photo Todd Weinstein

The next day, into New York City to finish the art for the CD. Finding P, before the trek uptown to see one of the major musical Shlomos who got into my head twenty years before and rearranged everything. This major musical Shlomo had changed everything and he was doing a rare show in the United States, in my favorite place, New York City.

I met P early to add the finishing touches to the CD, and he talked me out of homogenizing the name and retaining the ten universals that pulse and throb through all reality.

Shlomo was performing in the same place where I had been trying to land a gig. I got there a half an hour before the show so I could get a front row seat. I was accompanied by my friend Todd and his wife Izzy. I told them about Shlomo, trying to manage my enthusiasm, his influence on me so strong that I sometimes hear Shlomo when I sing.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

“Oh ——– seven years.”

I wondered whether he was still on fire. I settled into the front row and dreamed. I was tired from a rich afternoon of conversation with Lillian, Ben-Zion’s widow, in the four story brownstone in Chelsea which is a museum to Ben-Zion, four floors full of his paintings, sculpture, collectible antiquities, books, obsessions. It had already been a delirious day.

I had brought Lillian a wonderful photograph of Turkish pottery that S, relative of Ben-Zion in my town, had given me to deliver to Lillian. S had taken the picture in Ankara and processed it through a Polaroid imaging technique that gave the picture a special cast with chemical turquoise overtones at the edges. It was beautiful and a good choice, I thought, it was just the type of image that intrigued Ben-Zion: the pottery, the shapes, the implied antiquity, the work of the hands.

Since I had written the article on Ben-Zion, Lillian and I had come to be friends.

“Jimmy, when were you here last?” Lillian asked me.

“Summer. Almost a year ago.”

I had read to her at that time an article as it was published that I had written on Ben-Zion. The article was as much about her as it was about Ben-Zion. She had corrected the three or four errors I had made in the text.

In the article, I mentioned that I open my concerts with an intention that I took from the image in Ben-Zion’s “The Psalmist.” When I stared into that piece, I saw King David clutching his instrument to his chest, not playing it, but I imagined the moment before he played it, a moment of silent intention, holding the instrument to his heart. Like David in that image, I opened my concerts by an embrace, holding my instrument silently to my chest.

After I had finished reading to her, she asked me to perform for her. “Jimmy, play for me.”

“I don’t have an instrument.”

“Here,” she went into the other room and came back with a flaccid frame drum that Ben-Zion no doubt picked up somewhere and dragged home. It was old and interesting looking and unplayable.

I beat out a little rhythm anyway, closed my eyes and began to sing. I sang three songs, my voice had opened in the dense August New York City humidity of that summer, my vocal quality in her kitchen was as good as it has ever been.

She told me that she loved my singing and songs. She described in an extra-musical way something central to the music that only the most perceptive or the best trained understand. It was one of the most insightful compliments to my musical abilities I had ever received.

She closed with this: “What’s a human being without a spirit?”

jsg, usa

What We Learn When We Learn Torah

She came in from the parking lot. You have to know the way to find us from the parking lot; we have just moved here, the signs are poor and we’re almost hidden. Some of us like to be hidden; it’s the kabbalist and jazzster in us that enjoys the hidden and the over there.

She came in from the parking lot. Dark around the eyes, nice dark, lots of silver and dangles from the ears, leather on her feet in the form of boots, I know boots, not fancy boots but distinctive with some kind of floral embossing. A piercing or two. No visible tats, ratta-tat-tats, none visible though I suspect a few in the nistar, the hidden regions.

First time visiting us, we had already launched when she sat down, did not sit with any hesitation or who are you who am I formality. Jumped right into the deep with us.

We had about arrived at the moderating pshat of the text, even in the plain sense the words that treated our relapse with the egel [the calf] as motivationally complex and more a sense of being lost. The confusion of missing not our god but our teacher, he was supposed to arrive this morning specifically forty days from leaving but we had counted wrong and counting the day he left as one of the days we were way off and thus the opportunity for confusion, a sense of panic; we lost our bearings though it wasn’t too long ago we received the Ten Things.

The text is written with gentleness, vouchsafing the relapse with the egel not as Hemingway would have written it, without shadows and no mercy no mercy at all, but with an empathy for lost-ness; that’s what we were, lost. Into that empty space moved confusion, in the Aramaic our hero is late and the story opened to darkness and ir-buv-ya, confusion, great word ir-buv-ya.

My father tells the story of the Satan that comes and stirs up that confusion, said the spiked leathered newcomer, confusion and darkness, because there’s an opening there, because he can. That’s when we lost our grounding, my father tells the whole story from the Gemorah because he wants us to understand that when we panic, when we lose our moorings for even a moment, anything can happen. Gotta guard that spirit.

Ha-Satan is a trickster, she’s rolling dark eyes. He finds an opening. Word of caution for us: be vigilant around the soul. Otherwise – anything can (and will) happen.

What’s the business around the egel, I am dreaming out loud, what kind of thing is it anyway.

My father mentioned the magic of it (who is this girl) he hardly ever mentioned magic my father but here he tells a story about a plate that Moses had inscribed the holy name on that was thrown into the fire and don’t you see, my father said, there was a magical element to the egel, like a spell, like it was mesmerizing this egel — it cast a spell on us. There was something above beyond nature about it.

That led to a search through all the versions of I Put A Spell On You that all of us knew, myself favoring the Nina version, somebody introducing the Alan Price version with organ (who’s Alan Price? We figured out he was the organ player on the Animals early songs such as House of the Rising Sun, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood) and we ended with a very tasty Joss Stone and Jeff Beck version that we all preferred from Ronnie Scott’s club in London and not the one on American Idol cheesy.

