Presented for your reading pleasure, a collection of my contributions to the Canadian Jewish News annual Passover Literary Supplement.
Enjoy.
-Harold Pupko
2012: WHEN I’M 64……………..
It was the sixties.
More specifically, Times Square, December 31, 1966.
Midnight approached.
Socrates Berlin did not like waiting.
Unwilling to be controlled by the drop of a ball, Socrates Berlin opted to drop to one knee and ask the love of his life, Bella Rose Gershwin, to spend the rest of her life married to him. The people surrounding the couple responded with overwhelming support for the proposal before Bella had a chance to fully consider the offer. Swept up by the enthusiasm of the crowd, Bella’s fate was sealed.
A late June wedding was planned.
As the wedding date neared, Socrates proposed to Bella again. Pointing out to his beloved that, after marriage, their journey would be as one, he suggested that they both adopt a new last name to reflect their status as a couple united in life. Socrates and Bella were quite aware of the degree of importance that their families placed upon the sacred process of naming. They were both the only children of Holocaust survivors, and their first names reflected that fact.
For Socrates’ parents, the art of asking questions was not just an essential survival skill for navigating a potentially hostile world: it was the core element of their understanding of Judaism. They did their best to teach their son to master this skill. By naming him Socrates, they hoped that he would grow up to emulate his namesake by posing painful questions of a world that masqueraded as a civilization, and that those questions would contribute to moving the planet forward on its slow march to maturity.
And why the name Socrates, rather than a nice Jewish name like Hillel? That was precisely the point. The Berlins wanted Socrates to be able to blend into society without suffering the limitations of anti-Semitism, so they gave him a name that they thought would protect him from being overly identified as Jewish. They failed to calculate what schoolyard bullies would make of the name.
Because of the Holocaust, Socrates was robbed of any living connection to his family’s roots. He only understood the concept of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins on a theoretical basis, never having enjoyed the benefit of the real thing.
Socrates learned to love the theoretical.
Bella’s parents came from Belarus, a land decimated of Jewish content by the Nazi plague. With so many dead relatives to name their only child after, Bella’s parents deliberated at length on an appropriate name for their daughter. Influenced by their love of music, the name Bella Rose emerged as a homophonic symphonic kadish in memory of the kedoshim of Belarus.
Bella Rose, who should have grown up peacefully in Belarus, eventually made her way from a displaced persons camp to the freedom of America and the love of Socrates, providing a practical balance to his overactive imagination. Finding that balance was often challenging, and Socrates’ project to name their union pushed the couple’s creativity to the brink. The names Bershwin and Gerlin were quickly dismissed, and all subsequent proposals failed to light the flame of satisfaction for either party. As time moved on and plans for the wedding became the priority, discussions about the joint last name were put on hold. Socrates promised to give the matter further thought, while Bella hoped in her heart that her future husband would spend his energy on the more practical issues in their lives.
The time pressures of the wedding preparations soon became mixed with the tensions of the time. As the wedding date approached, dark clouds of doom began rolling in off the horizon. Another potential Holocaust for the Jewish people seemed imminent, as Arab states threatened to find a final solution to the “Jewish problem” by wiping the state of Israel off of the map. The joy of the upcoming nuptials was tainted by a hatred generated thousands of miles away but historically too close for comfort.
War broke out in early June, 1967. The darkness of the first day of the Six Day War was replaced one week later by the giddiness of having witnessed a miracle, for there was no other explanation for the military victory that had just occurred. Across the world, Jews as a people were experiencing something that they had not felt for thousands of years, a sense of unity, a sense of strength, a sense of pride. Swept up in the spirit of ‘67, Socrates’s mind was flooded with exuberance. With less than two weeks to go until their wedding, he suggested to Bella that they change their last name to Israel. Bella half-jokingly remarked to Socrates that the name Israel was not a bold enough statement to capture the essence of the wave washing over the Jewish world. She suggested that they name themselves Jewish, and Socrates, not getting the joke, thought to himself that his wife was a genius and pressed forward with the idea.
And so, Socrates and Bella Rose Jewish were married in June 1967.
Having married Jewish, the next step of their unified Jewish adventure was to plunge themselves into study. They spent week after week reading every book they could find on their religion, their culture, and their history. It became apparent that Jewish tradition taught that understanding ideally came about through experience, and so, they decided that their ultimate education would come through raising a Jewish child together.
