lilith.
“Drink this and come with me,” Lilith is saying in the vision. And Eve holds the cup before her for a moment and looks into it, scrying the crystal water. The cup is full of stars.
Eve raises the cup to her lips, still gazing into it. But at that moment the vision fades. Now she is gazing into Lilith’s eyes. “Come with me,” she is saying.
“Yes,” she murmurs, barely audible, and Lilith says, her voice now low and commanding, “I can’t hear you!” and the trembling figure says again, louder, “Yes!”
But when Lilith takes one step closer, Eve runs.
The next morning she is covered with scratches, tired, and very quiet.
The Tree
Just as he is turning away from the village for what he is certain will be the last time, Adam sees a pair of eyes looking at him. There is a man standing in the bushes by the river. The man motions to Adam to join him on the riverbank. He seems to be kin to the villagers, but he shows no interest in them; perhaps he is an exile. They look at each other and Adam thinks: He is like them, but he is different too. He is like me, but he is not like me. Following the silent stranger, Adam notices his agility, and the softness of his hair. They meet each other in the afternoon, in the hot part of the day. Deep in the woods, the man shows Adam things that he has missed somehow, plants too small to see and trees too large to see. Adam, following him, can see and touch the animals that used to flee from his presence. They speak as men do, without words.
Although the man is an outsider, Adam raises no protest to his presence within the garden. Yet after a time Adam becomes uneasy: after all, it is his garden. He keeps meaning to say something, but somehow, around the man with no name, Adam forgets how to speak. And then one day he comes upon the stranger picking a plant from the garden, and this violation incenses him. With a shout, Adam rushes at him and grapples with him, arm to arm. By the side of the river they struggle. As the sun lowers and the earth becomes ruddy, the stranger sinks to his knees -- not defeated, simply surrendering. Adam stares down uncomprehending as the other man extends his right hand. He stands for a moment, then turns his back and limps away.
That night, sleeping fitfully while Eve is away on one of her lengthy walks, Adam becomes aware of something moving near him, but though he strains his eyes looking, he sees nothing. In the morning, he goes back to the river bank. There on the ground he sees something, and he understands what his silent friend was doing in the garden the day before. It is a bouquet of flowers, exquisitely arranged in a rainbow of colors and tied with a length of vine. He picks up the gift and takes it to Eve, who has been very moody lately; she is delighted. The next day he tells her he doesn’t feel like going out exploring, he’s going to stay in the camp with her. And the day after that, he goes back to the river, he’s not sure whether he’s looking for his friend or avoiding him, but it doesn’t matter. Adam never sees him again.
The garden has begun to change. Or maybe it is they who are changing. The wild places within the garden no longer call to Adam; instead, he turns his attention to the making of stone tools: hammers, axes, knives. He learns how to make a blade sharper. Eve spends more time learning how to cultivate crops: she likes things that grow where she can watch them. She begins going to bed early, but she cannot sleep. Their conversation with one another is short and functional, as it has always been, but now there is an impatience to it. They are restless, as if their thoughts are elsewhere. As if they are now visitors in this place, as if it is no longer their home.
The Tree of Knowledge stands in the eastern part of the garden. It is easy to see from afar, harder to see from close up. It is unlike anything else in the garden. Its trunk is shiny, as if made of metal or stone, and deep bronze in color, the color of flesh. Its boughs fork into branches, each bearing leaves, and each branch bearing smaller branches as well. The smallest branches of the Tree of Knowledge are like the fibers of a spider web; in fact, the tree appears surrounded by mist. It seems to be a union of opposites: earthly and heavenly, good and evil. There is something forbidding about it: it seems to say Do not eat me, do not touch me. Yet it is beautiful, and by its five leaves they know it is good to eat. And this is where Adam is standing when he looks up and sees Eve there too. And now someone else is there, too, looking at them.
Eve is looking at the tree, thinking of something she’s lost -- she’s lost something but she can’t say exactly what, except that it had something to do with life, and something to do with wisdom. Perhaps it even had something to do with death. All she is sure of is that it is missing, and now, in the fruit and in the eye of the serpent, she sees it.
The Rose
The serpent is naked, unlike all the beasts of the field: like the woman and the man, it is hairless. And it knows what none of the other animals know: that though they may be warm-blooded, yet there is something about them that is cold, cunning, and reptilian. They know how to desire, and they know how to change the world to get what they want.
