The Rabbi Poems NEW YEAR’S SERMON In his youth,
the rabbi had conducted memorable new year services. He retold & reinterpreted the old story of Abraham & Isaac in light
of the Arabs, the Blacks, Israel, the
Republican Party, Hitler & the Exodus. The
cantors came & went, the shofar
blew. Lands were traded. Hostages taken. The years passed like rocks &
bullets & the blossoming olives & poppies across the desert hills. The story of the
father’s near-killing of his son only brought
painful memories––my poor mad father pulling his knife on me as a boy––sacrificed to his own mad god. So frail now, the rabbi’d become, barely able to life the scrolls over his
head, losing his place, the sermon incoherent, the congregants talking, pointing at him. “SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS” “I shouldn’t
have to do this,” says the rabbi at the graveside, bending down to kiss
the casket in his red skullcap. “Even though he was
old & sick, even though it was his time to go and
I have conducted funeral after funeral, even though I
have led the mourner’s prayer for his wife, for
my own–– this is no small task . . . so very few of
us remain & I’d always
assumed it would be him where now I stand, saying these words over me . . . But
now you’re dead, my oldest friend & with you
the world I know lies now beneath these feet . .
. THE RABBI’S SHIRTS The rabbi went
to the dry cleaners. He dropped off six shirts. A week past.
Then another. The fighting between the Israelis and Palestinians was so
intense that he’d forgotten all about them.
Finally, he went into the dry cleaners with his receipt and
gave it to the woman at the counter. “I’m sorry
rabbi,” said the woman, “We had a fire and all your shirts were
burned up. We lost everything.” The woman
gave the rabbi forty dollars for each shirt
lost in the fire. He had never
spent forty dollars on a shirt in his life. He took the
money and went over to the house of his friend. “I am trying to remember which
shirts I lost,” said the rabbi, “so I know which ones
to replace.” “My wife will
get a good laugh over this,” said the rabbi’s friend. The rabbi smiled. His old
friend’s wife had been dead for some time. THE RABBI’S NEW UNDERWEAR One day, the
rabbi drove a long way from town. Seeing only
bare trees, the rabbi was filled with a regret––some day soon my end will come and
all my wisdom will be scattered and lost.
Arriving at a shopping mall, the rabbi went to the
Haines outlet store to buy new underwear for
herself. There behind
the counter, she saw a young woman, who, as with most youth, had, upon
attaining adulthood, left her mother’s home and run far
away from the town of her birth to begin a new
life. As looks are
deceiving and every fate has its twin, unknown to sales clerk, the elderly woman she
was helping to choose the very finest
undergarments for the coming High Holy Days was her own
mother–– a rabbi considered by all to be a
visionary without compare. The rabbi’s daughter assumed that she
was simply getting a day’s pay for her efforts to
rejoice in her lot of low desires & inferior
things. But when the rabbi and the young woman were alone in the
fitting room, it was there the mother placed a hand
upon the girl’s shoulder and said, “None shall gain the
complete, natural & masterless
by taking pleasure only in minor matters, yet even without hope or expectation,
you will give rest to all, without
distinction.” THE
RABBI’S BLACK EYE The rabbi got
a black eye from a recent sparring in a karate class he attended. He put on
his glasses, changed back into his suit & picked up his
sister who was pregnant and a sergeant in the
army. Why should I
expect anything less than disaster he thought to himself. Disaster is the
story of life. The rabbi went
into his study and closed the door. The Israeli
military had surrounded the Palestinian leader’s compound with tanks, troops, &
snipers. A Palestinian
woman had blown herself up at a wedding. An artist held
a can of diet Coke in a doctored photo of death camp Jews gazing emaciated at
the lens. Opening the
