Ayelet ha-Shahar

Toward the Deer of the One and the Many

Aug 19, 2023

Midrash, High Summer

A thousand miles of open sea
breathes its salt across my dreams,
light curtains over me,
She sing beneath the trees

how linings thicken without leave
and sluice-box-sift through the debris
and stitch and bind, entwine and weave,
how some things quicken where they cleave

while most are shed in darkness on the shore
before a thousand miles of open sea.

“The Zohar describes קרדנותא דצפרא, the deep darkness from which daylight emanates. For this reason, the word for שחר, morning, is related to שחור, black, because the moment immediately preceding the dawn is the blackest period of the night.”1

The grass in the meadow of the land that owns us has gone waist high, gold about head, green about its feet. There is rain falling warm and quiet, straight down as if it means to stay a while. I am staring into the eyes of large doe who, despite my human scent, remains a few yards away. She is still and calm as if born of the spirit of this rain, allowing me for at least these few minutes to pretend as if she could see me as welcome, as something safe to stand with in the dusk.

The straits of her eyes are a crossing. Sea to sea. A longing to wash clean the strata of thinking and being upright and composed by a human monologue alone. For years now my dreams have been seas that ungulates walk upon, calling me out of the skiff of my own. From behind her or through her there is a scent of the brine coming, coming for another layer of certainty, the windings of the either/or way of being that has bound me for so long. It is a tilting rush of salt and churn finding me wandering between of late. I have been circumnavigating Jerusalem, listening to a singing upon another sea, inland and ancestral. There, too, something lures the human out of the boat. here, too, I am drawn by hoof and tawn.

Days later, but still this morning, I remain in the field with that doe. There is something blue-edged and half-home about the shape of this She-deer that tips the mind into the under and keeps whistling it further down. Without pronouncable reason, I find myself playing at the edge of an idea that she is the doe I buried a year back, that this must be what it's like to meet someone risen and not be sure. Mercifully, the Holy often spares us Her face. We struggle to recognize the G-d we think we are most familiar with, on the road (to Emmaus or elsewhere), under the trees, even in our own beds. After a few centuries in the grip of the tightening spiral of dementia that is materialism this sickness has progressed unto death.

I had found the doe of that burial down where the field heads south and drops into the woods as it tips toward the creek and its wetlands. She had been curled gently around herself, as if she had bedded down and passed into sleep. Those that take care of such things had come and taken her heart and her middle on with them, collecting their treasure without disturbing her form or her rest. The place where she crossed over circles a stump where we take the culled and the dead as offerings to the dark between the trees. She brought me close, my partner with me, and some makeshift stammer for a good passing was uttered and then we buried her in branch and leaf, petal and dirt as she lay.

This was the season of the start of this Yeshua business, this reapproach to a Jerusalem I never thought I would entertain. I had slipped those ties without regret and, after some years wandering in a dark place, mercifully found sense and home in the animism of my childhood. Or maybe, more accurately, an oath to forget the in-animism that had tried to prevail the many years since. It was deer people then who were the letters of the words of the note from the Others that had saved me and brought me to the first real sanctuary in my life. My gods would hereafter be antlered or not at all. And it was that relationship, life giving and beyond betrayal, that had felt stretched when the Galilean Rabbi slipped back into my siddur of apostacy, scrawled on the back of a note passed in from Martin Shaw, and now a prayer surpisingly as feathered and furred as any of the rest in its pages.

They say that the people that would be Israel once left behind an ungulate God, a golden calf. Or rather subsumed it into their middles before crossing over the River. They returned the calf to the fire they had brought it out from, spread the ash upon the water and then drank. Maybe some forms of G-d are trailed like pillars of cloud while others must be smuggled into the promised land. Odd that the calf would thus crossover, while Moses stayed behind. It is said he was kept from entering the land because he struck the Stone to bring forth water when he should have spoken to it. We cannot enter the the land without knowing it is flush with People. There is some ungulate ash in the belly of the text itself here.

If the doe in the rain was my buried one risen to bring word, or rather be word, it wasn’t her first time. Some weeks after her covering over, I was divining the living and the dead in my own middle, spending more and more time in the halflight between new sacreds and old. Pickpocket that I am, like a deserter handling another’s medal of valor, I had pinned a word from Martin Shaw’s upending otherworld travel journal (Bardskull) on my chest and let it ghost welcome into my heart. I don’t speak Dartmoor but I do speak Yid-Nostos. Genesis, the re-membering of the place it once pained you leave, or the One(s), in pain, you once left off speaking to.

