Rushashunna

The ripples move at the speed of September
The unseen mist is clever
And my nostrils feel clear and cold
I have the pricked ears of some rodent
listening for the pounce of a predator.

Or perhaps I am just going nuts.

The Armies Remaining Will Judge Without People or Courts

Betsy,
I write to you from the parallel universe that is known in most places as Los Angeles. Some Mexicans and decedents of those tribes who used to live here probably call it something I cannot pronounce. But it has been Los Angeles for long enough that nobody really cares - at least nobody with bombs or threats to use them. It's certainly a strange world.

I hear from my sister-in-law, Margo, that things are rather insane in your parts, not to mention from the constant barrage of news reports on cnn and haaretz.com. I don't believe there's any easy solution to this problem, though I was forced into a rather depressive state cogitating the matzav as I sat on the floor listening to sefer eicha the other night. It told of our enemies laughing at us, at a God who had turned his face away. I was worried and frightened that I somehow merited to be in a generation of loss for am yisrael. And how ironic that the very same march of years, my 39+, have witnessed such a rollercoaster of events. Six days, Yom Kippur, Sadat in Yerushalayim, Lebanon, Intifada, Oslo, assassination of Rabin, Intifada II.

How can I contemplate the world descending into global violence and utter breakdown of all value and reason when there are so many signs of hope? My daughter Adinah as she marvels at a balloon or a lovely dress - and then I recall that cringing moment when the first plane smashed into the world trade center, and as if it were timed to happen a million years before, a flock of birds gracefully ascended from a traffic signal in the street below - - and charred love notes trickled down to the pavement. Indeed, there are many faces to the Almighty; she is at once a cherub, an autistic teen, a firefighter, and a murderous soul who's been bought.

I wish the face to turn once more in the favor of our children and history tells us it is only a matter of time. Thank you for relating things as they are in eretz yisrael. May many a peace come in our days.

Shabbat Shalom,
-Chaim

Chaim's Open Archive

Here's something I scribbled on 12/26/04.

I don’t know where to begin. I do realize that it’s a rather hackneyed way to start a topic, but in fact I’m afraid, confused and feeling just ignorant, inadequate and unworthy. There are plenty of opportunities for my ego to soar – when I master my visual craft, when my daughter looks groggily toward me and says “abba, I happy.” The smooth experiences are overwhelming gifts for which I have no explanation and no way to repay. I sense some balance at these moments, as if all the hard work and the tears and the arguments and doubts have somehow culminated in a massive win. And also it’s that whole tincture of goodness, which I’ve spoken about before. That notion of the negativity in the world, with its overwhelming ability to strike fear and paralysis into me; and then as if an elixir of magical intensity, born of absolute redemption, like a droplet of amniotic fluid, breaks through reminding me that the sun shines. It’s the same feeling I have when listening to Bob Dylan’s “The Hour When The Ship Comes In.” You know he really had this ability to sound like biblical verse, and I want to weep when I hear him, just in the same wavering quiveriness that my father’s voice took this evening when he paraphrased the book of Ruth as we drove down Los Feliz Boulevard.

This is what it is. I told my father this evening, during his many refrains about the death of Jewry, and not just Polish Jewry, but the actual death of The Jew, in the gas chambers (I’m so fucking sick of the gas) – what I told him, what I thought he wanted to heare, is that he’s the last Jew left on earth. And for him it’s true, and I think that even though it’s grotesque to say that, it’s true for him. You know? I mean he’s the last surviving member of the Singer clan, that is other than his cousin in New York, and he’s so pissed off at her for whatever reason. He just goes on and on about what the Nazis destroyed. And I get so raging angry with him. He’ll stand there in Walgreen’s at the photo counter, exasperated and disgusted with Jews and Judaism and the liturgy, all swirled like a caustic soup and it splashes out at the frum (religious) Jews standing, waiting for their photos. These tall guys with dark beards and tzitzis hanging down their hips and my father’s squealing a foot away that there are no Jews left. And he rants on, how it’s preposterous; the centrality of the exodus from Egypt in our prayers. He wants the narrative of destruction, the annihilation of Polish and Lithuanian Jews to replace the “going out from Egypt.” And he’s disgusted with young Jews who for him know nothing, blindly and happily chanting “you’ve chosen us from among the other nations and lifted us above them . . . “ And I feel like I should summon the peace to let him know that I feel the truth in those words of prayer; that I identify with the notion of holiness brought to people by the commission of commandments, and most of all I want to tell him, to somehow prove to him that he’s wrong. But how can I tell him he’s wrong? He thinks that Moses was killed by the people after the Korach rebellion. He thinks that the corruption in Jewish history is so deep and pervasive, that he contradicts his own idealized view of his fellow Jews in Tomaszow prior to the Shoah. He thinks that Hitler was successful.

He asks where is his "goral" which sort of loosely translated means fate, and my mom tells him to turn around and to look in the back seat, and I say yeah your goral is snoring in the backseat, referring to our little girl snoring with abandon just like my dad, strapped in her car seat.

Heaven Scent: A Bisseleh Marquee

Hi everyone,
please visit http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-179599007488340439&q=heaven+scent to view my self-produced animated short entitled "Heaven Scent."

Listen to your heart.

-Chaim