To be underway is the path of possibilities, love and the creation of new life. It takes us beyond death’s grip. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
The Passover seder is the celebration of journey…not of arrival. The seder’s text, the Haggadah, reminds us of the continuing aspect of its story and trajectory by concluding with the chant “Next year in Jerusalem!” Those who live in Jerusalem customarily amend the text by saying, “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt!” There is always higher to go and more work to be done on ourselves and our world.
The Torah itself warns the Israelites that where they are headed will not be perfect. God advises them that when they enter the land of Canaan “and I inflict a plague (negah) on a house,” they will need to follow a protocol of purification. The same word, negah, was used in Exodus to describe what God inflicted upon the Egyptians.
There will be plagues in the promised land, just as there had been in Egypt…only this time they will afflict not Egyptian but Israelite households? Why bother to even go there?
In 1516 Sir Thomas More published a book about a perfect community on a fictional island. For the title of his book, More created a new word by combining two Greek words, ou (“not”) and topos (“place”): Utopia. The etymology of More’s coined word testifies to his awareness that such a place could never exist. He wrote Utopia not as a model to be replicated but as a prod to reflect on the social crises of the day.
Anselm Kiefer is a German artist. Born during the closing months of World War II, Kiefer grapples in his art work with German history, national mythology and post-war identity. Pictured here is his painting Bohemia Lies by the Sea. It is a work of enormous proportions. Over 18 feet in length and 6 feet in height.
The title is from a poem by Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachman. Lines from her poem are inscribed in the horizon of Kiefer’s painting. Bachman wrote Bohemia Lies by the Sea in 1964, when she was thirty-eight. It was published in 1968 immediately following the Prague Spring uprising, which was quashed by the arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague on August 15, 1968.
Bachman’s poem expresses a longing for utopia, while recognizing that it can never be achieved. Bohemia is a landlocked region, an area annexed by Nazi Germany as the Sudetenland. The sea will never reach it. And yet, she refuses to give up the search, the possibility: “If Bohemia still lies by the sea, I’ll believe in the sea again/And believing in the sea, thus I can hope for land.”
Kiefer in his painting takes up the cause of his fellow German-language artist. But his palette is not those of lightness and cheer. And it is not just that the colors are Earth tones. The very materials themselves are thick, coarse and of the ground.
There is actually little paint on the canvass. Covering the surface is shellac, charcoal, burlap, and emulsion. These materials speak less about the eternality celebrated by the great Renaissance painters and more about civilization’s fragility and potential for corruption and decay. He takes us through a field of poppies: symbols of sleep, dream, death, and veterans of wars.
And yet, like Bachman, Kiefer moves on toward a horizon. About his work Kiefer has said, “Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”
The name of this week’s Torah portion, Acharei Mot, literally translates as “after death.” At first it seems to refer to the death of Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu, but immediately the text moves on to describe the rituals for Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is a death and rebirth ritual. The shedding of one’s old self and the revival that comes from self-correction, atonement and the rebuilding of one’s moral structure, dramatically enacted by the construction of a sukkah.
Nelly Sachs was a poet who grew up in Berlin. Ordered by Nazi authorities to report to a labor camp, Sachs and her mother escaped on the last passenger flight from Berlin to Stockholm in May 1940. In 1966, the year she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she published the poem “But Perhaps God Needs the Longing.”
The poem is an exploration of the inevitability of death. It is simultaneously an affirmation of the capacity of life to transcend death: “O my beloved, perhaps in the sky of longing/worlds have been born of our love/Just as our breathing, in and out, builds a cradle/for life and death/We are grains of sand, dark with farewell, lost in/births’ secret treasure trove/Around us already perhaps future moons, suns and/stars blaze in a fiery wreath.”
In Sachs’ poem longing is not a desire to have what one does not. It is an expression of being underway. It takes one beyond the grip of death. It is the path of possibilities, love and the creation of new life.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday May 2 as we explore the holiness of being underway.