They say in the holy of holies of Solomon’s temple, marking the ark itself were two winged women. There at the lost center of my people, a people who so piled up their oaths against the graven image, behind a veil, was curve and gold and a re-membering of a feminine excised, or rather put to fire and sea and throat. Between the lines of the Text, one finds my people often on the heights, in the groves, circling Her fire. Did the Cherubim glow more fiercely on the nights of drum and dance or when those spires tumbled. To muddy Jung, I suspect the menschen forsake the consistent for the whole. Maybe rivers North of the future (Celan) had not been theirs, the polarity being reversed as I came home to the Many but in the season at hand I found the old Word of my past, Akedah to Shema and on to Galileee, as it crossovered, mouth to ear to middle, to meet in me as many receptors as a swan’s wing shroud or an ochered womb upon a wall. I hadn’t left the One in the desert when I came home to the Many. The Name, swallowed as upon a black sea, gone dark but still singing in my belly, offering to ember toward fire.

There is a corner of the land, near the stump we bring the dead, where we lined our first trail on the land, opening the rock wall at the boundary line between meadow and forest. It is the gateway between where we are fully at home and where we become guests. There, one evening while wrestling with all this I came to that gate and found, stretched down the center of the path, pointing me through that gate, the skeleton of that buried doe brought up and seemingly written as a signpost on my way. Her ribs lay flat and curved towards me, her spine the shaft of the arrow pointing me further on and further in. very bone was in line save the skull itself. All of Her was there, save Her face.

Rabbi Shim'on said, "There is one doe on earth, and the blessed Holy One does so much for her. When she cries out, the blessed Holy One hearkens to her anguish. And when the world is in need of mercy, for water, she cries aloud and the blessed Holy One listens and then feels compassion for the world, as is written: As a hind longs for streams of water... (Psalms 42:2). (Zohar II:52b)

There is something of a smile about the ambivalence of my path running through the Deer. This animal that anchors my animism and my multiplicity also happens to be an ancestral sign of Yeshua. In fact his dying words, that all-fours-cry against the loneliness and the abyss, Eli, eli lama sabachthani, came directly from the ancient song of the Doe.

The poetics of Psalm 22 as mouth-place of a once and future king, chosen myth-house for a God-man at death’s door, animal out, more hoof than hand.Midrash on the psalm says that David composed it in wonder at the Deer who, it is written, in terrible thirst and longing for a stream, digs a hole and singing low over it, is answered by water rising from the deep to fill the inland sea she has birthed in her need.

The image at the head of this post is from the restored ceiling paintings of the Gwoździec synagogue, a Yid-Chauvet of wood and longing destroyed by the Nazis in 1941. The symbol is soaked in the Shekinah, the exiled (and excised) feminine, the G-d who looks back on the human in mercy and need, even while being driven away. There are prayers in the old writings for G-d to always desert us looking back as the Doe, the “black radiance” of the dark before light. This is the counter-word to the linear delusion. Barfield’s return with difference (Vernon), the Holy always navigating a return after the one most strayed species among the ninety nine million enfolded.

The translator of the twelve volume Pritzker edition of the Zohar, Daniel Matt, says that according to Rabbi Eliezer when one looks closely at the text of the story of Eden it becomes unclear whether it was the human that was driven from the garden by G-d or G-d driven from Eden by the human. My friend Maja Popovac in a piece called Reorientation2 defines nostalgia as the call to “return to something that it once pained us to leave.” The ayelet ha-shahar (the doe of the morning) is an image in the eye-hold of a God who also knows nostalgia, who also needs as She lows over the empty sea of us.

“But at a time that the world needs rain, all the other creatures gather to her, and she goes to the top of a high mountain and places her head between her knees. And she moans and cries bitterly, moan after moan; and the blessed Holy One hears her voice and is filled with compassion and takes pity on His world. And she comes down from the top of the mountain and hides herself, and all the other creatures run after her and do not find her. “

The Zohar’s portion on the Deer of the Dark before Dawn, according to the translator/blogger Hitzei Yehonatan3 is among the longest and “most beautiful, lyrical passages in the Zohar corpus.” It is a strange text revealing the animal of compassion, working in dark and lack toward light and the feeding of all others. It is a mothering— birth pang and sacrifice— both beset and redeemed by serpent. It is the naming of the channel of G-d to the thirsting, human and other. In this text and others of the Kabbalists the deer is bound to the sophianic, to the Mother. She is the facet of G-d that, no matter how many times is written over in the story, always rises from the underlayers. Ink is no match for blood nor doctrine for song.

