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NOTES TO =sc_e_aa6.txt


(eaa6-1)
[ And also that is the Midrash:  When Moses was up on Mt. Sinai
with his hand out to get  

the Torah condensed into the Chumash condensed into the 10
Commandments 

to take down to Mevo Modi'in the Angels said, Why are YOU are
giving the greatest treasure in the Universe those Schmendriks --
and HaKodosh B'ruch Hu said, Do y'all maybe have a little bit
problem titgonif, that you need to carry around a big stone
staying "Thou Shalt Not Steal" ? ]

(eaa6-2)
[ Cf. Bob Dylan:  "They'll stone you and then they'll say , 'Good
Luck --- '" 
It is an Israeli principle that no soldier is left on the
battlefield, with the possible exception of Yossi Sarid .
So I think that whatever path or paths we're on -- psychedelics,
Sufi/Soupy  (In Arabic, as in Hebrew, the same consant is used for
F and P , so the old S.O.W is sometimes Sufi and sometimes Soupy,
QED McGee ) --  Baal Tchuva , whatever -- Ground Control must
ensure that its job description includes Emergency Search and
Rescue as needed, and try to take care that all the shift do not
go out on an 8-month coffee-break at the same time, even to have
babies or whatever.  Like, I lost about three years getting a
suntan when I could have been typing because everyone assumed 
Meshiach would come out to the beach with a set of clean clothes
and a one-way ticket to get me, and anyhow nobody really wanted to
go out and look for the beach.
 
But I digress. }

(eaa6-3)
[ Comment from the Peanut Gallery (sa):  Actually, not.
It's merely a flipout, no more useful, romantic nor existential
than doing a bellyflop from a hang-glider onto a manure pile. 
Possibly a soft landing, but it may take a while to get cleaned up
enough to go back to your office.  Depnding upon your line of
work, of course. ]

(eaa6-4)
{ So this is PVK's "a breakdown which avers itself to be a
breakthrough".
But that's just the best-case scenario, and so to piously trust in
its being the case is a Sufi copout, as_it_is_said, "thou shalt
not stand idly by the blood of your brother".  Not even dry blood.
Marilyn Strauss (Lidov) once said to me, "I've been crying without
tears.  That's much harder than crying with tears." 

You know, back about 1970 Lama was sending out a Spiritual CARE
Package of the Month, and so one month they did PVK in conjunction
with R. Zalman, if memory serves.  Like, Sufi and Hasidut.
And 30-plus years later I'm just beginning to catch up with that.
After so many glimpses from the heights of how they interweave,
and too many quandries in abyss's when they seemed to confront me
with an irreconcilable dilemma of loyalties.

Pardon my heing boring, it's just that folks kept asking me, What
did you do on your 3-year summer vacation, and so I figure I
should file or pigeonhole an answer somewhere and be done with it.

But I digress. )

(eaa6-5)
[ That is to say, if I understand RSC's unexpectedly elliptical
syle  -- making money is not unholy per se, it becomes unholy only
insofar as I subordinate it to my ego_ism rather to my
religiosity.  This is what in the 70s , eg at seminars at Another
Place Farm in Greenville New Hampshire, was called 'right
livelihood'; and of course it is 'parnassa im kavod', in the
birkat haMazon. ]


(eaa6-6)
[ Oh, take your "clouds of glory", Wordsworth, and --- 
Seems to me, kids ain't old enough for Shakespeare nor religion.
I mean, religion is an acquired taste, like drinking beer, or
enjoying in addition to having sex, or learning to prefer Bordeaux
to Merlot, or Ripple Peach. 
In Jewish tradition, it is at puberty that a child becomes Bar (or
if you will, Bat) Mitza.  And I don't see much point in dragging
the poor little brats to the Bet Knesset before that, or making
them wear kippot. ]
Gvalt -- I just realized -- that fatuous phrase by that fat ass
Wordsworth, "trailing clouds of glory" comes from Midrash or some
such -- the clouds of glory that accompanied the childen of Israel
through BeMidbar after that left Mitzryim -- and if you think
BeMidbar is the Sinai desert and Mitzryim is Egypt -- for the
Sinai does not belong to Egypt, I hereby declare it a World
Heritage Site -- me and Sadat and Weizmann say so -- and maybe
Dayan too -- so then you should go buy yourself a ticket tour with
that economical comopany that keeps losing its door and wheels and
tourists luggage in the desert -- not Galilee, not Egged, not even
United that Carries Krauts -- not one of the Politically Correct
East Jerusalem PLO-front a-Salami Companies -- the El Cheapo -- }