Now some will tell you that the serpent spoke, but it didn’t have to: the look in its eyes was enough. Yes, the serpent is looking at that fruit, first with one eye and then with the other, while its tongue flicks in and out to taste the scent of the fruit. That round globe of delight nestled in the bushy leaves and tawny limbs of the tree, that fruit contains the universe, and the serpent knows it. And Eve knows it too.
She feels the fruit burn all the way down. It will never stop burning. The memory of the strange face in the starlight fades, and now she will only remember the undulating coils slipping through the grass. And now, and forever, this is the shape of desire.
They have both eaten, and the radiance of the Tree of Knowledge spreads from them like the glow of a new fire. Things stand out in sharp detail, and take on new meaning. They see something they have somehow overlooked all this time, right in the center of the garden. It is another tree, not like the first: it is not pleasant or desirable, and until now it would never have occurred to either of them to pay it any attention. It is a small, scrubby thing, with twisted, dark, knotty limbs and an earthy odor. Its fruits are brown and small, scarcely more than berries. But there is a potency to it, an energy that suffuses the garden like the evening mist. Unnoticed and almost unseen, it sustains the garden. Eve knows that it is the Tree of Life, and who eats of its fruit will live forever. It is the doorway to eternity, the Gate of Mercy and the Gate of Mystery. Yes, this is what she wants: to live forever in this beautiful world. She takes the fruit into her hands, and she hands it to Adam. As they touch it, they are enveloped by its fragrance -- and then they drop it to the ground as if it were a hot coal, for suddenly and too late they understand its full meaning. To live forever, yes -- but not here. To live forever, in the next world.
The fruit of the Tree of Life is death.
The fruit grows before their eyes, like a sun exploding, and its round surface becomes grooved like a pinecone. The fruit is now a great black flower, a rose whose petals reach out to devour them. They run, but the black rose keeps growing. They smell it on their bodies, they feel it behind them. Without stopping, they glance behind them and they can see its giant petals over the treetops, stretched thin and phantasmic like smoke. They run, and they know that the smell will never leave them, it will stay on them like a slow-acting poison, in their blood and in their sweat. When they look again, the Rose of Paradise is gone, and in its place, in the distance, is an angel with a sword that flashes like lightning. Eve turns, but Adam grabs her arm. They keep running.
The angel stands there watching them for a long time.
"The Rose of Paradise" copyright (c) 2004 by Asher Abrams
All rights reserved.
2004-10-03
The World of Tomorrow
And G-d created humankind in the Divine image.
Genesis 1:27
The other day, while I was sitting at the Jewish student association's booth during "welcome week" for the university I'm attending, I found myself working with a young woman whom I'll call N. It turns out that N. is a Jewish convert of Caucasian and Arab-American heritage. The other woman at the booth, J., is also converted, which made three of us. This wouldn't be significant, except that we had to decide whether to list the Jewish group as a "spiritual" or a "multicultural" group. This is the age-old paradox of Jewish identity: Are we a race or a religion?
At the wonderful Jewish blog Kesher Talk, Judith's latest post links to a site that shows composite photographs of multi-ethnic people from various parts of the world. The same post offers a link on the Parsis, the ethnic Persian Zoroastrians in India who gave us the legendary Freddie Mercury. Judith also carries a post on Nonie Darwish, What I Learned from the Jews.
As N. pointed out, the conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle east is not eternal, nor is it Divinely ordained, nor does it need to last indefinitely. With each generation, humankind discovers anew its own richness and complexity; and we also have the opportunity to learn how much we have in common. Each of us carries a unique cultural heritage, our own "DNA" of memories, legends, images, songs, hopes, and desires. This is the stuff we are given to guide us on our spiritual path, and it is the raw material for the future world that we will build. In exploring our tangled roots, each of us has the opportunity to discover our common humanity - and our common Divinity.
Genesis 1:27
The other day, while I was sitting at the Jewish student association's booth during "welcome week" for the university I'm attending, I found myself working with a young woman whom I'll call N. It turns out that N. is a Jewish convert of Caucasian and Arab-American heritage. The other woman at the booth, J., is also converted, which made three of us. This wouldn't be significant, except that we had to decide whether to list the Jewish group as a "spiritual" or a "multicultural" group. This is the age-old paradox of Jewish identity: Are we a race or a religion?
