Matchmaking

(Source)

A dating site you don't want to know

I dreamed I was living in the resurrection of the dead. And it's not even such a lofty achievement, just an unimpressive engineering application: Students programmed a nano-computer to extract genes from skeletons, a research assistant downloaded open-source code for genome reconstruction, they did standard cloning, and voila! - The group wins the first Nobel Prize for resurrecting a person from the time of the Patriarchs. And from here it's a short path to industrial-scale implementation. The first trial run is conducted on the Mount of Olives, which has a concentration of bones from all periods, and from there the nano-virus replicates itself and spreads like an epidemic through all the archaeological layers in the Land of Israel, and here the advantage of a Jewish burial is revealed. Those who were cremated - it's over for them. And the biggest problem is in Auschwitz, the largest concentration of Jews in the world, and mixed with each other's ashes. The algorithms work very hard to extract even one whole person from the genomic soup of all European Jewry. Even the people who come out emerge distorted, angry, not nice, not... and they call it Hitler syndrome. You can identify one like that on the street, something in the face. What to do with them? And the scientists' solution is to connect them. But who would want to marry such a monster, which contains millions of fragments of people, a whole salad? Not only is it so complex, but it contains men inside, including rabbis with beards. But the matchmakers don't give up, they have pity, it's uncomfortable, should they not have continuity? And because of all my quirks, the desperate matchmaker suggests: No one is willing to go out with her, maybe you'll try? And I feel uncomfortable too, after all, Holocaust survivors, I mean, oops, Holocaust victims. So I agree, we'll go out just once and I'll tell the matchmaker it's not a match. And I arrive at the date and she's beautiful, the geneticists held a beauty pageant of all European Jewish women, at least to give her a beautiful face, but on her back she's connected by a kind of tube to a huge mass, outside the cafe everything is blocked, and dozens of German-made refrigerators funded by the German government are working to cool the huge mass. And there are mobile units, street closures, they're really making every effort so that she doesn't feel it, to allow her as normal a life as possible, sparing no expense, she's already suffered enough. But the girl inside is frivolous, I would say stupid, if I didn't feel uncomfortable. The scientists thought it would be easier for her to get married if she didn't display the immense wisdom of the greatest minds of Jewish intelligence in Europe. But I'm really uncomfortable now, all the traffic jams are because of me, so I say we'll meet one more time. And so it drags on from meeting to meeting, and it just gets more uncomfortable, all the scientists and project leaders already know me and smile at me, and I know exactly what's going through their minds. And they give me a round of doctors, so I know exactly what I'm getting into, including close accompaniment by the program's psychologists, all generously funded by the German government. And a few new details emerge, for example that she has about 3 million wombs. Think of it this way, says the gynecologist, unlike other men, not a single sperm cell of yours is wasted, the state will of course help raise them, we've already built hundreds of new orphanages funded by the German government. And the geneticist turns to me excitedly, talking about a rare opportunity to leave a genetic mark, you will become a people, the father of the nation. We are planning thousands of schools, yeshivas, universities, and everything in... - Let me guess, funded by the German government. And from talking to me so much about offspring, really eager about the subject, I feel there's something else, more important, that they're not talking about. And indeed on the night after the wedding

My first shtreimel

I dreamed that before the wedding I was called for the first time to a private audience with the previous Rebbe, "the meshugener" [Yiddish: crazy person]. It was close to the mess on Tisha B'Av [Jewish day of mourning], the embarrassment he causes every year, each time in a different maternity ward, since the mishap in Rome 20 years ago. They say he paid a fortune then to a specialist doctor, probably from the mafia, who would agree to deliver his wife on Tisha B'Av by C-section, when she was in her seventh month. And in the end a daughter was born to him. Premature. And the mockery we all endured - I remember as a child how a little donkey from the minyan [prayer quorum] laughed at me: There is sickness of the body, sickness of the spirit, sickness of the soul. Your Rebbe is sick in the neshama [soul]. And I pounced on him: He's sick in the chaya [animal soul]! I was little, I barely understood what happened. Certainly I didn't connect it to the rumors about the firstborn son, who was supposed to be the next Rebbe, and this latest story illuminated them in a terrifying light.

