Yom Kippur as Manifest in an Approaching Dorsal Fin (9 page)

the first one by listening to me say it once,

then the group repeating after me. Then say-

ing it with me. Then I sing it on my own and

we sing it once together. That’s it. No lengthy

process. Nothing written on paper until the

end of the workshop. The first time I taught

this I passed out the chants, with their trans-

lations, on paper before we started. Then,

with the chants written down, people read

them over and over instead of singing, look-

ing at the paper the entire time.

People worried about losing the words.

They always do. Don’t worry, I tell them.

There is power in the tune itself. Hum, tone,

sing
dai de dai
like we have all heard rabbis do. The tunes have lasted a thousand years.

Two thousand years. There is power in the

sound. Never worry about the words.

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We sang our first chant, all in our circle,

four times. It was practice, it was invocation,

it was lovely.

Hineyni

Osah (oseh) et atzmi

Merkavah l’Sh’kinah

Merkavah l’Sh’kinah

Hineyni
is “here I am.”
Oseh
(
Osah
for the guys in the group)
et atzmi
is “I make myself become.”
Merkavah
is a chariot.
Sh’kinah
is, literally, the Presence, but a distinctly femi-nine manifestation of the divine presence, so

“Goddess” is a good translation. But not a par-

ticular Goddess, however, and definitely not

the word for small-g goddesses. That’s what

Craig R. Smith told me, at least. And I believe

him.

Here’s how Shelly translated it:

Here I am!

I make myself

A chariot for the Goddess.

I like that. That’s how I translated it then.

That’s how I translate it now.

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The Harmony of Broken Glass

We learned the next chant.

Ana

El na’

R’fa na lah

That simple. I sing it once through before

telling them what it means:

Please

Strong One, oh please

Heal the world (all)(nature) please.

Here is what Craig says about it:

Ana
and
na’
both mean “please,”

loosely. It’s somewhere between beg-

ging and pleading and a demand, so

it’s closer to “oh please, NOW!”
El
,

one of the words translated “God,”

means “strong one.” It’s the same root

as other strong words. For example,

the word
ayil
is a ram (strong one of

the flock),
ayal
is a stag (strong one of the forest) and
eyal
is strength.
R’fa
means “to heal.” Tradition teaches

that prayer need not be lengthy or

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elaborate. This is the earliest known

Jewish prayer for healing, uttered by

Moses as a petition on behalf of his

sister, Miriam: “
El na, refa na lah
,

God, please heal her, please.”
Lah
is

“her,” and the Kabbalists say this is to

be expanded to all of nature.

The chant is done four times, steady, rising,

steady, falling, then starts over again, again,

again, again, again. Ten minutes, twenty min-

utes. An hour. Voices rise and fall. Voices high and low. Melding, separating, harmonizing,

combining into overtones that no single voice

creates. A circle of sound as, one by one, two

by two, people come to the center, sit, vibrate

throughout, breathe, heal. And all the while,

a sound around it all, a tone at once over the

overtone and under the lowest voice. It per-

meates and surrounds and whence it comes

we’ve no idea.

An hour. An hour and a quarter. An hour

and a half and the chant slows, quiets, takes

longer breaths, then ends all at once as if by

a cue, unheard and unseen. Silence.

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The Harmony of Broken Glass

What did you experience? I saw the color

blue everywhere. I could not stop singing. It

was not my voice. I felt waves. I was con-

nected. My body sang as I stood. I felt calm.

Calm. No time passed.

Water passes around. Some sit, some pace.

Some wonder what the sound was, that sound

over the sound, that sound under the sound.

I walk to the far window, the window

toward the back, for some space. To look out,

to look down and see the grass wave through

the thick glass and notice something new.

Powder. Flakes. Chips on the wood sill. The

caulking around the window is loose. The

window, vibrating in the frame, has loosed

the old glazing. The window, vibrating in the

frame, sang.

We gather again to say goodbye. A short

chant only, easy to learn and in English. We

make two lines facing each other, close to each

other, holding hands with the person to my

right, holding hands with the person to my

left, close enough to hug the person I am fac-

ing, each line joining hands at each end. We

are a circle pressed to a double line. We look

into each other’s eyes and chant, then move

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to the right, look into another set of eyes, sing, move to the right.

Come let us light up our hearts.

Come let us light up our homes

Breathe in,

And breath out

Making circles of love.

Oh, come, let us light up the world.

Move to the right, look into those eyes, sing,

move, look, sing. Her eyes, his eyes, my eyes.

Full circle. No one ends. We go round again.

All is quiet. All is done.

•

The next day we came to the store a little

before nine in the morning to discover the

phone wasn’t working. In the very back of the

building was a large room, concrete floored,

with a separate entrance. It appeared to be a

machine shop from the old gas station days

and one could not get to it from the inside. I

walked there now, through the front room,

through the large workshop area, past the

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The Harmony of Broken Glass

small office in the back we rented to a fledg-

ling acupuncturist, out the back door and

around to the right. I knocked on the door.

This was the landlord’s office.