At the wonderful Jewish blog Kesher Talk, Judith's latest post links to a site that shows composite photographs of multi-ethnic people from various parts of the world. The same post offers a link on the Parsis, the ethnic Persian Zoroastrians in India who gave us the legendary Freddie Mercury. Judith also carries a post on Nonie Darwish, What I Learned from the Jews.
As N. pointed out, the conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle east is not eternal, nor is it Divinely ordained, nor does it need to last indefinitely. With each generation, humankind discovers anew its own richness and complexity; and we also have the opportunity to learn how much we have in common. Each of us carries a unique cultural heritage, our own "DNA" of memories, legends, images, songs, hopes, and desires. This is the stuff we are given to guide us on our spiritual path, and it is the raw material for the future world that we will build. In exploring our tangled roots, each of us has the opportunity to discover our common humanity - and our common Divinity.
Nonie Darwish: Arabs for Israel
No, I couldn't believe that title either, but there really is an organization called Arabs For Israel. Do not miss their basic tenets:
Nonie Darwish, whose essay appears on the group's homepage, has her own website:
Nonie Darwish.
Don't fall for the culturally chauvinistic, Eurocentric lie that "Arabs/Muslims don't understand democracy". Nobody likes to live in fear. Freedom is the right of all human beings. Go check out Nonie Darwish and Arabs For Israel.
Thanks to Rabbi Melman for the e-mail link.
We are Arabs and Moslems who believe…
We can support the State of Israel and the Jewish religion and still treasure our Arab and Islamic culture.
There are many Jews and Israelis who freely express compassion and support for the Palestinians. It is time that we Arabs express reciprocal compassion and support.
The existence of the State of Israel is a fact that should be accepted by the Arab world.
Israel is a legitimate state that is not a threat but an asset in the Middle East.
Every major World religion has a center of gravity. Islam has Mecca, and Judaism certainly deserves its presence in Israel and Jerusalem.
Diversity should not be a virtue only in the USA, but should be encouraged around the world. We support a diverse Middle East with protection for human rights, respect and equality under the law to all minorities including Jews and Christians.
Palestinians have several options but are deprived from exercising them because of their leadership, the Arab League and surrounding Arab and Moslem countries who do not want to see Palestinians live in harmony with Israel.
If Palestinians want democracy they can start practicing it now.
We stand firmly against suicide/homicide terrorism as a form of Jihad.
We are appalled by the horrific act of terror against the USA on 9/11/2001.
Arab media should end the incitement and misinformation that result in Arab street rage and violence.
We are eager to see major reformation in how Islam is taught and channeled to bring out the best in Moslems and contribute to the uplifting of the human spirit and advancement of civilization.
We believe in freedom to choose or change one’s Religion.
We cherish and acknowledge the beauty and contributions of the Middle East culture, but recognize that the Arab/Moslem world is in desperate need of constructive self-criticism and reform.
Nonie Darwish, whose essay appears on the group's homepage, has her own website:
Nonie Darwish.
Don't fall for the culturally chauvinistic, Eurocentric lie that "Arabs/Muslims don't understand democracy". Nobody likes to live in fear. Freedom is the right of all human beings. Go check out Nonie Darwish and Arabs For Israel.
Thanks to Rabbi Melman for the e-mail link.
2004-10-02
Said Jane
"By Jane Novak" - the byline that guarantees forward-thinking commentary on the Middle East - now appears at the beginning of this fine piece in the Arab News. The commander of Armies of Liberation has published her analysis of the "Bush voter".
Read the whole thing at the link. Go Jane!
The Bush voters are the people willing to sacrifice their money and their sons for a freer Middle East, and a world infused with liberty.
The Michael Moores of the America begrudge every penny spent in Iraq, lament every life as unworthy of the cause, lament the cause as unwinnable and are quick to consign the Middle East to another century of tyranny. They, under the banner of respect, support the candidate of retreat and disengagement. The anti-war movement does not march for the Sudanese.
The Bush voters are realistic and know that France and Germany will not join the cause. They understand that the UN is mainly an alliance of dictators supporting each other in the maintenance of the status quo. They know they will bear the burden alone. Kerry’s magic alliances will not materialize, because some nations have their self-interest at stake and choose a path of anti-Americanism in the hopes of appeasing their own peoples and the beheaders at large.
The Bush voter knows quite well that America is not safer since the invasion of Iraq and chooses to proceed anyway for the betterment of future generations.
Read the whole thing at the link. Go Jane!