On Tu b’Av, the Jewish festival of love, in the year 1967 C.E., Socrates and Bella conceived a child. One month later, the discussion began as to what that child should be named. By Rosh Hashanah, a unique name for their offspring continued to elude them. Socrates turned for inspiration to the Torah reading for the New Year. Within those texts there were traditional names like Abraham, Isaac and Samuel for a boy, and names such as Sarah, Rebecca and Hannah for a girl, but those names failed to capture the imagination that made up the Jewish’s marriage of minds. They were looking for something unique in a first name to match their unusual last name. Socrates thought that that the name of Abraham’s brother’s son, Yid-laugh, sounded like a perfect unisex name, but Bella quickly extinguished that creative spark. And so, Yom Kippur came and went, and, faster than you can spin a dreidel, Chanukah arrived and departed. Reflecting on the Greek influence of that festival, and, pondering the Greek origin of his own name, an idea seed was planted in Socrates’ head. Perhaps there was wisdom in his parents choosing to name him after a famous Greek figure. After all, the precedent was there in the Talmud, with many a rabbi having a Greek name. Inspired by the burden of suffering carried by his parents and his in-laws, Socrates spent the months after Chanukah contemplating naming his offspring Pathos, the ancient Greek word for suffering. On Purim, he raised that possibility with his wife.
“Just think about it,” he suggested to Bella. “Every day in roll call at school, the teacher will call out to our child’s fellow students: Jewish, Pathos. That act alone will serve as a lesson for our child’s classmates, and hopefully stimulate much worthwhile discussion on issues such as sympathy and empathy for the Jewish people, two concepts rooted in the word pathos.”
Like his father before him, Socrates failed to take into consideration the schoolyard bully factor in the process of naming his firstborn.
Bella, suffering from iron deficiency and numerous other pregnancy related challenges, was exhausted and cranky by the time Socrates came up with his pathetic idea. The pressure of having to prepare their home for their first Passover as a family, as well as the anxiety of hosting her first Seder as a married woman did not help the situation. Her ironically rooted response was aimed at shutting him up.
“Listen, when God named the first human, he named him Adam. When God chose a man to bring monotheism to the world he chose Abraham. Both of these beginnings started with the letter A. What was good enough for God is good enough for me. So, based on your idea, we should name our child Apathy, which literally means the absence of suffering, which is what we both want for our child. I don’t want to discuss this any further until we are done with Passover. Understand, Mr. Jewish?”
Socrates was intrigued. He liked the name and Bella’s explanation for it. He decided that eventually Bella would too. So Socrates focussed on helping Bella begin preparing for Passover and did not give the naming process any further thought.
The joy of the night of the first Seder was mixed with anticipation for the upcoming addition of to the Jewish household. Both sets of in-laws marvelled at the miracle that was Bella’s bulging belly. At one point in the past, the grandparents–to-be could barely imagine surviving the Hell of Europe, and yet, there they were, awaiting the birth of a grandchild while celebrating the Jewish festival of freedom in freedom.
Near the end of the festivities that evening, the three women went to the front door of the house to participate in the tradition of welcoming Elijah the Prophet to their home. While the women stood at the door, Socrates stood at the head of the table and began to recite the 79th Psalm. Just as he uttered the words “Pour Out,” the Jewish baby took that as its cue, and Bella’s water broke. Apparently, like its father, baby Jewish did not like waiting, and decided to arrive into the Jewish world earlier than expected.
Elijah followed the Jewish family to the hospital and told Socrates the following tale in the waiting room.
“After the final chapter of the story of Cain and Abel played itself out, Eve suffered in silence at the loss of both of her children. Barred from returning to the Garden of Eden by angels brandishing flaming swords, she settled into a life of acceptance in her new home east of Eden. When she gave birth to Seth, her labour was terribly hard. All of the physical pain that God had promised her as a consequence of the snake incident was combined with all of the emotional pain that comes from losing two children, and she screamed so intensely during the birthing process that she blew out the flames of the swords of the angels. The angels, seeing the flames disappear, assumed that this was the result of divine intervention, and, believing that their job was done, ascended back to heaven.
One day, while working the fields after the birth of Seth, Adam saw that the entrance to Paradise was unguarded and told Eve. After some discussion they decided that they did not care to return to Eden. Having accepted their fate, an opportunity to return to Paradise was lost.
Adam and Eve did not recognize the apathy that disguised itself as acceptance.”
When hospital protocol allowed Socrates to visit with the mother of his child, he shared the strange tale told to him by Elijah with Bella, and looked to his wife to help him interpret its message. After a prolonged labour, Bella did not have any energy for theoretical explorations with her husband, so she asked him to let her rest and suggested that he too get some sleep to clear his head. Socrates decided that the best way to clear his head was to do something, so he proceeded to the nursing station and filled out the paperwork required to register the name of the newborn.
And that is how, in 1968, two decades after the regeneration of the Jewish state and one generation after the Holocaust, Jewish, Apathy was born.
————————————————————-
2013: THE FourTUNATE SON
Every Passover, for too many years, Aliyah Oylem-Goylem asked herself the same four questions:
How did I allow myself to get into this mess?
What right does one moment have to change all of time?
Why is love so unreasonable?
How long can I keep the secret?
She resolved that this Passover would be different.
This year, she would free herself from those questions, and unburden herself of a weight that seemed heavier than all of the charoset ever produced in the history of mankind.
