Pain. God is Pain. God is Love.
My late Uncle Irving would be the most pious Jew known to his friends and family if they did not know him. He sang on Passover and effortlessly recited prayers, He toiled endlessly in preparation and in rituals, on the outside he was no half way measure guy when it came to rituals.
But the real Uncle Irving, to him God was dead. He died during the Holocaust, and He killed his family, and forced him in turn to be a man he did not want to be: a killer.
He never forgot. He lived on till he died in secret angst, "Where were You?" "In the face of such evil and to put such evil into men and women, where were You?"
Was God dead?
To my uncle, there was no God. There was ritual remaining only.
Those that knew him, knew this. Those that saw him, had no clue.
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He waited for me to come. A miracle.
He lost his wife. Fragile she went down, on 12 prescriptions, she lived.
On her death, his vibrancy and positive spirit lived. And lived on years alone.
We visited every year, his distant home, now an apartment where he saved everything for his only child. Organized her in wealth. But his destiny was set. In rituals still.
But God was dead to him.
Elderly yet strong as an ox, he was hospitalized, His heart weakened not his mind he lost consciousness, and only breathed.
I came to him on his death day. He "stayed alive for you" "waiting" said my cousin, and without doubt he did to me. It was a miracle, for me and for her.
I gripped his hand and he gripped mine, eyes closed, chest heaving,
We did not need to say a thing.
I knew how he felt, and his spirit having touched mine before so deeply, in touching embrace, I left him that day knowing I would not see him again. Knowing also that yes, he had waited for me. His torch my torch to live with as with the many other torches I have touched.
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Love.
I lost a love, 4 times now in life, the last no different that the other 3, yet the last, said it plain as the world grabbed her, after months of glorious pause, happy, in love, "I need 7 million dollars in the bank." yet despite that wish, and others recited as pagan as anything I heard, there was love still in me. But there was nothingness left in her. Her insight, her love, lost in her false religion to the worldly.
God is alive in me and His love, despite what I see of evil and of "wealth" I know what is ephemeral and what is not.
It is not what we have. It was we are inside that matters. It is how we exhibit our honesty or dishonest modesty, that matters.
Yes that can kill me. No one is safe.
My spirit? As I am, I am.
And that is God.
Life is a struggle and yet in rituals, God is alive, in those that want God to be alive. In those that seek God, God is alive, to live with, but know that God see's evil and destroys it, And God see's goodness and destroy's it with evil for goodness is not what goodness has but what goodness does, silently, effortlessly, God has His judgement days. And God has no promise but eternally to live on Himself.
Will we see a judgment day soon, evil and good to die?
God knows.
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