Last Day in the Rose Room
Dear Friends,
After twenty years in the city we’re headed for a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. The choice was not so much a decision, in the craze of markets and a world in turbulence, we handed our dice to the gods and they cast their lot. After a summer on the road with a car packed to the brim, a Rolls Royce stroller, suitcases and an oud, a mobile mobile studio, four souls and a kitchen, many wondrous adventures accomplished, we are ready and excited to make home anew. (Though our roots in the city will never be transplanted: family, office, services and creations, a pied a terre in the works). On our last day in Manhattan, Rumi and I made an impromptu pilgrimage to the Rose room of the New York Public Library flagship location, which in all these years, I had never visited.
I’m always deep in research through this Sturgeon moon, readying for the holidays. This year my question is prayer. Even through all of our theological ambivalence, it’s still the thing we need most — centering, stilling, opening, wishing, wondering, communing. Trained by the interdisciplinarians of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized study, I rake in used books from the corners of America, seemingly disconnected works in philosophy, naturalism, gender studies, and mysticism with one unifying idea assembling itself slowly from each ambling page. Most used books you can get for the price of shipping, but “The Nonverbal Language of Prayer” (Uri Ehrlich) published in Germany by Mors Siebeck, was going for no less than $150. But for not one penny, you can read it in the Rose room, between the stacks.
When we arrived they told us it would take forty minutes to retrieve the tome from the vaults, so we picnicked in Bryant Park, where there were free board games and mini-golf. Per Rumi, these were the highlights of the adventure, a new version of candy land which we had never played before and her second in a lifetime go at golf. It must be an auspicious day she said, special in her linguistics, if there are free games in the park.
When we returned the book was waiting, and we found seats amongst the silent scholars. She took out her drawing, and I began pouring through the immaculate pages scanning the sources I anticipated making use of in the future. My friend Coco has clued me into the significance of gesture, and that was the subject of this book, the bows, prostrations, hand motions, lifts and turns of prayer. Sometimes the body can circumvent the intrusions of the mind, and hidden away within the wisdom of a posture, making oneself low, placing one’s hands over the heart, rising like an angel, is the prayer itself, which is at once offering and vehicle for transporting being into serenity, humility, exaltation. As they did with all things, the rabbis of the Talmud immersed themselves into the minutest details of discussion and disagreement concerning these gestures, how quickly the vertebrae of the spine should reconstitute their uprightness, the direction the eyes of a blind man should face at the hour of prayer. Beside me, Rumi drew and read quietly, as if she were a regular Talmudist or an apprentice of Borges.
We left the library and it did not occur to me to make the blessing of shehechiyanu — upon tasting something entirely new. The whole pilgrimage had been infused with the prayer. Since choosing our theme I have attempted to be in constant prayer. This is almost always the goal. And it is the dilemma of a secular mysticism. Where are the Temenos, the circumscribed circles that at the outset of an act, designate it as sacred? How do we find the protective boundaries of communion, when we believe it is in everything anywhere?
To ice the cake we grabbed ice cream. The summer debate has been the superiority of the swirl from the truck on the street, or the scoops of the shop. We were out of cash, so we settled for a shop’s chocolate in a cup, which came with unexpected fudge chunks. Ice cream is always prayer in our lineage. Sitting, standing, in a park, beside the water, in solitude near midnight, with a child wondrous that she’s yours hers together everywhere.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman