The encounter between the biblical Joseph and his brothers twenty years after they sold him into slavery, an event that inspired me to write the poem below, is among the most emotionally dramatic and heartfelt meetings between brothers in all of scripture. The resolution of their conflict has important implications for us and for the numerous religious, cultural, ethnic, and national groups in America and around the world. In this era of polarization, inter-group and inter-religious distrust and tensions, the story of Joseph and his brothers can be regarded as a corrective healing template. See the book of Genesis, chapters 37 to 50.
Pope John XXIII (1881-1963) thought so much of the encounter between Joseph and his brothers that he quoted the text: “I am Joseph, your brother” (Heb. אני יוסף אחיכם – Ani Yosef Achichem) (Genesis 45:4) to a delegation of 130 American Jewish leaders associated with the United Jewish Appeal in the Vatican on October 17, 1960, five years before the Second Vatican Council published its revolutionary document Nostra Aetate(“In Our Time”or “In Our Age”) in 1965. That document augured the Catholic Church’s modern approach to non-Christian religions, particularly Judaism and Islam, but also to other Christian religious streams. The document emphasized our shared humanity, common values, and the importance of interfaith dialogue, and it affirmed Judaism’s, Christianity’s, and Islam’s shared spiritual roots in the biblical Abraham while rejecting historical condemnations of one religion or other religious streams.
The moral message in the Joseph stories and in Nostra Aetate is simple – the more commonality we feel with those who are unlike us, the more empathy we will experience and the greater will be the likelihood that we will reach out and act with a sense of shared responsibility in times of need, persecution, poverty, hate, bigotry, and a people’s powerlessness.
The bronze bust of Pope John XXIII pictured above was given by the Pope to my aunt and uncle – Dr. Max W. and Fay Bay – when they met with the Pontiff in the Vatican in the early 1960s. My uncle was the President of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and my aunt was a beloved and respected leader in the Women’s Division of the United Jewish Appeal when they represented Los Angeles Jewry in a meeting with the Pope.
Fay and Max left the bust to me in their will, and I treasure it because it represents a new era in the relationship between the worldwide Catholic Church and the Jewish people, and it recalls my loving memories of my mother’s oldest sister (there were ten siblings) and her husband.
Here is my poem:
I can’t stop the dreams in the night / Even while awake I gaze the light / My mother died my father sighed / And wondered about my dreams.
Trusting a man along the way / I found my brothers lying in wait / To banish me from family and home / And send me far away.
They could not utter even my name / They cast me down and spat me away / They broke my father’s heart and claimed / That I had passed away.
My name was written in the stars / But I became a slave and was scarred / And as flesh in a woman’s lustful heart / Who also cast me away.
Her master incensed sent me to Sheol / But still a seer I glimpsed a glow / And blessings bubbled into my dreams / As I wondered about my way.
Alas I was given a royal reprieve / And brought to a place beside the King / I served him long and faithfully / And continued to dream my dreams.
My heart shut down over twenty odd years / My love poured into cold desert tears / I amassed power and instilled much fear / While serving at the pleasure of the King.
My brothers came their faces forlorn / Begging for bread before the throne / Thinking me Viceroy with scepter in hand / Not Joseph of their family clan.
My grandfather re-dug his father’s wells / Seeing my brothers the waters swelled / Into my steeped-up and hardened heart / I opened to love again.
I forgave them all and brought them near / Saved them from their desert fears / Settled them safely amongst their peers / As God intended over all those years.
I originally posted my poem “In The Black Night” on this blog on Friday, November 15, 2013 during the week in which Jews around the world read Parashat Vayishlach (Genesis 32:4-36:43) as part of the annual cycle of Torah readings. I re-read it this week in which again we read Vayishlach.
My poem addresses not only the biblical relationship between the fraternal twins Jacob and Esau from the perspective of Jacob, but also the relationship between competing political parties, peoples, and nationalities.
I offer it again now because it ought to be obvious how destructive and corrupting to human relationships are the impulses of ego, need, and ambition.
“In the black night / the river runs cold / slowly passing me by / over formerly sharp-edged stones / worn smooth by centuries of churning, / as if through earthy veins – / and I Jacob, alone, / shiver and wait / to meet my brother / and daylight.
Will there be war? / And will the angels carry my soul / up the rungs of the ladder / leaving my blood / to soak the earthy crust?
A presence!? / And I struggle yet again / as if in my mother’s womb / and in my dreams.
