I Was Present at the First Tikkun Layl Shavuot

Note: all melodies are from Salonica
The tikkun layl Shavuot is a custom to study the entire night of Shavuot

There is only one medieval text that mentions a tikkun layl Shavuot [Historia]
Zohar – book of Illumination — classic text of Jewish mysticism
It is not mentioned by the holy Yosef Caro himself
Not by the Rama
[Yes by the Magen Avraham, citing the Zohar],

Though it could be inferred from the yearning of the Shekhinah [Kabbalistics]
For Tiferet for Hakadosh Barukh Hu
For Kenesset Yisrael, the people of Israel
The anticipated meeting
The longed-for betrothal of G*d and Israel
The integrating notion the marriage of Israel and G*d on Shavuot
The cosmic coupling of Shekhinah and her love
Tiferet and Malkhut
Shekhinah and HaKadosh Barukh Hu –
Amen v’amen.

The first certain tikkun
the first all night session of study in honor of the holy integration
Has been preserved in a secret letter
Iggeret Alkabetz
The letter of Shlomo haLevi Alkabetz.

I wrote the letter [memorat]
I am the word merchant of Lekha Dodi
The wedding song welcoming every Friday night
The Shekinah
Malkhut
The Kallah the bride
As she comes looking for her beloved
HaKadosh Barukh Hu
Tiferet
K’nesset Yisrael/the community of Israel
On the occasions when we allow ourselves to be
Found.

I sing Lekha Dodi

In the secret letter, mid sixteenth century
Circulated through Europe
Written by me, Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz
(One of the musical Shlomos)
Recalling a Shavuot night in 1533
Salonica [Salonika, now called Thessaloniki]
In the polyglot Ottomon world –

Salonika: conquered by the Sultan Murad II a century earlier [1430] — [Historia]
It would remain Muslim until 1912
And a good 1/5th Jewish until 1943
When its entire Jewish population was carried off to Auschwitz.
Between the World Wars
Salonica was the only port on the Mediterranean
Closed on Shabbat.

Living in Salonica in 1533 were myself – Alkabetz –
And my teacher Rabbi Yosef Caro
(HaMeChaber of the Shulkhan Arukh — the Well Set Table)
Who I refer to as He-Chasid
The Pious one
Caro Spanish for dear the dear one the pious one
He was already known for his first halakhic work Beit Yosef
He came to Salonica in 1530 and indulged his fascination with Chen
Chokhmah nisteret, the hidden wisdom
Kabbalah –
Cagey Yosef Caro.

Caro would be visited for over fifty years
By a maggid
A spirit a voice that spoke through him
He read Mishnahs
Mishnah an anagram for neshamah
And through his being spoke a maggid
It was an angel that spoke through him
Sometimes masculine
Sometimes feminine
Sometimes masculine and feminine –

I sing Shalom Aleikhem

The darshan the kol the dibbur
The mishnah the Ima the Shekhinah
He/she was called all these names
This from the compiler of the central text of organizational halakhah
Masculine halakhist
Feminine kabbalist
Yosef Caro –

Whose ancestor is buried in the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery [memorat]
White Road, Chesterfield Missouri,
Rabbi Stone Goodman buried him there himself in the year 2000
Mr. Lipschitz of blessed memory.

I sing Shalom Aleikhem

When Yosef Caro spoke
The angels appeared in an invisible ring of fire around him.
Amen.

Yosef Caro imagined himself as Moshe Rabbeinu
Myself — Alkabetz –
was his Aharon.

This is how I described
The preparation for the first Tikkun Leil Shavuot:

We agreed — the Hasid and I — to stay awake [Historia]
The three days before the holiday
We immersed in the mikveh
We purified ourselves properly to accompany the bride.

We agreed not to stop learning for even one second
Thank G*d we were successful.

I prepared verses from the Torah
We chanted aloud in a spirit of great awe
With melody and verve
What happened next will not be believed.

After all the verses
We recited out loud all the Mishnahs of Zeraim
The first of the Six Orders
And then we started again
Learning it in the way of true learning
We completed two tractates.

