The Colour of God

Neither An Egg Nor A Bagel, But Some American Pie

It was that time of the year again.

The Potzker pulled his menorah from the shelf, blew the dust off of it, and began to fill it with the special cone shaped candles he had bought for the occasion. One by one, he slid them into their receptacles.

Red.  Green.  Blue.

Red. Green. Blue.

 Red. Green.

And a blue candle for the shamash.

He lit the shamash, and guided it to share its fire with the other candles, proceeding from left to right, in silence, without saying a blessing.

The Potzker meditated on the symbolism of the moment.

The light, well, that could take all day if he just marvelled at the light, so he moved beyond the light to the candles themselves, each colour representing the cones of the retina of the eye. He stood in awe at how these receptors for just three colours, for red, green and blue, created the full spectrum of colours that he experienced on a daily basis. He then, in his mind’s eye, pictured the four lettered name of God, the Tetragrammaton, and the colour that emanated from that word each time he read it. A colour that he could not describe to anybody, because, after all, it was a colour, and how does one go about describing a colour to another person? To the Potzker, the colour of God was the most beautiful colour in the world, an intimate experience that he could not share with anyone but its Creator. Sure, his physician explained his experience to be one of synaesthesia, a cross-modal awareness whereby the reading of letters or words is accompanied by other sensations, like colours or sounds. But to the Potzker, the colour that vibrated at him was not a perceptual phenomenon but a spiritual one, one that connected him to the moment of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, because it is recorded that at that moment the people of Israel collectively shared a synesthetic experience by seeing the thunder and hearing the lightning of Sinai, an event in time commemorated on the pilgrimage holiday of Shavuot. The Potzker enjoyed linking his candle lighting ceremony to the pilgrimage festivals, with the message of the freedom of Passover balanced by Shavuot’s message of responsibility, ultimately leading to the theme of impermanence that characterized the festival of Sukkot. With that holiday’s message in mind, the Potzker, as was his tradition, would go to his etrog box and remove the shrivelled fruit that remained from the past Sukkot. He would then take the knife which he used to slice the Shabbat challah and sawed the etrog in half. With half an etrog in his right hand, he proceeded to smash the lit candles of the menorah in a symbolic mimicry of God's rampage as described in the book of Lamentations.While doing so, he repeatedly chanted the phrase from Psalm 137, “If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem”. He then meditated on his breath and blew out the shamash.

It was another typical evening before Tisha B’Av in the Potzker’s home.

You may wonder about the meaning of the menorah lighting ceremony. The Potzker explained it this way:

“What is the meaning of Chanukah? What is it that we are celebrating for eight days in the depths of winter? Even the rabbis did not understand why this holiday became popular. It was taught that, when the Temple was rededicated by the Maccabees after being defiled by the Greeks, the Jews immediately celebrated the holiday of Sukkot for eight days. That was the first celebration of Chanukah, a one-time holiday meant to fulfill the obligations of a festival postponed due to inclement spiritual weather. However, the people enjoyed having a holiday to break up the darkness of winter, and so, demanded that a winter holiday become an annual event.  Due to the persistent demand by the people, the Jewish leadership eventually agreed to initiate a home based menorah lighting festival every year, in contrast to the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, and created what they thought would be a minor holiday to satisfy vox populi. It was because of its connection to the belated Sukkot celebration that Shammai ruled that the lighting of those annual Chanukah candles should begin with a full menorah and decrease by one candle every night, the same way that the bull offerings of Sukkot started with thirteen and decreased every day by one. Both the opinion of Shammai and the historical basis for an eight day holiday in the winter were relegated to the dustbin of history. My ceremony links Chanukah to Tisha B’Av because they are part of the same process. The rise of the Maccabees was not a great victory for the Jews, but actually ushered in the beginning of the end of the days of the Temple. Marking the Hasmonean victory is understandable, because we must remember that without the light of proper leadership, darkness ensues. But celebrate it? Why? Chanukah marks the beginning of an era of top-down corruption, where ignorance and incompetence among the priests eventually became the order of the day. Leadership from the bottom-up was no better, as a toxic attitude of causeless hatred within the Jewish people was the final tipping point that led to the Temple’s destruction a few hundred years after the “miracle” of Chanukah. The rabbis of the Talmud rightly asked: “Mahee Chanukah,” what is this holiday called Chanukah? I ask, Mahee Tisha B’Av, what is this holiday of the 9th of Av? Both of these holidays are like an inkblot test of the mental health of the Jewish people. The convoluted, diluted, polluted, galuted celebrations of Chanukah are just as pathological as the frozen grief of Tisha B’Av. We are a people in trouble.”

And that is why the Potzker, when he lit the candles on the 8^th night of Chanukah every winter, felt a sense of incompleteness until he lit the candles on the 8^th of Av ( a day he called ChanuB’Av) and then symbolically smashed them, bringing temporary closure to the wound that re-opened in his soul every Chanukah.

