Make an Opening in the Ark

Ara and I go on hikes now. I ask Ara, “Hike?” And from her magical little resonating chamber, she echoes “Hike, Hike.” For her a hike is just a walk around the house, tour of the different trees and the colors of their leaves. Elmo is red, Big Bird is yellow, green we haven’t figured out yet. The light diminishing, fire and wind burning away the feathers of the earth, the beauty of death to be followed by the still quiet repose of winter approaching. 

With Keely, working on the mystical coloring pages, we landed on the phrase, “Make an opening for the ark.” For hundreds of years Noah was growing cedars that would one day form the planks and beams of the zoological vessel. Some say they were willow trees, so we imagined him surrounded by the animals beneath the willow. As the world neared destruction, the people went about their business as if nothing was wrong. But the animals knew. The wolf howling a cry of repentance. Maybe the opening was just a window, to peer out over the infinite expanse of water from inside the cage of the ark. But some say the “opening” was a glowing pearl and in the day its light was soft, the memory of the way light came through the leaves of a tree, before everything was water. At night, the pearl was a moon in the ark, a full orb turning by whose light Noah fed the lion’s and the other feeders of night.

I told Keely when we studied – the images of the Midrash, the pearl or the window, they’re ancient, composed in the year 600, maybe before, before Freud and Jung and self consciousness, the images are not psychologically explicit, they are psychologically implicit, they ask for interpretation. In this case – how do you light up the ark of your being? Does light come in from without, does it shine from within? Like the Tiffany windows of a sanctuary, sometimes the aspaclaria, the mirror is meant to be dark, so the inner light can awaken. Other times we have nothing left but to be lit by an external flame.

On a whim, my friend Zahra Zubaidi, drove up with me and Ara from the city and spent a night. She was Ara’s first friend, and their love continues. After Ara got to sleep, Zahra and I opened the library of Oum Kulthum and chose one of her hourlong suites to perform at an upcoming concert. In the early days of my studies I spent countless nights on Youtube watching her concerts, performed the first Thursday night of the month at the Qasr Al Nil theater on the banks of the Nile. The people of Cairo and all the cities of the Middle East hovering over the radios that broadcast the evenings, people oohing and applauding, my god-ing into the ecstasy of her voice. I always dreamed of being able to perform these songs, and after many years of oud labor, the right friends, grace, dreams come true. 

The ark is the human being. We set our own night pearls within, so that some of the light of winter is self generative. But the ark is also the world, it floats at the edge of destruction, and there are many reasons to be afraid. These fears are not to be conquered or extinguished, they might be befriended. The carnivores and predators, they had their chambers too, the world was not repopulated with puppies and sheep and bunnies alone. Every word that echoes from the desert of a soul is a little ark, to be filled with soul with longing, every word a song, every act capable of prayerful quality when the opening is filled with light.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman