Creation begins, in the Lurianic
imagination, with God retreating away, while leaving behind a Reshimu
that can still, sometimes, be felt.
Over the summer, my family and I took a tour of the Mellach
– the old Jewish quarter of Tetuán in Morocco. Jews used to make up a
substantial part of the city. And while our delightful guide Mohammed assured
us that, “in Morocco the Jew, the Muslim and the Spanish live together as
brothers and sisters,” something was disquieting
about being advised to peer
through the wire grills over the windows of the only Synagogue still standing,
of the once 16 Synagogues in the Mellach, standing, that is, as a museum, not a
centre for Jewish life. Not that we could go inside, the museum was closed for
the summer.
There’s a beautiful blue ceramic tiled water fountain in
the Mellach, inscribed with that verse from Isaiah, וּשְׁאַבְתֶּם-מַיִם בְּשָׂשׂוֹן, - and you shall carry water in joy. It’s
beautiful, but no longer working and certainly no longer slaking the thirsts of
Jews no longer living in the area.
And there is the Horno El-Mellah – the oven of the
Jewish quarter – the place where the Jews of Tetuán would once take their Hamin
–pots of stew – on a Friday afternoon to cook over Shabbat and be ready for
lunch. There’s a heritage sign, explaining the oven's date of construction, but
… no pots of Hamin.
The Jewish life we felt, and you could definitely feel
something, was an impression – a Reishimu; a presence defined by its absence. It
could be felt in the pit of the stomach, like an ache that was somehow familiar
and in its pain somehow simultaneously comforting.
The thing that I was really looking out for, as we
wandered down the streets of the Mellach, along streets named Rue Haifa or
Avraham Ben Tata – were signs of Jewish life on doorposts. There are a few
left, not actual Mezuzot, but hollows carved into doorframes – just above
shoulder height – just at kissing height – where the Jewish inhabitants of Tetuán
carved out a space in which to secrete the scrolls of the Shema, Uchtavtem
al Mezuzot Beitecha. Apparently, that was the way you fixed Mezuzot in Tetuan
in the early to mid-20th century – you carved out a space in which
you placed the thing you cared about. And fifty/sixty years later, though the
Jews are all gone, the empty space is still, sometimes, present.
I’ve seen these absent spaces on doorposts before, wandering
through the Shetls and Ghettos haunted by once-Jewish communities in former Nazi
Europe. There’s even a project – MiPolin’s Mezuzah From This Home, where Judaica
artists Helena
Czernek and Aleksander Prugar travel to the great centres of Jewish life,
pre-Shoah, making plaster casts of the hollowed out once-places of Mezuzot on
the doorposts of Lublin, Krakow and the like and making new Mezuzot from these
casts of absence. The group of New Londoners who travelled with Angela Gluck to
Poland this year bought one. Stood in the shop, Angela, I’m reliably informed,
taught about the absence of presence and the presence of absence. Of course she
did. Jewish life casting its own Reshimu.
That word – Reshimu – is based on
an unusual Biblical root. It appears only once in the Bible, in the Book of
Daniel, where an angel uses it to explain something inscribed - הָרָשׁוּם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת –inscribed in a writing of truth. The
commentaries suggest that Roshem is more powerful than the normal kind
of writing – Katav; closer to the Hebrew word Chokek –literally
to carve. You have to think like an ancient; to really intend to leave a
record, in ancient times, you would carve away.[1]
For the Kabbalists, all presence,
all creation is built from absence, lined with a Reshimu – an absence in which
there can still be felt to be a presence.
I had a similar thought, about
the absence of presence and presence of absence, around the bereavement that
hit me personally the hardest this last year – the loss of our former Chazan of
blessed memory, Stephen Cotsen. Stephen was a friend, a mentor, a partner and our
Chazan and his passing in Nissan left me missing him and, even with the beauty
of the Slichut we’ve been so blessed to have from Yoav and David last night, I
still feel both his presence and his absence, especially today. I feel a kind
of friendship still alive. But there’s
also a raw absence, a stomach pain that occasionally manifests as tears –
another kind of Reshimu.
