I had vowed never to set foot in Poland. The extermination of my family there had indelibly marked that country with a glaring DO NOT ENTER stamp embossed in my heart and mind. Poland was the 'killing-fields' that took my family, my people - the seat of systematic destruction of Jewish Europe. But the call of a Chabad emissary crosses boundaries of reasoned decisions and emotional bias. It touches the soul. So I went. As Divine providence would have it, my flight schedule required me to spend a full day and a half in Warsaw.

So I allowed myself to venture out to the government sponsored Jewish memorials. First stop - the station where cattle trucks took my people from the Warsaw ghetto to their gaseous liquidation. A somber grey stoned square suitably inscribed with a few fitting quotations. This token gesture adjacent to a school of psychology - a surrealistic contrast: murder alongside an institute dedicated to human insight.

Next stop - a memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. An imposing slab with the grotesque sculpture of tortured fighters hewed three dimensionally out of raw stone. On this particular afternoon a huge crane hung limply on the large adjacent site. The foundations for another Jewish museum to rise from the ashes of the six million. Another 'virtual' attempt to jog future memories, to record history.

Memories and history. There is no Hebrew word for history. A cannibalized word,'historia',doesn't cut it. 'Historia' is the stuff of academic debate - cold, detached narrative. Scientific, methodological, meticulous. A bit like the records room of the crematoria. The authentic Hebrew, the holy tongue, has only one word which approximates consciousness of the passage of time - 'zecher' - to remember. 'Historia' is not 'zecher'. One is passive, and the other active. One is an 'add-on' to a brain-centred storage house - the other an active prod to bodily emotions.

The crane; another museum - 'historia'. But how do we transform cold detachment into the motivational heat of human motivation? 'zecher' - by allowing the memory of my murdered forebears to express through my hands, feet, heart and mind.

By creating a truly experiential memory which only comes through a bodily involvement with a living tradition, a recollection of our first encounter at Sinai, a consciousness of life itself through the prism of Jewish eyes. I must live Jewish. Not just a cerebral Jew; not even merely a cardiac Jew, and certainly not a culinary Jew. A Jewish life that is practiced with the hands and feet - Mitzvot.

I flew out of Warsaw, still vowing not to return. But I was not the same person. It was no longer a matter of 'historia'.

I O U

Coffee table conversationalists invariably employ 'I.O' language - the If Only statements. If only I won the lottery, if only I kept my mouth closed, if only I sold my stock at the top, if only I could shed those twenty pounds, if onlY...if only...

Welcome to the fantasy world of I.O. The price - spiritual myopia. The antidote - E.O - Eyes Open - the world of the 'here and now' - get real!

Beyond the fantasy world of I.O lies the less rarified stratosphere of I.O.U. Its inhabitants all have attitude: people owe them. The self talk: l am always giving and it's never acknowledged. They owe me! I do all this overtime and the boss never recognizes me - he owes me! I do so much for the world and all I get back is a big fat nothing - the world owes me. These people live with a fistful of IOU's - everyone owes them. They are rich with I.O.U's but, spiritually and emotionally, deeply in debt.

The answer - Oiiii! Or rather IOI! IOI means 'I owe I', not 'I O U'. Better put, no one else is my debtor except me. Happiness is not about collecting debts. It's all about giving. Life is not a transaction. It's not about cultivating reciprocal relationships. Love and happiness are not about an equal vote and democracy.

It's not about 'holding up your end' or 'doing your share', or collecting outstanding paying emotional debts. Those who exact payment to cover the costs of their 'good deeds' are really prisoners of victim mentality, of concocted righteous indignation for not being recognized as a 'nice person'. This is the ego-centricity of IOU thinking. In this mind-set every spoke of the wheel of relationships begins with you and ends with you. The ego-self dominates and everyone is in your debt. And when the ego is not stroked, it will respond with hurt, deflation, and even anger.

The answer lies with I.O.I - no-one owes you anything. You owe yourself. Your life's task is to access your inner giftedness - a giftedness that is not even of your making but gifted from Above - and share it with the world. No expectations - expectations stem from the ego: I expect you to, ... it is always 'I'.

Get rid of expectations and practice true Hessed - the natural flow of compassion and love that underlies the Big Bang of Creation. Give truly. Don't pervert it into emotional blackmail, a bribe, or a take. Instead, realize that you owe it to yourself. I.O.I.!

