The Moses Tree From the tangle of its roots, To the nests in its hair The tree blazed white and blue. And the tree sang the Lord’s name in flame until roots and hair had turned to ash.

The Original Sin Our DNA a polymer implant from our worldly creator, Blake’s Urizen. Backbone sidechain nitrogen phosphate And a plastic oesophagus for when you can't swallow Reason. Bonding one attribute to another: the adhesive Epox is on the horizon. One mind becomes many minds Separated in competition, growing bodies to maintain Separation. Protesting, Adam fiddles a stringtaut wire, A thin-sliced reproduction of human forest life: gunfire, Gas, batons, guillotines, barbe

Saul The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

The Blinded Samson (1912) by Lovis Corinth Samson 1 The LORD is a living dread whose absence in Shiloh is more potent than his presence. Notwithstanding the regenerative Spirit whose intimate impulse is felt by the inner man, no angelic return or godly descent precedes the rousing motions of body and temple torn joint by joint. No use for Delphic oracle or word from Jerusalem. 2 Absorbed by the moon, the sun gives up its light, the stars their sweetness, and the sky is d

A Dark Thought in a Green Shade Somewhere in the newly planted earth, a god sits at his bench, creating and curating each little plant and flower. Day upon day he nurses roots, stems and leaves, talks to fragile saplings, puts to work all the surprising symmetries and fractals he dreams of when he sleeps for hours in the afternoon sun. Neither a Moses nor a Prospero, but looking like both, the god puts down his staff and exhales a fragrant cloud that veils the garde

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy Jordan River, I make you Mine. Into shape I press the grit, into shape I knead the clay And your body clings to my fingers. I knead and a verb puts you in motion. I cut and I layer and an adjective fleshes out your shape. I slap and I roll and a rhyme gives you weight. I model and I sculpt and a noun marks you as a thing. With a name, I form you in my image (Your name is on my tongue). With a name, I firm you

Lifting Up of the Hands By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost sets in. There is time: The trucks to Treblinka are not ready yet and there's bread to be had. But the water and bowl are for the washing of hands. (It's what tradition commands.) Fingers make moves in the silence of thought like chess players at their difficult tables. A mouth is turned open and another is shut, and dusk in due course is steadily swallowed, with every crumb of affliction

A Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice And so the gods of lead and brass, The idols and their thrones, The teraphim made of fibreglass The mummified skulls and bones, Are tossed inside a whirl of wind And shattered into shells. But deep inside the kellipot The light of Yahweh dwells. And from the pieces Something new arises in the land, A temple of the sabbath king Built by Ezekiel's hand. With cherubim and fan-leaved palms Carved in the walls of paradise, And the air perfumed with

Shaddai A plant grows from the Nile, the שׁ, primordial cause, rooted in the water, breathing in the air, the commencement of births, becomings, and of all flows.

A Beginning I will proclaim the name of Elah Yisrael: It is Yahuweh Tzavaot the impassioned one who speaks the yod & the heh, who brings it all into being, into shape, first with words & then forming substance with his hands. Far above the newly hammered earth, the unseen Yahu (O He!) sits at his wheel, creates & curates each little pot, all the animals, trees & men, delighting in the lettered forms he finds inscribed in his personal sefer ha’mitzvot. Now it’s Yom HaShevi’i

Seven Worlds God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly light. The third turn, nothing but pea-green lizard eyes and cochineal blood. The fourth, an angel with four faces tolls the caked air with a dead bell. At the fifth there is only a fagged-out planet and the light of dead stars. The sixth, and it is said, “the former worlds shall not be remembered.” The seventh, and the land r

Tree, 1943 My roots are split & my bone-bare branches brittle. I degenerate in a cruciformed landscape. There are many like me. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times. Woodcutter says we’ve been marked out for timber or burning. The genus, it seems, is being hewn.

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i

Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) by Barnett Newman 'It Is a Place, Makom, Where Each Man May Be Called up': Being and Time in Barnett Newman's Art 'Even if you don’t know Newman’s place in art history, walking into a space full of his paintings can inspire contemplation. They give you nothing and everything to look at, these huge canvases whose only subject is themselves, enveloping you in the moment, confronting you with seemingly pure fields of color and contrast.’ (Molly Gl

The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen This is a collated version of parts one, two and three of my mini-series on the Jewish neo-Kantian ethicist Hermann Cohen. The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and an intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Bu

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin Do I desire the death of the wicked? says the Lord God. Is it not rather in his repenting of his ways that he may live? […] Therefore, every man according to his ways I will judge you […] Cast away from yourselves all your transgressions whereby you have transgressed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, and why should you die […] For I do not desire the death of him who dies, says the Lord God: so turn away an

The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and the intellectual precursor to the Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the He

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the

Adam (1951-52) by Barnett Newman Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and a supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew school, Barnett and his brothers and sisters were educated at home by Jewish scholars from Europe. He went on to