At Chazan Stephen’s funeral, we,
as a community formed an escort – literally a Levaya - for him. As
scores of his Bar Mitzvah students and wedding couples and congregants from
Mill Hill or Cardiff or Brixton or Hackney emerged alongside friends old and
new, I had this sharp sense that his life – too short as it was – was Nirsham
inscribed in the negative space delineated by all our presence, Nirsham
as an absence held by our presence.
A bit like that image of Rubin’s
vase – that sometimes looks like two human faces facing one another and
sometimes looks like a vase. Edgar Rubin – the Danish psychologist behind that
image was Jewish, by the way.
I’m not sure which, in this analogy,
for a life that is past, but still present, is the vase and which are the
faces, but at the funeral and the Shuva and since, there have been those of us
standing round and remembering and talking about a life that has passed, and
embodying in our own lives a shift because we knew Stephen and loved Stephen
and were touched by Stephen and in that paradoxical moment, he – like so many
of those we stand today and remember – is present in his absence.
That’s why we come here for
Yizkor – לרשׁם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת to inscribe again this negative space into our continued
lives, to feel absent presence and to trace back the way in which we are
changed – made better - by the lives we remember.
Up here today, on the day Chazan
Stephen loved more than any other in our calendar. I feel Stephen’s expectation
that I pay the closest attention to the page numbers and the congregational
responses
wanting me to keep the sermon
just a little shorter
wanting me do everything I can to
ensure that all of us here today know that this Mesorah, this tradition of
prayer, this way of standing before our Creator is powerful and our greatest
gift and we do well to tend it carefully.
What are the urges each of our
loved ones push up against us, in each of their absent presences?
I know we all feel similar
versions of this Reshimu from the death-transcending lives we gather today to
recall. Here is the model, the Yizkor services hold up. Now, what are we to do
with the breath still granted us?
What was once present can be
absent, but what is definitely absent can also be so very present as a feeling
and as a challenge.
My point is that what is no
longer physically present isn’t really absent, or at least isn’t just absent.
Of course, it hurts to, no longer, have someone to hold, or someone to hold us. But
the pain isn’t just bad. It’s the cost of love, it’s the Reshimu of having once
been intertwined. Our wonderful member Louis is thankfully out of hospital.
Louis – this one’s for you – like entangled electrons – we continue to experience
presence in absence.
There are places to go to
experience the souls of those who have left us on the other side of the curtain
that separates the living and dead – you can go to a cemetery, or a Shtetl or
to a Mellah, or to a favoured park bench. And there are times when the
opacity of the harsh division between the living and the dead becomes translucent.
I don’t really know what happens at
the end of time, or when we die. I don’t think any Jew would claim to. We just
don’t go big on structuring exactly how which of us gets to be in which circle
of heaven – or frankly hell. But I do believe in this;
There’s a time to strive forward
in our own right and live with the future before us for as long as we are able.
And there’s a time to reflect on the gnawing pains – the Reshimu in our gut –
and feel the presence of the absence of those we have loved who now rest behind
a veil, sometimes more and sometimes less translucent. For those of us fortunate
to have ever been loved by someone now passed, that will be painful. But if we
stop our running around and honour the call to come together in places like
this, at times like this, we can, if we are lucky, still be blessed by a
feeling of presence in that which is absence. And in that moment, our lives
become greater than merely the length of our days on this planet.
May we all be so blessed.
May the memories of those we have
loved and lost be always for a blessing.
[1] There’s a similar idea in the opening of the Zohar, where creation begins with God carving out a carving in the light of the heavens – the Aramaic is גָּלִיף גְּלוּפֵי – sharing an etymology with the English word ‘glyph’ as in ‘hieroglyph’.
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