She decided to begin with the secret.
The rusted sign that welcomes people to the town of Farblondjetville says: “POPULATION, 1028”.
What the sign doesn’t say is: “JEWISH POPULATION, 2”.
Aliyah was the only person in town aware of the two Jews, whose existence served in her mind as a microcosm of Jewish presence globally. Emmett, her six year old son, was blissfully oblivious to his matrilineal inheritance. Aliyah’s over-protective maternal instincts had repeatedly blocked her from changing his world forever by exposing his Jewish status to him. However, the burden of responsibility that comes from carrying thousands of years of Jewish history pressured Aliyah into revealing the truth to Emmett. She was just not sure as to how to break it to him.
Sitting in the kitchen pondering her dilemma, she found inspiration in the dish rack.
“Ma nishtana ha-ladle hazeh”, she chuckled to herself.
Weeks later, she was ready.
On a prematurely warm spring afternoon, Aliyah busied herself over the stove and created a storm of scents designed to pull her son into the kitchen upon his arrival home from school.
That moment arrived.
“What smells so good?” asked Emmett, as he bounced through the doorway.
Aliyah’s instinct told her to respond with the word freedom, but instead she stuck to her script.
“Dinosaur soup,” she replied.
The look in Emmett’s eyes told her all that she needed to know. Her son had fallen for the bait.
“Dinosaurs are extinct. There’s no way we could be having dinosaur soup. Show me what you are talking about.”
His mother smiled the smile of a gifted grifter. She walked over to the pot on the stove, plopped in the long ladle, and removed a strange and mysterious object from the pot.
“What is that?” he inquired.
“A matzo ball, my dear son.”
As she returned the ball to the pot, Aliyah continued the lesson.
“In this pot of soup are matzo balls, created in honour of the story of Passover, or Pesach, as our ancestors the Jews call it in our native tongue.”
Emmett couldn’t contain his curiosity.
“What is the story of Passover?”
His mother was quick to reply.
“There are many stories of Passover. Please be more specific in your questioning.”
Emmett scratched his head, hoping for some inspiration.
“OK, what do dinosaurs have to do with Passover?”
His mother seemed pleased, maybe too pleased.
“In the beginning, God created the Earth in six phases. Each of those phases lasted millions of years, but for the sake of our story, we will call each phase a day. On the morning of the sixth day, He created the dinosaurs, and let them roam freely over the planet. Magnificent beasts, they were a beauty to behold. God loved watching them, and in doing so lost all sense of time and self.
The angels marvelled at the variety, the simplicity and the power of the dinosaurs. However, later that day, they expressed concern to God about one of those creatures, the one they called the Tyrant King, known to you as Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The angels’ main job was to sing songs of praise affirming the Creator of All as King of the World.
The Tyrant King was throwing them off key.
They urged God to destroy T. Rex because it acted as a haughty imposter to the true King of the World.
The Creator of All, however, was reluctant to destroy his handiwork, and deferred responding to their request.
The angels, embittered by God’s failure to immediately act upon their demand, ramped up their pleas and insisted that not just T. Rex, but all of the land-based dinosaurs be destroyed.
The Almighty was saddened by the hardening of their position.
God designed T. Rex to have the strongest bite of all of the creatures that He had ever created, but He soon discovered that the bite of angels was the most painful.
Stuck between His love of the dinosaurs and His love by the angels, God fell into a state of T. Rex vex.
As the day progressed, the urgency and intensity of the angelic chorus started to get on God’s nerves. Overwhelmed by their relentless chatter, He finally agreed to their demand to trigger the mass extinction of the earthbound dinosaurs, but not before, unbeknownst to the angels, he secretly preserved the memory of his beloved T. Rex by embedding its DNA into the DNA of a flying dinosaur.
And within that imperfect moment, the angels finally desisted from their cacophony of complaint.
When silence re-emerged and God was able to once again think clearly, He regretted his decision, but realized that He could not renege on his promise to the angels.
God asked himself four questions:
How did I allow myself to get into this mess?
What right does one moment have to change all of time?
Why is love so unreasonable?
How long can I keep the secret?
At that moment, Metatron, chief scribe of Heaven, arose from his throne and addressed God:
‘Kel Shaddai, shamor vezachor bedeeboor echad.’ “
Emmett giggled at his mother’s attempt to imitate Metatron with a deep and booming voice. She sounded like a televangelist speaking in tongues.
Aliyah continued channeling Metatron, but reverted back to English
“To answer Your questions, You must remember that You designed the world to contain healing forces. The All Knowing is protected from all You know by two such forces, forgetting and limited recall. That is why You created me as Your chief scribe, to help You remember to remember. If You check Your blueprint for the universe, You will see that the divine plan requires that you smash an asteroid into the Earth to destroy the land-based dinosaurs. Let me remind You that major collisions carry your creative fingerprints. Do You not remember how You crashed a celestial body into the Earth to create the moon? Can you not see the majestic mountains that You created through Your vision of colliding tectonic plates? Wake up Your imagination to remember Your ultimate plan: the creation of the only animal with the potential to imagine You.