We played together as children once, / my brother Esau and me / as innocents, / and I confess tonight / how I wronged him / and wrenched from him his birthright / as this Being has done to me / between my thighs.
I was so young / driven by ego and need, / blinded by ambition, / my mother’s dreams / and my father’s silence.
I so craved to be first born / adored by my father, / to assume his place when he died / that my name be remembered / and define a people.
How Esau suffered and wailed / and I didn’t care. / Whatever his dreams / they were nothing to me – / my heart was hard – / his life be damned!
But, after all these years / I’ve learned that Esau and I / each alone is / a palga gufa – a half soul / without the other – / torn away / as two souls separated at creation / seeking reunification / in a sea of souls – / the yin missing the yang – / the dark and light never to touch – / the mind divorced from body – / the soul in exile – / without a beating bleating heart / to witness – / and no access to the thirty-two paths / to carry us together / up the ladder / and through the spheres.
It’s come to this! / To struggle again – / To live or die.
Tonight / I’m ready for death / or submission.
Compassionate One: / protect Esau and your servant – / my brother and me / as one – / and return us to each other.
El na r’fa na lanu! / Grant us peace and rest! / I’m very tired!”
Originally published in the CCAR Journal: Reform Jewish Quarterly, Spring, 2010, pages 113-115.
Soren Kierkegaard said: “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
Though we’re always living forward, the life lessons we learn can help to shape our future. Since this is the season of self-examination leading to the High Holidays, I offer a list of 32 life lessons I’ve learned – there are others, but the number 32 is significant in Jewish mystical tradition. It equals the 22 letters of the Hebrew א-ב (aleph-bet) plus the 10 “words” of the covenant (aka 10 Commandments), and is the number equivalent for the Hebrew word לב (heart – lev: lamed – bet) which the mystics teach are the number of pathways to God.
I offer the following as a hedge against the toxicity in today’s American political environment, the Hamas-Israel war, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza in these days leading to the High Holidays. Some of the following I borrowed 15-20 years ago, gratefully, from a then 90 year-old lady named Regina Brett that were published in the Plain Dealer from Cleveland, Ohio (hers are in italics).
They’re not necessarily a way to God, but a means to a healthier, wiser, and more sacred way of living, at least as I’ve come to believe in them.
God gave us life and our natural abilities only – everything else is either up to us or a result of dumb luck.
Life isn’t always fair, but it’s still good.
Life is short, so cut your losses early.
Begin planning for retirement as a teen by developing your passions and interests, for they will sustain you when you get old.
Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up your present.
You don’t have to win every argument, so at a certain point stop arguing.
Love your spouse/partner, children and grandchildren above all other people and things. If you aren’t married or do not have children, nurture the special friendships in your life.
Don’t compare your life to anyone else’s as you have no idea what their journey has been all about.
If you can’t publish what you want to say or do on the front page of The New York Times because doing so would be slanderous of someone else or less than dignified, don’t say or do or post it anywhere, including on social media.
Try not to speak ill of anyone, but if you must, do so only with trusted family and friends and then only so as to understand better how to cope with people like that.
Don’t procrastinate to see doctors. It may save your life (note: it saved mine).
Carpe diem. Take pleasure in this day and do what inspires you for we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
Breathe deeply as it calms the body, mind, heart, and soul.
Take your shoes off whenever possible as studies indicate that doing so will prolong your life.
Too much alcohol and drugs (in fact – any amount of alcohol and drugs) dull the mind and loosen the lips compelling us to say things we may mean but don’t want said and to say things we may not mean at all.
Get a dog or a cat for the love for and from such a creature is unlike anything else we will ever know.
Over prepare, and then go with the flow.
It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.
Speak the truth but only when you know you can be effective and only if it doesn’t cause another person unnecessary harm or hurt. Otherwise, be quiet.
Stand up to bullies wherever they are and whenever you encounter them, personally and in work, organizational and political life.
Time does heal almost everything.
Don’t fear or resist change for it is natural, necessary, and an opportunity for growth.
Don’t envy other people’s talent, job, wealth, circumstances or life – you likely already have everything you need.
Love isn’t just a matter of the heart – it requires concrete acts of altruism (no quid pro quo) in support of others.
Learn Torah, read great literature, view great art, and listen to great music as often as you can – they will enrich, change, and enhance your life and will inspire you (hopefully) to do what you might never choose to do otherwise.