Michael Rose owned the building and the

house next door. Actually, it was one prop-

erty with two buildings. He also owned a New

Age store not far from us. On top of these

ventures, he was the US importer for Blue

Pearl Incense. When he was in town he was

a good landlord and a more than decent per-

son. Usually, however, he was out of town.

Often at an ashram in Sarasota or India or

who knows. Today was unusual and he was

in his office. But his phone was not working

either. Together we walked around the build-

ing to look at the lines.

It was a calm summer. There was no storm

the night before. And so we were quite sur-

prised to see, before we ever got to the phone

lines, a thick black wire hanging from the tall

utility pole a few feet from our building lying

slack from the roof.

The wires were intact leading to the house

on the property, parallel to our store, so

Michael knocked on the door to use their

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phone. The line from their roof was still

attached to the pole. It was not long before a

gentleman from the phone company arrived.

It didn’t take him long to fix it though he

had to run a new, longer line. That seemed a

bit strange. Why not just attach the old one?

Would making it longer keep it from

breaking?

When I asked, with Michael looking up at

the new line, the repairman just shook his

head. He said the building had shifted nearly

two inches and that had put enough strain

on the line to pull it off. How it shifted, he’d no idea. He’d seen this after floods or, more

rarely, large storms. Our area is not known

for tremors and, if there had been one, cer-

tainly there’d been more lines pulled off than

just ours.

He left. Michael shook his head. Tall, heavy-

set, usually smiling, he stared concerned up

at the roof. I told him I thought I might know

what happened and asked if he would come

inside and look at a window.

I lead him to it and he immediately saw the

flaked glazing and the powder on the sill.

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The Harmony of Broken Glass

“We had a chant workshop last night. We

wondered what the buzzing was.”

He breathed in heavily and out again, aim-

ing at the window sill and blowing the powder

into the air. He was more than familiar with

chanting, with sound and with vibration. He

also had been invited to participate. But, still I had not expected him to actually be happy.

But happy he was. His eyes squinted and

his smile grew wide and he laughed.

“Fantastic. I wonder what other damage

you guys did. Other than moving the build-

ing. Can you break it? Can you break the

window?”

“I have no idea. Why would I?”

“Do it. Break the window next time. I’ll

replace it. It’ll be worth it if you can do it. I want to see.”

And so the next workshop was set but this

time we called everyone we knew who would

be the slightest bit interested. When they hes-

itated, I’d tell them the goal.

No, no charge. Just show up. Show up and

sing.

Never underestimate the power of prom-

ised destruction. People came just for the

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opportunity to sing a window broken. People

brought people. Small folk and thin folk with

voices high and piercing. Big folk and squat

folk with voices booming and deep.

More than forty people were there, in that

room. We were not crowded and had space

between us as we stood in one large oval. Four

chairs were set in the middle. We were going

to do this right.

Dusk came. Held in the air, a red thread

could not be told from a blue one and so it was

deemed night and we sang our invocation. It

was livelier than usual but the invocation qui-

eted the spirits and settled the energy.

Then, on to the chant. Many had been to

the last workshop and knew the chant but we

taught it from scratch. Why not? It doesn’t

take long and I wanted everyone to get as

much out of this workshop as possible. If we

didn’t break a window, we should still all leave with something we learned and a story to tell.

Ana

El na’

R’fa na lah.

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Ana

El na’

R’fa na lah.

Ana

El na’

R’fa na lah.

Ana

El na’

R’fa na lah.

Down low. Ascending. Up high. Descend-

ing. Down low. Ascending. Up high.

Descending. Voices mixed, changed, cre-

ated other voices. Forty felt like fifty, like

eighty, sounded like a hundred. The space

felt vast, the room felt small, people walked

to the center, vibrated visibly, found har-

monies. The pictures on the walls clattered.

The hum was evident. Obvious. It was loud

and came in waves, different this time.

Higher, oscillating, changing. Was it one of

the windows? Was it one of the two large

panes of glass separating the rooms? Was

it something else? No matter, we continued

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and continued and the sound gloried in its

being sung.

Time past unnoticed, the ineffable cue was

felt and we slowed, quieted, stopped. We sang

our last chant, each looking into the eyes of

the person across in a double serpentine bent

at the walls. Again, it was quiet.

So quiet. We just stood there. No one want-

ing to talk. I asked no one to tell what they

saw, felt, heard. I asked no one to share their

experience. The silence told the story.

No one rushed to the windows.

But after a while I walked to the front win-

dow to look out and see the moon rising. I

looked up to see it over the trees, bright and

beautiful. I stood, staring through the

window.

And what was this? In the high left corner,

small small, a crack. Visible if one looked but

nothing terribly noticeable. Still, a crack. We

had done it. We broke the window. Not shat-

tered, not busted, but broken nonetheless. In

the end, I’m glad it was small. The perfect

result in all ways. We did what we set out to

do but the window could stay, as it had, for

nearly a century. We could still see the grass

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wave, convoluted, from the thickened bot-

tom. The glass, as originally placed, would

continue on. Of that, too, I was glad.

Because, if you get very close, if you listen

very carefully and very near, on a quiet, quiet

day, you can hear the recorded hundred

years—the rumbling cars and trucks, shoes

on raised wood floors, thunder and pelting