(eaa6-7)
[ This is "the baal tchuva stands where the tzadik cannot reach".
But it ain't clear what that means, nor when it applies and when
it don't.  I mean, some of those black_jacket clean_cut clowns at
Diaspora ain't standing on much more than their own beer bottles. 
So it's rather wishful apologetics to suppose that the baal tchuva
is on a higher spiritual level than the kippa sruga frummie.  Like
in the movies when the Bad Girl is redeemed for having had sex by
getting killed.  Or that idiot from Monsey who thought he bought
up the copyrights to HBG and republished some with a patronizing
forward that said, now that he's in the heavens, we can forgive
RSC for not having joined a monastary after he had to put aside
his wife.  When that dude gets to heaven the first thing he's
gonna do is spend a thousand years looking for a massage parlour,
as it is said, we will be held responsible not merely for every
avera, but also for every lawful pleasure which we were too frumie
to take.
But I digress. }
 
(eaa6-8)
[ The sort of tzadik RSC seems to be imagining here is a dude who
does all the mitzvot chick-chack, clean and neat.  A spiritul
technologist, R. Zalman would term him.  But that's kipa sruga,
and we usually think of a tzadik as a dude with a beard long
enough to sit on, giving away all his money and shining it on
while he eats macrobioltic brown rice and not much else. ]

(eaa6-9a)
[ That is:  the holiness of Shabat qua vessel is that it
accomodates infinite yearning for the Divine. ]

(eaa6-9b)
[ The reasoning here seems to be:  whatever an infinitude contains
must be finite, since if it were infinite, it would be co-
extensive with the infinitude, and hence not contained in it.
But this ignores Cantor's notion of trans_infinities, infinities
of ascending orders of magnitute.  Though I can't imagine how
anyone could have made sense of such an apparently
self_contradictory notion. ]  

(eaa6-10)
[ Yes we know; that's why 4 out of 5 Isralis find it holier to
drive to the beach on Shbat and make a barbecue, than to go to the
Bet Knesset. 
The first thing to understand about so_called secular Israelis is
that their motivation is fundamentally religious.  They find, or
found in a religiously coercive childhood, that established
religious practice violates their religious sensibility.  And so
it is to protect that sensiblity that they pose as secular.
And you see that once Israelis get out of Israel.  As when they
pass by and come into the old synagogue on Rodos.  Even if they
have supper at the hotel after Kol Nidre, and go out to the beach
next morning in thongs, with enough spare change for a few fried
shrimp to buy lemonade. ]

(eaa6-11)
[ That is, most of the mitzvot observed on Shabat -- or rather,
the predominant mitzvot of daving and eating, and keeping kosher -
- are not, unlike the mitzva of eating mattza, prescribed
particularly for that day; they apply to all days.

Now that's not quite true, because on Shabat we are required to
eat at least two meals, and the custom prevails of giving those
meals as much festive charactaer as one reasonably can without
going into debt. ]

(eaa6-12)
[ But this is patently invalid -- that is, it may be true enough
almost all the time, but there is one instance for which it is not
true, hence it is not valid, ie not true for all possible
instances -- because Yom Kippur may fall on Shabat.
And I gather it is the rabinic consensus that when a Yom Tov falls
on Shabat, it is Shabat and not the Yom Tov which has ontologic
priority.  And that is a very important question for kavanot, for
focus.  Like the difference between chesed sh'b' GVURAH , which
would seem to be giving priority to the afflictions of Yom Kippur
but lightening them with Shabat consciousness -- the Shofar is not
sounded -- vs. gvurah sh'b' CHESED -- in which case, if Yom Kippur
falls on Shabat, the feeling is primarily peaceful and (albeit in
a somber way) joyous, qualified by a recognition that we all go
somewhat off-track and need to get back on the "King's Highway". 