God, having been reminded of His ultimate creative task, sighed a sigh, the force of which flung an asteroid towards the Earth. The era of the dinosaur ended with a collision between the celestial and the terrestrial, and with the shedding of a few divine tears. ”
At that moment, Aliyah’s mind drifted to contemplate the power of collisions to both create and to destroy. She remembered how her life path had collided out of the blue with that of her late husband’s to create a blessed marriage. She briefly relived the horror of watching from the passenger seat as her husband’s life was ended by a drunk driver. She recalled how, as a result of that impact, Emmett prematurely entered the world, and she reflected on how the arrival of her “little moon” brought a much needed stability to her life, which was now permanently tilted on its axis. She paused to consider the whereabouts of the organs that her husband had donated as his final act of kindness.
Emmett’s voice crashed into his mother’s trance.
“What has this got to do with the Jews?” he asked.
His mother choked back a tear and tried to regain her composure.
“God remembered how He had forgotten his own plan, so He took Metatron’s advice to guard his memory with a reminder, and envisioned the matzo ball for that purpose. God chose the Jewish people to be bearers in perpetuity of that reminder. We were given the responsibility to remind God every Passover of memory’s paradoxical power to both enslave and to free. We do so by making and eating matzo balls. In order to more fully appreciate the lessons embedded in those balls, you have to understand how they are made.
First, you have to understand that God loves the number four. The world only exists because of four forces dancing together in perfect harmony. Gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, weak and strong forces all interact to create the only planet in the universe that can sustain life as we know it. Because of his love of four, God commanded that matzo ball be made of at least four ingredients.
The first ingredient is finely ground matzo, which is the closest edible substance on Earth resembling the material that makes up the asteroid that is central to this story.
The second ingredient is the egg of the chicken. When God destroyed the dinosaurs, he secretly embedded DNA from T. Rex into the DNA of the ancestors of the chicken. God is the Great Puzzle Maker, and one of His greatest pleasures is to share in the moments when humans solve the puzzles that He has weaved into the fabric of His creation. Imagine God’s feelings of relief and joy when scientists like your father uncovered the secret connection between the humble chicken and the majestic T. Rex. It is only through the art of asking questions that the magical and the mystical can be uncovered. That is one of the key lessons of Passover.
The third ingredient is carbonated water. This represents the carbon dioxide that fuels the breath of storytelling. That breath allows me to tell you the story of Passover the way your father would have told it. Even though he is physically absent, his presence can still be with us through the power of storytelling.
Passover is all about the telling of stories. Stories of what once was, stories of what someday will be, and even stories of what never was but will always be. Stories of freedom lost and stories of freedom gained. An eternal haggadic process, where the same story is repeated annually, but with effort, heard differently, every year.
The last ingredient is flavouring, the most important being the love that the cook puts into his or her work. This represents the love and respect that God expects each of us to demonstrate to all of His creations. That is why He commands us to love four times in our Bible. And within the quartet of verses containing the word ve’ahavta, you will find the essence of our people.
So there you have it, the story of Passover, or more correctly, your first of many Passover stories to come.”
Aliyah then sat her son at the table and presented him with a huge bowl of soup containing four enormous matzo balls.
Emmett eagerly pressed his spoon into a matzo ball, but surprisingly the matzo ball pressed back with an indescribable firmness.
Emmett swallowed his lesson with enthusiasm and quickly emptied the bowl’s contents into his stomach.
Within moments, it felt as if he had swallowed an asteroid.
“I feel kind of funny,” Emmett mildly moaned, soup dripping down his chin, as he turned to his mother for comfort.
“My dear son, what you are feeling is the full weight of Jewish history pressing from within. Welcome to the tribe.”
“The tribe? Huh?” responded a somewhat bewildered young man.
“Judaism,” answered Aliyah with a loving smile.
“Any questions?” she asked.
“Yes, I have four,” chuckled Emmett, hoping that his intuitive response would relieve some of the tension that he had noted in his mother`s face throughout the evening.
Aliyah felt her soul elevated by the response.
It appeared that she was raising the Wise Son.
She promised him that next year the matzo balls would be fluffy.
———————————————————–
2014: The Lonely God of Faith
A mischievous student once tried to tie the Potzker Rebbe up in mental knots.
“Rebbe, can you explain everything with one word?” he asked.
“Everything?” replied the Rebbe, scratching his chin quizzically.
Sensing that he had the Rebbe on the ropes, the student smugly replied with the Hebrew word for everything: “Hakol.”
“Havel,” responded the Rebbe with a compassionate grin.
“You recite the answer to your question every morning in your prayers.”
