We Find Each Other

A poignant melody line in Anne Michaels' "Fugitive Pieces" weeps through the novel, appearing again and again like a strain from the Moonlight Sonata. The young protagonist lives his life with a recurring tender memory, his sister Bella's fingers as she played the Moonlight Sonata. As a child, he had hidden in a closet and watched the Nazi's kill his parents and carry off his sister Bella. Did she survive? Would he ever find her again? He lives this question into his adulthood. The novel ends and we never find out. The game of Jewish Geography, that enchants and compels us all, is our search for Bella: the sister that may or may not have survived, the relatives we never reconnected with, when one branch of the family went to Toronto, one branch to Uruguay, one to Israel, and the rest hid in forests or were sheltered by The Righteous of the Nations. (We say Righteous Gentiles in English, but the Hebrew expression is this, Chassiday Umot HaOlam, the righteous of the nations. We are now on facebook with the family that sheltered our relatives during the war.) This past Sunday we had a delightful visit with the always inspiring Frania Goldhar, who survived Auschwitz and and then raised lambs in Yokneam, Israel. She still lives today on the same land where she first settled in 1948. We were having one of those familiar conversations about all the crazy coincidental meetings of people who turn out to be long lost relatives. In our family we have an incredible talent for finding each other, or a recurrent streak of improbable luck, or a heaping spoonful of morphic resonance. I commented that I think we have a sense that detects relatives. "A nose", my cousin Yossi clarified. Much later, over dessert, lovely 88 year old Frania was talking about the 300 sheep they were raising. All of the ewes gave birth at the same time, and when they would come back from pasture to their baby lambs, each mother found her own baby. Frania remembered marvelling at the mothers' ability to find their own babies. Suddenly we all saw the connection. We do find family. It is a sense, like so many, that we cover over with intellect, but never lose. *************************************************************************************

Tzimtzum AND Expanding Our View

Aha! A phonecall from the mom of a child I work with, helped me understand matza balls. Tzimtzum (reduction) to the flatness of a matza, and then expanding big. Working in a language that is not my own, I have well learned to listen sharply, listen way more than I speak, ask and ask and ask until people are forced to clarify their own thoughts and distill their concerns into the clear elixir that is, in the end, their own cure. This family comes to me from faraway Zichron Yaacov, to work with their two lovely, quirky, different children. The mom, this morning, told me that I am more open, and more able to see big picture, than anyone she knows. More on this soon, I am busy cleaning into the tiniest corners of my drawers and cupboards. As above, so below, as below, so above. As we clean the details of our house, we clarify the details of our soul's storage areas. What will I keep, shine it up and display now? What will I keep, and put back into the drawer? What am I ready to kiss, honour, and let go of? How can I open feng shui spaces in my home and in my psyche? Get tiny, listen big. Do you wonder how on earth that is like matza balls? So it's not like matza balls.

Tzimtzum

Tzimtzum is a fundamental idea in Kabbala. It's an attempt at answering this big problem: If Ceaseless Creativity, (or whatever you call that which created all this physical world) is a oneness that fills all the given space, how was there room for anything else? A good problem. Tzimtzum suggests that the oneness contracted and made room for a physical world. Anyway, tzimtzum is what I'm trying to do until Pesach: contract my footprint by sorting through all my clothes and papers. But I just arrived at Matzah Ball's Law. You see, Pesach is the time when we unleaven ourselves, theoretically. Make ourselves flatter, like matzah compared to bread, reduce our egoprint on the world. But wouldn't we fill the space with matza balls and bubelah. And here's me, instead of throwing anything out, I'm prancing around in clothes I had forgotten, and delighting in poems scribbled on napkin corners. Tzimtzum? Maybe someday.