The Leonard Cycle

Here it is, just a few days after Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's first Hebrew yahrzeit and the day before his Gregorian yahrzeit, July 3. I remember well where I was that day a year ago, when I got the news of his passing--visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Rochester, New York, about to leave for Ruach Ha-Aretz in Portland the next day (just as, this year, I'm about to leave for Ruach Ha'Aretz in Philadelphia tomorrow!) . Reb Zalman told me and Burt that he  had once spent a year in Rochester, trying to get a Chabad yeshivah going. He used to go over to Brith Kodesh, he said, the large Reform congregation of which my brother, Joel, is now executive director, to play their imposing pipe organ. Brith Kodesh is in a different building now, much larger, grander, but they moved the massive pipe organ with them. So the organ Reb Zalman once played still graces their bima.

For some reason today is the day I happened to stumble upon a manila folder marked "To Be Transcribed," which contained a bunch of handwritten stuff dating back years that I meant to transfer to my computer. Among the papers in it were five poems written in the weeks after my father died, in February, 2010.  I'm calling them "The Leonard Cycle." On the eve of leaving for Philadelphia for ALEPH's "Getting it Together" weekend, celebrating 25 years since a delegation of rabbis made a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, India to meet with the Dalai Lama, and Ruach Ha'Aretz next week, I want to dedicate this one of those poems, "Love sees the whole," to the memories of the fathers - my father, Leonard, Eliezer ben Shmuel Itzak; Reb Zalman, the tata and zayde of the Jewish Renewal movement; to Marilyn's father Joe, Shulamit's father Bill, Elizheva's father Rico, Merra's father Gershon, the fathers who died in Charleston--to all the fathers, who have left us to leap and stumble, sob and brim over with joy in this world, without them.


Love

sees the whole

in the part,

the wholeness

in the broken vessel;

hears the innate

      harmony

of seeming random

      voices;

activates the bonds

      of life

even in the midst

      of dying.

Love is the open space

      before and behind the

      closed door,

the stepping stones

      awash in coursing waters,

the flood itself,

surging, awesome,

unstoppable.

Love is the ladder,

      propped upon sky;

and love is the

      climber, trusting,

      rung by rung;

and love is the one

      who steadies its feet,

      planted in earth.

            —Diane Elliot  3/16/10  Rosh Hodesh Nisan, z’man kheruteynu
              (first of the Hebrew month of Nisan, "season of our freedom")