ברוך מחיה המתים                                                                      ברוך שכוחו גבורתו מלא עולם

One evening last week, while I was at home dining with friends, the earth beneath us trembled, sharply, and I knew then the Terror and the Dread.  I died a little death. Though I did say yes, yes to your Strength and your Power,  I was not ready, H’, to stand naked before your Presence..

Within two or three seconds it was all over. “An earthquake,” we said nervously, “a small one, but very close.” We had a drink, and ended the evening together in closer companionship.

Praise be to H’, overturner of mountains, whose dread finger touched me!

Praise be to H’, raiser of the dead, whose sweet breath revived me!

Praise be to H’!

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May this Passover mark a season in which we not only leave behind our slavery but actively strive to forget it, shed its scars, erase memories of wounds real and imaginary,

let us tell no stories of personal griefs or tribal nightmares,

let us greet this day unencumbered by past burdens and future plans, remembering only:
This very day did Yah create, rejoice in it!

and let us eradicate from our Haggadah the passage, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us.”

HAPPY PESACH

!חג שמח

That I may be able to face the challenges of aging with curiosity, ingenuity and grace.
That my quest to know and to be known by the One will never lead me to turn away from the cries of the wretched of the earth.
That my future decisions be informed by both moral courage and prudence.
That I shall have the strength to continue to honor my obligations to others.

Many correspondents reported difficulties receiving the broadcast of “The Mystical Experience,” a panel discussion on the nature of mysticism in which I participate together with Brother David Steindl-Rast and Maata Lynn Barron. It can now be viewed online.

If you do not have time or patience to spend an hour looking at the whole program, here are some interesting clips: Illusory God; Questioning the Mystical Experience; and The Mystical Experience & the Sacred Use of Drugs.

After viewing, you are invited to share your thoughts and observations under “Leave a comment” below.

My grandson Daniel has just concluded his final weeks in the IDF, sweltering in a bunker on the Golan Heights during this summer’s heatwave. He remarked, in a posting on his Face Book page “I’m witnessing a Syrian fox making aliyah… Welcome to Israel… You’re in a mine-field…”

I can easily visualize the scene.

Fifty-four years ago, at the end of October 1956, during the Suez campaign, I was lying in a shallow dugout at the perimeter of our position just west of the Jordan river, facing the Golan Heights. We were on guard against a possible attack by Syrian commandos. At two or three in the morning, after hours of boredom, I froze, sensing a rustling in the nearby thickets. I reached out to my sergeant to alert him. After a moment he chuckled. “It’s only a wildcat,” he said. “Welcome to the Holy Land.” Continue reading “A Military Family” »

1. A few days after returning from a vacation in the Yosemite National Park, I dreamt that I was sitting by a large window in a train traveling through mountainous, alpine terrain. The landscape outside was blanketed with snow, flat and white, featureless except for two receding parallel ribbons of black, the railroad tracks. A moment of terror: did this vision presage the blank mind of plaque and tangled neurons? Then gradually forms emerged: the faint shining disk of the sun, jagged peaks etched on a background of billowing clouds, shadowed gullies and dark ravines, and below, a winding tree-lined river. I awakened, laughing.

2. It’s June, and our regular summer guests have arrived, a pair of albino ferruginous hawks. First we hear the harsh kaa-kaa of their rasping calls, and then spot them, perched, side-by-side, on a high branch of the 50-foot eucalyptus tree in our neighbor’s yard. They spend hours circling and hovering over the meadow beneath us, occasionally swooping down and immediately soaring up again, grasping in their bloody talons some wriggling prey, usually a small mammal; last year one of them caught a snake.

3. A Midrash: After Adam/Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden the Holy One of Being prepared for them garments of rawhide. Now these are understood as representing the leather straps of the tefillin, the phylacteries, those instruments of ritual that bind us and direct us with good laws and rules of right living. This is the way we Jews are to worship on this mundane plane of exile. But before the Expulsion, while still in that place of wondrous innocence, how were Adam/Eve garbed? In cloaks of light, we are told.

Oh that I may offer my orisons wrapped in that white light from Eden! It beckons me, but today I cannot reach it. Meanwhile, those leather ribbon-straps lie before me on my desk, demanding, summoning.
Jonathan Omer-Man ©2010