=scsanaa7 SA NOTES TO =sc_aa7 CAVEAT TABBYCAT . What follows may ruffle the feathers of a Blackbird or rankle the hackles of a Blackhat I've seen more snias at the newstand wrapped in plastic. We could have burnt folks at the stake for less, if only we had forsaken our old testament of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" for the true religion of cute_and_sweet and turn the other cheek, because we are no longer the chosen people -- like the Greeks say, what's the percentage in sitting up on top of Mount Olympus if you can't change your mind from time to time -- So like Ciel would say: What's wrong with this picture OK, y'alla -- grab an 8-tine shitshovel, 'cause it's "garlic and saphires embedded in the mud" time again: ---------------------------------------------------------------- GET =sasanot1 (aa7-1) GET =aa71n1 I make no claims to any RSC material that I have worked on ( and therefore have no standing to give others permission to use it, nor to withhold such permission), but acknowlege that others may have asserted or may assert such cliams. For further discussion on the question of copyright, see my memos, in =shmemos.zip on my Website, www.geocities.com/sa73122a , especially =goldrush if it's there. My own focus is on archiving, not outreach. So I input these transcripts with the line-ends of the manuscript, so the accuracy of my input may more easily be checked. I make no edits here, except spelling and punctuation. All the transcribed words of RSC are presented as transcribed. One might add that the Rabbi was not a native_English speaker. He learned English, if one can say that that is what they speak there, in New York city. And it shows, anyhow in transcripts from the 70s. (Incidentally, PVK would often lecture in German (having washed out of the Royal AirForce into a minesweeper in WWII) and even he acknowleged that what he spoke was an original dialect. Rinatya Nachman regards it as rather an improvement on the original, comparable to the Buber__Rosenzweig translation of the Bible.) So if the attitude toward the Rabbi gets any more idolatrous -- already everybody is singing his songs and almost nobody is digitalizing his tapes and cassettes before the chormium oxide of his words is resurrected as air pollution -- then soon all the neo_chevre will be speaking ShloimiEnglish. Which has rather little to do with one of the great Jewish orthodox thinkers of our time.} (aa7-2) {N.B.: Provenance is the last stop on the New York New Haven and Hartford before you get to Route 128 which wasn't built then and a good thing too. As for Divine Providence, that is an area of the city offering night-time entertainment, not that its really entertaining much less gay, of a sort that , whatever our inclinations -- personally mine is exclusively toward pre-teen camels with well-groomed tan camels'hair coats and while forelocks -- regardless of sex of course, as it is tactless to ask this of a Bedouin -- we are enjoined from enjoying. And R. Zalman once remarked, best's I recollect, 'Judaism is opposed to homosexual acting-out.' Like I say, pardon my advertisment but I can't afford to paint it on a BMW: Sleeping with women is normal; everyone likes to do it, from little-bitty babies to old King David. Sleeping with men is queer, though some women evidently find it periodically bearable. But I digress. } (aa7-3) "I went to tell everybody, but I could not get across ... Don't say I didn't warn you, when your train gets lost." (Bob Dylan, before he found Jesus of course. Though I wasn't quite aware that we had lost him. Fresh dusting of snow on the mountains above about 1800 m. Cold spirng rain. 16 May, 7 AIYaR, chesed sh'b' NETZACH, 8 Rabi al Thaanay, and for Catholics the day afer Pentecost, which is 50 days after Easter; an obvious emulation of Shavuot, just as Christmas, 25 December, is an obvious emulation of Chanuka, which begins 25 Kislev. They Try Harder, but still don't get it. For starters, we ain't the 'chosen people' , we're the 'choosin' people', and you can choose too, so fire the lawyers and can the Vatican cause they're ain't no need for New Testment, the old one will do fine, Wayne. (aa7-4) { I think maybe I change and now use upper-case V for vet, even though vet is just a degenerate Bet, and so use lower-case v for Vav, because it is often just a conjunction. But maybe I better not because for consistency. Anyhow I definitely do one or the other maybe. It is cold morning and I maybe eat too much or drink too much wine and schnapps on Shabat and so have bad dreams and so I am disagreeable this morning if there was anyone here to agree with but the cat. ] (aa7-5) a mother momish brings it down { In Catholicism, in contrast, it is popish } (aa7-6) This is Gemorah. {You can say that again.} (aa7-7) { I have no idea what the holy Rabbi is doing in this here disquisition, but it sure sounds like some kind of riff on that Passover after-dinner cabaret song called 'Who Knows One' (Echad, Mi Yodea) . (aa7-7a) {Whatever that song is, it sure ain't the children's song it sounds like, because they must have crashed out in the haroset hours before. I used to go for Seders at the Witts, usually unannounced -- once I walked into their Old_Woman_who_lived_in_shoe home with a six-foot-five Sioux Indian, but I can explain -- that was Jim Cummings, who was all Indian (paterlineage) and all Jewish (matralineage) and Norwegian (and anyhow I once heard Dhanyi Thorner give a talk in Central Square in Cambridge, and she said, some say we are one of the lost tribes of Israel, but maybe you are one of our lost tribes) -- and one day they tell Jim, oh by the way you are Jewish, so he comes to Israel with Sar-El, Volunteers for Israel, to find out what being Jewish means, and then one day I am walking back to the Witts from Ma'ariv at the Kotel, slightly higher and faster than a 747, and I am accelerating up the Midrahov because I could really use a drink -- and anyhow, one erev Pesach when I am about 23 years old I am invited for a Seder to the whom of someone else in Columbia SPU, and having arrived there just before the evening meal I , being a civilized sort of graduate student in philosophy, request a cocktail beforehand and am rather miffed when my hostess suggests I might wait because there will be wine at the meal -- I mean really, a short bourbon-and-ginger-ale would have done quite fine -- and anyone one other time I am at Chabaad House in Boston for an instant Seder -- gvalt, Chabad really illustrates Kurt Vonnegut's dictum 'there is no such thing as a free lunch '' -- a few pieces of matza with a dash of horeradish and they think you owe them your soul, and go ahead with collection procedures too -- surreptitiously, as all good mystics do -- if that ain't witchcraft, I'm a mechanical engineere -- I mean, where I come from, which is SoupySufiLand, it's bad form even to give someone a blessing if they ain't asked for -- after my latest flipout -- #l2 I still have nightmares where I dream I'm back sleeping in some cement passageway -- did last night, but that was from too much schnapps and coconut chocolate wafers for the seudah of David HaMelek, and then going to sleep immediately after -- I spent a year refusing aliyot at Mevo Modi'in for fear that I was not strong enough to fight off Golumb's brachot -- though he had quite mellowed after he retired from being Radbash - - a total maniac or normal Alabaman he wass in those days -- he once threw me out of the Witts when I had parked myself there to wait out one flipout -- depressions do pass, and I guess you only get permanently hurt if they put you in one of those chemical-saturated shrink machines they have the chutzpah to call a mental hospital -- like , guaranteed Iatagenesis -- so anyhow, after a month or so on that roof it is getting a bit of an imposition even for Joshua Witt, who had the soul of a saintly elephant , and there is Golumb, and I ask to see some ID that he is an authorized police officer, and he shows me tzittzit -- with techolet yet, meaning he is a high-ranking officer -- But I digress, and also when I came back after my latest flipout to Modi'in he continually went out of his way to make me welcome -- and also he is married to Leah Golumb, someone should input all her tapes in digital form -- when I was up at HaOn she once wrote me that she would like to come up for the swim across the Kineret -- a great idea tho in fact they just cut down from HaOn Campground to Tzemach -- adding that is was a great pleasure to take off most of one's clothes and get in warm water, and adding, "some things never change" -- "head in the clouds, feet on the ground" as the SoupySufis say -- that's the S.O.W., Sufi Order in the West -- we're so cool that even the real sufis would burn us, except that here in the West someone might call the cops for air pollution -- But I digress. } (aa7-8g) [ GLOSSARY: schwack -- weak ] [ GLOSSARY: taka -- DON'T NOW -- Best guess: the minimum device needed to affix s notice to a bulletin board with sacrificing one's chewing gum ] (aa7-9) {Nope, that's just a side affect or effect or whatever. Like, if I have fallen down a dry well on a deserted turnout when I stopped to take a pee, I am praying that someone else will have to too. So anyhow, the first time I saw Michael ben Shmuel he was rapelling down an ancient dry well behind Moshav Mevo Modi'in, on a rope that had hopefully secured under the tire of a car, to try to give first aid, as a former EMT, to a guy who had fallen down it.} (aa7-10) { Indians -- I mean the American Indians, not those subdontinental wannabees -- used to say -- Pray quick. So it ain't like -- Litvaks is outside, Hassidim is up in the mystic poo-poo. I mean, a hossid may be up there on one of the 6 higher planes, stuck in a swamp, while the Litvak is cruising on down Highway 66 with time left over to stop at a truck stop for a cup of coffee.} (aa7-11) Then he says something way out: {Exodus, I assume.} (aa7-12) -------------------- A long footnote: { OK, sports fans, let's review the lit quick: In the good old days of LSD, Leary would speak of 'ego-loss'. That happened at about a cap of acid, 1000 micrograms of LSD. Me, I always took only about a half-cap, which gets you only to the archetypeal level. Now PVK often teaches an exercise where one identifies successively with what Tibetan mysticism terms the subtle bodies - - one disidentifies with the physical bodyy, and goes (I paraphrase now from failing memory -- I think they said something about pot in this regard, but like I always say, senility is what you make of it -- so anyhow, one goes from physical body, magnetic field, detouring astral body, to aura, and increasingly subtle bodies until one disidentifies with one's personality and then with one's consciousness itself, and then -- and this corresponds to Bellephron soaring ever upward while Pegasus does the old re-entry bit with a six-pack of hotdogs for ground control -- and also it corresponds to the midnight ride of -- not Paul Revere but the Prophet Muhammed, Peace be Unto Him, to "the farthest point" -- and though they name Al Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount after it, that then having been the holiest place on earth, the Prophet was never physicall there -- so it won't quite do for the foreign news media to speak as if the significance of Al Aqsa in Islam is seperate but equal to its significance in Judaism; it is neither, it is derivative from the latter, not of inherent significance to Islam -- and it was only Dayan's sentimental athheism that led Israel to relinquish practical control of it to the Palestinians the very day that we regained in on Yom Yerushelayim in 1967. ] {I work on Archiving RSC and PVK. At Modi'in I give priority to the former, at Campra, to the latter. Local courtesy, I suppose, but R. Zalman might take that for paganism -- WodensDay, ThorsDay, FrigaDay, SaturnDay. So someone asks, why study teachings of other religions when there is enough in Judaism for many gilgulim, re-incrnations. Now first of all, the notion of re-incarnation is more conceputally problematic than the pop concept seems. HIK speaks of it with ambiguity and I think (most unusual in his recorded remarks) irony ("Every body re-incarnates, not every soul") PVK speaks of it as ambiguous and complex, and suggests that it might more accurately be thought of as strands -- a braided rope going through time -- though I think better metaphor would be in Wittgenstein's notion of 'family resemblance' -- abc, bcd, cde , efg -- so that no trait necessarily continues all the way -- but that won't quite do either -- active genes may be more apt, where after a while our tails become vestigial -- Ok, that was only warmup -- First of all, I do not think PVK would have, much less would, accept characterization as Islamic rather than eclectic. ("Now he belongs to the ages" said someone, closing Lincoln's eyes.) Someone at the Abode, which counts for a reliable source, once remarked to me that HIK's personal practice was Islamic, but I have not, in my happenstance skimming, read confirmation of that, nor heard it from anyone else, *l2 not that I talk to much of anyone except to pick up girls, and I do or did that mostly by politely progressive groping, being too shy to verbalize. I went through adolescence in the USA 1950's "when men were men and women were girls" (sa=. #L1 We do know that -- if I have this right -- the teacher of the teacher of HIK was Muslim, and