So here are your marching orders for the week: No more I.O statements. No more I.O.U attitudes. And if on occasion you slip into feeling sorry for yourself, just let out with a loud Oi! And immediately move into IOI consciousness. Over to U.

Oh, by the way, the by-product, en passant, will be a lifelong state of happiness - true happiness. No debts! No IOU's Only IOI. Oy!

When the Heart Soars

Words are packages that contain the flow of mind. Feelings are packages that contain the flow of heart. In this succinct manner do Chassidic teachings of Kabbala explain the two flows of consciousness - Mind and Heart. Even the great poets and word-smiths struggle to capture the nuances of the experience of love in words. Words are the coinage of mortals.

Love, the Divine gift, cannot be compressed into finity of words. Love is the experience of creation, of discovery, of the exquisite taste of connectedness and intimacy. An experience of feelings, not words.

That unique work of practical Kabbalah, the Book of Tanya, describes love as the ultimate truth embedded in the act of the Cosmic 'big bang'. The echoes of that Divine radicalism continue to reverberate through the Cosmos and transmute into our humanly expressed love for each other.

Love is more than the experiential titillation of the body. It includes all the nuances of Hessed (the gift of sharing and compassion). It is the glue that bonds discrete centres of energy called souls.

The author of the Tanya, the Alter Rebbe, identifies three qualities of love. The first is latent in all of us. This 'hidden potentia', Ahavah Nisteres ('concealed love') is the antenna that directs our life's purpose. It is unveiled through meditation, study, and practice. It allows our heart to soar to immense heights of self-realization. Through the power of love we experience the Infinite - we touch G-d.

One would have thought that the wings of love that soar so high would define human limits and be restricted to the gifted few. Not so, states the Alter. We all possess this potential. But it takes work and effort to manifest it. There is however an even higher state of love called Ahavah BeTa'anugim (the love of ultimate pleasure). This is experienced by the Tzaddikim (the spiritual masters). It is an ongoing state of deep connectedness with the Divine that knows no limit or boundary. It does need to be called upon, worked for, aroused, or tutored. It simply is. An ongoing state of deep ecstasy and profound oneness with the All.

One would be pardoned for imagining that there exists a love no higher. Not so, teaches the Alter Rebbe. There is a love in the third degree - a love borne out of darkness. It is the light that shines into the deep cavity of heart after the veil is removed - when the illusion is lifted. This is the love of the 'ba'al teshuva' - the one who makes a discovery of true love after having lived a lie, after groping in the darkness of confusion and spiritual blindness - the deception of the ego self (Nefesh Behamis).

Hence the Talmudic wisdom teaching: where the 'ba'al teshuva' (spiritual returnee) stands, even the Tzaddik (master) cannot stand. In the Jewish spiritual mastery teachings, even the Tzaddik must transform into a 'ba'al teshuva' i.e. the master also has infinite potential of growth and higher self-realization. The master also grows! Unlike the eastern notion of the Buddha as perfection, the Tzaddik experiences the limitless 'nirvanna' but is capable of transcending to infinite growth levels without end. Each step higher becomes a greater intensity of the third degree of love and the experience of Oneness. But the Tzaddik experiences this incrementally, if at all, notwithstanding the status of Master.

The 'ba'al teshuva' experiences transformation constantly and grows geometrically. Hence the psychology of the returnee - never satisfied with a status quo and always questing for more.

A little light pushes away much darkness. Why? Because the power of transformation takes place at the 'tipping point' of spiritual fission. The resultant release of immense energy splits the spiritual atom. The world is transformed. The person is transformed. 'Living-lite' is transformed into profound enlightenment. The experience of love draws directly from the fount of Infinity. It is never quenched. In the inexorable quest for love, the world is turned on its head.

Faces

Jaffa Rd. A disarray of man-size concrete pipes lying idly amidst deep man-made crevices and earth-moving tractors - empty and aimless. This was once Jerusalem's busiest vehicular thoroughfare. Today - traffic nightmare. Each day Egged bus routes and schedules change to accommodate road works that will one day, when Moshiach comes, morph into an intra-Jerusalem rail.

Yet, every seeming adversity is laden with opportunities and gifts. This afternoon I received the gift of faces. Swept up in a bustling throng along Jaffa Rd through to Davidka circle in Jerusalem, I discovered a rich tapestry of expressions, postures, movement, gesture and sounds - Jerusalem personified.

The face - a projection of the heart and mind. The eyes - a reflection of the soul. The hands - a message of goal and motivation.

