Kaddish

When I returned to Beth Tikvah after those few weeks spent at The Bean Cycle, I was greeted by a weepy Rav From Whence. Guessing that this would likely be the case, I stepped not to my apartment but instead to the main entry point of the sim. This landed me about twenty meters in front of the synagogue and, thus, about the same distance from her small apartment beside it.

I did not know whether or not she would be present. She is a busy woman, after all, and doubtless all the more so with the world stumbling once more back to life. She would have meetings. She would be quadruple and quintuple booked, if not more. She would most certainly be meeting with her congregants, with the ANRC, with who knows how many Jewish or interfaith communities, and offering the comfort and support that a rabbi must in times such as these.

She surely would be out, but I had to at least try, and so I knocked.

Silence greeted me, then the shuffle of paws on rug, then the clack of claws on wood, slow and unsteady, and at last the door opened.

‘Diminished’ is the word that springs most readily to mind. She looked diminished. She was wearing a plain tee and flannel pajamas, and across her shoulders was draped the blanket I know well from her bed, but even under that, I could see a slope to her shoulders that spoke of exhaustion. Red rimmed her eyes, and her cheeks were a matted mess of tear stains. She looked shorter. She looked older.

As soon as she recognized me, her face contorted and tears flowed anew. She reached out a paw to touch my cheek, then my shoulder, and then she was sinking down to her knees onto the parquet before me, holding onto one of my paws and weeping.

What is one to do in a situation such as this? What is one to feel? I did not know. I did not know then, and I do not imagine that, were I confronted with such now, I would have any better idea.

At the time, I felt self-conscious, a little embarrassed. I found myself perhaps even the slightest bit frustrated.

Why?

What could I possibly be frustrated about?

Was I upset that I expected strength and was seeing weakness? Was I frustrated that she was so visibly overwhelmed by emotion? That she could not hide her tears, just as I can never seem to? Was I embarrassed by this mismatch in our emotional reactions to each other?

I do not know...

I cast a glance back over my shoulder at the empty yard before the synagogue and, spying no one, lowered myself to my knees before her, drawing her into my arms.

I cried some as well, after a while, but I did not weep. She wept. She sobbed. She clutched at my shoulders and buried her face against my neck and sobbed.

Mostly, though, I just held her close and muttered some awkward reassurances to her — “I am here”, “it is okay”, “do not worry” — and let her wave of emotion pass while I marveled at my own feelings of grudging responsibility.

My frustration stuck with me. My temper remained. I was so on edge, being back.

Rav improved rapidly over the days following my return. She begged that I stay with her that first night and I acquiesced, but when I asked if she needed me to remain for another, she said that she would leave it up to me, that it did not feel like so pressing a requirement. I begged off and said that I missed my bed too much and would like to sleep there, which was true enough.

Some cruel part of me wondered if perhaps there was some part of this that was an act designed to get me to feel a certain way. Even then, even as this person I have already derided as a ‘bitch’, I knew this to be a stretch, but such was my mindset at the time.

The unspoken truth here, however, is that I was not ready to reengage to the degree that perhaps my down-tree needed, and she could read that in me as easily as ever.

It is perhaps not so surprising, given all that was going on. The world was coming back. Life was juddering to a start once more.

And yet, nothing was as it had been.

There was a feverish pitch to everything that we did. I wrote before that many of us were afraid that perhaps the apocalypse was not done with us, and I was afraid. Even as I heard through the news feeds and the grapevine — for there were those in the clade who worked on the project of restoration — that the problem had been patched out of existence during those months of non-being, I feared my dreams becoming reality, those dark specks of cutting short lives...

Rav improved, and grew busier than I had ever seen her. She had gathered in the senior clergy from our temple — herself; me, our scholar and representative for the Mishkan HaNetzach committee; Rav Erin Sorensen, our senior chaplain and chair of the ANRC; and Rabbi Peter Katz, our senior cantor — and other New Reform congregations into a working group on where to go from here. She also joined a similar working group with the ANRC — a situation which also gave us access to phys-side members — and at least two ecumenical groups structured similarly.

My life, to outside appearances, must have essentially returned to what it had been before, as did the lives of so many others. I read. I wrote. I met with the committees I was a part of. The library committee continued as though nothing had happened. The Mishkan HaNetzach committee — the group within the ANRC that managed the living document that was our siddur, guide to faith and practice, and collection of teshuvot — begain to outline a chapter on the Century Attack and to tackle responsa to sheilot.

But it had not. There was the life that I had before the Attack, and there is the life that I have now, and the thirteen months and eleven days between is an impermeable barrier.

Rav had needed me when I got back, and I could not give her all that she needed. I was not that person. That was not my life.