Old Book, the rabbi ran a crooked finger absently through a long curled blue dyed
forelock. He thought
about the labyrinths of intelligence & Plots of
destruction––of blood & dreams. When the warm weather comes, each will suddenly look into
the Other’s eyes,
knowing there is nothing to go back to. THE RABBI TAKES A VOW OF SILENCE After it had
been discovered that the cantor was a fake, that the cantor not only couldn’t sing, but
did not know the holy blessings, the rabbi took a vow
of silence. Some in the congregation believed the rabbi
had overdone it, that he was calling them fools when what
they needed was his tenderness & wisdom &
signs that goodness would prevail. But each day brought the rabbi only
the saddest recollections with greater vividness of all that he
had cherished & extolled & hallowed &
mourned & lost. Soon he
remembered it was not his intention to stop at any finite, given form or station, but
rather to walk the Path of
Names––the less understandable the better––until he gained the activity of a force
completely outside his control & all his mental & sense
images were effaced. Those were the
days when the rabbi would stand trembling at the alter, delivering his weekly
sermon without a sound. THE OUTLAW RABBI & THE TAILOR When young,
the rabbi had gotten kicked out of school for snorting cans of whip cream at the
convenient store. Later, he’d
dealt dope while his father thought he was studying at Yeshiva––perfecting the
art of God’s argument––but the young man wasn’t too good at
thinking through his actions & paid dearly for his
wrongdoings & lack of common sense. Shuffling from town to town, the rabbi became estranged from all those
he met. By middle age, he could no longer be touched by
friendship, so detached from ordinary bonds had he
become, save a poor tailor he had met before all his
troubles started. How the tailor
and the rabbi found each other after
parting ways was its own testimony to the
mysterious. Consider one
blistering summer day. They met at a roadhouse visited by biker gangs. There were
gaping tears along many of the seams of the
outlawed rabbi’s garments, for over the years thin he had not
grown. In short, he’d
so outgrown his frame not even his own mother would recognize him. Stumbling upon
his only true friend, the poor weather beaten tailor
looked up from a pair of leather chaps as if
continuing a conversation begun an hour, not decades, ago, and said,
“It is not the sewing of the torn garment that’s a tailor’s
joy, but the entering of the orchard of emptiness that is
the tear itself.” WHAT THE RABBI’S SNAKE DREAM MEANT Trees do not
speak of the angels washing their lips with fire & no one in the rabbi’s
office ever spoke of his desk––overflowing as if it were
the heaven of heavens––with Talmud editions &
old manuscripts, clippings from
newspapers, letters from scholars & tractates of
mystics. On one scrap
of paper the rabbi had written a dream he’d had last night. It was a dream
the rabbi had had since he was a child. It was a dreadful dream of walking terrified
through fields overrun with snakes. He knew this
snake dream well. It meant “fog over Jerusalem.”
It meant “pine needles in pools of mountainside gullies.” It meant “the middle of the
whirlwind.” It meant “small
dust-shrouded soul.” It meant “Our dead
mothers looking down for us children.” It meant “the
end of the dead” & “nothing to know.” THE POET RABBI The rabbi
followed a flock of crows headed toward the horizon. He asked himself, “Am I supposed to photograph
In-Charge-Of-Life the way photographs are taken of the dead in the streets of Gaza? When he arrived,
he found a gathering of people weeping where the
bodies had washed upon the land. He told them
“Those were the people with whom you used to live.”
Not far away,
some birds were singing in a bush covered with yellow blossoms. Content watching
the birds, the rabbi forgot he was hungry.
Then he thought, “Can it really be that no one
is alive?” & “Even so, I will enlighten
you.” FRANKENSTEIN AT THE DEAD SEA An infant
dressed in bright pink pointed up to the evening star. The rabbi had married a go-go dancer.