At midnight
The Creator graced us and we heard a voice coming from Rabbi Caro:

Listen my beloved those who most glorify the Creator
My loved ones shalom aleikhem
Happy are you and happy those that bore you
Happy are you in this world
And happy you will be in the world to come
Because you took upon yourselves to crown Me on this night.

It has been many years since My crown has fallen
There has been no one to comfort Me
I have been cast to the dust embracing filth
But now
You have restored the crown.

I sing Lekha Dodi

Strengthen yourselves my dear ones
Forge ahead my beloved
Be joyous
Know that you are among the exalted
You approach the King’s palace
The voice of your Torah and breath of your mouths
Arose before G*d and pierced through the many firmaments
Until the messenger angels were quieted
And the fire angels hushed
And all G*d’s lofty retinue listened to your voices.

I am the Mishnah that advised humankind.
I have come to speak with you.
If only there were ten of you
You would have ascended even higher
Still you have elevated yourselves and those who bore you
I have been summoned this night through those gathered in this great city
You are not like those sleeping
You cleaved to the One and have pleased G*d
My children, strengthen yourselves and push forth in my love
My Torah
My awe.

With a loud voice as on Yom Kippur
Say with me
Barukh Shem Kevod Malkhuto L’Olam Va’ed.
Sing it again in the melody of our Salonica
Sing it slowly
Close your eyes and sing it in a melody rescued from Our Salonica
Where I sit in 1533 with seven
Seven of the dear ones
Who sat and began the tikkun on this night 2,845 years since Sinai
The repair of our past
Take a deep breath and sing with me now
Barukh Shem Kevod Malkhuto L’Olam Va’ed.

I sing melody from Ir Me Quero Madre

We recited verses until daybreak
In the morning we went to immerse ourselves
As we had on the two previous days
And at the mikveh we met the three others
Who we had been waiting for –
We made the minyan.
They promised to join us on the second night of the chag.

On night two we did the same as the night before
Except this time we were ten
And the voice did not wait to begin at midnight
As it had the night before
But it made itself heard immediately
And it began to teach:
Listen my dear ones, those most glorifying G*d, arise and raise those who are
lying in dust, through the mystical secret of the dust from Above.

Many matters of wisdom were taught
And afterwards the Voice said
Happy are you my dear ones that raise me
How high you have been elevated now that you are ten
As is proper in all matters of holiness.
If permission were granted, your eyes would behold the fire
Surrounding this house.
Strengthen yourselves and do not break the bond with Above
Say aloud with me
Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad.
Barukh Shem Kevod Malkhuto L’olam Va-ed.

We sing Melody Ir Me Quero Madre

After another half an hour, we returned to studying the secrets of Torah
Exactly at midnight the Voice returned a second time
Teaching for over an hour and a half
It praised the learning and said:

See and hear this voice speaking?
Ask your elders and know that for hundreds of years
You are the only ones to merit such an experience
Be alert to help each other and to strengthen the weak
Hold yourselves as leaders
For you are the princes of the King’s palace
And you have merited to enter the hallway
Now come into the inner chamber
But do not forsake the entry
For one who leaves the gate
His blood is on his head/[is a dummy].

Behold the day is coming when men and women will abandon the Exile
And their silver and worldly pleasures their gods of gold and desires of wealth
And they will travel to the Holy Land
It is possible
You have merited what others
For many generations
Have not.

I sing last verse Shalom Aleikhem

On the following Shabbat
The Voice again came to my teacher Rabbi Caro
He again gathered the ten together
Proud I am, Alkabetz, to be one of the originals and to witness
He urged them to enter the inner palace
They agreed to set aside every desire
To refrain from meat and wine
And mourn the Exile of the Shekhinah.

We held the tikkun leyl Shavuot the next year
1534
A few months later plague broke out
Pious Yosef Caro lost his wife, two sons, and a daughter
The angel stopped speaking from his mouth
At the end of the year of mourning
He remarried and moved to Nikopol
On the banks of the Danube in Bulgaria.

