Who Needs Comforting? (Who doesn't?) A gift to us all, especially this w...

Holy Tears: A Not Kaddish

Holy Tears
© menachem creditor

what is it, precisely, this life,
comedy or tragedy?

we knowingly face death,
imminent, less-imminent,
it's there. waiting.
we know.

and if we think there's a way out
(oh, we don't want to die,
i mean i don't.)
we are wrong.
we will die.

tears well up
at the thought of the end,
the knowledge of it,
can be the tears of heroes
who fight livingly for every moment,
see majesty in the simple
muffin laundry sunset table
love love love love.

Love.

those tears, Holy One,
they are not ours alone.

Oh God, Your holy, trembling Hand,
hovering, quivering over Your
Infinite Book of Finite Life,
where even the days of the righteous end.

Oh, the vast sadness You must feel
when a fragment of Your Sacred Heart
dies. departs this world.

God, we are dying.
That's true.

perhaps, if we agree to live,
really live while we are alive,
then that's ok. perhaps.
(not really, but maybe.)

Your Tears are our tears,
Source of All.
We cry together.
Images of God and God.
Holy Tears.

It's so very, very sad when we die.
and it's also so very beautiful to live.
Those are Holy Tears, too.
Happy Sad Holy Tears.

Thank You.

A Shabbat of Visions

Torah in Mourning for #EricGarner: "On The Illusions of Clarity" or "Only False Prophets Claim Absolute Truth"

I Can't Breathe

That day, This day: Five Years after the Bomb in the Sky

That day, This day: 
Five Years after the Bomb in the Sky
© Rabbi Menachem Creditor 

Five years ago, today, this was me, riding a lion in Jerusalem.

But five years ago today, hours earlier, I stood beneath a beautiful blue sky at the Foreign Ministry, looked up, and saw a missile sailing right at me, intercepted at the last minute by the Iron Dome defense system.

That was a moment in my life (and in the lives of countless others) that froze time, changed me forever. The bomb detonated in a loud poof of smoke, but the explosion within me was deafening and shattering and terrifying - andohmyGodImthereagainasItype... 

But I'm not there at all, not really, because it's been five years since the world turned upside down and I've learned so much since that awful day of bombs in the Heavens and lions on the ground.

Life is not to be taken for granted. We are called to grab life by its woolly mane and ride and ride and ride and ride. And smile. And live. I will never be the same after the bomb. I've never been so alive.

That day. This day.

Shehechiyanu.

#BuildOnLove

more than the whole

more than the whole
© menachem creditor

I board the train, just like everyone.
They've had full days.
I have too.

Look.

What a wonder we all are,
groupings of traveling souls,
sharing a train ride,
each with our own eyes.
And days.
And skin.

How amazing God is, to have imagined all of this, each of us so different. Or maybe... Maybe we're more amazing than that. Maybe our skin and eyes and days exceed what even God once imagined.

Maybe each of us
is a fragment
of God's Imagination,
and the all of us
is more than the Whole.