What About the Here and Now?

“When you die, you will meet God,”  
reads the billboard  
foregrounding the stretch of industrial factories  
off the state highway  
on my commute home each night.   

* 
When I was twenty-four,  
I felt a great weight lift 
as I walked past New Life Dry Cleaners,  
Squirrel Hill snowmelt underfoot,  
and first believed   
in the Baal Shem Tov’s conception  
of Divine Providence:  
Each leaf’s falling,  
each turn on the way down,  
is prefigured in—at each moment,  
governed by— 
the Divine imagination.  

* 
The next week, a faceless force pulled me  
out of my chair in the star poet’s course  
on Apollinaire and the French Surrealists 
and placed me in a New Jersey yeshiva.  
In the study hall, a rabbi, thin as a reed,  
translated a Chassidic discourse  
on the world’s nonexistence:   
Creation relative to the Ein Sof  
is like a sunray inside the globe of the sun itself.  
Because everything transpires within the Divine,  
nothing occurs  
that is not fated.   
I sat motionless in my seat 
for thirteen months. 

* 
Once, after the day’s last prayers, 
I was summoned to the payphone 
in the rundown yeshiva coat closet—  
rabbinical students’ dusty fedoras hanging on hooks—
to hear my dark-haired wife whisper 
she was pregnant  
with our second child, 
our first son. 

* 
A week before his birth,  
in need of employment,  
I crossed the bridge that led to Brooklyn,  
mythic city of my father’s childhood,  
to discuss “The Metamorphosis” with twenty-year-old  
seminary students just returned  
from the Holy Land,  
who, I suspected, would take issue with 
their Czechoslovakian brother’s modernist conviction  
a million random factors  
had come together just so  
to bury his life.  

* 
Kafka passed away  
on the First of Sivan,  
anniversary of the Jewish people’s arrival 
at Mount Sinai—  
the day, the midrash states,  
all theological debates were set aside, 
and two million Jews camped in the desert 
like one man, with one heart.  

* 
The roles and faces here are unrehearsed,  
Szymborska wrote.  
Still, in my nineteenth year, I spotted my intended 
carrying a tray of steaming green beans  
to the serving station on our first kosher kitchen shift  
at the Upstate public university.  
Thin arched eyebrows,  
long dark hair,  
a space between her front teeth,  
eyes backlit by a calm radiance  
I could not name. 

* 
Kafka’s paternal grandfather, Yaakov,  
was a shochet, a ritual butcher— 
one who must possess exemplary fear of Heaven— 
in the Czeck village of Osek.  
He believed in Divine Providence— 
the force that stripped me from my table  
in the yeshiva study hall  
to explain to strangers of the opposite sex  
at the Jewish night college  
why an insect, once a man,  
might climb a wall and cling to a photograph  
of a woman in a fur coat,  
cut from a glossy magazine.                                      

* 
We walk down a lane  
between a corn-feed factory and a grassy field  
in Postville, Iowa.  
It is father-son weekend at yeshiva,  
my eldest son’s third high school 
in three years.  
At this one, the rabbis tell me  
he is a good bachur, a serious student.   
When I share this with him,  
he looks down at the concrete path in disbelief.  
When he was a boy,  
I lost my temper whenever he stared off  
during morning prayers, pushing away  
a God I told him was close.    

* 
Before he revealed himself  
as the century’s great mystic, 
founder of the Chassidic movement, 
the Baal Shem Tov, 
known for his infinite patience,  
served as a teacher’s assistant in a Polish village,
who walked the youngest children  
to school and back. 

*
Once, when I sat beside him 
during evening prayers, 
my father, away most nights 
on call at the hospital,
lovingly circled his thumb
around the back of my neck. 

* 
Last month, stuck on the turnpike  
behind an elevator repair van,  
I heard on the radio, for the first time,  
a job posting for an elevator repair technician.  
Then my son called from Postville  
to say he and his study partner had begun to review  
the detailed laws pertaining to the sharpness  
of the shochet’s knife.  

* 

Kafka’s mother gave birth to six children,  
Franz the eldest.   
Two brothers, Georg and Heinrich,  
died before he was seven.  
His three sisters, Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottla,  
were murdered in the Holocaust.   
Those who believe a Divine force  
oversees every detail  
are asked to explain the world’s sadness,  
but they can’t.