Deflated by an awareness of the impertinence that permeated his impermanence, the student humbly sought redemption in the Rebbe’s eyes.
“I see,” replied the student. “You are saying that everything is havel, or vanity, as taught in the second verse of Ecclesiastes, Vanity upon vanities, everything is vanity.”
The Rebbe responded: “I prefer to translate the word havel as breath, so the teaching of Ecclesiastes is: unappreciated breath in, upon unnoticed breath out, everything can be understood through the metaphor of breath.
But, to fully comprehend the lesson that you seek, turn to the book of Genesis. There, you will find an answer to your question in the story of Havel, or Abel as he is known in English literature.
Come, meet me in the text.”
And so, the Potzker began his teaching.
“And Adam acquired intimate knowledge of Eve, his wife, and together, they conceived the future. Nine months later, Eve gave birth to a boy.
And Eve exclaimed: “I have acquired a little man, a god for me.” And so she named him Cain, a play on the word canaa, to acquire, for up until that point, she had owned nothing beyond her own skin.
Immediately following Cain’s birth, Eve delivered another son. During that difficult and painful process, Eve feared that she might never again own another breath, so she named that son Breath, or Abel, to remind herself never to procreate again.
Cain became a farmer and Abel became a shepherd.
One day, when her children had reached the age of bar mitzvah and she thought that they were old enough to understand, Eve taught her sons about the Creator of All, and how He had exiled their parents from Paradise because of a simple misunderstanding.
Cain and Abel were frightened by the tale, so, that very day, they sought to appease the Creator. Cain presented before Him an offering of the finest vegan treats he could find, while Abel presented the fattest of his lambs.
And a lightning bolt from the heavens struck the lambs. And even Cain the vegan was entranced by the delightful smell of roasted lamb.
And Cain and Abel waited for the heavens to send down a lightning bolt to roast the vegetables.
And they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And Cain’s face fell, and was further contorted by sadness and anger. Abel, being attuned to his brother’s emotions in the manner that only twins are capable of, gave Cain a reassuring brotherly hug, and silently returned to the fields to tend to his flock.
And the Creator revealed Himself to Cain and said:
“Why so serious? Do you really think that you can control Me with vegetables? I understand your hope that, through prayers and sacrifices, I will agree to grant your wishes. But I have the right to refuse to accept those requests, and sometimes, if you search within those moments that disappoint, you will find valuable lessons. Shema, pay attention, for the answers to your prayers may come from you listening to yourself. Today’s lesson is that you are created in My image. We both have the capacity for freedom of choice. If your choice is good, your spirit will be lifted up. But beware, time judges choices, for what may initially appear to be good choices may ultimately miss their mark. The consequences of mistakes are like predators, lying in wait for an opening, ready to pounce at you. But I, Creator of All, have faith that, should your mistakes come back to bite you, that you can prevail. You have my word, for I am God.”
Cain, somewhat confused by the Creator’s muddled teachings, focussed on His closing words. Cain believed that he was god, just as his mother had taught him, so he went out to the fields to seek reassurance from his brother.
“Who is God?” Cain asked Abel.
Abel’s understanding of God’s essence was gained through the warm silence that he experienced while tending to his flock while out in the green pastures. Abel tried to convey that understanding to his brother by silently mouthing the letter aleph.
Silence collided with fury.
“What is the name of God?” pressed Cain angrily.
Abel, knowing that his brother enjoyed riddles, replied: “If you say His name, He disappears.”
The only thing that disappeared was Cain’s self-control. He grabbed Abel by the throat, hoping to extract the name. All Cain managed to do was to squeeze the last breath out of his brother. Abel lay motionless at Cain’s feet, which only infuriated Cain further.
“First you play the riddler, and now the joker? Enough!” he screamed at Abel.
God reappeared to Cain, and asked: “Where is the breath of your brother?”
At that moment, Cain became aware that Abel had ceased breathing, and was not just feigning sleep. Cain was struck by the cold silence of his brother’s body.
“How should I know where his breath is? I am just a kid,” replied Cain.
“Mother taught us that You breathed the breath of life into our father and into each of us, so You are the keeper of breath. Or are you saying that I am the keeper of Abel’s breath? Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Panicking over that possibility, Cain grabbed Abel’s staff and poked at his brother repeatedly, hoping to restore breath to Abel, and thereby avoid angering the temperamental God that his mother had warned him about. He poked and he poked, more forcefully each time, with strength that he did not know he had, until blood poured forth.
God’s face fell.
Shattered by His failure to protect the only human being with whom He had found the beginnings of true companionship, God struggled to regain His bearings. Contemplating His own reflection in the waters of the oceans, God saw, within His own eyes, an expression that He had only previously seen in humans: the look of shame.
God thought to Himself, “No man can see this face and live.”
Turning to Cain, He struggled to find words to express his distress.