At that point our elder statesman bassman came in with his girl, he was moving his head with the beat of the Joss Stone Jeff Beck version, who’s that cat he asked and we explained to him the whole English roots thing and how some of those English girls can flat out sing and how the heck do you account for that perennial fact.

The statesman bassman kept the beat with his head as we returned to the Torah text, he didn’t miss a moment and it was no stretch for him to go from the egel to I Put A Spell On You to English girl singers and that is why he is such a great statesman bassman and Torah scholar.

We brought down the under-mentioned mi-zeh u-mi-zeh, this way and this way, our man coming down the mountain and the tablets written in G*d’s crazy version visible on both sides, that mi-zeh u-mi-zeh description that you could skip over and miss, I stumbled all over it with wow! What does that mean and out of that wow came this poem that the statesman bassman spoke/sang moving only his head:

Two tablets inscribed
mi-zeh u-mi-zeh [Ex. 32:15]
this way and this way.

The holy And
[so unlike the Either/Or]

And

Grasping
Ba-zeh v’gam mi-zeh —
This way and also this way. . . [Kohelet 7:18]

This and that
except — there is no that
only this and this
just as mi-zeh u-mi-zeh,
this and this.

You and me
G*d and you
Me and G*d
Matter and spirit
Good and Evil
Male and female
Left and right
Yin and Yang
The two triangles
Law and Lore
Gevurah and Tiferet
Severity and beauty
Apollinian and Dionysian
the good and the not-so-good.

Mi-zeh u-mi-zeh,
this and this.

Sometimes I feel so
Separate –
ordinary and separate.

A few drop dead experiences, please –
in the midst of ordinariness
a reminder
what we are all about.

This and This.
Radically And –

There is no place empty of G*d.
We are radically And.
We know this mostly —
HaShem Is Eloheinu, Hashem only.

Blessed is that holy notion
Mi-zeh u-mi-zeh
this and this
no that

no that at all.

By then we had come to the end, we all exited onto the heart line, the omphalos, the belly button of America each of us to our own pathway, having begun with this from Rav Kook in honor of our beloved Zohar:

Be careful on someone else’s pathway
Beware the unformed and empty
Protect your spirit;

A world absorbs.

Your waters are blessed
Drink from them;

Your wellsprings
Overflowing.

jsg, usa

I’m Fine

I am sitting at a table with a room full of talkative people. I am sitting at a nice blonde-wood table, on the other side of the table are several other people, there are places for at least six people at the table where I am sitting. There are six stools around the table; the table is set for six people. There are several computers tethered to the table as if they are located here for personal use. I have my own computer. It is a computer store, I prefer not to mention any more than that.

I am wearing a very tasty black fedora, soft felt, not expensive [Kangol] but another one of the hats I have bought after visiting prison. I have developed a mystery ritual that I buy [at least one] hat every time I leave prison. The sillier the hat, the better I feel.

Hats

The hat sequence is to help me understand what the hat ritual is about. The last time I visited prison, I bought two hats. I wore them both on the way home. One of them is a nice Stetson flat western style hat I have seen in the movies. It looks ridiculous on me. I have long felt that there is something liberating about wearing a ridiculous hat when you are on the road by yourself or in new territory or even after having survived something emotionally or physically dangerous, though for me this has mostly applied to the emotionally or spiritually dangerous, those challenging experiences the denouement of which for me implies a hat. ??

I am wearing one of those hats at the table now as I sit in the computer store. The hat has not clarified for me but it feels good, good to be wearing this hat as I am about to penetrate the newness of the phone I purchased this morning that I cannot get to function the way it promised me. The phone speaks. It promised me it would work such and such.

On the table where I am sitting is a tasteful sign that built of fancy plexiglass that reads: Personal Setup. There were four other people sitting at the table when I stumbled onto it, I made jokes about needing a personal setup maybe someone would come and sit down and solve my problems for me I thought maybe the young lady sitting next to me was my personal setup but I didn’t want to go in that direction so I made jokes about the professional who would come and sit at the table and solve all the mysteries, the doctor is in five cents, etc. I drank a little too much coffee. Wound up.

Everybody at the table seemed to appreciate my soliloquy, otherwise I would have stopped. I kept going, then Dan came over and explained to me something simple that given a decade of good thinking on a desert island with a painted volleyball I would have figured out myself but I would have not known it without being told earlier that morning at the store where I purchased the phone. My problem is solved as everything is downloading as it should and I made Dan into my personal God and if nothing else happens good for him today, this will be enough.

The hat hasn’t clarified.

The Story

I return to the story, my phone restoring as is my spirit. The lady sitting across from me and I agree that pens and paper are the preferred technology and we love them the most. I apologize for interrupting her, and she says: you’re fine. Thank you, you’re fine too I say and realize I better keep my mouth shut. She gets up to go says goodbye to me as if we are having lunch once a month on break at the Kroger’s where we’ve been working for twenty years.

It’s almost Shabbes and on the phone that is now restoring someone calls and asks me how am I doing. I am doing fine, in spite of my limitations I am fine and I was fine before I arrived here and I’m fine as I am leaving.

Yesterday I wrote a poem I took from a story I heard at a meeting:

How you doing?
I’m ok.

Hi, How are you today.
Ok.

Hello again: how you doing?
I’m ok.

Don’t you have bad days?

I have good days
I have bad days
On both –
I’m ok.

Today I am living it in prose.

jsg, usa