the shekhina and the shikse goddess

The shekhina and the shikse goddess walk into a bar...

I know. It's not funny. And it didn't happen that way, anyway. It's so much easier to think of the two of them separately. As if they just don't belong inhabiting the same paradigm. But there they are, deep in conversation. It doesn't really matter how or where they met.

The shekhina. She's remote. Unattainable. Melancholic. Removed. Horrified at what we've done to the place. Her world, her dominion. The dominion of malkhut. With the shekhina, what you see is not what you get. Or rather, you don't get to see at all. We are blind to her. We've blinded ourselves with pollutants. I'm not sure if her role is to make us feel guilty for-what-we've-done-to-the-earth, or to inspire us to diligence.

One of the strange things about the shekhina that I think about a lot, is that a correlative to her name are the shikunim — slums and housing projects — the urban wasteland. And it's precisely this that grieves the shekhina (at least these days).

When I was little, I had a storybook about the aleph-bet. In each tale, the Hebrew letters go off looking for the shekhina, the sabbath bride, the queen of god. And they cannot find her, for she has disappeared from the world, in her sadness. And when I was older I realized that she had gone into occultation — just like the 12th Imam, although his reasons differed.

Shekhina means 'residence' — the residence of the divine on earth. The dwelling place of the divine on earth. She takes up residence, but then discovers what we've done with the place, and bam, she's gone till we clean up our act. Or maybe she's just gone for good.

But no. She returns. She can't help it. She's drawn back into the dreams of the righteous. Drawn back in at Friday, sundown. She comes to those places where harmony is used to knit the world back together. Voices blend. Or bodies resonate together. For 24 hours, we bring back holiness.

That's what they say, anyway.

I don't think she'd exactly be drawn to the tyranny that the sabbath has become for many of the glat orthodox — a full day cycle of restriction and rigid rules. That's not the spirit of the shekhina, as far as I'm concerned. I think she likes it better when we pick up trash on the beaches, dogshit on the cliffs. But even that's not enough to bring her back into the world any time soon.

Shikse goddess: Now she's quite different. She is of the earth itself, and not beyond. She lives here, she breathes. She has some foreign ideas. She's not running away from anything. Right?

"Take some amaretto," she said, knowing that I do not drink.

"I'm not making fruit salad," I replied, confused.

"Something to drink. You need a drink," the shikse goddess said.

She's an alcoholic. That's what she says, anyway.

Don't get me wrong. She doesn't drink. She hasn't had a drop in almost twenty years. She has 'sobriety birthdays.' And when she reaches exactly twenty years, I think she's going to go out and celebrate. That part actually I just don't get. How can you celebrate sobriety with a drink? But her eyes light up at just the thought of it. And the thought just doesn't go away. Scary.

"You've had a bad day," she says. "A trauma. That's what a good cocktail is for."

Is that some kind of joke?

I stare at her. I know she's trying to help. But the fact is, I've never had a 'cocktail' in my life. I'm still staring at her. She means me well. I know that. I do.

"I'm Jewish," I reply. Which seems to you a non sequitur, but she knew what I meant.

"A cocktail helps you feel what you feel. Connect with your emotions," she said.

"That's what a therapist is for," I answered.

I mean, what would happen if you picked up a cocktail every time you had a bad day? I mean, where would we be then? The shekhina's already in despair over the state of the planet.

The shikse goddess replies, in all her wisdom:

"Maybe what the shekhina needs is a good stiff drink."

the concealed one, blessed be he

When Malkah, (the shekhinah herself!) was a little girl, the tzaddik used to tell her Bobo Stories at bedtime to calm her to sleep. And this was long before his journeys with Rav Gavriel rescuing artifacts in India.