that he had intended to be initiated by a Muslim -- but then he met a dervish who said, I have come to initiate you, and the dervish was Hindu -- or maybe I have that backwards -- maybe the dervish was Muslim and the teacher was Hindu -- We do know that most but not all of the teachers in the Silsa of HIK and hence of PVK and ZIK were Muslim -- In 1999 I bumpted into ZIK was with typical Isreali take, as described in the GuideBook I have read, I asked him, "Are you practicising Islam" and he replied, "I am eclectic, like my grandfather. To this day I do not know what religion PVK practiced, if any. He surely believed in a Supreme Being, but one can scarcely imagine what that would have meant to PVK. Now it is the case that the preponderance of PVK's terminology, though by no means all of it, is Islamic, and that almost all the practices he recommended and taught are given in Islamic terminology. But it seems to be generally agreed that one might use alternative terminology, from other religious traditions, although not in a sort of Berlitz Phrasebook way. R. Yankele Shames, still at Bet Meir below Jerusalem as far as I know, has I think done more work than anyone else on finding equivalents or analogues in Jewish religious tradition for many of the terms used by PVK. I once asked Charisma, Robin 'Alita Giber, to give me an equivalent in Jewish tradition for the notion of 'Christ', and she did, but of course I did not remember it. Richrd Baker, Roshi, of Tassajara, lectured for a week at Zenith, and spoke of meta-languages. I could not sit through his lectures -- he seemed to present himself as an engllightened nerd -- but it is a useful notion. My metaphor is "one mountain, many trails". And that of course is, "with one tochas you can't dance at two weddings". No doubt the trails all go up to the same summit, but you can't hike two at once. But although they may all resolve concepually, one can say that there are different attunements. Each time that I have converted to Christianity -- I used to do it more or less on every, or every alternate, flipout, whenever I was so filled with despair that I figured that the only way to save my soul, whatever that might mean, was to catch hold of a skyhook, and Jesus is the only skyhook I've heard of, though I think Budweiser is an ok substitute, at least temporarily. In New Mexico they used to say, if there's a tipi prayer meeting scheduled for the evening, and if you can't get to it, get drunk. So what I want to say is -- some religions may get you to some places a lot quicker and easier than Judaism will. Like, if it wasn't for Jesus I would have hired a hitman to shoot the Vaad a few weeks ago -- but instead I used the money to buy half a kilogram of alpine cheese. Alpine cheese is expensive, but it lasts a long time, especially if you have fewer lower teeth than ears. My mother was German-Jewish, and grew up in the New York Ethical Culture Society. AvrahamHai put in the Bet Knesset some volumes of Talmud in English translation, in an original translation from early 20th Century that his father brought from Cochin. One of the listed contributors (subscribers) to publication of that edition was Felix Adler, who was or went on to be the Founder of the Ethical Culture Society. Something for those who find Reform Judaism just too old-fashioned and frum. A sort of risk-free Unitarianism: whoever you mee tthere, if anyone, it ain't apt to be Jesus. Me, I'd rather try my luck with teh Quakers, at least they don't talk too much. So anyhow, I like to tell folks, the Sufi Order is New Age Ethical Culture. Or sometimes I say, Ethical Culture plus Eclectic Myticism. And everyone I say that to , or did, would nod politely with no idea of what I meamt. not that I really meant to say much of amything to them anyhow. I mean, one can with luck have an intelligent conversation with a Siamese cat, and also there is a fox who comes by for leftovers who seems by his eyes, or hers, to be quite empathetic. With people one makes small-talk. That's something I learned in Belmont Senior High School. Use more than two words of four syllables a week and you're a fairy. That was 1950s; I gather that the USA has dumbed down quite a bit since then. So anyhow, whenever I convert to Christianity I find it's "cute and sweet" and warm and comforting for an hour or two, and then darned lonely, as_it_is_said (by me), A Jew who is has very recently converted to Christianity is deemed a Jew with wet hair. I mean, 'sexual preference', like Jesus (no implied similarity intended) is essentially irrelevant to Judaism. Personally I would prefer half my neighbors' wives and two-thirds of their daughters to my old lady ( my chapter of Peace Now Pay Later having advised me that those visits to the desert were counterproductive), but this is usually impractical , especially on Friday afternoons, which is the only time that one is permitted to take a break, so to speak, from Learning. But I digress. ] ---------------------------- (aa7-13) [ So this is Larry Kushner's Book of Letters -- Sefer Otiot. Sefer Otiyot, The Book of Lettes, A Mystical Alef-bait , by Lawrence Kushner, Jewish LIghts Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont, ISBN 1_879045_00_1 Copyright (c) 1975 and (c) 1990 by Lawrence Kushner. lst printing Haper & Row, NY 1975 PJ4589.K8 492.4'1'1] Larry Kushner is Rabbi at the Reform Whatchamacallit in Sudbury Massachusetts, which is next to Lincoln, which is a nice place to go jogging and swimming or ice-skating across Walden Pond, and easy cross-country ski-ing. His other books are noted as: G_d was in this place and I, i did not know, The Book of Words, Honey from the Rock, and The River of Light, all available from Jewish Lights Publishing. Reform is largely assimilationist, but Larry Kushner is a card_carrying hippy (emeritus maybe). This is one of the great books in western civilization, if you count Jews as westerners. (Most goyim do so only in public, and lots of our more self- apologetic Jews too. I mean, what can one say at the wine_and_cheese__parties. Politics is a fashion accessory; attempting to responsibly form a political opinion is something to do when one retires, on days when the trout ain't biting and the mosquitos are. ) Or better. this in an ok book in Semitic civilization, and might rank with some of the lesser works of Arabic calligraphy. His midrashim are for real too, or anyhow honest attempts; he don't fake it. You want footnoes, you get footnotes. You don't want footnotes, you got footnotes. But I digress. } (aa7-15) {I'm darned if I not what this Aleph is that RSC is talking about. PVK speaks of an innermost part of the self that can never be sullied. So maybe that's it. This is also the morning