Her face was soft, angular, belying the gentleness and wisdom of a Yemenite countenance. I watch this middle-aged matron grasping three fully laden Supersol plastic bags. And in an instant my student's memory teleported me to Operation Magic Carpet, the early fifties, eager faces of youngsters spirited out of Yemen on the wings of engined eagles - gently deposited, finally, into their own country. Gentle as it is that face is etched with determination, conviction, and loyalty to the ways of mothers, fathers and generations. Supersol bags may change colour and size. But not the heart and mind of a Teymani Jew. Nor that face.

He may be brash, but the Moroccan zaggag (glazier) parks his van in the middle of Davidka. As he deftly blends chutzpa and humor, blocking a long single line of traffic inching forward, horns blare in a cacophony of frustration and anger. Israeli drivers are not noted practitioners of delayed gratification. Instead drivers and pedestrians orchestrate a spontaneous parody of the Boston tea party - kleszmer style: wild gesticulations, frenzied arms waving pointedly at our zaggag coupled with colourful Hebrew epithets hurled from a place that is a curious admixture of righteous indignation and aspirations to stand-up comedy. And the face of our Moroccan zaggag? Full of feigned astonishment and surprise. Wordlessly the face says it all: 'What's your problem? Just need to deliver this piece of glass. Lighten up.'

In predictable response, the storm and tempest moves up a notch or two to nine on the Jerusalem drivers' 'Richter scale' of ten. And then, as suddenly as it erupted, it instantly subsides, the glass has been unloaded, and our hero flashes the most charming smile as if to acknowledge the fictional consideration and courtesy that the Israeli drivers had extended to him. And Davidka returns to normal. Normal?- an Israeli version of relativism.

She leads a hive of children ranging in age from five who surround the aging pusher that bears the one who aspires to soprano. She is decked out in modest black, from head to foot, sheitel-ed as well as 'bee-hatted' - a precarious head structure that denotes membership in one of many dozens of Geula sub groups. This schooner and flotilla of youngsters navigate through the human slipstream of a crowded rechov Malchei Yisrael. Deftly maneuvering through throngs of Chassidim, tourists and beggars, her strong face and concerned eyes belie a soft and maternal concern, as she chatters to each of her charges in flawless Yiddish. Her face is not one of poise, but of single-mindedness - the spiritual and material welfare of her children, the next generation. The face belongs to another era, to Europe, to Galicia. It's a face that has stared down the 'outside world' and outlived hundreds of thousands of Jews who simply disappeared into the fabric of a majority society - the hordes of Jews who lacked this fortitude and couldn't withstand scorn and mockery of traditional dress, traditional life, and the face of ages. This face will survive. The faces that are adorned by dread-locks and sophisticated coiffures will not.

His face was a blend of soft cream and putty. As he approached from the opposite direction along Rechov Malchei Yisrael, the knitted yarmelka juxtaposed a contrasting pair of side locks (pe'os). He wore a colourfully-edged linen smock-shirt and off white loose cotton pants brushing against green crocks. This is a new Jew. Born of the defiant 'hilltop teenagers', but now coming of age, creating Israel's 'third way'. The face of an angel, the heart of a lion, and the mind of a yeshiva student. The eyes reveal a soul close to the surface of consciousness - he wears his beliefs on his sleeve. The face reveal more than hope. It expresses the very dynamics of an evolving future. His is the face of the precursor to Moshiach. Adult babes who understand a truth better than many of their elders. A face of simple, uncomplicated, deep commitment to the land of Israel.

So many wonderful faces. So many eyes. All telling stories, volumes, tomes of Jewish lives and history. So many souls that radiate wondrous energies that dynamically configure a spiritual template of Israel today. Look at that white bearded Jew, a gnarled Sefardi face, a portrait of what was, is, and no doubt will be. Permanence amidst a sea of impermanence. The eyes are the deep blue of once full water cisterns, the face depicts the ruggedness of the Judean hills.

The faces of Jerusalem are often jagged and Picassoesque, sometimes tortured and Van Gophic, yet always colourful with flashes of Renoir - faces that momentarily reveal another time and another place, juxtaposed against a fleeting modernity. The faces arise from the spiritual deep - a profound and infinite ocean of genetics and Sefirot echoing thousands of years of continuity and existential defiance.

I look at the shop window. The sun's angle plays a trick on me. The glass reflects my face. And mine is all those faces and theirs are mine. We are One.