“What have you done? The Earth cries, having tasted the blood of your brother. You have cursed yourself, for she will no longer share her strength with you because of your weakness. As for us, I must hide My face from you. You are on your own now. Go to the land of Nod and accept your fate as an exiled son descended from exiled parents, a stranger, forever wandering among the others.”
Cain could not believe his ears.
“The others? The only humans left in the world are my parents and I. What are you talking about?”
God explained.
“When I decided to create humanity, I said to Earth, come, let us marry, and let us create offspring. Come, let us make man. You provide the materials, and I will provide the spirit, and through humanity, we shall fulfill our potential for good. For I am a king without servants, and you are a queen without subjects.
Earth was reluctant at first, but I prevailed in persuading her to share My vision, and we joyously created the rainbow as a symbolic reminder of that moment. She provided the water, and I, the light. We then proceeded to create preliminary versions of hominins, such as the Neanderthals, ironing out the kinks along the way. We eventually created your family, with the hope that you people would be different than the others and demonstrate a capacity to rejoice in life with both Myself and Earth. But only Abel developed that ability, and now, he no longer connects me to Earth. Perhaps Earth was right all along. Perhaps creating mankind was a mistake. Perhaps I should destroy humanity now.”
Cain, now fully aware of his own mortality, found himself caught between the possibility of meeting his end through an act of despair by the Creator of Destruction, and the possibility of potentially becoming the victim of a bloodthirsty xenophobic mob in Nod.
A sickly dread gave way to a revelation.
Cain chose to reflect God’s earlier lesson back to Him in order to save his own neck.
Said Cain: “My punishment in being unable to comfort You in Your pain is more than I can bear. But was it not You who taught me that, when mistakes come back to bite, one can prevail? Humans will eventually turn out as You designed them, and choose to live up to their potential for good. You have to have faith in freedom of choice. You have no choice. “
God found a temporary refuge from His shame in Cain’s words, but could not reverse Cain’s destiny as a wanderer. Realizing that Cain’s life was vulnerable to predation by the inhabitants of Nod, the Creator of All decided to protect Cain.
First, He provided Cain with a canine companion, the world’s first service dog, tasked with the job of protecting its master. Understanding that those who hate look through their victims until all they see are objects, God took light left over from the first day of Creation and concentrated that light to rest within a twinkle in the eyes of Cain and his dog. In doing so, He hoped that whoever would look into those eyes with a cold-hearted intent to harm would feel the warmth of the divine, and have no choice but to exercise self-restraint.
And so, Cain and his dog Mark spent their days melting hearts in the land of Nod, spectacularly surviving through the protective powers of specular highlights.
Many years passed, and God saw that mankind continued to deviate from the path that He had planned for it. He maintained His faith in man’s potential to freely choose the path of moral evolution, but that faith was eroded daily by the forces of reality.
Nevertheless, God patiently waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And just as He, in the depths of despair, was ready to wash the planet of all earthly inhabitants, God noticed Noah, an individual who stood out from all the others.
And God said to Noah: “For every outside, there is an inside. You are alone in the world, and so am I. Come, let us be on the inside together, and let us repair the world, for every inside requires an outside. Are you on board with me?”
Noah found himself lost in the shadow of God’s tower of babble.
Confused and humbled by God’s revelation, Noah responded with the profound power of simplicity.
“To life” he replied, raising a glass of wine skyward.
And so, God, desperate to reboot His vision of a unified humanity, put his faith in Noah and his family.
However, Noah’s descendants, devoid of compassion for God and His utopian vision, found comfort in their own passions.
And, through the ensuing loneliness, God awakened to mankind’s limitations in appreciating the unity of His Oneness and His Noneness.
But He never lost His faith.”
The Rebbe paused, and the student noticed a film of salty tears covering the spots of light that guarded the pupils of his teacher’s eyes, pupils that served as portals to the Rebbe’s inner space.
And within the blackness of those pupils, the student caught a glimpse of the darkness of outer space.
And within that darkness, for the briefest of moments, the student could have sworn that he saw the face of God.
It seemed like an eternity before his next breath proved him wrong.
And the student understood.
Hakol havel.
2016: The Antidote
After thoroughly reviewing the medical chart, Dr. Solomon Teyku strutted with an air of confidence from the nursing station towards Nissim Fresserman’s room in the hospital’s surgical ward. The strutting was in defiance of the fact that Dr. Teyku suffered from Imposter Syndrome, a gnawing sense of inadequacy despite significant professional accomplishment. Dr. Teyku tried to convince himself that, by successfully managing the first patient of his career as a newly-certified psychiatrist, he could set himself on the road to his own recovery.
He ignored the chuckles from the nurses who had cautioned him that his cross-cultural sensitivity training might prove lacking in dealing with the self-described “Jew in room 302.”
Upon entering the room, Dr. Teyku was somewhat surprised to find a stereotypical Jewish patient in his rural hospital, but reminded himself that modifying expectations is one of the goals of psychiatry, and so, he carried on.
