Joy to my nishema (soul)

I thought about having some kind of likkle sign at the beginning of those emails where I go off philosophizing so that those of you who aren't hugely enraptured by Jewish philosophy (or any kind for that matter) can yawn contentedly, click the little x, close the page and, like they sang in the kid's program Why don't you, 'Go off and do something less boring instead.' (As kids, Sean and I spent hours musing over the irony of a TV program that began with the song 'sitting at home watching TV, turn it off no good to me, why don't you go off and...', that taught kids, via a program on TV, to not watch TV because there were all these other fun things to do instead and if you just watch a bit more, and next week, we'll show you just what you could be doing if you weren't watching this...)

So my sign will be as follows:




That lovely shell means philosophy is about to meet religion. Leave now: this is your chance. I won't be offended. I know you care about me and I do about you but there's a limit to every friendship. Off you pop. G'night, then.


(Right. Now we've got rid of that lot, we can begin.)

I had a good day, as days go round these parts. It's all relative anyway and for a day to achieve a status of 'good' requires far fewer criteria than it once did, but I had snippets of real joy warming my nishema and for an hour and a half this morning and an hour this evening, I felt home maybe, maybe, wasn't so far away after all.

I have an amazing Rabbi teaching me now, and although his class was the second of the two today, I'm starting there. Now, I have vast problems not only with my level of Hebrew but also with his pronunciation of Hebrew which means in classes one and two I was lost because we're working on Abarbanel's fifteenth century (non-translated) text all in a high level of Hebrew which in itself is challenging, never mind the concepts he's talking about. I wasn't happily, drifting-off lost - I was very very frustratingly lost because riveting stuff was being chewed over and it orbited my head like a celestial body, but today - TODAY - I loved every second. This has to do with the atmosphere in the class (less frosty), the fact I've been working on understanding the subject matter before I go in, and the very quintessence of the subject matter itself. It's heavenly talking about heaven, and cosmic to consider the sun, moon and stars and whether the world was made from this substance or that or if not, from what, then? And who said what about it and who refuted who, and when what was made, in what order, and how?

To take history not as points of events, not to divide the past into blocks of war or revolution or plagues and fires or chronological batches of hundreds of years, but to map it out from one brilliant thinker to another incredible consciousness - from Plato to Aquinas to Rav Soloveitchik; to think of the Middle Ages as Rambam's time, then Ramban, and jump through history using Newton and Einstein and marvel at how the thinking changed as each new world-changing idea or scientific concept came to blow away previous conceptions in the understanding of people and our relationship to the world is to map out the journey of consciousness and intellect itself in its own historical, scientific, metaphysical, theological evolution!

Ach. Breathe. Emma, G-d is good to you. Wipe that tear away. Breathe.

I wanted to go into it here, what I learned. But the phone is ringing. And anyway, I'm trying to breathe because my neck is constantly tense, there's a knot in my gut and I really don't breathe any more.

Really. I'm grateful. For everything.