Tonight, dry and alone under roof, I sit before those very bones of that doe, gathered from the path and kept as they came until they can be fashioned by imagination and hand, maybe amulet or icon. Do the bones in my hand mean she isn’t risen and re-membered in that field still? A friend and fellow writer asked me recently to choose. Bread and wine or Body and Blood. I wish upon the well of Her who is water for a way between Jerusalem and the Deep Blue Sea that is Both/And. Desertering the allure of a consistency of the sacred, recieved or feral, for the once and future world of the story before its stasis I walk barefoot on Horeb by day and, by night’s torchlight, place my palms in the place of my mothers before me on the wombed-wall of our before. I will light the Sabbath candles and say the words over bread and wine I know my well-dead will recognize because I belong to them and because, ash on the sea in my middle, how could I not. But I also know I could never, after all the suffering and blood spill that is creation, love a G-d who didn’t come as body and take the ride in full Him/Herself and so I eat the same in a re-memberance maybe marking me as deserter. Apostate only am I true (Celan). And finally I will let both the One and the Many circle through the doorways of the chest.

CLOSE, IN THE AORTA’s ARCH,

in bright blood:
the bright word.

Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
Carried across,
all of that weeping.

Still, in the coronary arteries,
unbinded,
Ziv, that light. 4

By Paul Celan

I don’t know exactly how this all plays out in the end, this dancing between Jerusalem and the Deep Blue Sea. But I know a return to the ambivalent and ambiguity of story is the only map to a ground sure enough to raise a sanctuary but never firm enough to raise a scaffold. The opposite of the open and wild isn’t monothesim but rather the literocertain. The Word begins and ends under unconstellated stars, its syllables shimmering with animal spit and the salt of sea, lit not by flourescent but by fire. To whom else would we go, for only here have there ever been words of eternal life to oppose those of stasis.

The rooms we have passed through, Auschwitz and Wounded Knee, Languedoc to Gaza, are rooms we cannot unsee and remain trustworthy. The attempt to claim a cock-sure resurrection of tradition and authority can become a Frankensteinian project that would use the electricity of the ending of this world to raise a monster, the likes of which have always blooded the mead hall whether invited in or not.

I return with difference. More than a few stories in the biblical texts, at least one the surface, put forward a god I would be uneasy kneeling before. Even more so some of the theologies built from those stories by the various the orthodoxies. I think the Word of G-d is found not in some unbroken line of saints but only in the redemption found in Midrash, and that only that Midrash that doesn’t squint at the record of barbarism (Benjamin) that is too often named Faith. I believe with Arendt’s Benjamin5 that the eyes of our fathers are only found as pearls after both the sea-change of centuries and the passage, by knife point, out that bed and up to the surface, trued by the shapeshift accomplished by natality and the living G-d speaking anew. The Word we veil under the name Imagination (Barfield).

But, on the other hand, calling the time of death on the Abrahamic entire, and moving to bury that which still breathes in the woven container exiled and adrift in the dark matter of those lineages is no better choice. In a few days I will put up a reading of the Twelve Wild Geese and some thoughts on how this story might have some patterns for the work of Both/And-ing, for being not consistent but whole between Jerusalem and the Deep Blue Sea. None of this here pretends to be for everyone or even sufficient for those it does reach with. This is a signal fire looking for Company. It’s makeshift and more stammer than song but I hope it is a bottled note that finds a shore somewhere.

Advent

Once, on a holy night
with the wind awake
Deer stirred and left the boy
dreamless,
sleeping soundly.

The curtains belled
and the blue light begged
at the doorsill of her eyes.

She stood at the window and swayed
on her hind legs wishing
the fading stars fair travels.

The messiah, Deer recalled, will come
only when she is no longer needed.
She will arrive not on the last day,
but on the very last.

A single star would outshine the rest.
Or was it making a way for the others,
flotsam Constellations
long deferred,
to finally be numbered in new light.

Every kind of eye sees,
every kind of ear hears.
And may there be no end
to the telling there of, no end
to the cosmos gifted with so many Words.

Next year in Jerusalem, whispered Deer.
She left a bit of breath on the glass.
and turned back to the boy
careful to keep antlers out
of string and chime.

As she drifted off she lingered
in the blue, slowly counting down
the clearings in the forests umanned.
There would great herds again.
Lush grass. And wolf.

A shudder left her haunch and she was gone
in the whippur and churr. The boy awoke
to hoof and tine receding, fur fading.

Toes curled and thumbs grasped
as he marveled at an inexplicably racing heart
afield in a night far from the one at hand
pulsing in world a-howl.

In the window West,
as if to spite all dream,
Jupiter glowed more certain still
and pulled Saturn hard to his chest.

Bog-down and Aster

Discussion about this post