As for the verse of the137th Psalm, it never ceased to amaze the Potzker how cruel humans can be to one another. From the Babylonians forcing the exiled Jews to sing songs of Zion as described in the Psalm, to the Nazis who found amusement in torturing Jews with their own culture, the tone of the Psalm seemed to capture the spirit of Tisha B’Av. It sickened the Potzker to his core to imagine the cruelty inflicted upon Jews in the past, and he felt that pain as if it was transmitted to him epigenetically. While repeating the phrase "If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem" the Potzker thought about how he would translate the verse to his own satisfaction: " If I someday appear to forget what God did to thee Jerusalem, it would only be because I have suffered a left hemispheric stroke, explaining why my right hand has lost its power and why my tongue feels as if it is stuck to the roof of my mouth." The Potzker was committed to never forgetting the source of the churban, and was just as committed to someday making sense of the destruction. Tisha B'Av was the one day of the year that he dedicated to this task.

The 9^th day of AV was the day designated by the rabbis to remember a fully functional Jerusalem, the Ur of Shalem, the City of Unity, and to imagine its future restoration as a world centre to serve man’s need to be inspired to serve God. He tried to imagine what that day would be like. He would look at the state of the world and feel despair as to that possibility.It was enough to give the Potzker indigestion, but just in case his thoughts failed to do so, his actions guaranteed it. The Potzker had a tradition of eating symbolic foods for his final meal before the fast of Tisha B’Av. He based his meal on his teaching of Deuteronomy 7:16: “And you shall eat all of the nations that the Lord Thy God gives unto thee.”

And so, he would begin his meal preparation by raising a glass of water in a toast to Hezekiah’s “victory” that saved Jerusalem from destruction by Sancherib just a few centuries after the completion of Solomon’s temple. The Potzker visualized the time that he himself had stood in the technological wonder that constitutes the tunnels of Hezekiah, and pondered the “miracles” involved in that event.  He wondered why the only commemoration of that moment in history was just a brief mention in the Haggadah at a point in the seder where most people miss it. The Potzker would say: “The caged bird sang his song, and the Jewish people have done him wrong.” And with that, he felt that he had corrected a historical injustice by remembering the waters of Hezekiah in his ChanuB’Av ceremony.

He then proceeded to chop and then fry some Spanish onions in olive oil. With tears in his eyes he would inquisitively listen to the onions as they were frying until he could hear voices rise from within the pan. As soon as he heard the sound of the babbleonions, he was satisfied that he had properly remembered the Babylonians and the destruction of the first Temple at their hands. 

Setting the onions to the side, he meditated on the olive oil and its connection to the Maccabean “victory” described in the Chanukah story. He then drizzled some honey left over from Rosh Hashanah into the onions. He did so in memory of Miriam, the last of the Maccabeans, whose body was preserved in honey by her husband Herod the Great (Killer), but whose memory is preserved in Talmudic legend.

He then opened a can of Romano beans, in recognition of the Roman Empire’s destruction of the second Temple that Herod had massively renovated. From there he proceeded to commemorate the destruction inflicted by the Nazis upon the Human Temple of Torah by cooking up some vegan bratwurst. He chose this food to remind himself that Hitler was a vegetarian who enacted animal protection laws, but refused to see Jews as human or animal. When the “sausages” were done, the Potzker would, at that moment, think to himself, “Jerusalem does bring out the best and the wurst in people.”

He then combined the sliced sausages and fried onions into the beans, ate his feast, and when he was satiated, picked up his bottle of the  extra virgin, fair-trade, Palestinian grown olive oil that he had cooked the onions in, studied its label, and sighed a sigh that stretched back almost three thousand years, to the building of the first Temple by King Solomon, his sigh resonating with the sighs of the workers who toiled for Solomon, unaware that the product of their labours would still resonate in the human imagination to this day.

He then began his fast.

The Potzker taught that Tisha b'Av is the happiest day of the Jewish calendar, because it is the one day of the year that people can completely experience the joy that comes from the intimacy of absolute, unrestrained honest communication in the relationship between man and God.
The Potzker taught that Tisha B'Av is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, because it was the one day of the year that people could completely experience the oy that come from measuring the distance between those partners.

Tisha B’Av.

The only day of the year that the Potzker, no matter how hard he tried, could not see the colour of God.  

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While it is customary to not listen to music prior to and during Tisha B’Av, it was the Potzker’s tradition to permit listening to music that he reclassified as dirges (and thus being permissible) while eating the pre-fast meal. The Potzker chose to listen to an endless looping tape that he had made of Don McLean’s version of Babylon from the album American Pie over and over again until he finished his meal, at which point he did not need to eat on Tisha B’Av, because the earworm of that song ended up eating him until the end of the day. Throughout the day, it is reported that the Potzker could be heard muttering to himself “I am an endless loop, I am an endless loop…………………….”