Week 14

I walked home from the gym and reentered the chaos of shuk Levinski.  The glare of street lamps revealed traces of the day freshly past: sidewalks slick with greasy water, the unpredictable traipsing of late night spice hunters - and to my excitement, mountains of boxes.  I was on a hunt for the perfect container, since over the last few months I've realized how many belongings I won't need in the time remaining here (or have never used) - my bike gear, camelback, sport coat, red boots, dress shoes, menorah and candles, cookbook - and have decided to mail them back to Boston.  When I spotted one that seemed the right size, I carried it down the street...until I found what I truly sought.  It was sitting on the corner, alone, and was stuffed with other crushed boxes, banana peels, bottles of beer and pistachio shells.  This was my box, full of shuk, filled to the brim with my experience.

I'm still aching from a combination of lifting people with my back for hours during the Contact Improvisation Festival last week, and now from carrying the now-full box several hundred meters to the Post Office today to ship it.  As I slid its seventy pounds across my shoulders as if I were dancing with another body, then placed it on my belly and grabbed it by the corners - I whistled breathlessly to the only song of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes I felt worth buying, "Home", on repeat:

Alabama, Arkansas.  I do love my Ma and Pa
But not as much as I do love you.
Holy Moly, Me oh My!  You're the apple of my eye.
Girl ain't never loved one like you.
Man, oh man, you're my best friend.  I scream it to the nothingness
that we got everything we need.
...

(Chorus)
Home, let me come home.
Home is whenever I'm with you.
Home, yes, I am home.
Home is wherever I'm with you.
...

This week in one of my classes, we looked at a Talmudic text in which a woman asked a rabbi, "After God created the world, did God just sit there doing nothing?!"  The rabbi responded, "From that point on, God began pouring that creative energy into to making pairs [yes, a Divine matchmaker!], declaring, lo tov hiyyot ha'adam l'vado: 'It's not good for this Adam creature to remain in his aloneness'".  Our teacher tried to show a modern example of traditional Jewish "pairing" with the scene "Do You Love Me?" from "Fiddler on the Roof", but his DVD kept freezing.  After spending most of the last ten minutes of class rewinding and fast forwarding, to no avail, he finally broke out in a duet with one of the students:

Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?

Both lyrics sing home as a place comprised of activities we've become familiar with - and fallen in love with through their consistency.  In Israel, what I've come to depend on is surprise, a consistency that unfortunately never becomes familiar.  Last night, for instance, on the way to meet a date, Matti, at a courtyard cafe hidden behind shuk Levinski, I walked around a fish laying on the sidewalk with its tail cut off.  When I arrived, a DJ was spinning, and I found my date with his dog, Gary.  Gary was so anxious that he repeatedly bit Matti, so I took him by the collar and did some impromptu pet Reiki as Matti and I sipped our beers, and the street light above us flicked on and off and on.  Today, I went to the big shuk haCarmel to buy cucumbers, onions, clementines, halva and olives and ran into Matti again, buying his vegetables as he does every Friday, with Gary anxiously trailing along.

Three weeks ago, my Pastoral Counseling teacher, Daniel, shared with me that one of his teachers once asked him if it was possible for him to use his personal sufferings to help direct himself and others toward living a happy life: is it possible to use the pain you've experienced to create moments of beauty - or in Leonard Cohen's eternal words, to follow the broken places to where they let the light in?  Perhaps the material Daniel has compiled for his course is an attempt to begin to answer his teacher's question.  A few weeks ago, as I prepared for class, I stumbled upon the writings of Bakhtin and Tolstoy, and excitedly felt like these two writers began to give voice to an answer, and to my emergent sense of things.

Maybe it's growing up too fast over the past few years, or the too few mornings I make the extra effort to pray or meditate or mindfully move.  But in any case, my moments of happiness and contentment are beginning to attract the same curiosity and intentness with which I've always focused on and examined my sadness and distress before.  According to Bakhtin, "wholeness is always a matter of work; it is not a gift, but a project....wholeness is never a given, it is always a task.  Disorder, by contrast, is often (though not always) a given."  In beginning to accept the natural tendency of the universe toward chaos, I've started - with this "baseline" reality of uncertainty - to overflow with gratitude, to become exhilarated even, during the tiny moments when something seems to be going just right.

In this context, Bakhtin declares, "there is no alibi for being" - by which he means, "There can be no formula for integrity, no substitute for each person's own project of selfhood, no escape from the ethical obligations of every situation at every moment."  Even that is a bit hard to understand, though.

What I think he's trying to say is that, in my day to day life it's not only important that I'm starting to ask "What's going right here?"(instead of "What went wrong?") - but also that I have a moral responsibility to work with the universe to create more pockets of meaning and order for myself and others, more instances when things "go right".  Perhaps its by not pushing through the person whose shoving past me in the shuk, but letting them pass.  Perhaps, when I find myself mumbling through words of prayer, its to do so with as much intention and attention as I can toward cultivating intimacy with God in this act, until I realize the words are filled with sweet silence.  Or perhaps it's by dancing in the streets.