Caro became ill
By 1536 he had declined so that I –
Alkabetz, his student,
came from Salonica
– To say goodbye.

When I arrived, Rabbi Yosef Caro revived.
He would live another forty years.

The voice from heaven returned
And on a Sabbath in February, 1536
The angel appeared in my presence
And asked that the two of us keep the oath.
I then wrote my famous letter
Recording the events of the Tikkun Leyl Shavuot in Salonica
That had taken place almost three years earlier.

In 1536, during the Hebrew month Elul,
Caro and myself, Alkabetz, sailed from the port of Constantinople
Ten days later we landed in Eretz Yisrael.
We set up residence in Safed
Rabbi Caro became the chief rabbi of Safed from 1546
To his death in 1575.

Safed — In the north
The holy city on the hill
So began the golden age of Kabbalah in Safed
The ascendance of the imaginative circle who gathered around the holy Ari
I would create Lecha Dodi
Become a teacher to my brother-in-law Cordovero.

Rabbi Yosef Caro and everyone in his circle
Honored the Voice of the maggid the rest of his years
His spirit would move through his ancestors
One whom Rabbi Stone Goodman buried
On an October day in the year 2000 in St. Louis, Missouri
The heartine the omphalos the belly button of America –

I feel the poets of the Diaspora speaking through me now
The halakhists and the kabbalists
The Caros and the Alkabetzes
All the dear pious ones –

When you open your mouth
Whose voice do you hear
When you open your mouth
Who what speaks through you.

Be a mouthpiece for a maggid
Be a poet
A vessel
Be a voice
Be a Torah –

A maggid
A Mishnah
Be a neshamah
An anagram for the soul.

Be a listener
Be nothing –

An empty vessel for God;

Amen.

James Stone Goodman
United States of America

Please

Surprise me, lift me off to somewhere new send me on a roundabout way but make it a common journey one that I know I would have taken if not for this if not for that. Too far out of my perimeter, and I might not go with you but don’t make it too familiar.

Use your own words, the idiosyncratic ones, the ones that tumble in your head and when you speak them in the wrong crowd, they look at you slant. Don’t tell me too much. Every once in a while smuggle in an organizing notion, a re-visioning idea, sneak it past the guardians of my equanimity the first line of defense, then ease past the conversationalists the ones who speak way loftier than I do. They snatch away the lowly, the uninspired, their standard is high: language and gesture only those great tortured Southern drunks in heaven aspire to and the circle of intellectuals from Detroit who sit in my mind and discourse, alert to the cliché, the untoward the inelegant, the symbolically over-fleshed. They guard my perimeter like coyotes on the hunt.
 
My teachers, the owl-eyed Reines in his work shirt and heavy boots and the others sit in faculty Senate. Dr. Lehman who speaks slowly but draws on four, five civilizations he quotes from memory, Dr. Fish roaming through the texts of a dozen ancient and modern libraries of three continents they are inside me and a tough gang to penetrate.

Be thoughtful and push your ideas the best you can through them won’t you — they are merciless on language. Be a thinker, a word maven, sweet singer of the unconventional soul, and please, remember Mihaly chewing on his pipe will be standing in the final circle of review, he will be saying this, something I might have put in his mouth or he actually said it:

I need meaning.
It completes me.

jsg,usa

I’m Living in New Orleans Now

I moved to New Orleans. Didn’t intend to, had never been there until just before I up and moved everything there. I visited there then I moved there.

It was some years after “the storm;” Katrina, 2005. New Orleans was still in an expansion, clean-up mode, and until the proud Times-Picayune retreated to three days a week, I think most New Orleanians were feeling good about their revival. The Times-Picayune downsize was a step back, I could feel that. I was all eyes and ears on my first trip.

I had never been to New Orleans until the end of 2012. Then I visited and then I moved.

Almost all the musicians I met on the street had a similar story: I left after the storm, went to ________ for a few years. I came back. For me, I made one trip, something clarified for me in a week, and I moved.