I never understood why it would be considered a mitzva to eat
white flour challot rather than whole_grain__bread (vollkornbrot)
on Shabat -- until, heaven be praised, I lost my teeth.
(And that's the sort of shtuyot you get in the beginning of
Solevetchik's Halachic Man -- "do it and get a reward" -- and had
he not so tragically been cut down by a stroke, and then rather
idolized by some, notably Ch. R. (Efrat) Shlomo Riskin, that would
not doubt have been corrected.  }

Or maybe it's just that the Swiss put a pit of millstone grit in
their vollkornbot.  At Meor Modi'in of course everyone bakes
wholewheat challot for Shabat.  The hippies anyhow, the frummies,
they should live long and stay out of hospitals if they get sick, 
are apt to buy sugard rubber whiteflour challot. 

I mean, to suppose that you're so holy that it doesn't matter what
you put down your gullet as long as it's got a hexsure on its
hexsure -- that's idolatry.  And it's also "tempting fate", to use
the USA paraphrase of that phrase in the Good Book. 

But I digress. ]

(eaa6-13)
{ And this too is "a feast_ale is a feast_ale" in R. Shlomo's
retelling of 'The Great Fixer' from Reb Nachamn. 
This means, that whatever you have on Shabat, as long as you've
got at least two pieces of bread each the size of an olive, and a
dash of salt -- the size, I think, not necessarily the weight --
though some crunch though an entire square frisbee of matza at the
Seder and say it's only a kazais --  

Now what I happen not to know is -- where are you at if you can't
get any bread at all for Shabat.  Or to make it harder, if you can
get bread, but not any bread that you want to eat -- for reasons
of health.

Or if you don't want to drink that plastic cough-syrup that passes
for proletarian kiddish wine in Israel -- and is considered the
quintessence of yiddishkeit in the USA -- 

Or if it's havdalah and I have ten hogshead's, you should pardon
the expression, of Yarden Mt. Hermon Red , but I'd rather do it on
Lipton ice tea, to keep my head clear.

Or if I've converted to Islam, how do I make kiddish, if there's
wine and beer but no grape juice nor grapes in the house.
( And incidentally, this is R. Shlomo's Moshe Feinstein joke --
"But Reb Moishe, I'm the Pope -- " "Nu, nu, [your mother was
Jewish so you must ] bentsch nagelwasser." ) 

But I digress. }

This is how I'll  
(eaa6-14)
(eaa6-14)
[ haKodosh, B'ruch Hu ; not Shloime from Flatbush and Baden bei
Wein in better days ]

(eaa6-15)
{ And this of course at its limit is, in PVKs teaching.  "samadhi
with open eyes" or "awakening in life" (in contradisticntion to
"awakening beyond life".  And that is why I group the three paths
I have tried to follow -- the American Indian way, what little I
learned of it a New Buffalo hippie, and Judaism, and the path
marked out by HIK and PVK -- misleadingly termed "Sufi" -- this is
why I group those three paths as "transcendental" (in the sense of
Emerosn's transcendentalism, not that I ever read more of it than
a few quotes in a nice glossy English literature book we had in
11th grade of High School, or maybe it was 9th grade of Junior
High School -- I hope this isn't boring anyone but me, I should
maybe take more coffee if I don't fall asleep on the way to the
coffee pot -- in contradistinction to Buddhism and Christianity
(theoretical Christianity, not actual Christianity; when it became
apparent that the Apocalypse would be inexplicably delayed for at
least a few millenia , the Christians managed to overcome their
sorrow and do quite well, thank you; and if Jesus were to come
back and say Greetings, Faithful Servants, I'm here to take you to
the Final Judgement, sorry if I'm a bit late, Mate, they'd say,
get back up on Your Cross don't make us waves, Knave, we'll try to
send a kid by with a glass of water later on and see that you get
a good Obit in the Times, James --  )

But I digress. }

(eaa6-16)
{ Or if I may presume to put the previous consequential phrase -- 
"or you're completely nothing or you'll blow your mind" in
somewhat more acceptable if not precisely conventional English --
American that is, who knows what they speak on that sodded Isle,
as_it_is_said, "If I were any more Brrrritish I couldn't speak at
all." --  

then either you must have annihilated your ego to the point that
you're  completely nothing, or you'll blow your mind and wind up
under starched sheets in the funny farm where for recreation they
stick a thermometer up your wazoo just when you're starting to
think it's time for Shaharit.

