on being a jew

one wonders over the years of hebrew school
and chicken soup just who cares where you come from.
i mean each culture has its virtues

but i have learned slowly, hard-ly
that being a Jew is just who I am tho
it has no particular virtue except to have formed me somehow.
many in my camp snickered when they heard i was marrying
a Tony from California. nobody was so sure about him.
too cute, too hip, and with a heart like that? and those eyes? and he sang????

goyishe coup, they snickered, those aunts of mine
and the jewish boyfriends who scorned me for not being holy enough
in my youth.
though my holiest of friends embrace me from every part of the cosmos
and my years in monasteries and church socials have shaped me
more toward the good than running from the oppressive expectation and "mitzrayim"
(the narrow place)
that comes with the cultural in crowd mentality

but,
the jews were in residence today
i saw the generations being channeled today
in my long haired, grey bearded husband.
the sun slanted in from the green porch through the barren bougainvillea
and head bowed, glasses pressed against his nose, he studied,
he davened, he dove deep into the work before him.
today my Tony revealed himself as the grand son of a rabbi from Warren , Ohio
(did you know that?)

i could hear his brain mechanisms chanting the pilpul
"on the one hand" his head seemed to say, but then
" if sixty angels danced on the head of a pin
why now could they not take away one sixtieth
of the disease in my lung?"
and so the prayers and reasoning went
on and on- quietly conjuring the past
seeding the future-on the one hand on the other hand
til he was exhausted
and went to lie down with his thoughts.

my husband the Talmud scholar,the yeshiva bucher studying the
medical options on his disease, reading the biographies of the
patients sliced before him, the outcomes, the measurements.
talking to a friend of a friend in England still weak and struggling through
the remnants of the surgery he had two years ago to "cure"his mesothelioma.

and the chanting, the rocking of all those rabbis in heaven, i could hear them
hiding under their dirty taleisim, praying, snuffling, closing their eyes, stuffing their mouths with herring for inspriation
cleaning their glasses, tipping their heads from side to side to shift the ear wax---
but, ultimately they stayed in the yeshiva of the sky

they did not come and sit next to my exemplary student,
my seeker of the truth, the logician adding inti's and rupiah and
trying hard to see how all this adds up to life and hope and possibility.
no. they have left him to his own study, his own gathering of information
and ultimately
to his own leap of faith that will move him where he goes

for the key to prayer for a jew
is ultimately to leave the brain behind and ride the soul
through the clouds to God--up to where that celestial yeshiva rents space
to ride up kind of like Buzz Lightyear and dance in the clouds and trust the wind
and be willing to lose all for the oneness of whatever oneness is.

sure, easy, right?

I wonder if Buzz's Super Rocket can give our Tone a lift.