Support the State of Israel as the democracy and Jewish State that it is regardless of its imperfections and corruptions, for Israel remains the best hope for the Jewish people to create a utopia worthy of the ethics of the Biblical prophets, the compassionate teachings in rabbinic and modern writings, and the vision as articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence (see https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp).
My Hebrew teacher, Tamar Kfir, who lives in the German Colony in Jerusalem, has just published a wonderful user-friendly Hebrew language book she calls The Handy Book of Hebrew Verbs.
[A disclaimer – I was one of the book’s editors and do not profit from the sale of the book.]
This book is not just another Hebrew language book. It focuses on 97 of the most commonly used verbs, their infinitives, the preposition that follows each verb, the verb’s gender forms and tenses, and 5 sample Hebrew sentences (transliterated and translated) that show how the verb is used in every-day Israeli speech. Tamar includes also a list of many commonly used Israeli slang expressions and their meaning.
Each verb has a dedicated page, its 3-letter root set inside a circle, and other words based on that root spraying out like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Tamar’s website (www.HebrewWithTamar.com) offers an opportunity to see sample pages and other offerings, how to order a copy or multiple copies, and her direct contact information. The book is available on Amazon.
This book ought to be on the bookshelf of anyone who loves the Hebrew language and aspires to become a proficient Hebrew reader, writer and speaker.
I signed this pledge today and invite my readers to do so as well, wherever you live around the world, whether you are Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Please read this commitment to Interfaith Relationships carefully, and if you believe in this declaration of commitment, click onto the link at the end of the statement and include your signature. I thank you in advance.
An Invitation to Recommit to Interfaith Relationships in These Tumultuous Times
In this year of 2025 in the Western calendar, defining religious observances for Jews, Christians, and Muslims occur within days of each other. Jews commemorate liberation from slavery at special Passover meals. Christians celebrate freedom from the slavery of death brought by the resurrection of Jesus. Muslims celebrate Eid-al-Fitr as the joyful culmination of Ramadan, uniting in prayer, charity, and reinvigorated communal experience. This convergence provides a moment that our world in turmoil desperately needs, a moment to continue the progress of the past several decades in deepening interfaith relationships.
Our world is living through a time when relations among people of different faith traditions are under great stress. The ICCJ, being especially dedicated to dialogue between Jews and Christians, as well as trilateral dialogue with Muslims, believes that the violent and polarized world of today urgently needs such dialogues to continue and, indeed, to intensify in the months and years ahead.
The ICCJ has composed a declaration of recommitment to the work of dialogue, including specific practices to enhance it.
We invite any individual, organization, or institution that cherishes interreligious amity to join us in our resolve by endorsing the declaration and enacting its values in their own lives and circumstances.
A Pledge Sponsored by the International Council of Christians and Jews
The First and Second World Wars killed over one hundred million people and made refugees of hundreds of millions more. Empires fell. Nations were born. Weapons with unimaginable power were devised, threatening the very existence of life on our planet. Nonetheless, from this carnage and chaos positive initiatives arose, including in many places an historically unprecedented transformation in relationships between Jews and Christians.
Appalled and traumatized by the industrialized slaughter of two-thirds of European Jewry, people in both communities sought rapprochement after nearly two millennia of estrangement and antipathy. Christians had to confront a long history of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence, while Jews had to risk hoping that Christian overtures were truly sincere. Crucial turning points were a conference in Seelisberg, Switzerland in 1947, which led to the founding of the International Council of Christians and Jews, and the Catholic Church’s 1965 Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate and the 1967 report of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, “The Church and the Jewish People.”
The quest for open dialogue and sincere friendship between Jews and Christians raised many moral, theological, and social questions and shed new light on each community’s self-understanding. After centuries of mutual ignorance and polemic, it took time to build trust and to learn how to speak to one another. Gradually, a unique era of dialogue, understanding, and mutual enrichment began. As never before, unfolding differently in various parts of the world, Christians and Jews, while forming civic collaborations and deep personal friendships, studied together in exceptional depth, some becoming expert in the other’s history and texts. These dialogue partners explored religious ideas that previously were avoided. Understanding themselves to be journeying together in God’s covenantal presence, they found new respect for each other’s religious integrity, leading many churches to disavow missions to convert Jews. Such efforts and experiences were models to engage with other religious communities, especially Muslims.
Over the years there have been disputes and missteps. The journey has been a complicated and uneven one. The post-Shoah geographic concentration of Jews in Israel and major cities in the United States means that most Christians around the world cannot personally engage in interreligious dialogue with Jews. In various times and places, religious radicalism dehumanizes people by setting them against each other along religious lines. Even though peace often seems an impossible dream, there are Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have nevertheless steadfastly pursued dialogue and friendship for decades. Their courageous efforts are signs of hope to people everywhere.