Perhaps that "fashion de parlay" is helpful; I should not like to
have inadvertantly left anyone with the impression that flipout
pays, as_it_is_said (by Vonnegut) "there is no such thing as a
free lunch".
I always assumed Vonnegut was a total jerk, but lately I read that
he was in the U.S. Army, captured in Battle of Bulge, interned in
Dresden, beaten up for telling the German guards what he though of
them, and then survived, barely, the firebombing of Dresden.
So I must say he's not a total jerk, he just writes like a total
jerk.  Or reasonably near thereunto, as_it_is_said, I would not
call you a perfect idiot, because nobody's perfect.
         
They make quite a good pear schnaps in Switzerland.  Excellent on
a rainy day; I think I won't convert to Islam this week.

Called Pear Williams , as_it_is_said (in Alice in Wonderland) "You
are old, Father William, the young man said, "and your hair has
become very white.  And yet you incessantly stand on your head; do
you think at your age it is right?"
Nu, tell it to Ben Gurion.  

He's down at Sde Boker, in the Negev.  You wouldn't get him back
in the Knesset if Lenin pulled up in his masoleum, climbed out,
walked over to the kever and said, here, take my Limo.

But I digress. ]

(eaa6-17)
[ And this is precisely the Sufi saying, "Renounce the world, and
then renounce your renunciation out of love."  
(Which is the "lower house" analogue -- it's more complex than
that, it's really the upper apartment of the lower house -- so
we're getting back to Plato's preportionality of descending
symmetry "or whatever" -- of the Sufi saying, which epitomizes
their analogue of tzim-tzum, "It was for love of you that I [ the
Supreme Being ] created the world."

Notice how RSC goes against Instant Mysticism here -- Sixjoint Joe
would say, it takes strength to do Infinity.  Mishrekan minimum. 
RSC says -- and that may be included in his "chevre, it's time to
get out of diapers" --  that it takes a whole lot more strenth to
let Heaven stay up there with the stars and the space cadets, and
just learn to tie your tfilin tight enough that they don't slip
down to your toes -- although in that case you are much less
likely to be carded -- 


And that of course is "awakening in life" or "samadhi with open
eyes."

And that too is Rumi, "forgive me, oh pious ones".

But I digress. ]

(eaa6-18)
{ The Indians say -- sometold said to me, in Taos, they say that -
- thae house belongs to the woman.
My father told me, my grandfather, Benjamim Amdur(sky),  did not
keep kosher, but my grandmother, Mollie (Jaffe) Silberblatt
(Amdursky), did, so in her home he kept kosher. )

(eaa6-19)
[ understand the meaning behind the words, and then the intent
behind the meaning, and then the consciousness behind the intent,
and then the Divine Programming behind the consciousness -- that
was a dash of more_or_less PVK conceptualization sports fans --
just something I tossed in while the coffee was boiling --  and if
anyone reads this before 15 Aug '05 please airmail a Jlem Post Int
or even a Jlem Rpt to Steve, Campra, CH-6718 ]

(eaa6-20)
{ Prooftext:  "And de head bone's connected to de -- neck bone,
and de neck bone's connected to de -- " etc., ("Ezekiel saw de
Wheel" -- Negro spiritual, or so they say }

(eaa6-21)
{ Right, Gesundheit.  Sometimes alophatic is all you need.  "Crude
but effective" (Wonder WartHog Comics, MIT, 1970s).  Sometimes
wholistic is like driving from Cambridge to Concord -- nobody goes
to Nedham -- via the Great Circle Route. }