Holy One, Voiceless One!

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

I voice your Name, YHWH,
And know it is the Interbreathing of all life:
My own breath and the breath of all around me
That sustains me.

And yet to save my breath, my life,
For two months I have chosen to breathe into me
The dark-side particles of radioactive light
And chemicals all aimed at death:
At killing cells of cancer that refused to join in the restful celebration of my Body’s Sabbath.

These cells grew and grew, voraciously
They ate and ate, and all we know today of healing the large body from them
Is to kill these unresting clusters.

But there is a cost.

In me it is the losing of my Voice.

To trade ongoing Breath for curdled Voice,
To trade the drink of poison for “L’chayyim, Life” –
It is the very definition of a life of Limits to be forced to make this trade.

The pellets of endarkened light
Left scars within my mouth,
Made it so painful to eat and drink
that even after I had been assured
I had been cured of cancer,
I contemplated death.

Was the work too hard to keep myself alive
Past all this pain?

Should I embrace the simplest death:
No food, no water?

This is the one day’s death in life of Yom Kippur.

Yet every breath we take
On the Amazing Day
Is intended to draw us back
into the weave of Breath, of Life.

I do not choose to fool myself
With the comfort of the teaching
that no food, no water
lifts us alike to angels;
rather it means that on Amazing Day we take
into us the serious possibility of dying.

And then we choose.

I lose my Voice,
the Voice that spoke for justice and compassion,
That murmured words of love —

And in this I see myself in You,
I see You in my self.

I hear Your breath collapse into a weary mutter
And hear You facing planetary Death:
Uncertain whether it is worth the pain and sorrow
To put out the baleful fires of our planet’s many cancers.

And yet, and yet, I hear Your tortured whisper:
“Stop whining how hard it is to drink and swallow,
remember that My Wholeness is woven
from our feeding one the other; even harsher – Our Wholeness is woven from our eating one another.”

“If it hurts so much to whisper, then whisper for those who cannot speak at all.”

Whether it is the wailing women, shrieking in pain upon the Brooklyn Bridge because some White-Shirt officers have pepper-sprayed them and walked on, oblivious;

Or it is a cluster of the jobless who come together – in Your Name or Not – to feed each other in the deepening twilight.

Or it is a beloved partner, crouching beneath the burden of caring when she has no information to make the caring possible.

Or a beloved child, calling out lest all the world become bereft of loving.

We are You, You are We.

Perhaps Your planet is on the verge of making Yom Kippur under its many names,

Facing death, tasting death, breathing Death –

And choosing.

Rabbi Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center www.theshalomcenter.org