The war between Israel and Hamas in the wake of October 7, 2023, which has longstanding regional and intercontinental aspects, has shaken interreligious amity to a degree not seen since World War II, and will have long-term consequences. Among some Christians and Jews old stereotypes and suspicions about each other have resurfaced. Around the globe, antisemitic bigotries and even violence have surged, provoking fear. Although people view and are impacted by the current crises in diverse ways, all are haunted by the tragic death toll. Yet we who cultivate interreligious friendships yearn for and must prepare and work for the day when peace will dawn and both Palestinians and Israelis, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, will prosper in peace and security.
THE SIGNATORIES OF THIS PLEDGE RESOLVE that interreligious dialogue cannot be a victim of these or any other attacks or conflicts. Indeed, dialogue is more important than ever. We believe it to be God’s will and our holy calling. Wherever we live and whatever our circumstances, we pledge to:
Be blessings for one another and therefore for the world,
Support one another in our covenantal responsibilities to God,
Share each other’s joys and sorrows,
Actively oppose religious prejudice, including especially antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Christianity, and bear truthful witness for each other when misrepresented or defamed,
Review our religious teachings, rituals, and practices to address any elements that caricature or teach disrespect for each other, or that in any way racialize or dehumanize anyone,
Continue and deepen the joint study of subjects that urgently need attention, such as: Christianity as more of a credal religion in comparison to Jewish self-understanding as a peoplehood, the land and state of Israel in Jewish and Christian spirituality, the meaning of the Jewish identity of Jesus for Jews and Christians today, the ongoing implications of the Shoah for Christians and for Jews, their bonds in the scriptural Word of God, their traditions of ethical reasoning, and how they can speak and act together for the good of humanity and creation,
Seek to develop deeper interreligious friendships with Muslims, and
Better discern the divine Presence in each other’s communities, traditions, and rituals.
In making these commitments, we pray that God will bless our efforts and continue to accompany us in our search for deepening and lasting interreligious friendship and understanding.
THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWS (ICCJ) MARTIN BUBER HOUSE, HEPPENHEIM APRIL 2025
In the summer of 1972 I spent two months teaching horseback riding at Camp Alonim, the children’s camp of the Brandeis Camp Institute in southern California only forty miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The large property includes 3000 acres of undeveloped land populated by oak, pepper and eucalyptus trees, a large cactus garden, an orchard of oranges, grapefruit and avocado, open wheat fields, meadows and canyons, grazing cows and horses, all resembling the terrain of the Land of Israel.
As a member of the barn-staff, I rode a 7 year-old Rhone mare named “Princess” and led the campers on 4 rides daily – 2 each morning and 2 in the evening, except on Shabbat. At times, I took Princess out for a run on my own. She loved to gallop at full-speed, and her gait was so even that it felt as if I was floating with the wind.
This is me on Princess – Summer of 1972
This past Shabbat I picked from my home bookshelf an old paperback called Modern Hebrew Stories – A Bantam Dual-Language Book (NY: Bantam Books Inc., 1971) that I had read more than 50 years ago in Jerusalem during my first year of study for the rabbinate at the Hebrew Union College (HUC). Dr. Ezra Spicehandler, a Professor of Hebrew Literature, was my teacher and the Dean of HUC. He was the editor of the collection of stories.
One story that especially moved me, though I had forgotten it entirely, is called הנמלט – The Runaway by Yizhar Smilansky (1916 –2006), known by his pen name S. Yizhar. The story focuses on the experience of a beautiful white stallion who breaks free from his boorish master’s farm and simply runs.
S. Yizhar was an acclaimed and talented prose writer in the first generation of Israeli authors. Born and raised in the agricultural settlement of Rehovot, he was awarded the Israel Prize for fine literature in 1959. He served as an intelligence officer in the Haganah during the 1948 War of Independence and as a Member of the Knesset in the Mapai Party of David Ben-Gurion from 1949 to 1967. He was a senior lecturer of education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a full professor at Tel Aviv University.
As S. Yizhar described his story’s magnificent runaway horse, I recalled Princess, the immense joy I took in her, and I ruminated over the wider significance of the Jewish people’s return to the Land of Israel and the freedom from oppression that the white horse’s liberated run represented mythically in the history of Zionism. More specifically, I considered how this story, though written in the first half of the 20th century, carries meaning today in the midst of this awful war against Hamas.