She let me return to my apartment the day after I got back, she tolerated me at times avoiding her, with a tired smile of understanding. I could not give her what she needed, and she understood that, and perhaps that is what aches the most, now.

Today, it is my birthday. It is our birthday. A large chunk of the third stanza, plus a few Odists besides, has gathered tonight at a small restaurant serving hand shaved noodles and steamed dumplings that we might celebrate 316 years.

It is a night of the savory tang of black vinegar and chili oil, of laughing over the fact that I can barely eat the noodles and yet that I can eat two dumplings at once, while the humans within the clade — and, at one point, the owners of the restaurant — have to bite the dumplings in half.

There will be another celebration in two days, when Purim comes around, and I am sure that, at that point, we will all gather with our own and throw parties that are very uniquely us. There are years that Purim will fall on our birthday, and it is those years when we will so many of us gather, take over some field or some enormous buffet and the room, the springtime will be filled with us.

This year, though, two days off, and we are merely here for a dinner, a chance to eat chicken and chive dumplings by the dozen and bowls of noodles the size of our heads.

It has been thirty-five days since Yom HaShichzur. Five weeks since I stood before thousands, stood before those here sys-side and those back in the embodied world and stammered my way through a short speech.

It has been two weeks since I started to be reeled back into my body, since the burning heat of dissociation was once more quenched, but still there is a prickling on the back of my neck that at times catches me unawares.

Tonight, there is such joy as I have not had in some time. Oh, But To Whom made us promise that we would not speak of the Century Attack. She made me promise that I would not speak of HaShichzur, too, because she knows me, knows that I do tend to at times go on, and she loves me and I love her too, and so I have not.

And so tonight there is so much joy as we celebrate our birthday.

After dinner, a few of us go for a walk, for across the road from the restaurant is a lake, placid, with a wide soft-surface path ringing it. Trees — Douglas firs for the most part, though there is a notable willow whose weeping branches reach nearly to the surface of the water, stopping just shy — line the path, alternating on which side. That road often has cars driving along it, for there are many who still like the things, but it is easy enough to cross, and the cars provide only the soft whoosh of the wind of their passing without much more. It is prosaic in the way that any town might at times be. It is soft. It is lived in, and loved. It is home for many, and we can feel that.

Rav From Whence and I walk paw in paw while beside us walks Unknowable Spaces.

There is within us I think a certain yearning for the void. There is a part of us that is avid for death — voluptuous, complete, and final death — and thus it looms large at times in our thoughts. Whether or not this is due to the traumas of the past, the ways in which we came close — so close — to death, we do not know.

It has, however, concentrated in various different ways throughout the clade. I do not myself yearn for death — none of us are suicidal, I believe, or none of us still extant on the System — but it does occupy a small part of my mind most hours of the day.

Perhaps such is inevitable for one such as me: I am a tricentenarian; I am an Odist; and I am one who concerns herself most with matters of faith. There is law, yes, Torah and Talmud and halakha, but among these are matters of the soul. I have written papers and papers on the shifting views of life and death within Judaism, of the ways in which we conceive of a soul, of what comes after the end. I have written on heaven and hell, and the return to the concept of Sheol, and the idea that has taken hold of nullity as what there is after death. There is nothing, we say, but the joy of life, and the never-ending silence. The tranquility of the world to come, we say, is the tranquility that others may have because we have left the world a better place.

Ah, but Unknowable Spaces!

She is one of those among us who splashes in death. She and Slow Hours and The Only Constant and a handful of others all together contain our death-thoughts. They do not just yearn, but they obsess.

She dwells in the realm of grief. She breathes the sorrow of loss. She lives through the pain, and in it, she finds holiness.

It would not be wrong to say that she has been busy since the Century Attack.

Despite our differing interests, we are still cocladists, and bear our similarities for that. We both have our hyperfixations. We both remain skunks. We both dress for the most part in loose earth tones, though she in skirts and blouses and me most often in linen trousers and a tunic. She will at times wear a tichel and at times a sun hat while I stick stolidly to my ‘skunkerchief’, as Rav so endearingly called it when first I adopted it, a simple kerchief tied to keep my mane out of my face and my hair, such as it is, covered.

“What Right Have I, From Whence says that you were overflowing,” she begins. Her voice is always so quiet and so calm. Another contrast with me, I suppose. Every time I am around her I am reminded of the ways in which we are comfortably contradictory. We are complements to each other in many ways. “How are you feeling? Has it let up completely now?”

“I believe so. I have...ah, that is, I am feeling better, though I have been left in an uncomfortable state of mind. I remain...mm...” I trail off, at a loss for words.

