The singer of all our songs
Haegel, Nancy M.
the rabbi's teaching and questions. Only one thing mattered amid the forms and the parking and "opening day" bureaucracy: only God, the only worthwhile object of transcendence. "Do you need...
...We moved on to study the mystics, learning about the Hasidic emphasis on experience and mysticism and then concentrating on the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook...
...f I Timothy Hodor The Lazarus Love Before the eyes of autumn, Another summer has evaporated into itself...
...But I'I1 take them if you wish...
...Never, in all my experience, have I felt God so close and so present...
...I would feel out of place, would be the only one who couldn't read Hebrew, and wouldn't know the prayers, but I wanted to return...
...What is instructive about the scientific analogy, for those who stand in awe of the diversity of the world's religious traditions, is that the reality is greater than our ability to experience it...
...13 September 1991:509...
...He aspires toward the heights, and he attaches himself with a gentle love to the community of Israel...
...They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and cele- bration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness...
...His spirit extends to the wider vistas of the majesty of man generally, and his noble essence...
...In a tradition that was foreign and a language I did not understand, He was as tangible as the bread and wine of my Catholic faith...
...Both...
...I had enjoyed the last evening so much, had gone home with such a sense of excitement and discovery that I wanted to return...
...Then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices...
...e met for the final class the next evening...
...He paused, with a quizzical look...
...light and matter have both wave and particle nature...
...Had he known...
...The words literally danced on the page...
...That one act, that repetitive, traditional act of fidelity, carried on for thousands of years, assures that though the world may have his body, it will never completely own his soul...
...As I was musing about the power of the symbol, the conver- sation shifted...
...Abraham Isaac Kook, ed...
...Would Rabbi Kook be offended if I suggested that the one who rises with all these things is God alone...
...The forms are not essential...
...Our minds have left and right brains...
...one woman asked...
...From this source of life he draws the subjects of his meditation and study, his aspirations and visions...
...He feels grieved in her afflictions and delights in her hopes...
...The energy is quantized in packets called photons...
...Together with her he sings her songs...
...We danced, circling the room holding hands...
...I took it as both and knew that I would be back next week...
...B. Z. Bosker, Paulist Press, 1978...
...Nancy, would you read please...
...No, I don't think they're essential to me...
...he pattern of the class became established and I knew what to expect each week...
...What is lacking in our belief that compels us to try and force it upon others...
...I have nowhere to go And no reason to move...
...only by accepting the "truth" from many angles is the larger truth revealed...
...When sundown comes and Sabbath begins," said the rabbi, "it is a special time...
...Then there is one who rises toward wider horizons, until he links himself with all existence, with all God's creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them...
...It has taken its warmth To a soul we know by time...
...The skeptic, the doubter, the consigner of mysticism to the realm of intellectual curiosity was having a mystical expe- rience with Rav Kook...
...After class I approached the rabbi...
...I learned a lot in "Psychology and Jewish Spirituality...
...Suppose we don't get home before sundown," one woman asked...
...Do you still find meaning in the ceremony...
...The group next door, a class for people preparing to marry in the Jewish tradition, was learning about the symbols of their faith...
...I was unable to par- ticipate in the discussion that followed...
...There is another who sings the song of his people...
...Only God...
...Both Catholics and Jews have orthodox friends...
...The nature they display to you at any time depends in part on where you stand, on experiments you chose to perform...
...One evening we were discussing the Sabbath, with all its rich- ness and meaning for the Jews...
...They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness...
...He leaves the circle of his own individual self, because he finds it without sufficient breadth, without an idealistic basis...
...As a journal keeper myself, I felt that we at least had that in common...
...we sang Hebrew hymns, swaying to the rhythm of words that I knew without understanding...
...Chief rabbi of Jerusalem from 1919-35, Rabbi Kook was also a modern mystic...
...But this rabbi was not ready to fall prey to the temptation...
...A mystic, regardless of tradition, sees beyond the world of men and women to the all-encompassing world of God...
...Mysticism in dreams can be dismissed...
...Birds begin their departure And seek another sun...
...It is of one such as this that tradition has said that whoever sings a portion of song each day is assured of having a share in the world to come...
...I study the leaves, The bark, and the branches...
...Soon experiments were being interpreted in view of this new model, and things which had previously been mysterious became clear...
...Together they sing their song with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other...
...He contemplates noble and pure thoughts about her past and her future, and probes with love and wisdom her inner spiritual essence...
...Coincidence...
...Mysticism in waking moments could change your life...
...And so with God...
...I have learned that nature Plays dead in the winter...
...Do you need these forms...
...If you try to isolate the particle nature of light, if you seek solely to verify your own experience, you will lose the wave behavior...
...Similarly, to allow the wave behavior to appear, you must let go of the particle picture...
...If you are a Christian, your Messiah has come...
...The transition from Palestine to Los Angeles and the translation from the language of the mystic to my own required more than I brought to the task...
