Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins
Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen performs his classic song with a mind-blowing assist from saxophone giant Sonny Rollins. This song is taken from a? Hebrew poem called Untaneh Tokef read on Rosh Hashanah. Michael Kagan speaks, Latma wishes a Happy New Year and Reb Zalman shares his understanding about Yom Kippur.
Reb Zalman Schachter- Shalomi sharing Yom Kippur teachings with Nava Tehila – Jerusalem’s Jewish renewal community via Skype. 14th September 2010.
Highlights by Michael and Ruth Kagan
Yom Kippur is when we can press the defragmentation button on our souls to put ourselves back into onement, clear out the accumulated cookies and links that take us to places we’re no longer interested in, remove downloads that are no longer relevant, erase a lot of the accumulated junk that has penetrated and clutters the operating system, create more space on the disk of our lives.
Then after the conclusion of Yom Kippur, there begins the process of upgrading those useful programs that have grown old to newer, fresher versions. Do not fear: everything is backward compatible. So on each of the four days before Succot we can welcome in the latest, shiniest, most relevant version of the central operating system through the letters of the Divine Name – the yod, the heh, the vav, and then the heh. This process vastly increases the bandwidth capability allowing for greater correspondence between client-side and server-side. Then during each of the days of Succot we welcome in the latest versions of the main archetypal programs (both male and female versions). On the eighth day there is an azeret, namely a general rebooting in which all the parts are gathered together, synchronized, hands shaken, Bluetoothed, WiFi’ed, rezoned, whatever and we start off again from The Beginning. Enjoy.
I was in Tel Aviv for Yom Kippur 37 years ago. From the early morning we noticed that strange things were happening that should not be occurring on Yom Kippur: a fighter plane flew over head; a jeep raced through the deserted streets; a soldier running holding a tallit. All through the morning service people started to disappear; a stranger entered, a tap on the shoulder, a nod, an apology, a worried look, a quick goodbye, a jeep waiting outside. At midday children starting spreading the news that the Egyptians had crossed the Suez Canal – rubbish, how was that possible, couldn’t be. At 2:00 the women rose and left the synagogue even before I heard the siren begin to wail. The Rabbi calmed us down, told us to remain in our seats until we finished prayers. Unbeknownst to us, far out at sea, a missile carrying a high explosive warhead had been released from an Egyptian fighter plane and directed at the center of Tel Aviv (it was shot down by a plane over the sea near the Herzliya Coast). We went home and turned on the television and listened to Golda Meir and Yitzchak Rabin promising to “break their bones”. Three weeks later…
If you have the opportunity to read this out loud at 2:00 tomorrow in your synagogue then we will not forget.
Yom Kippur, 2 o’clock in the afternoon – 1973
…And who by fire
And who in a burning tank
And who on the deadly sands
And who in an open trench
And who in a closed bunker
And who by a SAM missile
And who on the mountain top
And who by the long Canal
And who in an invincible line
And who in the air
And who on the sea
And who will survive
And who will be mourned
And who will never be found
And who will be exchanged
And who will be forever scarred
And who will be left to sing this song
And who remembers anyway?
M. L. Kagan
New Year Good Wishes from LatmaTV
This is just precious.
