The Blintz

      “He never gave his work a title, but once I publish it, I think I shall call it The Blitz.”

      Saul loved the grand gesture – an old photo of him in uplight seemed just right – and therefore his use of the word “shall” only irritated me, not him.

      “The Blintz?” I said, mishearing on purpose.

      “Blitz.  It means the light.”

      “Oh.  But people will think it’s about bombing raids.”

      “Pish!” he said, quothing no bard.  “The only people who will think that are the ones who think the book Hitler Leads is about the tango.  Idiots, in other words.”

      I was back in cousin Saul’s study in the brownstone in Brooklyn.  We were again talking about our distant relative Meyer, the Tipsch Gaon of Letz, the rabbi with no use for God.  Why I had returned there, I could not say exactly.  I was not interested in religious issues in any way.  And Saul, full of his own emeritus and all, could be insufferably pretentious.  Still…

      “So the blitz in question,” I said, picking up the thread, “is the understanding that…”

      “All of life is united.  And here of course he was following in the tradition of Heraclitus.”

      “The famous fool of Schnippistock!” I nodded, unknowingly and kiddingly.

      “No, the 6^th century Greek.  He too denied God.  But he did believe in a living cosmos in which everything – you, me, the sun, that speck of schmutz – is connected in a roiling stew.”

      “They had roiling stews back then?”
      “My metaphor, not his.  Yet Meyer built on this.  He said, in a typically Jewish fashion, that nothing is permanent, not even the cosmos, so why make a big deal?  Nothing is perfect, not even perfection itself, so what are we so upset about?  Nothing is complete, not even time, so why get all meshugge?”

      “In other words…chill.”

      “I would say…accept the world as it is and don’t look for answers anywhere else. Especially not…” and here Saul raised his eyes and index finger heavenwards.  “This is what he called the Aynfal, the truth.”

      “So again, no use for God,” I summed.

      “People use the idea of God for their own purposes.  That is what he had no use for.

But if we substitute the word universe or cosmos or maybe even what-there-is, then he had no problem.  In other words, he had no use for God the vengeful or the forgiving, the wish granter or the tormentor, the all-knowing or the all-consuming.  But instead, some understanding of existence as a symphony in which we all play…soft or loud, solo or in concert, now or later, buzzy bee and humming human.  And the music resonates everywhere and we call it by many names.”

      “That’s lovely.”

      “He said that the world owes us nothing.  All we can do is do what we can, with what we have got.  Expect nothing, rejoice in rejoicing.”

      “But there is so much suffering in the world,” I protested.

      “The blessing from the universe – is not to not suffer.  It is to see the suffering as a gift.  An oytser, to use your word.”

      “A gift?”

      “Yes, the gift of life which is about suffering.”

      “Swell gift.”

      “I know.  On the other hand, there isn’t any other so we might as well accept this one.”

      This is just what put me off about philosophy, if that’s what we were discussing, or matters of life and fate and all that.  You whirled around in words and concepts and ended with nothing but vertigo, never clarity.

      “We’re going round and around here,” I finally said.

      “Well, it is all cycles, isn’t it?  Uni, bi, tri, you name it.  Cycles of madness and complacency.  Cycles on epicycles.  Kondratieff’s economic cycles, Vico’s historical ones, Spengler’s cycles of civilization, Erickson’s growth cycles, the Hindu cycles of 4 billion year kalpas…”

      The kind reader will here take a long pause for dinner to denote the passage of an eternity as Professor Saul completed his list of examples.

      “…menstrual, farm, business, and on and on.”

      I was dozing at that point and dreaming of cycles and cycles and more words and ideas and explanations.  But I was fed up with all ofl that, drowning in it.  I needed to believe in something, not just think about it or talk.  I needed a sense of meaning and it occurred to me in my reverie that this is what I was searching for.  This is the reason I had returned, the reason for all the stories.  There may not be a God, I thought, but there had to be something more than just atoms smashing.  But this idea of a unified universe did not seem to answer the question either.

      Yet in another way I knew just what he meant. 

      I had lost my Mom that week.  After all those years this woman whom I could not please, whose bright psyche had penetrated mine, whose worried voice I could still hear in my head, was gone.  I was grieved and liberated but I had no idea how to place her death – or anyone’s for that matter – in some kind of context because I had none.  I had faith in nothing, believed in nothing, and in the end had no way to absorb her life into mine.

      Perhaps I was there to discuss that, although it never came up.  Rabbi Meyer's adeism was not atheism, Saul insisted; there was still a spirituality to be grasped but it seemed well beyond my reach.

      Yet even then, as I slowly awoke with Saul tapping on my knee, I could see a hint of something, a cycle forming: that arc of grief from the dyingness and the hollow time, to the tearing of the heart and the confrontation with fate, waves of doubt and rhythms of sorrow.  And then, sometime later, signs and signals of a new possibility, gentler thoughts, that lingering stillness and inevitably and eventually…a return to the tiniest glimmer of life.

      Not just now as I was mourning, but always, the constant choice of renewal.  That was the way it worked – caught up in the spinning world – with its cycles of loss and gain, doubt and hope, fear and grit.  Maybe that was what Meyer was writing about all those decades ago, what Saul was nattering about now.  The way we go on no matter what.  The constant turning upwards in spite of ourselves.  Hope itself.  You did not need you-know-who to believe in that.

      “Do you see what I mean?” Saul asked but I had no idea what he was referring to.

      “So the book is your explanation of what Meyer believed?” I asked as I got up to leave.

      “It started that way,” he said, walking me to the door.  “But it has seduced me.  I think now that I am an adiest too, believing in the harmony of everything that beats…quark, heart, star.  The meaning is what we find in each moment in which we wonder.  I’ll get you a copy of it when I’m done.”

      “The Blintz,” I said as a final joke.

      “That's it,” he said, mishearing on purpose.