2004-09-24
Morning Report: September 24, 2004
Informal Morning Report. Since I'm away from home and sneaking a little dial-up time from my hotel room before re-convening with my fellow Marine vets, I'm just going to drop a few lines on current events.
Bush, Allawi speak out. Caught GWB and Iyad Allawi on TV yesterday morning, with their impressive news conference, shortly after Allawi's address to the US Congress. Allawi thanked the American people and Congress for liberating his country, and stated, "more troops we don't need" - rather, he said, Iraqis need to be empowered to take charge of their own affairs through continued training and support. Allawi and Bush both stressed that while tough challenges lie ahead, Iraq is moving in the right direction.
Senator Kerry wasted no time in declaring that the Prime Minister of Iraq didn't know what he was talking about, and today's issue of the Jayson Blair Journal began its editorial with the words "Iraq's appointed leader, Iyad Allawi, put on an impressive performance yesterday in Washington." Iraq's self-appointed leaders in New York explained that 'Until Iraq holds free elections, Mr. Allawi cannot claim to speak for more than the narrow coalition of exile parties that maneuvered his appointment as interim prime minister.' The JBJ editorial went on to link Allawi with a small cabal of CIA-backed exile groups, and concluded by accusing Iraq's Prime Minister of 'expressing doubts about the value of a free press and refusing to accept the importance of an honest and realistic discussion of what's happening in his country.'
Funny, just last night I was up talking with two young guys who just got back from a second tour in Iraq; they happened to be staying in the room next door. Nobody forced these Marines to re-up, they did so voluntarily. They recalled that in fifteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces, security and reconstruction are proceeding at an astonishing pace. Wonder what's wrong with them. Maybe they don't read the Jayson Blair Journal enough?
Bush, Allawi speak out. Caught GWB and Iyad Allawi on TV yesterday morning, with their impressive news conference, shortly after Allawi's address to the US Congress. Allawi thanked the American people and Congress for liberating his country, and stated, "more troops we don't need" - rather, he said, Iraqis need to be empowered to take charge of their own affairs through continued training and support. Allawi and Bush both stressed that while tough challenges lie ahead, Iraq is moving in the right direction.
Senator Kerry wasted no time in declaring that the Prime Minister of Iraq didn't know what he was talking about, and today's issue of the Jayson Blair Journal began its editorial with the words "Iraq's appointed leader, Iyad Allawi, put on an impressive performance yesterday in Washington." Iraq's self-appointed leaders in New York explained that 'Until Iraq holds free elections, Mr. Allawi cannot claim to speak for more than the narrow coalition of exile parties that maneuvered his appointment as interim prime minister.' The JBJ editorial went on to link Allawi with a small cabal of CIA-backed exile groups, and concluded by accusing Iraq's Prime Minister of 'expressing doubts about the value of a free press and refusing to accept the importance of an honest and realistic discussion of what's happening in his country.'
Funny, just last night I was up talking with two young guys who just got back from a second tour in Iraq; they happened to be staying in the room next door. Nobody forced these Marines to re-up, they did so voluntarily. They recalled that in fifteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces, security and reconstruction are proceeding at an astonishing pace. Wonder what's wrong with them. Maybe they don't read the Jayson Blair Journal enough?
2004-09-17
Soldier, Where's Your Hatred Now?
By an anonymous soldier of the 136th Field Artillery Battalion, 37th Infantry Division - Fiji Islands, March 1943.
SOLDIER, WHERE'S YOUR HATRED NOW? (F.I., March 1943)
Soldier,
Where's your hatred now?
You haven't any? But you ought to have.
Remember the advice we gave.
Where will you be anyhow
If you forget that you must fight,
That they are wrong, and we are right?
You must make their heads to bow.
"I will fight because I must.
My hatred falters. In the heat of war
The hatred that was once a sore
Festered with a bitter lust,
Becomes a heartache, throbbing deep,
So that I cannot help but weep
Seeing comrades fall to dust."
Soldier,
Why that tear-wet eye?
Your fallen comrades you won't see again?
Remember, this affair is plain:
You may be about to die
Like them; but while you live, be strong,
For right will conquer all that's wrong.
Fight till they for mercy cry.
"You are right, my hatred's gone,
But I remember they are human too -
Those boys who in a sick world grew,
Groping - while afar, the dawn
Awaits to shine on them again
As it has on Freedom's men.
Can I , hating, speed the dawn?"