“You do seem a little bit more emotional than usual,” Rav From Whence hazards. “It is not in any way bad, you just seem more...labile is not quite the right word, but you are quite sensitive to emotional shifts.”

“That is...ah, I think that is accurate enough,” I reply, giving Rav’s paw a grateful squeeze in my own. “Though I think that I am struggling in particular with the discomfort of frustration or...mm, I suppose it is a sort of fury.”

“‘Fury’?” Unknowable Spaces asks, and I take what calm from the calm in her voice. “What makes you choose that word?”

“Anger is hot, but...ah, but this feeling is cold. It is steady, not flaring. It is almost respectful. It is almost kind. It is...ah, well, I am going to talk in circles, if I continue.”

She levels her searching gaze on me, and as so often happens with her when she has fallen into that very particular sort of empathy that she so often displays, I feel nearly translucent. I feel like she can see beneath the surface, can see some truer shape of me. She sees my soul. She sees that essence of me, and her empathy is borne of imagining what the world would be without it.

I bear it as best I an, though I can only meet her gaze in short moments before it feels as though such empathy will bleed me dry.

“Is this fury serving you?” she says at last.

“I do not yet know. It is...ah, I am still piecing together where it is directed.”

Rav speaks up, saying, “It sounded as though it was directed at HaShem.”

“It was...ah, it is, yes, for Their silence and distance, but it is also directed at death, for its complicity, and it is also directed at us, at humanity, for what we are capable of, and it is...ah, it is also directed at myself for my lack of control over my emotions.”

Unknowable Spaces nods, watching me still.

“I think that...ah, that I am still struggling to differentiate it from overflow,” I admit. “Even these many days later, yes? I am...ah, it does not feel quite...real, I suppose. Until it does, I do not think that it will be serving me, no. Until I can direct it, then...ah, then perhaps it will have meaning.”

“And this is why you say you have been left with this feeling after overflow?”

“Yes. It is...ah, it is not overflow, but neither is it wholly separate. It is– ah... I am talking in circles. I am still thinking in circles.”

My down-tree gives my paw a reassuring squeeze in her own. “You may if you wish, my dear. If speaking in circles offers relief, perhaps you should.”

I look down to my paws as they pad along the trail, claws leaving faint divots in hard-packed earth. I look down and I try to figure out what dividing line might be drawn between the numinous emotions of a mind unbound and mere fury.

“I think that...ah, that what I am experiencing is an earnest anger, but what I am missing is the words to express it, or even a clear direction in which it is pointed. There are options, yes — HaShem, the world, me, what-have-you — but...mm, well, that is all so vague. It is...well, I do not know the directionality. If I am facing HaShem and it is directed at me, what does that mean? If I look within and find it blaring out at the world, then what? And here I have said that it is pointed at all of those things, but I am...ah, rather, it is all so indistinct, and so it is difficult for me to piece together why I am even feeling it.” I offer my cocladists a weak smile. “An indistinct emotion that...ah, that I am not sure why I am feeling is a common feature of overflow, yes?”

It is some time before Unknowable Spaces replies, and we have made it another quarter of the way around the lake. “Do you miss your understanding of the world before the Attack?”

I furrow my brow and scuff my foot against a rock, figuring that I might kick it along the path for a ways as we walk. It is immobile, and I lose a half-step trying to figure out just what has happened.

Within me, that fury wheels about on myself. Stupid skunk, I think, and my inner voice is a growl. You look a fool. Stammering and tripping and cursing the world...

I hate myself, in this moment. I loathe myself. I wrote this sentiment before and there it is in a flash: I hate this me. She is intolerable. I do not want to be around her. I cannot stand her...

But no, even that fades as the direction of the emotion drifts away. I do my best to simply drop it, to set my anger down there by the rock and hope that it stays.

“I miss...ah, I miss that version of me who believed that something like this could never happen, yes,” I say at last. “I miss a world in which the Century Attack is unthinkable.”

Unknowable Spaces takes up my other paw, smiles her ever-sad smile, and we the three of us walk in silence for some time, paw in paw, taking the evening air.

I do my best to leave my anger with that immobile rock that I had tried to kick, and instead just count all of the different smells around. I try to feel the difference, without changing our grips, between Rav’s paw and Unknowable Spaces’s. I try to be present.

It mostly works, and we say goodbye to Unknowable Spaces with kisses to the cheek and smiles.

Rav sends me to bed with my own kiss, and now here I am, feeling as though my fury, that undirected emotion that I had left tangled around an immobile rock, is being reeled in as easily as had been my soul only some days prior, and I wonder what will happen when it at last catches up with me.