The only intimate knowledge that Dr. Teyku had about Jews was that which he had gained from his Jewish friends during his medical residency.
“What could go wrong?” he thought to himself. “I love Jewish food. “
Dr. Teyku’s Jewish friends had given him the impression that Judaism was all about the food, especially holiday food. He was soon to discover a new dimension to that cliché.
“Hello, I am Dr. Teyku. I am a psychiatrist. Your surgeon, Dr. Komos, asked me to stop by for a chat. Do you understand why he might have suggested that?”
Nissim Fresserman was in an irritable mood.
“It’s all my mother’s fault,” grumbled Nissim.
“I see,” replied Dr. Teyku, sensing a potential wealth of psychotherapeutic opportunities.
“And why is that?”
“Because she married my father,” answered Nissim with a smirk.
Dr. Teyku heard cash registers ka-chinging is his head. He resisted the urge to immediately offer Nissim a business card for his private psychoanalytic practice.
“I see. And why was that a mistake for your mother?”
“She should have married her own kind, but no, she decided to marry an Ashkenazi guy, and I have had to suffer every year on Passover because of that. What kind of woman doesn’t consider her children’s potential future suffering before making such decisions? “
Dr. Teyku was lost.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you are saying, but perhaps we should limit our discussion to what is happening to you right now.
“It says in your chart that you were found wandering the streets before you collapsed. Yet it also says that you had pain for hours before collapsing. Any reason you didn’t call 9-1-1 earlier?”
“My cell phone was in the closet. I couldn’t get to it. I don’t have a land line.”
“Was the closet locked? Did you lose the key?”
“No, it wasn’t locked. Unfortunately, I left my phone in the closet with the chametz that I sold before Passover. Chametz are the foods that are forbidden on Passover. They either have to be destroyed before Passover, or they can be gathered in one place and sold to a non-Jew. So, it was forbidden for me to trespass into that non-Jew’s closet, and even more forbidden for me to even look in the closet just in case I saw the chametz within my property.”
“What would happen if you saw the chametz?” Teyku asked with a sense of befuddlement.
Fresserman grimaced and replied:
“The worst thing that can happen to a Jew: karet! “
“Karet: the end of my soul’s connection to 3000 years of its heritage. I can’t even begin to imagine that horror!!”
Dr. Teyku began formulating a diagnosis. Mother issues, father issues, neurosis bordering on psychosis. He understood enough to understand that Nissim did not sound like a mentally healthy man.
“OK, I think we can postpone talking about the horror. Could you describe what you were doing the day that you collapsed?”
“It was the fourth day of Passover. Passover is supposed to be a holiday to enjoy the delights of springtime, but it was freezing cold outside, and raining too. My family went back to the city, and I was stuck here alone in cottage country, with not much to do. So I started to binge-watch Netflix. And I was getting hungry, so I started munching on matzo. By the end of the second box, I wasn’t feeling well. I was already constipated for days. That didn’t help.”
Dr. Teyku smelled a psychiatric opening.
“I see. So you were binging on Netflix and food. Do you have a tendency towards impulsivity and poor self-control? Alcohol, for example?
“Yeah, I had four cups of wine for two nights in a row,” playfully replied Nissim.
Dr. Teyku duly noted the indulgence.
“Do you understand how you ended up in surgery?”
“Yeah, apparently the matzo got stuck and formed a ball that eventually turned into a stone-like substance that couldn’t be budged by any means other than surgery. Dr. Komos called it a bezoar. He told me that bezoars were at one time considered to have magical properties, that they were useful as antidotes to poisons. So it looks like I produced a magical healing substance with my own body. I have the power to heal. Feeling a little jealous, Dr. Teyku?”
Dr. Teyku added narcissistic grandiosity to the list of observations and continued his probing.
“You mentioned that you had a problem with constipation. Is that a regular problem for you?”
“Ha-ha doc. Very punny. Regular. You think I’m anal? Let me tell you, for the past six months, ever since I became a vegetarian, I have had beautiful bowel movements, sometimes two or three a day. But come Passover, my mother issues plugged me up.”
Dr. Teyku treaded carefully.
“Please explain.”
Nissim elaborated.
“On Passover, it is forbidden for a subset of Jews to eat from a class of foods called kitniyot. This illogical list of the forbidden includes peas, beans, lentils, corn, peanuts: the list goes on and on. Those were the foods that I was thriving on. People from my mother’s Sephardic background are permitted to eat those foods, but because she married a man from a different culture, she and her children had to take on his culture’s traditions of not eating kitniyot. And why are these foods forbidden? Only God knows. Some overprotective Ashkenazic rabbis, beginning in the 13th century, became so afraid of people suffering from karet that they started making up bizarre rules about kitniyot to protect our souls. And they haven’t stopped in the hundreds of years since.