Soldier,
Spare no love for those
Who try to tear down what we want to save.
They're bestial, and they're not so brave.
Bring conflict to a quicker close:
Destroy their tanks, destroy their planes;
It is this Justice ordains.
Give them death if death they chose!
"I will wreck their tanks and planes
And let their cities fall, for all I care,
And in the name of right, I'll tear
Their bowels out, and smash their brains,
(For you, my country, killed my soul)
And as we approach the goal,
Clamp them in Revenge's chains!"
Soldier,
Bear it for a while,
And if you find no hatred for the foe,
Hate, then, the evil that brought woe.
Hate the greed and hate the guile.
Hate, then, the motive, not the man.
Love the Truth, for if you can,
Soldier, you have won God's smile.
SOLDIER, WHERE'S YOUR HATRED NOW? (F.I., March 1943)
Soldier,
Where's your hatred now?
You haven't any? But you ought to have.
Remember the advice we gave.
Where will you be anyhow
If you forget that you must fight,
That they are wrong, and we are right?
You must make their heads to bow.
"I will fight because I must.
My hatred falters. In the heat of war
The hatred that was once a sore
Festered with a bitter lust,
Becomes a heartache, throbbing deep,
So that I cannot help but weep
Seeing comrades fall to dust."
Soldier,
Why that tear-wet eye?
Your fallen comrades you won't see again?
Remember, this affair is plain:
You may be about to die
Like them; but while you live, be strong,
For right will conquer all that's wrong.
Fight till they for mercy cry.
"You are right, my hatred's gone,
But I remember they are human too -
Those boys who in a sick world grew,
Groping - while afar, the dawn
Awaits to shine on them again
As it has on Freedom's men.
Can I , hating, speed the dawn?"
Soldier,
Spare no love for those
Who try to tear down what we want to save.
They're bestial, and they're not so brave.
Bring conflict to a quicker close:
Destroy their tanks, destroy their planes;
It is this Justice ordains.
Give them death if death they chose!
"I will wreck their tanks and planes
And let their cities fall, for all I care,
And in the name of right, I'll tear
Their bowels out, and smash their brains,
(For you, my country, killed my soul)
And as we approach the goal,
Clamp them in Revenge's chains!"
Soldier,
Bear it for a while,
And if you find no hatred for the foe,
Hate, then, the evil that brought woe.
Hate the greed and hate the guile.
Hate, then, the motive, not the man.
Love the Truth, for if you can,
Soldier, you have won God's smile.
2004-09-16
From my Father's World War II Memoirs
From a series of poems by fellow soldiers that my father collected. The works' authorship is unknown.
A FLOWER GROWS ON WAR-SCARRED GROUND
(Munda Point)
On this island Mars still plays his hand.
The beach is quiet now; he has moved inland.
Beneath the sun, men toil;
Digging, clearing, piling soil on soil.
Between them and the sea - a fringe of sand.
On this fringe of sand Mars left his seal.
Here, craters deep abound: imprints of his heel
In some the sea has crept;
Others remain empty - all except
For flowers, growing there with quiet zeal.
A flower grows on a war-scarred ground
Amid man's shattered tools of war strewn around.
Amid war's after-gloom
It flourishes, hanging bloom on bloom.
How strange a home this zinnia has found!
It is not alone here on the beach;
Yonder springs - oh, if it could only reach! -
Another common flower,
Dainty, fragile, holding yet some power
To draw its strength from the reluctant beach.
Zinnia and petunia, hand in hand
In Mother's garden casually appearing
Now in this almost flowerless land
Become at once exotic, rare, endearing.
A FLOWER GROWS ON WAR-SCARRED GROUND
(Munda Point)
On this island Mars still plays his hand.
The beach is quiet now; he has moved inland.
Beneath the sun, men toil;
Digging, clearing, piling soil on soil.
Between them and the sea - a fringe of sand.
On this fringe of sand Mars left his seal.
Here, craters deep abound: imprints of his heel
In some the sea has crept;
Others remain empty - all except
For flowers, growing there with quiet zeal.
A flower grows on a war-scarred ground
Amid man's shattered tools of war strewn around.
Amid war's after-gloom
It flourishes, hanging bloom on bloom.
How strange a home this zinnia has found!
It is not alone here on the beach;
Yonder springs - oh, if it could only reach! -
Another common flower,
Dainty, fragile, holding yet some power
To draw its strength from the reluctant beach.