bracha, "the soul which THOU has given me is pure" } (aa7-16) [ RSC here gives in translation the 7 lower sephirot: chesed, gvurah, tiferet, netzach, hod [ more often translated 'splendour' than 'honor', although the latter is also supported in biblical use of the term -- eg 'hodor '' ki tov -- ki l'olam Chesed:o' ] (aa7-17) { This sort of teaching, pairing two rather oppositie emotions, is functionally similar to PVK's teaching wazifas in tandem. } (aa7-18) {Well, there is a limit pat which forebearance does not build virtue but rather weakens one's spirit. I think this is analogous to the old gambit in Talmud: if you desire neither the suffering nor the reward for enduring and transcending it, then you might as well be well (and so he cured him), If acting saintly and forebearing toward someone who uses you badly does not build and strenthen your character, then you might as well look up and down the street twice, and then stuff the dude in a garbage can. Otherwise we get into the sort of holy passivity whihc the Zionist claimed -- not without some justification I assume, though with much less justification that they supposed -- facilitated the Shoah. This is "Calves are easily bound and slaughtered, never knowing the reason why. But all those who cherish freedom, like the swallow have learned to fly." And that is supported in the teachings of religious Judaism. One is required to give at least a tenth of one's wealth for tzdaka, but forbidden to give more than a fifth, "lest he himself become in need of tzdaka." (Kitzer shulchan aruch, quoted from memory.) And so similarly, one should expend one's emotions, but only to the extent that one can emotionally afford, not to the point where one is emotionally weakened. "Forebearance, poor Clarence; this ostentatious Austin Texas wench's outrageous" (sa) } (aa7-19) {Well, that's frightfully cute, and looks fine on paper, but I'm not sure I'd advise trying it. Even an idiot knows when he's being put down. I think what idiots want most -- and of course most of those whom I meet are in that category -- is to be treated with respect. Alev once said: Everyone wants to be seen. And HIK says something like, do not throw mud at a fool, or it will splash back on you. And also he says, a desire for revenge is like a desire for poison. And also he says, do not hurt someone with a cutting remark. Well, there ain't much fun in being a saint, not that I can see. } I'm going a bit out of my way in this set of notes to point out similiarities between the teachings of RSC and those of the so_called Sufis, esp. HIK and PVK. Because being intellectually provincial is cute and sweet when you're out in the country at the end of a dirt road, but when that dirt road turns into a 6-lane highway carrying 1000 cars a minute full speed to the seacoast city, then intellectual provincialism is a bit incongruous. I mean, the whole point of modern orthodoxy is that we can live off the fat of the land of the empire of Mitzrayim -- and all the more when that empire is intellectual, and we are not forced to live there -- I mean, one would expect USA Jewry to be more reactionary than Israeli Jewry, because the former are at much greater risk of loosing their Jewish cultural identity. Not to mention their Jewish religious identity. So it ain't surprising the most lose their political loyalty too, and side with our enemies to better conform to the goyische culture in which they dwell.} GET =scsanot2 ================================================================ BUT FIRST, LET US DEEP6 ALL THE PRECEEDING FOOTNOTES --------------------------------------------------------------- THE FIRST BATCH IS =scsanot1 That goes through >Note 19 Remerber to GET to it at topdoc =aa7n1 (aa7-20) {And others would phrase this, most usefully for those who balk at anthropomorphic imagery -- which is of course at risk from our anthropomorhic traumas -- and that's the main motivation for feminist theology, it ain't much theology, just a little psychodrama against all them males by whom one felt mistreted -- how much are you in harmony with the Tao. I mean, the heathen Chinese don't have to worry about Daddy Tao vs. Mommy Tao.} (aa7-21) {[ Dale Carnegie, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' Very popular in the USA in the 1950s, but no longer so now that people have been possessed by Republicans. The Stepford Wives and all that. "The Enemy Within" as Tailgunner Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Fruitcake said. "We have met the enemy and they are us" (Walt Kelley, Pogo "With a fanTAStic collection of STAMPS / to win friends and influence his uncle." (Bob Dylan} (aa7-22) { And PVK says something similar, with regard to saying wazifas. You cannot say, Ya Haq (the Dvine Attribute of Truth) and then go out and -- whatever --- I was going to say, fiddle iwth your income tax, but I do that so it can't be worng -- } (aa7-23> { This constitutes a commentary on the passage immediately following the Shma -- that one should have the Divine Unity not merely in mind but also in heart and soul at all times, in all situations. } (aa7-24x) { OK sports fans: we should not need Woody Allen to ask, Why is there not a bracha over sex. Or brachot, since there are many phases of sex, and each should be consecrated, from the dawn of lechery to the bregrudged courtesy of satiety. Does one say a bracha over that which is unkosher. Not if it is truly unkosher. I mean if I take some dainty for a trash can I would not ordinarily say a bracha over it, especially if I have just come from a mutually satisfactory interaction with a Magic Money Machine, and want to make some gesture that may impress the passing ropeman for the Neon Punk Disco. But if I am a prisoner in a concentration camp, G_d forbid -- and there are not many situations in which one may pray that the free will of humankind, and even natural laws, be suspended -- and I am risking my life and worse to find food for those who are in worse shape than I, and I find a little bit of ham in a refuse pile, with which I can make soup to sustain half the barrack, then I may say a bracha, for everyone knows, Heaven moves even through the ungodly -- if only to place an apponted banana peel at the edge of a cliff, speedily in our days. For while the optimal solution is that they see the light and join the Resistance and/or a monastary, if that ain't happening , then the greatest good for the greatest number might be best served by shooting them at once. That, I suppose, was the premise of Leninism. But I digress. } (aa7-25) { this word was inadvertantly omitted in the first draft. It's been one of those years -- decades, actually. I used to assume that the appropriate reaction to such a change of life would be