To Fulfill the Ideals

'To fulfill the ideals'

~ so states the eighth of our twelve challenges.
And once again Dr. Korczak, like a musical refrain ~ let us repeat his words with which we opened our guide to this eighth call ~ and let its tones build up within us.

This is what he said.

This is what his teachings continue to say to us, his life and his death – his genocidal murder along with Stefa Wilczynska and their two hundred orphans:

One Thing has been given you: the Longing for a better world that isn't, but could be someday; a life of truth and justice.
It is forbidden to leave the world as it is.

This might be the idea, the movement – more than any other – that most characterizes the life orientation, the world outlook we call Judaism. That there is this distance between what is and what could be.

It is the heart of Judaism's so-called pure or absolute monotheism as well as what has been articulated as its ever-deferred messianism. That there is this essentially unbridgeable distance between.  All right, yes – given to partial bridging. But always only partial.

Between exile and redemption.
Between This World As It Is and the Coming (Messianic)World
As We Yearn And Strive For It To Be(come).  
Between the Divine Absolutely Unlike, Other, Different Unique, on the hand,
and Anything And Everything We Know, on the other.

Between what Herman Melville called – what is 'kind to our mortalities', on the one hand, and what is the 'God aw(e)ful truth' of things – how they really are, on the other.

And this – very much including ourselves, our very own selves – as individuals and as our collective communities, traditions, nations – and all of us together in our common humanity.

There is the present given reality as it is versus the imagined ideal reality as it should, ought to be – can be but now isn't. This distance repeats in the Passover Seder:
Now we are slaves. Next year we will be free. Before our ancestors were idol worshipers. Now the Ever-Present-Place-of-and-Beyond-the-Universe has brought us to His/Its service. Now we are here. Next year in Jerusalem.

A young Israeli film-maker named Lea Klibanoff has made a documentary, released in 2010, called "The Messiah will always come". She focuses on the work of Peace Now activist Hagit Ofran, granddaughter of Professor Leibowitz. Since she began working for Peace Now, she has been traveling across Judea and Samaria monitoring settlement development. All alone, she documents the growing number of caravans and land confiscations, photographing each and every detail. Hagit’s unending journey confronts her time and again with the settlers. This awakens the pain and rage she feels towards the religious community, which she herself hails from, while evoking the reasons that led her to stop being religiously observant. Yet this journey also evokes her deep connection to Judaism and her love for the land of Israel, the land she crosses in her travels.

(This is obviously only one side of a very complicated picture. There are some Israelis who believe that it’s possible to reconcile the settlement movement, or at least some of it, with recognition of legitimate Palestinian rights. )

In the Hebrew – the way the Hebrew expression-idea 'between' works is that the word between

– beyn - בין –

repeats so that what's translated here as 'between the hoped for and the imagined' - in Hebrew – it actually reads like this; 'between the hoped for and between the imagined'.

This is important because in the poem the word 'between' indeed is repeated – a repetition that is felt even more so in the Hebrew.

The last three lines of the poem are a take-off – an interpretation – of three words from the biblical book The Song of Songs – chapter 1, the first three words of verse 5:

שחורה אני ונאוה.

Literally: 'I am black but beautiful.'

In other words, I am dark – meaning divided – between life's contradictions;

but because of that – I am beautiful, sensitive, deep, response-able to life in all its demanding complexity.