Week 12

As I reentered the dance hall, I watched about sixty dancers from all over the world speaking dozens of different "languages" - some lifting one another, others finding rest and support in one another's weight, yet others using mime to make visible and traverse their inner world.  As dozens of bodies adorned the space in momentary and unrepeatable tapestries of stillness and motion, two women stood in the middle of the wood floor with their arms around each other, solid as an ancient oak tree.  Now, with them as my reference point, all the other dancers suddenly became as inconsequential as autumn leaves, drifting around the rooted stillness of these women's bodies.  One woman leaned in for a kiss, her mop of hair covering both of their faces, and the other kissed her back on the cheek.  This was the opening jam of the international Israeli Contact Improv Festival.

As I relaxed back into my native language at the Contact jam (since it's officially an "international" language), I gained more perspective on a hunch I had that speaking Hebrew (or any language for that matter) is a constant act of midrash (an often imaginative commentary on, and fleshing out of, a "text").  All the words in this blog, and your internal dialogue as you read is always commentary, a risky
maneuver that links our subjective experiences with the "objective" outside world.  To use a Hebrew example, pointing at an object (say a train or "rakevet", with root r.k.v.) I am symbolically linking it to the fiery chariots and mystical merkavah practices of ancient Jewish mystics (including Jesus); or if I'm talking about my bicycle (an "ofenaim", with the root o.f.n.) I'm suddenly bringing this wheeled creature into one of most psychedelic mystical realms recorded in literature: the spinning, four-faced creatures of Ezekial's vision.

When I prayed on Monday morning, rather than a jumble of words sleepily tumbling from my lips, I felt like a priest adorning the living language of my (almost) daily experience in Israel with my sacred vestements: breastplates, jewels, magical stones.  As I became aware of this powerful encounter with the liturgy, I realized that in living in Tel Aviv-Yaffo (an extremely down to earth, and relatively liberal place - in contrast to my past experience of Israel, in Jerusalem) the Hebrew language had begun to taste like its dirty streets, beautiful people and churning sea.  Only now that each word left trails of grit as it found its shape between my tongue and hard palette, did my senses exalt at the act of lifting these bundles of particularity into the wordless and infinite realm of the sacred.  In the eternal visions of this sacred poetry, I was beginning to see snapshots of the everyday - whorehouses, claustrophobic markets, mall playgrounds - and to feel the sacred core of these moments ripple out to the invisible horizons of my soul.  Maybe prayer "matters" after all?