Zinnia and petunia, hand in hand
In Mother's garden casually appearing
Now in this almost flowerless land
Become at once exotic, rare, endearing.
2004-09-15
Final thoughts for 5764.
May you be blessed with prosperity, health, safety, freedom, wisdom, and good friends.
May the people of Iraq enjoy democracy and well-being in their land.
May the coming year see the liberation of the people of Iran.
May we find the strength and courage to stop the slaughter in Sudan.
May Israel know peace and security. May Israel see dialog between Jew and Arab, religious and secular. May the Jewish homeland live out its dream in safety. May Jewish children know that they have a home in the world.
May America live up to its true greatness and its dream of freedom, within its own borders and around the world.
May all have enough to eat and protection from heat, cold, and illness.
May the seeds of freedom spring up everywhere.
May we all learn to listen and understand one another better.
May we have the clarity to know good from evil, and the courage to choose good, even when it is difficult and dangerous. May we risk being unpopular when life has granted us a chance to speak out for freedom and justice.
May all creation know its own true higher nature, when G-d allows us to cast away the kingdom of evil from the land.
L' shanah tovah.
May the people of Iraq enjoy democracy and well-being in their land.
May the coming year see the liberation of the people of Iran.
May we find the strength and courage to stop the slaughter in Sudan.
May Israel know peace and security. May Israel see dialog between Jew and Arab, religious and secular. May the Jewish homeland live out its dream in safety. May Jewish children know that they have a home in the world.
May America live up to its true greatness and its dream of freedom, within its own borders and around the world.
May all have enough to eat and protection from heat, cold, and illness.
May the seeds of freedom spring up everywhere.
May we all learn to listen and understand one another better.
May we have the clarity to know good from evil, and the courage to choose good, even when it is difficult and dangerous. May we risk being unpopular when life has granted us a chance to speak out for freedom and justice.
May all creation know its own true higher nature, when G-d allows us to cast away the kingdom of evil from the land.
L' shanah tovah.
2004-09-14
Morning Report: September 15, 2004
Forged memos dog CBS. For those of you who haven't been following the internet for the past week (and really, it IS worth following, even when Dreams Into Lightning isn't posting!), the blogosphere has scored a major coup against the MSM with the revelation that several derogatory memos about George W. Bush - ostensibly written by his Texas Air National Guard commanders in 1972 - were crude forgeries. The documents, produced by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, appeared to have been produced on Microsoft Word, not an IBM Selectric, calling the 1972 dating into serious question. For the full story, see Rathergate at LGF.
Kerry coached horror stories, 'Nam vet says. ' A veteran who testified to John Kerry about atrocities he committed in the Vietnam War is now claiming that the Democratic presidential candidate coerced him to tell tales. Steven Pitkin, an Army combat veteran, told FOX News that Kerry coached him and others to say they had witnessed war crimes, even after Pitkin told Kerry that he had not. ...' Fox News story on Vietnam atrocity allegations
Syria testing chemical weapons on Sudanese? Sources are reporting that the German daily "Die Welt" claims Syria is testing its chemical weapons on Sudanese civilians. According to the AFP story, 'Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people, the German daily Die Welt claimed in an advance release of its Wednesday edition. The newspaper, citing unnamed western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims. It said that witnesses quoted by an Arabic news website called ILAF [www.elaph.com] in an article on August 2 had said that several frozen bodies arrived suddenly at the "Al-Fashr Hospital" in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in June. ...' Don't miss Andy McCarthy's comments.
The Emperor has no pajamas. "Eat your heart out, Cox & Forkum."
Kerry coached horror stories, 'Nam vet says. ' A veteran who testified to John Kerry about atrocities he committed in the Vietnam War is now claiming that the Democratic presidential candidate coerced him to tell tales. Steven Pitkin, an Army combat veteran, told FOX News that Kerry coached him and others to say they had witnessed war crimes, even after Pitkin told Kerry that he had not. ...' Fox News story on Vietnam atrocity allegations
Syria testing chemical weapons on Sudanese? Sources are reporting that the German daily "Die Welt" claims Syria is testing its chemical weapons on Sudanese civilians. According to the AFP story, 'Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people, the German daily Die Welt claimed in an advance release of its Wednesday edition. The newspaper, citing unnamed western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims. It said that witnesses quoted by an Arabic news website called ILAF [www.elaph.com] in an article on August 2 had said that several frozen bodies arrived suddenly at the "Al-Fashr Hospital" in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in June. ...' Don't miss Andy McCarthy's comments.
