May Your Memory Be a Blessing

Remember

the before?

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You must remain offshore, on your boat, for 40 days before you can come ashore. You must stay apart from us in a confined space, for a quarantino, a span of 40 days.

Mem

The Hebrew letter mem is a confined space with a narrow entrance/exit, often thought of as representing a womb. Its numerical value is 40, for the 40 weeks of gestation, the quarantino of the bambino.

Em

Em, the word for mother.

M

Mayim, the word for water, begins and ends, like the stern and bow of a boat, with the letter mem, the letter most associated with water. 

Mem

Mysteriously, water existed before the world was created. God hovered over it like a wind in darkness. It was from this undifferentiated watery darkness, the tovu vavohu, that YHWH spoke the world into being.  

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But God also destroyed the earth with water. Noah spent 40 days and 40 nights confined to a boat before it was safe to come ashore. 

Remember

The billionaires who buy bolthole homes in New Zealand 

to ride out the apocalypse. 

The headline “European Union condemns rescue boats 

picking up drowning refugees”

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez & Angie Valeria

The White Lion

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The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic ever, which, at its peak, reduced the population of Europe by half and the world population from 450 million to 350 million. More en vogue to fight the plague than quarantine was the extermination of Jews. The Erfurt massacre, the Basel Massacre, the Aragon massacre, the Toulon massacre, the Flanders massacre. 510 Jewish communities were destroyed for the “health” of Europe. In Strasbourg alone, 2000 Jews were burned alive on a single day, St. Valentine’s Day. Purportedly a preventative measure (the plague had yet to reach the city), the ashes of Jews were nevertheless sifted through as they smoldered. By Christian residents eager to acquire new things. 

Em

Em, the word for mother. Emet, the word for truth. Met, the word for death. 

Truth, emet, comes from mother, comes from death.

Mem

Once in Egypt, long ago, Jews sheltered at home with lamb’s blood on their doorposts and lamb’s blood on their lintels waiting for the Angel of Death to pass over them and pass them over. The word for Egypt, mitzrayim, means “narrow place” and begins and ends, like water, with the nearly closed womb-like confined space of the letter mem, the womb from which a people will be born, a people that will roam for 40 years and cross two waters before they can be born. 

Remem

Often described as an act of ritual purification by water, immersion in a mikveh does not cleanse you. Instead it changes your status and marks that change. Part of a mikveh is a bor or pit that contains 40 sa’ah of natural rain water. This 40 is not, or not just, the 40 of birth, of creation, but rather its opposite. According to Jewish tradition if something is mixed with twice its volume, it is considered nullified. The largest human is 20 sa’ah in volume, thus 40 sa’ah will nullify the self of the person immersed, will cause them to ask “what am I?” 

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The mikveh is both a womb and a tomb, a place of creation, for water existed before the creation, for we came from water, for we are made of it (and for 40 weeks we could live in it) and also, at the same time,  a place of non-existence, a place we can no longer survive in, for water existed before the creation, for we came from water, for we are made of it, and yet cannot stay within it any longer.  But perhaps returning briefly to that untenable space before we existed, from which we are made, the nullification of 40, of two 20s, perhaps holding us in that (de)generative space of (non)being, being held in it, tells us something.

Remember

The year 2020. A year of perfect vision, where everything we were was crystal clear. A plague year.  An election year.  A year of two 20s that marks a change in status. A year of two 20s that nullifies the self. A rebirth/debirth year. The Hebrew years 5780 and 5781. 

Ember

Every year in Jewish mysticism Jews draw meaning from the numerologic correspondence between the year to come and Torah verses whose letters match the year numerologically. 5781 is unusual in that there is not even one verse in all of the Torah with the numerical value of 5781. There is nowhere in the scroll, nothing that has been written or sung, to draw wisdom from to prepare for the year ahead. 

Mem

In Tarot, the card corresponding to mem is The Hanged Man. This card corresponds to the element of water. It signals the breaking of patterns, metamorphosis, a change in status. This upside-down man represents suspension, like the immersed breathless person in a mikveh, who in that brief moment when not touching any of its sides or the bottom, suspended, in a womb, in a tomb, says a prayer to each of the four directions. 

Em

Did water exist before God? Em. 

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If we quarantine to avoid the Angel of Death, and quarantine, immersed, suspended in 40, to become, for a moment, death…what do we remember?

Remember

What we don’t remember is like the escape goat. The goat that was not offered to God as a sacrifice by the High Priest at the Temple of Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, but the other goat, the scapegoat who became the carrier of the sins of the community and was driven out into the desert. When Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights (like Elijah and like Moses before him, each themselves fasting for 40 desert days and 40 desert nights), did the devil who tempted him appear in the form of a goat?

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Who is the devil?  William of Norwich, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Simon of Trent, Gabriel of Bialystok—we remember their names, innocents whose deaths were venerated, commemorated by feast days, sanctified, because they were killed by Jews.  For their blood.  They supplied a crucial ingredient in satanic (Jewish) Passover matzahs.  Do you remember the names of the scapegoated?

    _____________

& _____________

&_____________

& ____________

Ember

For centuries countless cats were killed by Christians because cats too were considered close to Satan and thus the carriers of disease. Without cats, the rat population, the actual vector of plague, grew unchecked. The more cats they killed the greater the Black Death became. The greater the Black Death became the more they hated cats. In what form does the devil appear?

Mem

That that desert was once an ocean.

Em

That that which we could once breathe. 

M

is for mask. For we could once breathe water, for we could once breathe a plague-less air. The word for breath and the word for spirit and the word for wind are the same word. YHWH hovered over the watery darkness like a spirit or a wind or a breath. 