The Prince and Bobo journeyed through the villages of central India, and through the fields outside the villages, and through the jungles outside the fields. And each night the Prince would encounter another mystery that needed solving, another treasure, another rescued child, a princess about to be burnt alive upon the funeral pyre of her young but very dead new husband. You get the idea. The Prince was tall and linear, with good posture. He was a handsome fellow, young and well-intentioned. Bobo, on the other hand was old, and gray and very very wrinkled. He had little eyes and enormous ears, more beard than he ought, and of course he had that enormous trunk that was the main feature anyone really saw when they looked at him — apart from his sheer size. The Prince discovered the problem, but it was Bobo who uncovered the solution each night. Although Malkah may well have fallen asleep before hearing how the case was solved.

When the tzaddik declared one day that he was off to India for real, Mrs. Tzaddik had a little shit fit of her own but, in truth, was happy to let him go. He was going, he said, to keep an eye on Rav Gavriel, and keep him out of trouble. Mrs. Tzaddik and Malkah had heard this one before. Malkah loved the tales the tzaddik brought home from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and more. Rav Gavriel was always in one kind of trouble or another. The tzaddik managed to get him back safe and sound each journey — with rescued brittle manuscripts and other Judaica galore. A miracle!

This time, it was the aron kodesh itself that they were after. A community on the coast was disappearing fast, and there were only elders left. No young ones to keep the thousand year old community alive. They had written Rav Gavriel begging him to save their ark. This was the mission, so could the tzaddik refuse?

In truth, I think Rav Gavriel made at least half of it up just to lure the holy man off on another misadventure. But I think I'm not an objective observer in this regard.

To Malkah, this adventure conjured up no more and no less than Bobo and the Prince. In her young mind, surely the tzaddik's main goal would be to track down the sleuthing pair in order to get anything done at all. Surely only they could save the Aron Kodesh!

In India, (so the story goes) Rav Gavriel was a real hero. He was adorned with hallowed raiments and a golden turban that set off the pointy black beard upon his chin just right. He looked glorious! He bellowed and pontificated, he commanded and was obeyed — and they just gobbled it all up. The tzaddik stood in the background in his rumpled dark gray (unmatching) jacket and pants, pulled on his wise beard, and patted his big belly, and he kept an eye out. Rav Gavriel was in his element! He was proclaimed a sadhu and accepted the title (if not the role itself) with relish.

The community packed up all their treasures, and with joy in their hearts shipped the whole kit and kaboodle off to America to be saved.

Malkah always did find it strange that her poppa told Bobo stories. I mean, it's not like he told her midrashic stories, right? No lessons from the sages, no Rabbi Akiva as the hero, no Maccabees, no Queen Esther. Just Bobo and the Prince. In India.

I asked Mrs. Tzaddik about the Bobo Stories recently, now that I can't ask the tzaddik himself. She had no idea what I was talking about. But she was pretty clear that it must have been a secret transmission. I mean, what else could it be?

"Bo" she said, "means 'come here,' right?"

But there was really nowhere to go with it. She worked on the letters for a while. Shifted the vowels. Nothing.

"Who is the Prince?" Nothing. And more nothing. The only thing she was sure of was that the tzaddik was no prince.

All we learned was that there was not another living person on Earth who had ever heard the adventures of Bobo and the Prince. This was a transmission to Malkah alone and to no one else in the world. She was struck with awe at receiving such a gift. After all, anyone could study midrash, right?

So it was hers to figure it out.

And there it was, before her eyes. That her old rumpled poppa the tzaddik had in this way taught her the secrets of shape-shifting. Had given her lessons, night after night, year after year, in the art of concealment.

It was not until the Shekhinah had long disappeared from the world and was fully ensconced inside her own practiced occultation that she remembered Bobo himself. His largeness, his big belly, his long proboscis, his deeply wrinkled dark gray skin. And there was the tzaddik, mystery solved.

For if you've studied your phonology, you know that in the places of their travels, the voiceless sound is transformed to voiced. Mrs. Tzaddik was on the right track after all. In those lands, the letter /p/ is replaced by /b/. It took half a century to remember!

So the silence of the tzaddik was heard there loud and clear. Every word he had not uttered. The trickster and shape-shifter journeyed side by side. The unvoiced teachings of my poppa.

And if you've studied your Indology, Gajthar and Ganesh you'll remember. He's still adorned there with fragrant flowers. There is no silence like my father's.