The World is on Fire

I am going to present a metaphor, a mixed metaphor. It's going to be a mixture of two images that have never been brought together before. One is ancient and one is modern. Only when the two are brought together does it describe my current state, a state I've been in somewhat latently for a while, and acutely since I lost my job.

When I visited Norway last year, I visited a Jewish community that met once a month, led by a very bright Israeli man. We prayed and worshiped together, and afterwards, he presented a Torah lesson for us. To a religious Jew, Torah can mean any religious study. My host's Torah lesson was from Bereshit Rabbah, the ancient Rabbinic commentary on the Book of Genesis (called Sefer Bereshit in Hebrew, after the first word in the book "in the beginning", which is one word in Hebrew). The five books of Moses, which are most commonly referred to as "The Torah", are partitioned into 54 weekly portions, following the Hebrew Calendar. The third portion is called Lech Lecha, (לֶךְ-לְךָ ), which means "Go!" or "Leave!" but because it is repeated, the Hasidic rabbis interpret it to mean "Go, go away towards yourself." I favor this psychoanalytic interpretation, and I will use it in what follows.

Lech Lecha is Genesis 12:1 to 17:27. The previous portion, Noach, is the story of Noah and the flood, and the Tower of Babel, and ends with the story of Terah, the father of Abraham. They lived in Ur, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, in Sumeria. Genesis 11:31 tells us: "And Terah took Abram [later Abraham] his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai [later Sarah] his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there."

Ḥaran was an Assyrian city in Turkey, pretty far away from Mesopotamia. In the ancient world, few people had traveled that far in their lives. Terah was going from one civilization to another. But this is not sufficient for the Lord, nor for Abram. Lech Lecha begins (Genesis 12: 1-3): "Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

God leads Abram and Sarai and Lot to Canaan, renames Abram as Abraham, and provides him with the Covenant. The destiny of all of the Abrahamic Faiths is distinguished in this, and it cannot be emphasized more highly as a pivotal moment in the history of religion, and the invention of Semitic monotheism.

The section of Bereshit Rabbah pertaining to Lech Lecha begins by asking why Abram had to leave his father and his father's house, and set out on his own. Rabbi Isaac, by way of an explanation, relates a parable:

There is a man, a traveling man. He travels through cities, and he travels through forests. He travels through deserts and great wildernesses. He comes upon a city (or it could be translated as a palace) on fire. He enters the burning city, and looking around,  he cries out, "Is there no owner, no master of this city?" From a burning balcony, a man appears, and calmly states, "I am the owner. I am the master of this city."

Similarly, Rabbi Isaac tells us, Abraham cried out, "Is it possible that this world is without a guide?" and God replied to Abraham, "I am the Guide, the Master of Universe."

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This left me and the other guests pretty baffled. We spent about ninety minutes discussing what the parable could mean, and left somewhat unconfirmed that we understood it. Why didn't the owner try to escape from the flames and save himself? How could he be the master if he couldn't or wouldn't put out the fire? Was the fire part of the master's plan, or the catastrophe it certainly appeared to be, or both?

And yet, like much of Torah, I could not drop the issue. I struggled with the parable, taking it out now and then to ponder further, not making much resolution with it, but engrossed nonetheless.

Six months later, my synagogue was reading Lech Lecha aloud as our weekly Torah portion. After services, during the Kiddush, I was in a conversation with my rabbi's husband, himself a rabbi who trains rabbis at a rabbinical school. I brought up the parable from Bereshit Rabbah, and asked him what it meant. With a smile, he told me that, like so much of Jewish religious literature, much hinges on how we translate the words. The word in Hebrew that gets translated as "on fire" can also be translated as "illuminated", with the connotation of the beauty inherent in illumination. Let's try Rabbi Isaac's parable again, with this new translation:

There is a man, a traveling man. He travels through cities, and he travels through forests. He travels through deserts and great wildernesses. He comes upon a city (or it could be translated as a palace) beautifully illuminated. He enters the glowing city, and looking around,  he cries out, "Is there no owner, no master of this city?" From a balcony, beautifully lit up, a man appears, and calmly states, "I am the owner. I am the master of this city."

Similarly, Rabbi Isaac tells us, Abraham cried out, "Is it possible that this world is without a guide?" and God replied to Abraham, "I am the Guide, the Master of Universe." 

Totally changes the meaning, don't you think?

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The rabbi warned me, however. If you just interpret the parable to be a city on fire, you only understand the parable but partially. If you just interpret the parable to be a glowing, illuminated city, you only understand the parable but partially. To fully understand the parable, you have to superimpose both interpretations onto the story. The city is burning out of control in a destructive blaze, and is simultaneously glowing with a beatific glow of illumination. Both interpretations are simultaneously true. The world is spiraling out of control in a chaotic blaze, and the world is a breathtakingly beautiful precious gem, scintillating in your palm in peace and calmness. Both are always true all the time. And God is the Master of it all. And Abraham was the first man to recognize this.

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The second image comes from an Amiri Baraka poem, I believe, although it has been twenty years since the first and only time I heard it. I'm sure my gentle readers will correct me about the source of the poem if I am mistaken.

Ornette Coleman is a jazz saxophonist, an avant garde composer and stylist who shocked the jazz community when he first appeared in the late 1950s with his free jazz style. He moved to Los Angeles from Fort Worth, Texas, and he was so poor that he could not afford a brass saxophone. Instead, he played a plastic saxophone. His sound was so strange, and his appearance so ragged, that nobody in the LA jazz community thought he was legitimate. To them, his plastic saxophone just added insult to injury, and nobody would play with him. During the day, he worked in a warehouse, often taking the elevator to an abandoned floor so that he could practice playing sax for hours. He lived in Watts, and after a while, he got gigs in Hollywood, playing in front of a mainly white audience who regarded him as a novelty. He was so poor that he would walk home from gigs, all the way from Hollywood to Watts.

He was walking home from a Hollywood gig with his plastic saxophone when the 1965 Watts riots erupted. Baraka's poem describes Ornette's long odyssey from Hollywood back to his home in Watts, guarding his plastic saxophone as his neighborhood erupts in flame and rage all around him, policemen swinging truncheons, shop windows shattering, cars and buildings on fire all around him, returning to his squalid digs and his poor, destroyed neighborhood.

I lost my job. My last day is next Friday. I feel a song, a theme, a vision in my heart, a world-shattering paradigm about to erupt in chaos out of my heart and fingers and voice. But to my colleagues in my industry, I'm an strange guy with a plastic saxophone making sounds nobody understands. Each day, I walk home from my fish-out-of-water gig through a city on fire, burning, but also a city beautifully illuminated, glowing, magical. With a throbbing heart, I see this beautiful, horrible, magnificent, tragic city all around me and I ask, "Is there no owner, is there no Master of this city?" and I strain to hear the Master's reply.