The Machzor and the twenty dollar bills get twisted up together on the table where all of the detritus that litters my life is thrown. I never said that I wasn’t a Jew, or, in any case, if I have I am now compensating by saying loudly and frequently that I am a Jew. I stated for myself a goal of coming to a new place of comfort with myself, a place where I could say I am Jewish-American and it would mean something other than that I am doubled over in pain and confusion. I am trying to find the mystical voice of knowledge and strength that is not purely based on subjective fantasy. I do not want to be entirely independent of history. I want to be remembering from beyond the scope of my own personal life story and yet still have the memories be connected to myself. The Jews read the Machzor on Yom Kipur. They read and they read and they reach in their prayer books the passage known as Eileh Ezkerah, or Martyrology, which recounts the murder of master rabbis by the Romans. Eileh Ezkerah is the point in their prayers at which the Jews come to know intimately the problem of evil. Eileh Ezkereh is the emblematic point of remembering into which all of the savageries perpetuated on the Jews are channelled. Placing the remembrance of the martyrs in the context of the day of attonement, places the spotlight of accountability and penitence onto the heavens. It is at this point in the journey of the day that G-d throws Himself into the fire with His holy men and breaks His heart with the hearts of the broken. This, G-d allows and desires as part of creation. I do not desire pain and brokenness, but it is what G-d has given. Threfore to be a man of righteousness you must learn to desire what is painful. You must learn to desire what is painful just as palpably as you desire what is good and right. And then you will know G-d in the fullness of the senses. Pleasure is our twisted teacher that does not always respond to what we think it should. Pleasure is our uncompromising aesthetic guardian that teaches us against our will and against our better judgement. In this way our visceral senses mirror the intractable and impenetrable will of G-d, who gives us a good fate or a wretched one, who heals us or throws us into the fire, who gives us love or gives us numbness. Last night, I dreamt two dreams. In the first dream: I was walking with Elizabeth Cotton, the master finger-picking guitar player and transmitter of vast knowledge about pre-Blues African-American song. Elizabeth Cotton has been dead since before my birth. We were at a music festival where we had both been performing. We were wandering through a kind of town center with a wide open walk-way and tall grandiose buildings. We passed an area where we saw a woman singing gospel music off in the distance. Elizabeth Cotton seemed to get inspired by the street-performer. She said that she has a new song to sing. We came up to a bank with a massive facade decorated with all manner of caryatids and decorative motifs. Elizabeth Cotton started trying to climb the wall. She was trying to locate guitars hidden among the statuary in the facade. The bank manager ran out and started yelling that she had to get down. Elizabeth Cotton looked at him with an expression of both stubborness and innocence and said, “But you can’t keep a woman from her calling.” Elizabeth Cotton found a guitar case in the wall and pulled it down. The chair she was balanced on slipped from under her and it was my job to catch her. I managed to catch her, but somehow I was only holding on to the cloak she was wearing and I did not feel her body at all, as though she was some kind of ethereal presence. In the second dream: My wife, Shasta, and I were staying in a hotel. There was a horrible young man there also renting a room with his girlfriend. The young man was acting in an outrageously hostile way towards me and Shasta. I was yelling at him to get away from us. I was so angry that I tore a lighting fixture off the wall to use as a weapon. I felt as though there was no way to respond to his aggression that could adequately convey how horrible that man was making me feel. I was enraged to the core. I saw the manager of the hotel and started yelling that she should call the police at once. There were several middle-aged women standing around, who had been too timid to speak up, nodding their heads in agreement and saying that the young man had harrassed them too. The manager was trying to calm me down and evade the issue. She didn’t want to have to deal with the problem. I believe these dreams deal directly with Yom Kipur. In the first dream I encountered an angel and was allowed to witness her work and aid in it in some small way, even in the face of the aprobation of social forces. In the second dream I was thrust ino the presence of evil and when I called out in protest I was met with neutral and evasive answers from above. This is the basic paradigm of the Yom Kipur service: We are invited into the company of angels. We are permitted to pray with sinners and saints mingled together and we are allowed to help the angels in their work of praise and creation. And then we encounter the fear and trembling and destruction which are co-commital with the joy of being in G-d’s presence and which are the price we pay for living in the world. And we pray and beg for and demand forgiveness. G-d answers, “If I hear another sound uttered I will turn the world to water. I will devastate both heaven and earth. This is my decree; accept it all of you who love the Torah that proceeded creation by two thousand years.” What are we to make of this answer? What answer can we give in response to this answer, so that we may live and not feel ourselves condemned to die? * * * * * * * Later: During the day on Yom Kipur I attended a class give by Amichai Lau-Lavie. The topic of the class was a brief selection from the Talmud in which Rabbi Ishmael, the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem, recounts an incident that he once experienced when performing the Yom Kipur offerings that require him to enter the Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, the physical place of intersection between G-d’s realm and our own. Behind the heavy curtains, in the sacred place that only he as high priest can enter, Rabbi Ishmael saw G-d. And G-d spoke to Ishmael and asked him to give Him a blessing. Ishmael spoke: May it be Your will that Your mercy may supress Your anger and Your mercy may prevail over Your other attributes, so that You may deal with your children according to the attribute of mercy and may, on their behalf, stop short of the limit of strict justice. The Talmud teaches further that we learn from this incident that the blessing of an ordinary man must not be considered lightly. This Rabbi Ishmael, the High Priest, is one of the ten martyrs whose murder by the Romans is chronicled in Eileh Ezkereh. There is a magical circular quality to the fact that it is the same man through whom G-d was blessed by man and who has become the archetype of the saint abandoned by G-d at the pivotal moment of crisis. Rabbi Ishmael’s sublime trust in his senses allowed him to be aware of G-d’s vulnerability and at the same time be willing to submit himself freely to the sadistic whims of brutality that are presented to us as being part of “the plan.” We pray for mercy and bless G-d that He should be merciful. The prayers are quiet screams inside ourselves. They need not ever reach outside the realm of our interior holy of holies in order to attain the status of truth.