to commit suicide when one is of no more use in one's geneologic and the evolutionary processes. But everyone knows, though nobody knows why, that alter kakers must be honored. And PVK says, you have not only earthly parents, but also heavenly parents. To the former we owe procreation, and sad is the man or woman who has not fulfilled this role -- the notion of priestly celibacy is heresy, incidentally. We should not have needed Lenny Bruce, zl'b, he died for our sins, to remind us that "G_d -- your G_d -- created those tits" and all the other "naughty bits" as the Brits would put it, those bloody buggers. If ever there was a perverse culture, it was the English. What they did to prisoners in Merrie Olde England we would not do to a dead bull that had just gored your mother_in_law. So it must be that we owe a debt too to our Heavenly parents. And like Sokrates said, hold the hemlock, Sherlock, I still got two IOU's in my pocket. Ellen Goodman, writing for the Boston Globe reprinted IHT 11 May '05, notes in passing the problematic feeling in having outlived whichever parent one took for the Authority figure. Incidentally, whenever I get up there, if I ever make it -- and PVK says, damnation is not eternal -- tho he don't say what domes next, I mean, disappearing into the Great White Void is not precisley something to live for while all the little devils or whatever they are -- not doubt something much worse and trivial too, so there's not even a dignity in one's victimhood, as Orwell intimated -- I mean, we can forgive whoever crucified Christ, but not those who mocked him -- so when I get up there I do intent to have a word or two, or whatever one uses thataway, with whoever misdesigned this situation so that we never get to know our parents as just plain people and friends -- my parents always had usw address them by name, not as Mother and Father, tho my mother remarked at various times that she rather regretted having done so -- tho she never told me why -- still, shee really was my best friend and closest intellectual companion as I was growing up -- "Say what we feel, not what we ought to say" -- that's from the closing scene of King Lear, when, for the older generation, led by Kent, everything really has fallen apart and ought to be packed up and put away with a few suitable labels -- I've lost the thread now, and would rather eat breakfast than go back and pick it up, so let we tie this up "quick and dirty" -- So ok, I had at one point vowed I would not outlive my father -- much good that would have done anyone, least of all him -- but when that time came nigh, and all the Kol Nidre's maybe not sticking, I repented me of my foolish vow, and tried to make a deal rather than jumping off the nearest suitably high hotel -- this was on the beach at Rodos, a good place but not a great place on which to hold a major identity crisis -- and my mother often said, if you're going to have an identity crisis, it's better to do so with money in your pocket -- Honest Iago says the same thing to Othello, it's his first and last recorded mitzva -- "put money in your purse" -- So I said -- put on the table as a negotiating position really -- like, Ingmar Bergman should be resurrected and shot -- so OK, I will keep on living, but only in service to mankind -- humankind, rather, though it had already been too long since I had served a lady -- I mean the Victorians were quite right, every man should have a wife an mistress, jsut in case the old cow goes dry -- keeps a man from melancholy, and that'ss the first order of business, like Reb Nachman says -- And then some parts of myself that I'd always stuffed away out of sight under the donkey-suit said, hey wait a minute Chralie, look at all the things we ain't done yet -- let us re-negotiate -- So there we all were on the beach on Rodos arguing it all out while the Greater European Tittybathers came and went, and anyhow here I am now, Heaven be praised, and I must say this gig pays a darned sight better than I ewer would have guessed, THE END . But I digress. } says you have to know that G_d is momish (aa7-26) { Precisely the point of the feminist theologians } (aa7-27) [ And that would be supported by the rabbinic commentary on the passage in Genesis where the angel says to Hagar, the LORD will see the boy where he is at. ] (aa7-28) [ This seems to be taking 'yomim' not as plural, which it would seem to be, but as the unusual grammatic form, dual . ] (aa7-29) { Oh really. I mean like, today its near freezing with low clouds and a drizzling rain and I have a hole in my sock and a hole in my undersock and the nearest place to get a plain normal American breakfast is I think at a truck stop off old U.S. 66 somewhere east of Gallup , and you want I should be instead sitting in the 6_month sun at Mevo Modi_in watching the cars go by and being a CashCow . I mean, enough with this Heavenforbid this and that and that and this biz. Go with the flow Daddy-o. It don't need Jesus to say, if suffering comes your way and you can't get out of it get into it, Schmidt. Pope John Paul, zl'b (as_it_is_said (at Haverat Shalom) when he visited Boston on Sukot, Gut Yomtov Pontiff . (Gary Bean said that. Repeatedly.) But I digress. } (aa7-30) { Oy McCoy. Even a medieval theologican would choke on that conundrum dumdum. Cf. PVK on St. John of the Cross (you should pardon the intrusion of a symbol (an infusion in a thimble) but that's what the Dude's called, Maude.) "the dark night of the soul." Somebody could write a nice Ph.d dissertaion in comparative religion on the relationships between St. John of the Cross and Reb Nachman. And sell it on a streetcorner in Mea Shearim, of course. } (aa7-31) { I mean, gvalt, this is like dialing the fire department because it's a rainy day and you want someone to talk to. I mean, try that with your woman and you'll be back at the one_hand__newsstand . Like, even Deities have a right to some time off. A bit of privacy some might say. And this is the final words to Moses: Go and be gathered unto your people. Like, there ought to be a midrash on that. Moses saying, after all we've been through, I should go and hang out for enternity with those shmendriks -- playing pinochole and talking about the racetrack at HiLo . I'd go bananas in a week, or whatever you have up there, with nothing to do but sit out on the porch while they play Bingo on the Radio, and wait for the sun to turn into a Red Dwarf. So please, I've worked hard and only tried to go out on strike once or twice -- so like, "in" YOUR Palace are many masnions" -- Jesus is coming along to say that, he should only find some guy like my Joshua to cover his back -- so like, "make me a pallet on your floor" in one of the servants' quarters, I don't