The Emperor has no pajamas. "Eat your heart out, Cox & Forkum."
2004-09-07
I Am A Jew and My Father Was A Jew
My father described his father as mildly anti-Semitic, "not an Archie Bunker type" but not without his prejudices either. Dad was born in 1920 and grew up in the New York area, spending some years in New York City. He would later write of his early curiosity about "the people my father spoke of with such contempt."
My father? Picture a cross between Albert Einstein and Captain Kangaroo, and you begin to get the idea. I remember him as a kindly man, soft-spoken and very precise in his speech. He recalled the Depression years vividly, and spoke bitterly of the humiliation of watching his father search desperately for work. During World War II he served in the Army, in Battery A, 136th Field Artillery, 37th Infantry Division. He spoke of the war occasionally, but only occasionally.
Like my mother, Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home; like her, he started looking for answers on his own as a young adult. They met in a Unitarian Universalist church in Connecticut, and found they shared a fondness for the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were married in 1959.
My father held a master's degree in literature from Wesleyan, and taught high school English for many years before moving on to a new career on the editorial staff of Choice Magazine - a position he held from my early childhood until very late in his life. He had an unappreciated gift for oratory, I think, and enjoyed reading aloud. When he spoke, he always chose his words carefully; losing this gift with the onset of Alzheimer's must have been a very cruel fate for him.
Both of my parents were liberals, but I think Dad was more of an idealist than my Mom, in the sense of being a perfectionist about the future. He didn't share my mother's driving rage (which could be directed against anyone, at any time), but he did have a deep-seated mistrust of anything that smacked of snobbery or elitism. He respected Senator Lieberman, but found him too conservative: "He votes like a Republican," Dad once grumbled.
Curious about traditional religion, I began studying Hebrew in my mid-teens. After a year or two, I started attending services at the synagogue, and so did my father. When I left home to join the Air Force in 1981, neither of us had officially converted but we were both leaning in that direction. I converted with a Reform congregation in Tucson in 1984, and eventually had an Orthodox conversion in San Francisco in 1988.
What we both saw in Judaism was a balance of opposites: nationalism and universalism, feeling and intellect, mysticism and rationalism, tradition and growth. For both of us, too, it was a gateway into a community, an older and richer one than we could have known otherwise. We liked the way social activism and Jewish values went hand-in-hand. My father was also interested in the theological debates: the encounter with modernity, the problem of evil. He devoured books on liberal Jewish thought by people like Jacob Neusner, with whom he corresponded. (Myself, I always found the scholarly stuff a bit dry. I loved Soloveitchik, but in general I skipped the philosophizers.) Dad's real passion, though, was Jewish music. He collected recordings of the great cantors (another taste I'm afraid I didn't inherit) and in the last few years of his life he became active in the choir at the Conservative synagogue. I'll always remember the joy it gave him to be involved in the community that way - and his sorrow at not having started earlier.
I'm hard pressed to say how much I'm like my father. I do not know whether I resemble him a lot or a little. Sometimes I think I take after my mother more. She was obsessed with the quest for truth. She wanted to peel back the layers of illusion and find the secret that lay at the core of reality. Not formally educated (but with an IQ most college professors would envy), she read books on science, history, Gnosticism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Born in 1929 on the eve of the stock market crash, she had little memory of the Depression, but I believe she was deeply changed by the newsreels that she must have seen as a young woman. I don't think she ever forgave G-d for the Holocaust.
Illness came upon my father quickly. He'd been healthy all his life, but things started going wrong all at once: heart trouble, cancer, Alzheimer's. He had to leave a holiday performance in the synagogue because he was too ill to continue. He died quietly in his sleep four years ago, on the second night of Rosh Hashanah.
Mom lived on a little longer. She rarely left the house, being in poor health herself, but she enjoyed the company of her caretaker and her next-door neighbor, who also had an interest in Judaism. I don't know whether she ever made her peace with G-d. She died last year, on the second night of Passover.
After her death, I learned that she'd had her hospital records changed to list her religion as "Jewish".
- Asher Abrams
This post is my contribution to Jonathan Edelstein's "Arrival Day Blogburst" in celebration of American Jewry's 350th year. I will be posting more Jewish-themed material over the next few days (including the 11th of September).
