Ahava Rabbah: Orientations א
Who speaks when we choose to hear?
More than words sometimes, what fails is syntax. How to order and position reality? How to give logic to what sheds it?
I’m hoping to be writing in ways more synchronous with the plural paces and rhythms of life. With the moving fragments that we are. With the trace thoughts that arrive and leave their wings as mirrors.
Each week I try to head to the forest, to learn from its own cadences and cosmologies, to ask what is wider than me for permission to listen. The Ahava Rabbah (‘abundant love’) is both a prayer and a traditional klezmer scale, a fluid compass to steer through the seas of music.
a forest teaches
On one side of our earthly body, on one hemisphere of our planet, winter slows the air. Everything breathes differently.
Ben adam. In Hebrew and Aramaic, a ‘human being’ can be read as ‘a child of earth’. Fausto Reinaga reminds us that a human being is ‘earth that thinks’. Ana Carolina Alfinito speaks of the ‘body as the earth that walks’. Samantha Tzipporah spells that are ‘our bodies are not a metaphor for the earth, they are the earth.’ We are inseparable. Our thought is inescapably arborescent, our digestion microbial, our sight, the collective handiwork of all that sees us.
a tree, an orchard, a family
R’ Steinsaltz, reflecting on the wisdom of trees, reflects that ‘when you don’t want to hear, the wisest thing doesn’t say anything.’ All beings are only as simple as we allow ourselves to perceive them. The possibility of learning, of stepping into a relation of learning, lives in our openness.
R’J.N notes that in the Talmud, the destruction of olive trees is ‘a symbol for abject grief’. What does that mean for the destruction of an entire orchard? What grief does the destruction of entire families, entire children of earth, require?
Questions arrive in the aftershock of every violence. Fady Joudah asks: ‘What makes a state obsess over its desire to totally dominate a whole people, to own their bodies between servility and expulsion? What makes an overwhelming majority of a people consign another to oblivion, cut them off from the outside world for decades, mutilate their image and their being into superfluous nonbeings? What people obsess over severing another people from their olive trees? How deadly the olives?’
The abyss is an abyss because it is always asking.
missiles
In Cyrillic, in Arabic, in Hebrew, in Latin, in every script, the news tells of missiles and bombs. Of rubble. Of mourning. In murmured conversations, friends interrogate hope: where is it? Who is it?
A friend talks of a ‘pessimistic hope’, that things simply cannot remain this way. Maria Faciolince Martina teaches me about the emergence imbued in emergency. Zagajewski, from memory, provokes me to praise the mutilated world.
Reading is my coping. Sami Michael reflected that “universal literature does not need a passport or visa from this or that ruler. It crosses borders, and like water its passes above and below, and from the bowels of the earth it is borne on the wings of the wind.” A person is the land that speaks.
In wars, the ministries and newsreaders announce tallies of bodies. The poets bring their proofs of existence.
Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva writes:
‘on the unmarked graves of our lives
war plants paper flowers.’
In one of her final poems, Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nadah enounces:
‘I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.’
In an interview, Claudia Rankine explains: “I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn’t just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it’s violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.”