Homeward Gazing

It is convenient that the school year almost perfectly aligns with the Hebrew calendar, starting off in the Fall. This way I can gather both together and deal with them in my thoughts a little clearer.
The year 5778 has been one unlike any I have ever experienced. Many things I thought I had known or been through before have been put to shame at their innocence. This year has been the bridging thoughts between William Blake's Song of Innocence to Song of Experience, and here I stand on the Echoing Green.

One phrase has been forefront on my mind and in my breath day to day, "I want to go Home."
By Home I don't mean Paradise Ca, I mean Paradise Eternal. I feel like Narnia is fading into something new but I might miss it if I do not hold fast to all that the L-rd is asking me to do. Feel is a key word here, because I know that there is no jeopardy in missing Paradise, but I want to enter it well, being faithful and courageous while in these Shadowlands.

This year, I fell in love. I thought I had fallen in love before, and I thought that my love was for this certain fellow I happened to meet at a lunch table, but it was for someone else. This fellow taught me so much about what it is to be cherished. It was a bit messy later on, because humans often are messy when it comes to affection for each other, but even when he left I realized I was still in love; and that who I loved hadn't left me at all.

Praise sang out from my lips and my heart more often than tears did, and bitterness died every time it attempted to germinate. There was some heart ache, and confusion because I had attributed my love to the fellow. For about a month I found it hard to eat or sleep, I was too shy to engage him or ask questions. I was angry at the distance, that we were somehow strangers, but false sort of strangers because I knew I was still very aware of him and suspected he was equally aware of me.

Was it wise to be removed? Probably, and good, and right, and just as it should be. We can't ever really know the way things might have been if they were all different than what they are. But I know this, what ruptured between he and I taught me more about the love of Messiah than anything ever had. I learned a restraint I never needed to practice before. I was trained in a new weapon against hatred that I never imagined I could wield, and the rule I had adopted for affection from C.S. Lewis' Four Loves was put into daily action. The beauty is, Appreciative love won out. I delight in seeing my brother happy, in hearing his voice, and in the few conversations we've had since.

Nothing has been so tangibly a "Kingdom" relationship like this one. I don't really know how to explain it, not in any of its truth and beauty. A very delicate kind of beauty, one selfish action might destroy it and scar something good with the reality of what is bad.  I don't know how to tell of the purity resting there between us without expecting you to look at my with alarm. No, reader, don't be alarmed, if this is madness it is only because it is a taste of Home while we are still living in the foreign country. I will become as mad as possible in it, because I want everyone to remember Home. When I am honest I also acknowledge that this might be a feeling on on my side of things, which is a tragic thought, but one that keeps a sobriety in my actions.

This year has been one that brought me in one way outside and in another way deeper into life's tangible reality. In one regard I have tasted heaven, in another I have glimpsed hell. This seems equally impossible to explain to you, and I fear you may think I am overreacting intensely. But the heart of the Jew is in Jerusalem, The
City of Gold. The first time I walked those streets I already knew them. I don't think I ever could be lost among them. Jerusalem is not merely the capitol is Israel, it is the capitol of every Jewish heart, we cannot forget her. Her streets are written on our palms, etched in our eyelids, and carved down into our soul. Our blood bleeds her citizenship, whether we die there or abroad.

That is why when I heard of Mereille's death in Paris it was a glimpse of Hell. An 87 year old woman who endured the holocaust met with that same devil again, and it killed her.She was stabbed to death in her apartment by two young men she had know since the boys were children. Her death had taken place two weeks before I had heard of it, and the force of it was much greater than I anticipated feeling, it was more than I felt for some people who passed that I have known in person. That was because Mereille represented a dream and a symbol, survival and hope by her breathing. Survivors are to us Jews a miracle that helps us cope with the knowledge of so much evil in the world. That when 6,000,000 were crushed some of us were invincible. Women like Mereille are heroes, they are Tikvah, Hope. When someone like her doesn't die peacefully in her sleep, how can any of us ever expect to?

One thought struck me, "Such might be my fate," and for the first time, "How could I ever consider bringing Jewish children into this world when such is our inheritance?" and more pointedly, "How could I ever consider marrying a gentile when you never can know if they might..." that thought died much sooner and revealed the reality of my contemplated fears. I was afraid of rejection, and rejection appeared so extremely tangible. At this point not only was rejection the evidence of social storms, but of the tremor it sent through me and my inability to explain it to anyone at all. I sat shaken at lunch and felt as though I failed in telling anyone why I seemed up set.

That afternoon I spent three hours effectively sitting shiva on the eve of Pesach for this woman I had never met. I became dehydrated from crying. And a fire that I had as a freshman was ignited with more understanding than it had had back then. I remembered on Good Friday that I am a Daughter of Zion. As I attended a Anglican service that evening with two of my good friends, one of the stations of the Cross was Yeshua comforting women who were crying:

"A large crowd of people followed Him, including women who were mourning and lamenting Him. But turning to them, Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and your children. Look, the days are coming when they will say, ‘The women without children, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed, are fortunate!’" Luke 23:27-29

As the congregation read these verses it was as though G-d was using His church to comfort me as He had taken the time to comfort those women while bearing the cross. My heart swelled anew with knowing that my pain is understood by my savior. That He bore the grief of the world, but took time for this specific kind. How great is his love for Zion, how little do we recall it. 

This week was Yom HaShoah, the day we set aside to remember the Holocaust. I am glad to know that in all these things G-d remembers and G-d is good. May He be so to you and to all Israel, and say Amen.