Administrative note: Today's post was delayed due to technical problems with Blogger. My apologies to Jonathan for missing the September 7 date; perhaps we can think of today as "yomtov sheini", especially in view of the day's diaspora theme.
Please visit Jonathan Edelstein, The Head Heeb.
My father? Picture a cross between Albert Einstein and Captain Kangaroo, and you begin to get the idea. I remember him as a kindly man, soft-spoken and very precise in his speech. He recalled the Depression years vividly, and spoke bitterly of the humiliation of watching his father search desperately for work. During World War II he served in the Army, in Battery A, 136th Field Artillery, 37th Infantry Division. He spoke of the war occasionally, but only occasionally.
Like my mother, Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home; like her, he started looking for answers on his own as a young adult. They met in a Unitarian Universalist church in Connecticut, and found they shared a fondness for the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were married in 1959.
My father held a master's degree in literature from Wesleyan, and taught high school English for many years before moving on to a new career on the editorial staff of Choice Magazine - a position he held from my early childhood until very late in his life. He had an unappreciated gift for oratory, I think, and enjoyed reading aloud. When he spoke, he always chose his words carefully; losing this gift with the onset of Alzheimer's must have been a very cruel fate for him.
Both of my parents were liberals, but I think Dad was more of an idealist than my Mom, in the sense of being a perfectionist about the future. He didn't share my mother's driving rage (which could be directed against anyone, at any time), but he did have a deep-seated mistrust of anything that smacked of snobbery or elitism. He respected Senator Lieberman, but found him too conservative: "He votes like a Republican," Dad once grumbled.
Curious about traditional religion, I began studying Hebrew in my mid-teens. After a year or two, I started attending services at the synagogue, and so did my father. When I left home to join the Air Force in 1981, neither of us had officially converted but we were both leaning in that direction. I converted with a Reform congregation in Tucson in 1984, and eventually had an Orthodox conversion in San Francisco in 1988.
What we both saw in Judaism was a balance of opposites: nationalism and universalism, feeling and intellect, mysticism and rationalism, tradition and growth. For both of us, too, it was a gateway into a community, an older and richer one than we could have known otherwise. We liked the way social activism and Jewish values went hand-in-hand. My father was also interested in the theological debates: the encounter with modernity, the problem of evil. He devoured books on liberal Jewish thought by people like Jacob Neusner, with whom he corresponded. (Myself, I always found the scholarly stuff a bit dry. I loved Soloveitchik, but in general I skipped the philosophizers.) Dad's real passion, though, was Jewish music. He collected recordings of the great cantors (another taste I'm afraid I didn't inherit) and in the last few years of his life he became active in the choir at the Conservative synagogue. I'll always remember the joy it gave him to be involved in the community that way - and his sorrow at not having started earlier.
I'm hard pressed to say how much I'm like my father. I do not know whether I resemble him a lot or a little. Sometimes I think I take after my mother more. She was obsessed with the quest for truth. She wanted to peel back the layers of illusion and find the secret that lay at the core of reality. Not formally educated (but with an IQ most college professors would envy), she read books on science, history, Gnosticism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Born in 1929 on the eve of the stock market crash, she had little memory of the Depression, but I believe she was deeply changed by the newsreels that she must have seen as a young woman. I don't think she ever forgave G-d for the Holocaust.
Illness came upon my father quickly. He'd been healthy all his life, but things started going wrong all at once: heart trouble, cancer, Alzheimer's. He had to leave a holiday performance in the synagogue because he was too ill to continue. He died quietly in his sleep four years ago, on the second night of Rosh Hashanah.
Mom lived on a little longer. She rarely left the house, being in poor health herself, but she enjoyed the company of her caretaker and her next-door neighbor, who also had an interest in Judaism. I don't know whether she ever made her peace with G-d. She died last year, on the second night of Passover.
After her death, I learned that she'd had her hospital records changed to list her religion as "Jewish".
- Asher Abrams
This post is my contribution to Jonathan Edelstein's "Arrival Day Blogburst" in celebration of American Jewry's 350th year. I will be posting more Jewish-themed material over the next few days (including the 11th of September).
Administrative note: Today's post was delayed due to technical problems with Blogger. My apologies to Jonathan for missing the September 7 date; perhaps we can think of today as "yomtov sheini", especially in view of the day's diaspora theme.
Please visit Jonathan Edelstein, The Head Heeb.
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