I was so moved by S. Yizhar’s writing that I wanted to share some of the story with you so you can also experience the joy of unrestrained liberation that the writer projected onto his magnificent stallion, an ecstasy that I felt riding Princess when she would take off into the wind.
On a personal level, taking the time to read this story on Shabbat offered me a reminder not only of my beloved Princess, but that all of us, I think, need to be able to find the means to transcend the burdens that so often oppress us and a measure of release from the torments that weigh down our hearts and spirits – as this war most certainly does for the people and State of Israel.
At the end of the story, this magnificent beast “with a flame flecked tail” that had escaped his autocratic and mean-spirited master, was found, returned to the farm and secured more tightly than ever to prevent his escape again.
S. Yizhar’s name came to be associated with a political position that morally objects to expelling Arab inhabitants from the Land of Israel-Palestine – a theme that is still poignant, especially in light of today’s extremist, supra-nationalist, messianic, Israeli settler movement that gathered this past week in the thousands in Jerusalem’s large Binyemai Ha-uma auditorium to celebrate wildly and without regard to the somber mood of the nation during this ongoing deadly war, when the hostages are still missing, and so many Israeli soldiers’ have lost their lives and been injured and Gaza is in ruins with many dead civilians. This movement of Jewish extremists claims that it will do a tikkun, a “corrective” to the 2005 unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza. They intend, if given the power, to expel all Arabs from the Gaza Strip and resettle it only with Jews. S. Yizhar’s story is mythic on one level but also a real-world warning not to forget that the Land of Israel-Palestine is the Homeland not only of the Jewish people, but of the Palestinian Arabs too, and though a two-state solution seems so very far away, still the dignity of those Palestinians who are not murderous towards us Jews requires our respect as we require their respect for us as a people and nation.
Here is a portion of the story as translated from the Hebrew by Yosef Schachter (1901-1994), an Austrian rabbi, philosopher and educator who immigrated to Palestine from Vienna in 1938:
“…the runaway got away…wherever he was running. The sun had risen quite high by now, and the sea breeze was blowing in strong playful gusts. But nothing stirred; everything remained motionless, purposeless, but out there, where we couldn’t see from here, something was running. Whatever was not stirring here was running out there, running like a deer, running like a lion, like the wind, running free. And on account of him, everything had stopped dead here.
Ah, there’s so much space for running over there! What would you know about that? If only you knew, you wouldn’t stay on here another moment; you’d be twitching to tear away at a gallop. It’s so wide open for galloping out yonder, away from this place here. Ah, yes, just to gallop, plain and simple. There’s nothing simpler and more straightforward. No obligations whatsoever, no need to arrive anywhere, nowhere particular you have to get to, no duties to perform, or what they call “objectives,” no time limit, nothing at all like that. Can’t you see what that means? Don’t you realize? No? Well look here: after all…everything’s wide open on every side, to the right and to the left and straight ahead and all around, and this sense of being free encompasses you totally, the warmth and the blue and the gold. What more can one wish for? Always there’s this gentle breeze coming in from the sea, fluttering like a lively girl’s dress even if it’s a bit dusty. Of course, but it’s a fragrant dust, with the grasses and shrubs nodding their heads in approval as it puffs by and skips away, charged with the warm, bluish oxygen. Out there at last, you can start galloping to your heart’s content, to the full stretch of your imagination, and you no longer have to follow any set path or road, keep to any rut or groove or anything of that sort. There’s nothing to stop you: it’s just wide open, open and warm and vast. You don’t have to get anywhere, reach any place; all you do is just gallop. So go galloping, young man! Gallop, son! No restraint and nobody to stop you. No accounts to render and no regrets. You just live your running to the full. You become everything you have ever wanted to be deep down inside you. Out there, whatever has been quivering inside you, whatever you have ever longed to be, to attain, comes into being in that wondrous running. Nothing to stop you. You won’t stop in the noonday shade of a thick-branched sycamore to rest among the heat-weary sitting underneath it; you won’t crouch down to munch green grass, or sip a drop of water; you won’t encroach on your neighbor’s plot or whinny to your mate. There’s only you, wide open to run your race under God’s warm sky stretching before you in utter perfection. And beneath that sky, the earth stretches in warm, dusty reaches, and at last there is breathing space for anyone who craves to breathe freely. That’s all there is: a running field that is boundless, a vast openness, shoreless like the sea, the ocean, the sky, like the limitless sky itself.