Em

For as the days of a tree shall be the days of My people. No tree, no breath. No breath, no spirit. 

Mem

The Hebrew words for mask, masecha & masveh, each begin with a mem.

Remember

Moses, Moshe, means “to be drawn from water.” And Moshe begins with the letter of water. And Moshe spends 40 days, the number of the letter of water, away from the people, with YHWH. When he descends the mountain his face is so radiant from speaking with God that he must wear a mask.

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The most famous depiction of Moses, that of Michelangelo, depicts the prophet with horns like a goat, much as Moses’ fellow Jews in the Middle Ages were often thought to have them, even forced to wear horned headdresses to demarcate themselves as Jews. But the horned Moses may be a result of a mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Latin. The Hebrew words for horn and shining ray of light were close and often interchanged. Moses spoke to God after 40 days and his face had become glorified, had become radiant, had become horned. He would never be the same, could never relate to others as an ordinary man again. 

Ember

When Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, did the devil he encounter have a glorified face?

Remem

We must return a second time to this story of the boy “who was drawn from water” for it is not simple. But strange. A return to it will only make it stranger, doubly so. 

Mem

What happens on the mountain where the boy who was drawn from water quarantines for 40 days and 40 nights before meeting God face to face? And why, unlike Noah, Elijah & Jesus, does Moses have to do this twice? Was the Mt. Sinai double quarantino both a womb and a tomb, a drinking and a drowning?

Remem

Moses, far up the mountain, gone away—unseen, unheard—for so so long, the people at the foot of the mountain desire a proxy, something tangible, physical, visible, and there to celebrate and worship. Aaron instructs them to melt down their gold to make a molten god, an egel masecha. But the word we translate as “molten,” from the root “to pour in,” is the same word we now use for “mask.” 

Mem

After 40 days without food and without water, Moses, the boy drawn from water, receives the covenant of God. Mt. Sinai is illuminated with this encounter, a glow that does not frighten the people below. But when Moses descends and sees his people worshipping a molten god, a mere mask, he breaks the tablets in anger. 

Remem

A second time Moses refrains from food & water for another 40 days and another 40 nights. A second time Moses ascends the mount. A second time he receives a covenant from God, who in giving it, gives the people a second chance. But this time it is not the mountain that is radiant, horned, and glorified. It is Moses’ face, a face so transformed from this second face to face with God, that it frightens the people. But why are they frightened now, by an illumination quite like the one that had horned Sinai, that they had welcomed before? Was it shame, the memory of having mistaken the mask for the masked? Either way, Moses forevermore, for the rest of his lived days, covered his face when among the people, hid his new face, to keep their uneasiness at bay.

Mem

Some say the reason Moses’ face was glorified, not by his first encounter with God, but by his second, was to (re)assure the people that the second covenant was indeed a true covenant as well. Some say the first covenant came from the Tree of Life, the second covenant from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That the first “before the Fall” covenant was Edenic, where humans were (and would’ve been again?) in harmony with the non-human other, where there was no shame in their nakedness, no killing needed to eat, no pain in the labor of birth, no labor needed to be fed from the earth. The “after the Fall” covenant, given after they fell again, was given to a people lost in the human forebrain of representation, as if that representation, that mask, were the thing itself, that molten god God.  

Remem

For as the days of a tree shall be the days of My people. 

Mem

is for masveh. Moses wore a masveh, a mask or veil, but a mask or veil referred to as a masveh. This is the only time this word, masveh, is used in the Torah. This is not a masecha, a molten god, a representation of God held before his face, but a woven fabric. The masveh was not a false representation. But it hid something true. 

Remem

We return to Sinai a second time, a second ascent, a second fast, a second encounter, a second covenant, a second descent, and yet…

Mem

If two 20s, the volume of two human beings, 20 sa’ah twice, creates self-nullification, what do two 40s create? 

Remem

The word for heaven in Hebrew, shamayim, means “double waters” or “second waters.” Yet the word mayim itself, the word for water, is already in its plural form. Plural, just like the word punim for face, which is multiple too. What if we should be looking, not up into the heavens, into the double waters, the shamayim, not raising our heads, our faces, as the boy drawn from water ascends up high? What if we are looking in the wrong place? What if we have been looking at the wrong water with the wrong face?

Remember

Remember Miriam, way down below, at the foot of the mount, in the mount’s shadow? Miriam whose name means “strong waters” and “bitter sea,” Miriam who is not only or mainly Moses’ sister, but a prophet, the same Miriam without whom the people could not survive, the prophet whose wellspring of water miraculously accompanied her as her people moved throughout the desert? The Miriam who, when she died, the well died too, and the people were thirsty. Miriam over whom the Angel of Death had no power. Miriam who died instead from a direct kiss from God. Miriam, one of the seven over whom the worms had no power. Miriam who wore no mask, who from the deep unseen and down below drew her strong waters. Was this prophet’s face glorified too? Was her face radiant and horned, and no one stopped to notice? What if we allowed our faces to be plural, blessed both by the waters above and the waters below, if we saw ourselves in the faces of others, in the Uighurs forced to make our masechas, the Gazans denied vaccines or potable water in their open-air prison, the refugees fallen face down in a river of water that is a border? What if we remembered the escape goat and its song, our sins on its head, the home we denied it? What if we remembered when our lungs filled fully with the waters of another, our mother, when we lived in the womb, the tomb, the well, the ark, the garden, the darkness, the heavens? 

Remember 

the waters. Re-member the waters. The days of a tree. Remember when no one was a member, when all punim were sanctified and nullified, all faces radiant, glorified and horned. Re-mem-ber the before.