I was first attracted by the street music. I heard wonderful music on the street, not at all the kind of music I was accustomed to hearing on the streets of our city. I spent three, four hours every day listening to music on the streets of the French Quarter.

All the instruments were suited for such performing, which meant light on the amplification heavy on the brass and simple percussion contraptions. Bass generally covered in brass, intersecting lines woven through other reed and brass configurations. A singer singing in higher registers, generally a woman, over the top. The acoustic guitars were mostly of the gypsy, swing jazz variety or simple electric with battery powered amplifiers, that chordal chunk chunk swing style I first heard articulated by Charlie Christian on records of Benny Goodman’s and Count Basie’s bands.

One afternoon, I took the advice of a friend who had visited New Orleans frequently and suggested, I think somewhat fancifully, that I make a pilgrimage to the park named in honor of Louis Armstrong to a place colloquially called Congo Square, once called Place de Negres, so called because it was the site of a slave trading and a certain celebrational dance and music style that was practiced and continued there after it became a part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

I took my friend’s advice and walked to the park one morning to make my pilgrimage. It is on the edge of the Treme, just on the other side of Rampart Street from the French Quarter. I spent some time in the Square, sang a few tunes there, paid my respects to the statue of Louis Armstrong who hailed from the area and to whom I traced the impact of New Orleans music as it traveled up the rivers of the heartline, United States of America, and into my hands in the river towns where I was born and have lived.

After making my pilgrimage, I continued to walk around the Treme, blissfully unaware of where I was or how far I was wandering away from where I was staying near Bourbon Street, an environment unsuitable for me that I tried to avoid at all costs.

On the edge of the Treme I spied a True Value hardware store that was outfitted as cleanly as well appointed as any hardware store I have ever visited. I am an aficionado of hardware stores. On the second floor of the hardware store a display of utensils and coffee makers bean grinders espresso makers everything outfitted for the tastefully appointed kitchen. I know everything about coffee making and we discussed that. I also sought an eight-dollar water infuser so I could make coffee in my hotel room. They did not have the coil infuser but we began a conversation over coffee and other subjects I know about of no consequence.

Would you like to sample our local brew? They asked me. They had some of the recently ground bean ready and made me an espresso then a cup of regular Joe from the local bean. Both were excellent and I explained to them why I thought so. We were not talking wine; we were talking coffee, though we could have been talking wine. It was a tender meeting over sophisticated irrelevant standards of noblesse oblige, the stuff we love when nothing more pressing is heavy on us.

I continued into the Treme and walked, looking everywhere for the spirits of the iconic stories I knew that were birthed from that place. There was some day activity, some repair, much construction in the entire city and I felt the past speaking to me out of the modest streets I clopped clopped on through my wandering.

I wandered a little too far and began to lose my bearings; back towards the French Quarter, nearer again to Rampart Street, out came a group of four, five men dressed as women just as I was passing their house. They were dressed in the most dramatic fashion, several of them were six inches taller than me, they wore decorated hose and boutique skirts, several with bustier type contraptions around their chest, a couple with long blonde wigs (I think) and very tasty cowboy hats.

I looked at them as they came down the walk from what I imagined was their lodging on a street at the edge of the Treme. I’m sure I looked a little surprised and ambushed. They opened with, “What are you doing here?” as if I was some sort of stranger.

What the heck — I told them. I told them about my pilgrimage to the Louis Armstrong site, that I had never been to New Orleans before, that I was a musician who takes his roots seriously and I made this holy pilgrimage to the Source on that day and now I was exploring semi-lost in the neighborhood of an old dream. That seemed to open everything to them. They got serious with me and expressed their understanding and complete appreciation of my pilgrimage, once they realized I was for real.

I walked with them down the street. Where are you going? I asked them. Honey, we’re going to work. As we walked into the French Quarter chattering away, tourists (I assume) stopped, got out of the their cars or interrupted their strolls, to take their pictures. Does that bother you? I asked them.

