Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Kippur 5773

 

Kippur 5773

History can hardly be clear-cut. It is like a sliding page that scrolls up and down and sculpts memories and human frailty. Yom HaKippurim/Day of at-one-ment 5773 echoes with the Roman Christian (Gregorian and Julian) Year 2012. Other computs are available in Christianity and Islam is apparently a bit laidback with 1433.

Times and delays, decades, days and nights, Lunar or Solar cycles can swing, sway, swindle, revolve. Time and duration are elastic and can smash whimpses of light or shadow to all directions. It does not mean we only have reached the date I put everyday here online in the Menologion. Indeed, we are tonight on Tishrei 9, 5773/ט' דתשרי תשע''ג for the Jewish "style". It is difficult to define because it transcends faith, DNA, national essays of identity, constancy, being and though possessing nothing but being what God plays around with them.
 God would never play games. God does not cast lots. He proposes time and space to humankind and the peoples, nations, races, tongues make a choice or act with irrationality. Human beings are basically gregarious, much animal-like, barely "tamed" or taming the others. Man comes out of a world of total ignorance, loneliness, solitude and fright on a route to conquering both time and space.

The Hassidic tradition is right. The Greek word "historia" includes a large portion of concealment as suggested if the word is written according to the sounds and letters of the Semitic and Hebrew languages: "hester/הסתר ". God is concealed/El Nistar - אל נסתר as the Son of Man or Messiah and Jesus of Nazareth also move along and around the reality of visible and invisible.

On Yom Kippur 5773, we may not get to the key point night and day, tonight's cycle that shall end tomorrow in the afternoon in Jerusalem. Newness comes and will grow, blow up from a tiny branch or even leaflet of time or space that started decades ago, inaugurating changes that only show the surfacing of different instants and moments, periods. Leaf/leaflet is "elah/עלה " and feminine in Hebrew and indicate this ascending direction.

For the first time in 3000 years or so - let's agree to consider that we reach tonight a specific milestone - none of the rregular Jewish Autumnal feast will be celebrated in Egypt, at least openly, in an official way. The milestone is peculiar: it also determinates tonight that Exodus did take place and that the Families of the Jews have quit Egypt as "Mitzrayim = מצרים ", the land inside of the ropes, symbolically describing a spiritual and human prison. It is evident that this makes no sense with regards to the present-day Republic of Egypt and its naming in Arabic or Hebrew.

We come to something that surpasses a milestone: a sort of hapax, we speak of "chidush/חידוש " i.e. a matter, a reality that suddenly appears to be totally new, innovating. Who could think for there could be a break in the ritual and liturgical celebration of the Jewish religious cycles in the Land of Egypt? It is clear that celebrations may take place next year or in two years. Still the total official break is brand new.

In Afghanistan, but also Iran and Iraq, the presence of the Jews is drastically restricted and residual. Consequently, the Fertile Crescent or more accurately the birthplace of Abraham and the monotheistic "primary clash" with his father slowly puts a point mark to spiritual reign of the Sumerian civilization.
It is a long process and it will take decades, centuries before it will evolve toward new re-orientations. It will slow slowly raise a new furrow whose seeds are showing as in a concealed way.

It would not be possible to write more right now in this post. On the other hand, it confirms the general trend that I try to depict in the development of the situation in Eretz Israel and Jerusalem: that the breach created by the emergence of the State of Israel and the in-gathering of the exiled lead us to "the end of the time of the Gentiles" as stated in the New Testament, the Gospel of Saint Luke (Lk 21. 23-24).

This observation has definitely no political basis. On the other hand, the existence, reality, consistancy of the Jewish entity through history, the surface of the whole of the Earth, diachronically and synchronically questions in the same way as God interrogates the humans on Kippur Eve: "Who are You, who is alike to You, God?" mirroring back the quest of what the humans want to reach, God willing.
av Aleksandr (Winogradsky Frenkel)