eat much you know -- like, a few handfuls of matza or manna a day, Hey. And then the Supreme Being says to him, Man, you've done your think, sit down and pick up your Social Security checks and don't make me complications, I've got some really busy days ahead with the Bushies coming on line. And since I am cross-referencing the Sufis in this set of notes, "Let me make one think perfectly clear" as Tricky Dicky (that was Harry Truman's phrase, I heard him say it at a rally for for Stevenson on the steps of the Unitarian Church in Harvard Square -- "You can have Adlai Stevenson -- or would you rather have Dwight David Eisenhouer and Tricky Dickie too." ) used to say -- the old Sufis are making this same mistake, and occaionally getting nailed for their chutzpah -- "I want burning, burning" -- "Sorry Charlie, the chicks could barely scrounge enough firwood to bake bread today; will a crucifix dc. Or maybe you would rather just nip a loaf and cop a feel from that restless young one over there in the loose chardor, and let decent folk get on with their business, bourgeois and boring as it may be to you.") G_d forbid when something goes wrong. (aa7-32) { With an attitude like that, you should work for IBM. } (aa7-33) { Speaking of Sufis -- even al-Hallaj would not have been dumb enough to say something like that I mean, be serious for a minute -- this is like taking a chick to your harem -- I assume we all have harems, however concealed -- why else would the good folk of Mevo Modi'in build such preposterously large house -- and saying to her, I will do anything you ask of me, as long as you never leave my sight -- Like everyone knows, if you want to expand your consciousness, think twice before you don't "leave well enough alone" as they used to say in the USA before the Bushie's made a parody of it -- , there's most likely a darned good reason why it done shrunk down, King Oedipus } (aa7-34g) [ GLOSSARY: Kvais -- I don't know. My best guess: A form of dried corn eaten in the South African veld, primarily by aborigines when on foot in quest of antelope on a trip of more than 3 days. ] (aa7-35) { I have not idea what R. Shlomo is talking about here. The first step is to identify, input, and translate the passage from Reb Nachman under discussion. My guess is that Reb Nachman was not being deep, just a little bit weird. So ok, like Wittgenstein in Tractatus has both true and false facts , "or something", so I guess we could have both actualized and failed acts. And I suppose you could imagine those potentialities as words, or even letters, floating around in the old cerebullum . And even call one class black and other class white if you like. Or pink and chartreause if you're a faigele (I learned that word from a Mel Brooks film, 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights'. It's a pity that being Jewish is a non_returnable commodity, because one could make quite a list of prominent persons, mostly American, who ought to be offered that option -- with a free Gift Certificate to MacDonald's thrown in. } Oh, and as for the 'white bag'. This is a mystical kabalistic device which the Rabbi or his closest disciples carried everywhere. I contained a secret kabalistic essence of canabis so potent that even to think of it would get you stoned for a week. It was left hidden in a tree one year on 1 Nisan for fear that it has been used in the production of Mishrekan Brownies, which the chevre used to sell on streetcorners in Beverly Hills rather than be seduced by the Saknut into accepting a plastics factory. "We have forgottn the tree" and so today only the birds get high. But you can obtain a genuine replica of this mystical kabalistic potholder -- which reminds me of the time that the house at New Buffalo burned down, and all that I found in the rubble of the orgyloft was my pre-Columbian head, which I had used for a potholder -- by sending 100 dollars in unmarked bills to Steve, The Moshav, Greater Modi'in . Be sure to specify Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, or Hypothetically Humungous. Act fast, this offer is good only as long as the US dollar is. } --------- GET =scsanot3 FILEOFF AS =SCSANOT3 Then add to botdoc of =scsanaa7 --------------------------------------------------------------- (aa7-36) [ RSC has just switched sides in this dramatic dialogue, from sender to receiver. One should note that he brought to his lectures a fine dramatic sense, so his illustrations were at times enacted dialogues. ] {aa7-37} { I think this point of HaLuchot HaDinim, little as I understand it, has similarity to a teaching by PVK: There is the Divine Plan, the 'Programming behind the Universe' -- I guess PVK intends that term to cover not only 'efficient causality' (to use Aristotle's terminology) but also 'final causation', that is, not merely the physical evolution of the species of life_planets, but also the purposive evolution of intelligent species in the universe -- but the Divine Plan must be integrated with the free will of intelligent species -- or at least of our species, which is touch_and_go enough as it is -- it don't take a science fiction writer to imagine what some other imaginable speciies must do with freewill if Heaven let them get away with it -- I mean, any more reptilian -- to use a notion of Leary's -- than mankind -- womankind has pretty much got her ass on the ground -- and we got us big trouble, Hubble. So like, what we got us here -- I mean if RSC could get away with doing philosophy in jivetalk why I can't I -- and R. Shlomo's jivetalk was all bubblegum, pretty pinks and blues, what happens when I put aside the white challot and bubblegum kiddish wine -- I once offered Eliahu a glass of it -- he said cough-syrup. Next time I offerred him a glass of what passes in Israel for red vin ordinaire -- and just as he was about to drink it I said, of course I added sugar -- that was darned near the first time he ever refused a drink -- so what we got us here is both Divine Programming and Freewill. Now all us GoodyGoodies will say, of course, you must abnegate sour personal will , that the Divine Will may act through you. I mean, if that ain't Islam, sell all the prayer rugs to the Aremenian shuk -- and Jesus taught the same thing, not that the USA Christian facists would even recognize it -- "Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven " But PVK -- and shis is a point to those who might mistake him for a repesentative of Islam -- or mistake the Sufis for Islamic rather than transcendent_eclectic -- PVK says, if you don't want to go along with the Divine Programming, then do your thing -- and this does imply, 'and go to hell, Mel' -- for PVK adds, the Divine Programming is continuously -- or maybe it is