Sleep-waking

I used to dream that I wouldn't have to sleep during the night, so I could get done all the things I wanted to do.

Now I sleep even when I am awake.

The Pretty Woman dance

You wink at me, turn your head slightly, flick your hair back. I'll sidle over and introduce myself, get your name, more your number.

I'll call, we'll talk, soon meet, and walk. Coffee, food, dinner and drinks. A true gentleman, suave and witty, cocksure yet good-humored.

We'll dance around each other, twirling, whirling, feeling the tempo, the beat cursing through our veins. Can you feel the rhythm?

But don't you know the music ends? Can't you hear the band fading out, the song never goes on forever. You are so beautiful a vessel, fair of skin with a smile so radiant it could light its way through a three state power cut.

Yet this is just a one-time dance. I have to go back across the country, to dance where I live, not to return to this dancefloor for a while.

Why would you think that I would look for a dancing partner based on her looks? Aren't you aware it's a game I play, a compulsion when faced with pretty dancers, something I can't control. This is the way of the world, the sky is blue, the sea is wet, and TRK dances with pretty girls.

But TRK's full time dancing partner will not be a particularly pretty face, one who has always had dancers chase her all her life. No, this is not the way. I will dance to my own tune, with someone who can hear that music too.

Happy hunting

TRK

An ode to the Mechitzah

The twitch of a curtain, a veil

hiding for us your purity and virtue

the allure, the magnetism, the attraction

revealing one tefach, hiding two

but when the curtain falls, revealing all

the mystery is gone

and the cold harsh reality sets in

TRK

Rav Kook on Teshuva

This is a huge and incredible topic. I will scratch the surface now in my amateurish fashion and hopefully come back to it another time.

Anyone not familiar with Rav Kook's views should try and read up on them. They are fantastic, incredible, sometimes outlandish but always stimulating and challenging.

Sin and repentance take on a new light in Rav Kook's thought. Sin is natural and inevitable, an outcrop of nature being material and static. Teshuva is a cosmic process of returning to G-d, man's individual Teshuva enables the universal Teshuva as well. Teshuva links everything with the Divine.

Rav Kook believed that the human desire for progress, excellence, freedom and an ordered life emanates from a basic human need to get close to G-d, which is the fundamental of human life. Every culture and religion is an illumination of the divine light amongst humans.

The most startling idea for me is the idea of human progress, improving the world, making it a more civilized place, this is Teshuva. He explicitly mentions ecomonically and socially improving society which goes together with personal atonement and repentance - it is all one deed, one act.
There is so much more to say, and even the small amount I have said I haven't expressed particularly well (a major problem with Rav Kook's thought) but I hope I gave you an inkling into his ideas.

Tzom Kal and have a meaningful day.

TRK

The one sin I can't do Teshuva for

(I hope that title piqued your curiosity). As I stood there before G-d, trying to ignore my litany of errors and sins, one big fat gargantuan monster sticks out at me, accusing me, berating me, rebuking me. WHY DO U NOT LIVE IN ISRAEL??? Why are you too lazy and comfortable to get your pasty, white, sweet-potato pie American ass on a NBN flight and move to the Land of the Jews? (I can see Jameel and OC jumping up and down saying "Now that's what I'm talkin' about").

I don't think there is teshuva for this one. The only possible response is to claim that all my Rabbonim chose to stay in the US (to save my aforementioned pasty ass from assimilation?). What's my excuse?

TRK