My family on my father’s side are descendants of one of those rabbis, the Shvertzuzeiner Rebbe. He was stringent in his teachings about kitniyot and also forbade gebrokt, which is the mixing of broken matzo in any form with water, for fear of it turning into a chametz-like substance. He even taught that drinking water with matzo was forbidden, and I guess subconsciously, that teaching stuck with me, even though I think it is ridiculous. Yet, for some bizarre reason, he allowed eating gebrokt on the eighth day of Passover, but we could only eat it from special dishes. On a special tablecloth. White, of course.
Even my mother’s family tradition was affected by the folly of kitniyot. Her people are permitted to eat chickpeas and sesame seeds, but are forbidden to eat them ground up together as chummus. Why, you ask? Because it sounds like chametz. What do you make of all of that, Dr. Psychiatrist?”
“On your father’s side, severe obsessiveness. On your mother’s side, a clear looseness of association. Classic formula for psychosis,” Dr. Teyku thought to himself, while trying to maintain a professional sense of detached composure.
Dr. Teyku remained silent, and nodded to allow Nissim to continue.
Nissim started to get angry.
“My heart breaks knowing that the Temple of Jewish Law is collapsing under its own weight, and God is getting buried in the rubble. Contradictory and illogical rules do not bring people closer to God. Instead, they potentially lead people astray, or even worse, they can lead to madness. MADNESS!!!”
Suddenly, Nissim observed Dr Teyku’s face started to change.
His nose turned into a cob of corn. His eyes turned into kidney beans, his eyebrows, sesame seeds. His hair turned into buckwheat. Teyku’s upper lip became a green bean, his lower lip, a snap pea. From those lips, chummus began dripping into a beard composed of tofu peppered with lentils. Dr. Teyku’s face was turning into a kitniyot-themed Arcimboldo painting before Nissim’s terrified eyes.
Nissim’s visual experience made him wonder if his disrupted connection to reality was a prelude to a darker disconnection, that of karet. However, he could not understand what he may have done to bring that about. He did not eat any chametz during Passover. Suddenly, he became suspicious that there was some chametz in the narcotics that his surgeon still allowed him to liberally self-administer post-operatively through an intravenous pump.
“Dr Teyku, you are a psychiatrist, a healer of souls. Am I losing my soul?”
Dr. Teyku calmly responded.
“Nissim, let us try to gain some perspective on your problem. You have a fear of karet, the disintegration of the essential connections of your soul. What is the opposite of karet? It is that state of being where the connections of your soul are all integrated as one. Your ancestors playfully called this state keter, rearranging the Hebrew letters k, r and t of the word karet and manipulating the vowels. Likewise, by rearranging your thoughts and emotions, you may find yourself closer to keter than karet. So, as you indicated to me earlier, it is true, you do have healing powers within you. My prescription for your soul is that you strive to find within yourself the capacity for love and compassion, which is the path to keter.
Nissim, I feel your pain. Nothing is as whole as a broken heart, but through such pain one can find the wholeness of healing. Rules should be soft and firm so that they can sustain you, like a nice piece of bread, not rigid and breakable like a dry piece of matzo.
Here is a simple rule from your ancestors that may take you a lifetime to master: love the stranger, love your neighbour and love yourself, and in doing so you may find love for your God. Love the rabbis, whose misguided love for your soul got you into your present predicament. Remind them of vox populi, the power of the people to change Jewish law, as they did by refusing to accept potatoes as kitniyot.
Eat kitniyot, not just for your physical health, but for your psychological and spiritual health. Eat them in a mindful state of holiness, remembering the big picture of the Passover message. Celebrate Passover, a Temple based holiday, as they did in the times of the Temple, when kitniyot was not even a figment of the rabbinic imagination. Re-learn to love the power of imagination. And by the way, always drink plenty of fluids when you eat matzo.”
Nissim was perplexed.
“You clearly aren’t Jewish, yet you seem wiser than Solomon. How can I trust that the truth in your words is real?”
Dr. Teyku grinned.
“It is true. I am not Jewish. In fact, I am not even real. All is an illusion, including the illusion that all is an illusion.”
And with that, Dr. Solomon Teyku vanished in a puff of smoke.
And through that smoke emerged the whisper of a still, small voice. It came from a well-dressed man carrying a clipboard.
“Hello, I am Dr. Elijah Gogel-Mogel. I am a psychiatrist. Dr. Komos asked me to speak to you. Is that alright with you?”
“What happened to Dr. Teyku?” asked Nissim.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fresserman. There is no Dr. Teyku on staff at this hospital. But I am prepared to attempt to handle any conflicts that might be troubling you, including any ‘Teyku’ issues that you might have. Shall we begin?”
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Recent halachic decision on kitniyot: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/2011-2020/Levin-Reisner-Kitniyot.pdf
Medical article that partially inspired this story (with picture of an actual matzoh bezoar): http://www.ima.org.il/FilesUpload/IMAJ/0/77/38668.pdf