continually, he doesn't use these terms, and I ain't yet clear what he does mean - - in change -- PVK teaches, this is the meeaning of that heavens_splitting phrase in Exodus, 'Ayeh Asher Ayeh' -- which is of course the image of the throne-chariot in Ezekiel's vision -- that the Divine Programming is changeable -- and that is also within the meaning of the traditional Sufi teaching, "I was a hidden treasure desiring to be known " -- which is the notion of tzim-tzum -- that the Divine Being is enriched by its incarnation in humankind -- and the Divine Programming modified, and optimally enhanced , by human freewill. Of course that has its shadow too, the Big Bang was the ultimate crap-shoot, the absolute gamble -- and that is the explanation, for sophmoric minds what needs it, of such disasters as the Shoah -- which by the way ain't unique in human history, much as Jewish national identity would have it so, though nor is it subsumable, as some of the apologists for Palestinians would have it, to other instances of national victimhood -- though the mechanistic impersonality of its techniques, matched only in the USA's style of capital punishment, albeit in the USA on an individual not ethnic scale, added a mew technologic dimension of horror to homocidal psycopathic madness -- but then, so did Nagaski if not Hiroshima, and before that, Dresden -- Why did Heaven allow the Shoah -- because Heaen allows humankind freewill. But did Heaven then approve the Shoah -- hell no, they can all sizzle in individualized hells for their thousand-year Reich -- (I'm winging it on this one, PVK never taught anything about purgatory nor hell, not that I know of -- though he did remark, at least twice that I know of, 'damnation is not eternal' -- The Divine Plan is characterized by moral absolutism, and the goal is the triumph of Good over shadow -- of Light over darkness -- but room is made for free will And that is most neatly said by Jesus -- quoting from memory, poorly -- It needs be that evil will be done, but woe unto the man through whom it is done -- So if Judas objects, "but I was just fulfilling the Divine Plan" -- for without Judas we would not have had Christ, or at least not so spectacularly, we would just have had maybe a simple carpenter who goes back home to the Galil and rescues Mary Magdalene from a life of prostitution and makes her a happy mother -- as it says in the Hallel, repeatedly --- nikimi, and also ki l'olam chesdo -- as others have said, from D.H. Lawrence 'The Man who Died' to those DiVinci Code clowns. So maybe I've started to show now that not merely is it permissible to introduce the teachings of other religions into Judaism, but it can sometimes be darned hard to carry forward an intelligent discussion of some topics without them It's like when I flew out of Israel to Switzerland, over the mountains of Albania I guess -- the El Al cabin attendant I spoke to did not know the geography -- and incidentally, I most likely, or so I feared though I maybe greatly underestimate the humanity and rationality of Israeli security personnelle -- might not have got out of Israel but for the rather incredible and very understated diplomatic intelligence of Yohevet Branigan -- so one sees the whole logic of the georgraphic formation of a set of mountains that define a nation, or a region -- those same mountains that one might walk up step by step -- and this is an image that PVK often evokes -- the overview of a landscape -- That doesn't mean that from a certain perspective the Shoah should have happened -- not even though it led to the re- establishmenzt of the State of Israel, and not even if that brings Meshiach -- nothing can justify injustice, the end does not justify nor redeem the means -- And also, this is the fallacy of the closed system -- we mistake a sufficient cause for a necessary one -- we say , it is only because A happened that B, or we say, if A had not happened, B would not have happened -- but of course, there's always another way -- had Churchill stopped Nazi-ism with a quick pre-emptive war in the 30's, maybe Mandy Rice-Davis would have been elected Prime Minister and issued the Balfour Declaration as a favour to Bobby Balfour, with whom she was having a brief but delighful fling. Yes, it is shocking to regard the Shoah as a short-term aberration in the Divine Plan -- and I do not mean to deny that a lot of Germans who were born before I was shouild have been strangled at birth -- and that is supported by that strange Islamic parable of Eliahu haNavi -- that is Kidr, as PVK says -- taking Moses out for a walk, and they see a guy drowning, and Kidr, the precursor of the Mesiah, says let him drown, he's supposed to -- so too, that is Pinchas -- though the rabbi's taught, if you had met Pinchas in Grammar School you should have given him a darned good drubbing -- On a causal dimension, the Shoah does not violate the Divine Plan; on the moral dimension of course it does, and anyone who was in a position to have retarded or aborted it and did not do so must bear the guilt of that 'sin of omission' as the Catholics put it. And I reckon that includes poor old Pope Ratzinger, who has unquestionalbly fulfilled the Peter Principle by rising one job_grade above his level of incompetence, and will not doubt have to bear the fall of it, unless he experiences a conversion that will make Saul of Taurus' look like a bump on the ass -- And this is taking us to "We are to emulate the Divine Attribute of chesed, but not that of Din" -- And that is also taken us to that most problematic bracha, "Baruch Dayam Emet" -- eg, someone dies of a heart attack, and we would do anything to have undone that event, but who is to say that he was not spared a passing of a sort, increasingly common in our polluted world, that most of us would give anything to avoid. Or again, "the Porush may die" -- condolences to the widow and all that, she should only convert and marry one of the single gentlemen who think they have nothing left in life but to go the Bet Knesset three times a day -- a great loss to Polish aristocracy and all that but the unfortunate demise of the Dearly Departed does seem to have saved a shtetl or two, and a lot of young women may lead happy healthy fruitful lives who would otherwise have been begging on the streets of Minsk and dying childless of tuberculosis -- This ain't quite the place for this but, also maybe I can wedge it in as a corallary: PVK made a no_drugs rule for the SO - - that meant pot and psychedelics, it is aa shame that he did not include the psychiatric drugs, for it those, not the harmless hippie-drugs, that are soul-destroying -- hippie drugs are surely soul-enhancing -- so anyhow, PVK said he did so with great reluctance, for he did not approve of making rules, taking as paramount value for the SOW , respect for human freedom -- (and it is that which made him reject the possible role of guru -- thoough maybe some hasidic Rebbe's tend to fit that model -- and also I think it is fair to say that there was tenedency of some of PVK's followers -- though not the original Abode Family, as far as I could see -- to regard him as a gurul -- So anyhow, he said he was sorry to have made a rule, and that he intended that to be the only rule he would make -- Now I do think that he somewhat over-reacted, assimilating pot to the psychedelics -- Amd also I do think he was right -- psychedelics are much too great a gamble -- that does not apply, in my judgement, to the use of peyote in the context established by Little Joe -- But as far as I can see, marijuana, which strikes me as a mixture of psychedelic and soporific, and used more for the latter property -- is a distraction, I think it pushes one more toward the astral plane, or something like it. It ain't as clear and clean as meditation -- But also, every rule finds exceptions to itself, usually short-term and small-scale, so their ain't no 'slippery slope' ro anyone un__up_tight enough to take each situation as it occurs, on its own merits and demerits -- And also, I think the wise agree that pot ain't where it's at -- the Indians told us "don't mix them", aand R. Shlomo said, "chevre, it's time to get out of diapers" (Hatzkala told me that saying), and so too PVK -- But like I say, occasionally, for some people in some contexts -- it is maybe advisable. So in short, I think that's one rule that can be dropped. Islam does not use alcohol. The SO has no rule against it, though in practice it is rarely seen, except at Zenith workcamps, but someone said, Zenith is not Sufi. I like alcohol, it sure beats tranquilizers, not to mention the zombie pills. Beats cigarettes too. Drinking on Shabat gets me happy and singing -- but I can't say it's much of a real consciousness-raiser neither. QED, Bungagee. Or will be maybe. Somewhat, wot. But I digress, 'Ness.] (aa7-38) { Well, HIK says, if you lose something it is either because you have risen above it or fallen below it. He was maybe the gretest musician in India of his time, and awarded the title, Tansen of India, whatever that means, and one day he lost all his medals on a train -- which to us may not seem as bad as dropping a Torah scroll, but apparently it meant much to him -- and anyhow, subsequently he left India -- quite a bit to give up for someone on the peaks of maybe the world's greatest cultures -- like, 'western civilization' is a fast-food parvenu comopared to Indian, Chinese, and even Islamic civilizations -- not to mention American Indian, which we never even recognized before we wiped it out, all but the barely-surviving pueblos -- -- so anyhow then HIK went on to France annd the USA to found the Sufi Order in the West -- rather an awkward name for it, as PVK sometimes remarked -- which may yet have an impact on cultural history, though it don't look like that now -- but then again, "we can not complete the work, but it is not for us to abandon it" (loosely quoting Pirke HaAvot -- or again, less obviously maybe, "be as careful with a light mitzva as a heavy one, for you know not the reward reserved for each." } (aa7-39) { Well, it ain't that simple. Best is if I can accept the Divine Will. This is what HIK terms 'self-sacrifice', I think. Although that is paradigmatically predicated of Jesus accepting the inevitablility of the crucifixtion -- though truth to tell, it don't seem to have been all that inevitable. On the contraray, exit signs kept popping up all the way "down the line" as Jimi Hendrix said -- incidentally 'the Doors' comes from Aldous Huxley's epochal monograph, "Doors of Perception", a very enthusiastic introduction of the public to LSD. So OK, best is to accept the Divine Will. That's a spiritual jackpot. Second best is to get your money back -- the Divine Decree is taken back, though there may be some problems down the line -- Cf. Bob Dylan , " ... you can do what you want Abe but -- next time you see ME you better run ... " Third best, or least wurst -- a rather small plate of coldcuts served at the Wursthaus in Harvard Squasre -- is I wriggle and wheele and nothing changes. Or I walk off in a huff and go bowling and eat a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur on the steps of the synagogue -- or even, heaven forbid, join Shinui -- Well, R. Shlomo says that's worse than hanging in there and wheedling, but I don't know -- at least I keep my pride, my spirit, a useable self-image, rather than turning myself into a schmendrik -- I mean, following R. Shlomo's usual analogy, though with more sophistication about relationships with the supposedly fair sex than he had opportunity to learn -- how cruelly the frummies badgered him out of a normal love life , the usual run of affairs, which was about all someone in perpetual motion could expect, after he got divorced -- but think of how many great women he might have found relationships with, and sired children into excellent upbringings, mostly unorthodox no doubt -- So anyhow, go with that analogy a minute. My woman takes from me something I very much want -- eg her body -- do I then wriggle and wheedle -- or do I "take it like a man" } (aa7-40) { You know, Reb Nachman did write quite a bit of shtuyot. And well as maybe the best phenomenology of spiritual fall, and some of the most beautiful stories until maybe Debussy. I mean, the alternative to wheedling -- winjing, the Brits cal” it, though heaven knows how they spell it -- is faith. And it don't take Kierkegaard to tell us that. Gvalt, the ultimately literate schmendrik, he didn't even have faith enough to get married -- as if holy matrimony was just a social custom for which a hunchback was ineligible. } (aa7-41) { Nu, you get a thousand dollars and you say, I miss the interpersonal epiphenomena. } (aa7-42) {Wrong. And this is, "Say little and do much." (Pirke HaAvot) } (aa7-43) { Just wait a little while; the way George Bush and the Bushies are heading, pretty soon a thousant roubles may be worth more than a thousand dollars. Even a thousand Belorussian roubles. Last time I stayed in a Belorussian Hotel, this is in Grodno just up from the train station on the main drag, I was going to tip the concierge 100,000 Belorussian Roubles, but Ziv Hosid said, that's really not much here. } ============================================================== sa, Campra, 17 May '05 -- gvurah sh'b' NETZACH -- 8 AIYaR -- 9 Rabi al Thaany -- a clear cold evening aftger a rather heavy daylong rainstorm. ===========================================================