They met at the dogtrack. It
was love at first sight. The thought of her boots made him remember the lonesomest Sabbath & people who had no idea where they were from, who
needed to wipe out their memories. Perhaps they had been
accountants for Unity Mitford
before she had fallen in love with Hitler, or someone had said to them, “Listen to
me, forget about me.” “Everyone has their marching orders,” thought the rabbi, sitting on his doorstep listening to the frogs
as if he was Frankenstein
at the Dead Sea picking flowers with a little girl. The rabbi
wondered, “How long since forgiveness gave up hope of those whom within it dwell?” Then strangely, to no one, he said, “That you are all standing here
in front of me makes me feel no simple passion, not even
the excess of passion, but the passion to bring
sanctity to everything. THE ZADDIK “Every word
has a perfect shape all its own, yet how many had come to the zaddik as one whom his own heart had cast out? The world is
exactly as it happens to be & if you ask me
how I know this, since I am neither a prophet myself
nor the son of a prophet, let me tell you––if
words from the heart find no heart to receive them,
then these words do not err in space, but return to the heart that spoke them. That is
what happened to me.” “But zaddik,”
said the rabbi, “Don’t you
know, you are no longer among the Living?” When
the zaddik refused to believe him, the rabbi unbuttoned the zaddik’s coat & showed the zaddik he
was dressed in bones. LOCUSTS Fiery serpents
coil through every generation & because of them, anguish multiplies like locusts, for it is said all God does is
mercy–– it is only the world cannot bear the
naked fill. This is why it
is written in Tales of the Hasadim it is the rabbis that delay redemption,
for they bring about the separation of hearts &
groundless hatreds that further nothing. In the hour at
the Tree of
Knowledge, the hour of the golden calf, & the hour of the destruction of Jerusalem, how many rabbis had the sign upon their
foreheads of the image in which God creates the
people? Giving,
regardless to whom, the rabbi concentrated all his strength against the throngs of
renegades slipping through the nets of law, the nets of
mind, the nets of heaven, but he had reached a
place in life where his prayers were those of a
blind man typing a masterpiece on a typewriter
with no ribbon. The rabbi noticed his toe
sticking out of his sock. “What shall I do with my little wisdom when I have said all there is to say?”
THE RABBI’S CERVIX When the stars
rose on the second night of the rabbi’s labor, her husband said, “I know what
is in your heart. You have passed through
the 50 gates of reason.” Having stared at the
question whose answer no woman has ever found, a
little girl was then born to the rabbi, and as the
wheel of fortune rolls on its innermost point,
one night years later the daughter & her mother
were watching Tombstone.
At the end of the movie, the young girl asked her mother if the Shekhina wears a great bowling pin headdress atop her
radiant body sheathed in white light because she’s from Arizona. The next Friday, the
rabbi gave a sermon on the failure of military
resolve. She told a
story about the ashes of a poor man that were gathered into a rusty tin can.
When his friends scattered the dead man’s
remains into a river, a strong wind came up &
blew the ashes back in their faces. “That’s how it is
for any person, any people, any government.
Any Truth without
peace is only a false truth.” DAYS
OF WINE AND ROSES The rabbi
washed two sweaters––one was drying on the bed & the other on the
bathroom floor. The day was filled with sunlight and warmth.
He packed quickly, silently, all the while
thinking of people whose stomachs were filled with
grass. Back from
another funeral––they had played “The Days Of
Wine And Roses” as the beloved was lowered into the earth––the rabbi felt
the ache of separation. He felt it on the
subway beneath the city on his way to address religious
leaders about the hideous beheading of a journalist
whose throat was slit while confessing himself a
Jew. The rabbi
arrived at the meeting, black bags
under his eyes, pushing away the microphones
shoved zealously into his face. Once seated,
he said only this: “The God these murderers do
not believe in,” he told the gathering of leaders
from all faiths and creeds around the world,
“is the God I too do
not believe in.” 25
September 1995 (“New Year’s Sermon”) 24
February 1997 (“Shouldn’t Have To Do This”) Fall
2001-Spring 2002 [Published in Quien Sabe Mountain: Poems 1998-2004. © 2004 by Jim Cohn.] |
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