I don’t know what else there is to say, and there’s no need to either… why all the talk?… It’s only that he is out there racing, he is out there running, singing as he runs, singing out to the world, and maybe he’s not singing at all, and it’s his running that’s singing his song to him, as he swallows up the distances, his drumming hooves stirring up a light dust in the gold of the warm fields under the warm golden sky out there, outside, outside, outside…
Ah, do you know what it means to run! If you’ve never run you can’t know what it’s like. Just like somebody who’s never been swimming can’t know. Once someone has run he knows how it feels and he keeps hankering for more. How all of a sudden you are in the open. All of a sudden you’re in it. Wide open, and everything is permitted. Wide open and you’re in it. All of you inside the possible. Suddenly you are lifted into the possible like… what shall I say?… like someone plunging into the sea and he’s in it, surrounded and swallowed up by it. All of him becomes what the sea is. All self becomes the sea’s self. All that’s specifically he becomes one with the vast specific, which encompasses him effortless, endlessly. If you understand what I mean. I myself understand it. One moment I do and the next, I don’t. It isn’t at all something you can understand or not understand. Hell. No. It’s being rather than understanding. That’s it. Like… I don’t know… actually it’s like being in the sea with water all around you, and you breathe the water in, battling to keep afloat on your back whether you want to or not. And it’s all the same to the sea – your caring or your not caring doesn’t affect it the least big; it remains changeless, not even scratched, not every the faintest smile. But you care. Oh yes, to you everything matters. Your heart beats are now absolutely different. All those heartbeats of if-only-I-were change into heartbeats of here-it-is-at-last, and this-is-it. THIS IS IT. And you say: O God, let it go on, don’t let it stop! (Because deep down within you there are always those shadows flitting across your heart, shadows of doubt and disbelief. It can’t be–they say to you–you’ll see it can’t be, it can’t last, you’ll see it won’t last, you’ll pay for it before long, you’ll see how soon you’ll pay for it–and they give you a thousand reasons why, those hovering shadows. It would be much better if you could look away from them before they get a hold on you and effect you. Come, let’s ignore them). And what now?
What now? You keep running, of course. O Lord, at long last here it is. This is it, and you – incredibly – are in it my son, part of the running, swept along by the if-only-I-could which you have always yearned for. Do you know what that means? What if it means to get there? But it isn’t getting there-that I am talking about!–on the contrary, you never get there. There’s no such thing as a point or line you arrive at, that your reach and stop at, as if “there” is a kind of place you come to and say, “So far” and no further!” Nothing of the sort. There’s no such thing out there. On the contrary: yonder’s the place where there is no destination. It’s the place where everywhere you are is your point of departure, the place you start out from. It’s just like…how do I know?…it’s as if somebody had run out of dry land and had come to the sea, and one starts anew. You cross over and start from the beginning. And you’re in the new, and in what is beyond it: in the different, the newly begun, the beautiful with an air of this-is-the-first-time, in the all-encompassing, the flowing.
O Lord, how he broke loose and ran! Ran like the best of dreams. Ran, broke free, free as the fullness within him, leaving everything behind – all of us: me, you (you too, my friend!), everything, the old, the necessary, all that is held to a single plot of land, the commonplace which comes and goes mechanically, dented and used. All the “this-is-not-what-we-imagined” which has vanished. All that has been left behind and saws away as it pleases – but now, finally the beginning starts, the opening – that isn’t as yet that is just now starting off and will be and will arrive and is all involved in the possible, amen, all in the “maybe, yes,” in the maybe this time. O Lord, why not, perhaps this is the time; perhaps this is the possible. Perhaps yes. Perhaps yes. Maybe we can do it now, O my God, maybe yes.
…You must know, realize it to the depths of your soul, that such a place does exist, and it’s not beyond the mighty hills, either; it’s there for anybody who wants to go there. Away from all the highways and byways. There’s the real wide world, rich and beautiful. The whole wide world rather than some measly road…
…To be alive and not sluggish. Free and not bound. To be like the dolphin slithering through the wind-tossed sea, or soaring free of heart like the falcon into the wind, with the blue airy abyss below. To be at one with the incessant chirping of the cricket,… to be swept along in this flowing movement, this running, to be carried aloft, to beat upward and fly–beyond all fences and all enclosures and all allotments, and the duties and obligations, out into the wide open. Ah, yes.”
Rabbi John Rosove's Blog 