May 2005 Only in tears can the distortion provide acuity The Vurker Rebbe got it right. Only in tears. No words. Insufficient. Duplicitous, devious, cannot do it justice. Entrapment by words, words that indict, words that sentence, Words that mean two things, language that conceals more than it reveals, texts that remain forever opaque to dissection. Like two lovers embracing, on a city bench, hard wood, overlooking the River seine, at dusk, the bridges lined with Victorian lights that flicker, these lovers have no need for words, just clasped in each other with tears that well up, tears of yearning longing and desire. No words needed at the beginning and end of life, for joy there are tears: for grief there are tears. Words remain inadequate at the two ends of life. So too with God, all the praying, supplication, benedictions, petitions, Glorias, Sancta's, Hail Marias, breast-beating confessionals, all these sacred words remain inadequate, failing as they do, to describe or even approach the grand Paradox of God. God in history, God in nature, God in psyche, these oxymoron, non-sequitors, those meaningless word games philosophical jargon, betraying only the fraudulence of the author. Subject/object, transcendence/immanence, incarnation/tzimtzum polarities of good and evil faith and Auschwitz these binaries pale before the atrocity of logic and decency in the mind of the ultimate software engineer. Even love, as our two subjects on the hard wooden bench seem to demonstrate, even love contains such paradox that cannot encapsulate the sublime experienced by the groping arms, feelings simultaneously lived in, such as fear, hatred, powerlessness, attraction, joy and death. So the Rebbe invites us to jettison words and embrace tears. For each drop that slowly wells up in the corner of the eye, waiting to grow until it descends down the mountainside of the cheek to leave a trail of white salty tracings lined vertically and in parallel, etched in the landscape and contours of the maxilla like the ski marks in snow, contains within a myriad of feelings most mutually contradictory. Most sufficient to do justice to the complexity of human emotion, unlike words. It is these tears that provide the refraction and prism by which to look out into man and history, God and dying, love and hatred, joy and slow painful decline, and see the utter enigma and uncanniness of it all, in a way that feels right. Through the distortion of the pear-shaped teardrop lines begin to bend, reality curves, that which appeared symmetrical, aligned, in focus, logical, now appears to no longer give certainty as to what is real, what truly represents history and truth. In such a teardrop all the safety of rules, theorems, laws of mathematics softens and gives way. In the lived experience of the tear, its distortion, I see the only possible strategy to hold my own paradox, of sanity and insanity, competence and failures, lies deceits and betrayals, To hold on to history and man to have faith in life despite the horrors of torture and death. In the tears of the Vurker Rebbe, the deepest torah is revealed.