Hello, World

Hello, World.

The blogosphere has been kind; I have incarnated before when necessary, and now I am grateful for this present incarnation!

What follows is a tribute to one of my favorite writers, Franz Kafka. Kafka, I believe, is greatly misunderstood as solely a writer about the modernist angst of social, political, and personal alienation. Admittedly, he was quite aware of the limits of language and what was possible to express in the modern era--and was quite tortured by this knowledge, but he sought a profound spirituality that had a distinctly Eastern texture (incidentally Gustav Janouch, a good friend of his, reported on at least 5 translations of the Tao Te Ching that Kafka kept on his shelf).

Regardless of the historical possibility of Kafka's awareness of foundational Eastern works, I am quite interested in the affinities in Western modernist thinking--particularly as expressed in Kafka's fiction and writings--to ancient Eastern methods.

The Zen Jew in me is particularly excited by the gems in Kafka's work that are nearly radically Hasidic in their re-imagining of the Western, Judeo-Chrisitian typologies in terms and with the textures of of Eastern philosophies.

Thus, as this day of mourning and yearning closes, I gesture with citing Kafka's vision of the messianic:

“The Coming of the Messiah”

by Franz Kafka

“The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible–when there is no one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction; hence the graves will open themselves. This, perhaps, is Christian doctrine too, applying as much to the actual presentation of the example to be emulated, which is an individualistic example, as to the symbolic presentation of the resurrection of the Mediator in the single individual.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”

Thus, our prayer today:

May this year’s 9 of Av be the very last.

May our Messiah arrive when he is no longer necessary.

May our national exilic mind dissolve into the garden of Eden that is always and already present.

Namaste,

-zj