Not in the least. It’s part of our job, another added: life, job. We were strolling like old friends. They got a tremendous kick when I told them my profession. For everyone who stopped and snapped their picture, they posed and feigned some silliness but by this time we had developed a seriousness between us. On the corner where they directed me one way and they were off another, one of them asked, will you bless me? Yes, they all chimed in, will you bless me, me too? I’ve never been blessed by a rabbi.

Sure I said, and they all moved closer together into the circle we had made on the corner at the edge of the French Quarter and I sang-chanted slow and mellow the three-fold priestly blessing, pretty and slow the holy blessing from the book of Numbers (6:23-27):

Ye-va-re-che-cha Adonai ve-yish-me-re-cha.
May G*d bless you and protect you.
Ya-eir Adonai pa-nav ei-le-cha vi-chu-ne-ka.
May G*d’s face shine for you and be gracious to you.
Yi-sa Adonai pa-nav ei-le-cha ve-ya-seim le-cha sha-lom.
May G*d’s face always be lifted to you and give you peace.

First I sang it in Hebrew, then in English, then in Hebrew again. I did not hurry it. The first time I chanted it with my eyes closed, then I opened them and everyone’s eyes in the circle were closed, then they all opened and I chanted the last verse again with all eyes open boring into our interiors.

That was real, somebody said. Thank you thank you went all around and we stood for a moment kind of hushed on the corner of those streets, they then went their way and I went mine, and I’m thinking maybe none of us will forget those moments.

Later that night, I hopped on a streetcar on Canal Street. Most of the streetcars were not operating that day, so it was crowded crowded on the one I caught. I sat down. There was an older woman across from me holding onto a strap and I offered her my seat. She declined.

Next to me was sitting a man in disarray. First he spoke loudly to his girlfriend on his cell phone, to whom he pledged he would go to jail for her just as he had gone to jail for his last woman. He ended his phone conversation and by this time the car was packed.

The man sitting next to me started hollering at I thought the driver. “RT! What you letting so many people on this car. Too crowded. I can’t see where I’m going. RT! You paying attention?” He kept hollering and there was real tension in the car.

The woman standing in front of me watched him and when there was a pause in the noise she said quietly and forcefully: “You need to keep quiet.” He made his way up to the front to get off the car soon thereafter.

When he passed the driver he said to him, “how come you didn’t answer me?”

“You didn’t say my name,” said the driver.

“I don’t know your name!” and he got down out of the car.

The tension had evaporated and everyone within earshot exploded into laughter. I think RT stood for Rapid Transit. It was that moment that the mask that covers New Orleans came off and I saw the every day underneath, the real face, of this beautiful city.

Until that day, New Orleans presented to me as a confused, loud, forbidding place. Many people lingering in doorways, a lot of scams, scammers, hustlers, fraternity boy drunkenness and occasionally a truly sinister seediness. The curtain parted for me that day on New Orleans and I saw the same things I see every day: you don’t know my name, talk to me, I respect your pilgrimage, the desire to know and be known, etc.

It was then I became a resident. That moment, the parting of the curtain.

Just before my visit I had begun a food regimen that kept me from enjoying the fabled New Orleans cuisine. My brother said I’m the only person he knows who went to New Orleans and couldn’t find a decent meal. The best meal I had was a pizza from a place my daughter’s friend owned in a bywater neighborhood that was spectacular. It had kale on it.

Everything seemed to be in motion in this city, swinging, expanding. A stranger myself, I felt welcomed by strangers. No one outside the camp, I thought, who cannot be brought within. No one a stranger, or we are all strangers.

Some of the people in these tales were black some of them white. Some of them old some young. Some were men some were women; some a combination of the two (there are so many more than two possibilities).

It was the turn of a new year. I spent it in a hotel room, I couldn’t bear to navigate the streets in the area I was staying. I can abide sinister but public drunkenness is difficult for me, and when they carried a guy out of the restaurant where I was having a civilized dinner, I opted for a quieter welcome of the New Year.

Then I moved to New Orleans.

jsg, usa