...It is part of our relationships, our psychology, our science...
...He aspires toward man's general goal and looks forward toward his higher perfection...
...Yes," she replied, "and the children enjoy it, but my Orthodox friends say we shouldn't do it after sundown...
...What is it then in the nature of religion that has allowed us over the years of history to divide ouselves by grasping at our little piece of the truth...
...We read a lengthy section from The Lights of Penitence and talked about the ideas...
...If you are a Jew, God is in the waiting...
...The Messiah has come and the Messiah has not come...
...The larger truth, encompassing both, is God...
...If the physical creation has this paradox built into its very core, does it reflect its creator...
...The question has been posed and now we wait for Father, Rabbi, Reverend to answer...
...We discussed what we read, and my Jewish classmates, with their backgrounds ranging from Orthodox who had embraced Reform to Reform Jews who were moving toward Orthodoxy, told the stories of their lives...
...We deal all the time in paradox and duality...
...For the first time it seemed significant that we had stopped...
...As always, we read aloud, moving around the room at random, covering the final passages that the rabbi wanted to share...
...So often one thinks of things that the Jews do not do on the Sabbath, giving little thought to the special things they do...
...the rabbi's voice filtered through my daze and I turned mechanically to the appropriate page...
...For this work, Einstein received his Nobel Prize...
...If it runs, it runs without his aid...
...Among all the "Jewish World View" refugees, I was the only one remaining...
...The individual stories blended with the stories of thousands of years, until it almost seemed that the great figures of Jewish history walked through the classroom and stopped to chat with those who were on the journey...
...we sat in silence, meditating on the source of our lives...
...All eyes turned to the rabbi...
...He nodded, a gesture that could have been interpreted as approval or dismissal...
...Suddenly I could have been in any class, in any church...
...Even the Christian God has a triune nature...
...I had come empty-handed, afraid that I would unwittingly break one of the food laws and embarrass myself or my new friends...
...508: Commonweal I read it once, stopped, and read it again...
...Light and matter behave sometimes like wave and some- times like a particle...
...Later we had a small farewell party, each one having brought something to share...
...I was miles away, thinking about last night's experience and concluding that it was the stuff of dreams...
...And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices...
...As I read, it became clear to me a mystic is one who sees beyond the divisions, who sees oneness amid the diversity...
...There is another who reaches toward more distant realms, and he goes beyond the boundary of Israel to sing the song of man...
...he inquired, in his best psy- chology-and-spirituality fashion...
...Truth" depends on where you stand...
...Mainly I learned that the rabbi had it right the first evening...
...It occurred to me that we used to do that as Catholics...
...I must go on And part from The sunken echoes of months That have woven memories across my mind...
...Then in 1927, in another Nobel-Prize-winning piece of work, Davisson and Germer found that matter too--elec- trons, protons, and ultimately you and I--also has a wave/particle duality...
...We took turns reading aloud and soon learned to pause in midsentence to allow the rabbi to fill in the Hebrew parts of the phrases...
...On the Sabbath, the economic machine that drives our society stops for the obser- vant Jew...
...Once, during a quiet meditation period, the sound of the shofar burst into the silence...
...There is one who sings the song of his own life," I heard myself begin...
...Then one night, so tired that my head was nodding and my eyes closing, I came upon the following passage: There is one who sings the song of his own life, and in himself he finds everything, his full spiritual satisfaction...
...I read it a third time, out loud alone in my room...
...They are both--and neither...
...This year, I play the same game: I see a woman rising from the point of evaporation And breaking free from the knot of sounds, And I wonder when I should abort my dormant death...
...His editor tells us that Rabbi Kook produced his more significant writings in the form of a personal journal, with daily meditations unfolding from experience...
...They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness...
...The next week the class was much smaller...
...His glance told me that that was not a revelation...
...Only one thing mattered amid the forms and the parking and "opening day" bureaucracy: only God, the only worthwhile object of transcendence...
...Why me...
...Eighty-five years ago the scientific worldview was changed when Einstein published a paper entitled "On a Heuristic View of the Nature of Light...
...Does every religious tradition, every community, every individual have its vital piece of the whole...
...Still, some- times reading Kook was difficult and I had to force myself ahead...
...Richard Feynman, another Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, wrote, "When we look for a certain phenomenon we cannot but help disturb it in a certain minimum way, and the disturbance is nec- essary for the consistency of the viewpoint...
...I'm enjoying the class very much, and I'd like to stay," I said...
...As a final piece, let's turn to page 228...
...How does it feel to you when you light the candles late...
...Should we still light the candles...
...are true, depending on where you stand...
...At the end of each class, we took some time for prayer and meditation...
...I heard a voice that was not my own...
...In a way that I did not understand and could never explain, the words spoke to the heart...
...I'm not Jewish...
...In it, he suggested that light, which displayed itself daily in the wave-like properties of reflection, refraction, and diffraction (images in the mirror and rainbows in the sky) also had particle nature...
...Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 15