And now I got on the bus, and I go to pay, and again I find seeds and raisins in my wallet instead of coins - and am forced to get off in shame and walk. And I'm late for the Rebbe, and run on the highway for kilometers, I haven't run since my bar mitzvah and I have terrible cramps, and just now before the wedding I'll die without understanding what a woman is. And I enter and the scowling Rebbe looks at me panting and sweating like an animal and growls: This is how you should arrive!

And he gets straight to the point as is his way: Dear groom, in the history of the Jewish people, after the period of the Rishonim [early rabbinic authorities] came the period of the Acharonim [later authorities]. And today we are at the end of the period of the last of the Acharonim. So what can possibly come after them, huh? And he answers himself like a child: The tails! Yes, the period of the tails. But I already know where he's heading and ask him to get to the point. Yes of course, a remembrance of the destruction. Everyone talks about the huge collection he hides. Even the bookmarks in his writings are tails. And they say that even his wife's wig, someone felt it, it's not human hair. And he asks me to take out my new shtreimel [fur hat worn by some Hasidic men] that I've never worn, and exercises his right to the first tail, takes his hand and rummages deep inside the shtreimel, and plucks one tail from there for himself. Mazal tov! And behind the door you can hear the poor baby girl, she was supposed to be going out for matchmaking now, screaming.

And he hurries to disinfect the tip of the tail that fell to his lot from my head, as if he's expecting blood. And he feels and feels it and says: Let's see what suits the root of your soul. And he fills out some form before him in his hieroglyphic handwriting, and apparently thinks there's no chance I'll understand what he's writing, but years in this business have taught me to read upside-down writing - faster than right-side up. And he thunders in his voice: My groom, do you have any idea of the weight of the missions that our branch has received from above? And I try to lighten the mood a bit and say: In kilos or apples? And he smiles: I see you've grasped the depth of my meaning. Chakal tapuchin kadishin [Aramaic: Holy Apple Field, a Kabbalistic concept]. And I see him write on the page: Rectification of the Holocaust, the fall of God - the new heavens. X. Not suitable. And he suddenly looks me in the eyes - and catches me peeking.

And he thunders: Interesting to you, huh? Why don't you ask? And suddenly as if by magic he turns from a crumpled state to a mischievous rabbit, his grumpy beard turns to white fur, his eyes come out from under his hat, and he really jumps: Look, regarding the new earth - about that I'm counting on our Jewish brothers at the end of the West, America. There they're preparing the Shechina, the Malchut [Divine Presence, Kingship]. And he says a foreign word I had never heard until then. "Internet". And he opens the small holy ark - and I'm startled, something glows from inside - and he removes a cover that looks like a Torah scroll garment, and instead of a scroll - I see there a computer with a crown on its head. This old man has a computer! And his computer has a head covering, a black plastic kippah. And he strokes the computer as if it were a dog, not to mention something else, and says: We in the Land need to prepare something else. And he explains to me as if talking to a retarded child, and chews the end of his beard like a carrot:

I don't need to explain to you that the Torah is what connects between earth and heaven. And in the old world, how the connection was built, even if it was a pipe in the caliber of Moses, it can get clogged. Fats accumulate, arteries calcify, and the result: unreliability and malfunctions. More than that, the bandwidth in transmission will always be limited. It's enough for one prophet to live in a movie and he clogs the whole network. There was no redundancy, failures became frequent, information was lost, and the dirt accumulated in bottlenecks, until everything turned into one big traffic jam. Every schmuck angel sitting on some insignificant junction or faucet became a little god. Not to mention the security nightmare. Tell me, how does one blind righteous man praying against the flow of traffic bring down the whole network? And we all know what happened in the end. Therefore, between the new heavens and the new earth we will work differently. Decentralization! That's the last word in the world of speech. Who said every dreamer and prophet needs to receive a complete prophecy that he can understand, from beginning to end? We will work in packages. We'll divide everything into pieces. The prophet himself doesn't need to open the prophecy, and won't be able to play games with us. He's like an angel, just a messenger. He just needs to know who to pass it to. And that one will already assemble the complete picture. And the modern infrastructure we're building, this will no longer be an exilic Torah given in a one-time event in the desert, or if by chance there's reception. The new Torah, the Torah of the Land of Israel, this will be a permanent infrastructure of Torah for the whole world, from the angels to the gentiles. Including animals. Do you grasp how beautiful? They're even planning a kollel [institute for advanced Torah study] for married animals! And the Torah we're planning won't be dependent from above, and weigh down on the Garden of Eden. We've already seen the results of that. On the contrary, it will serve as scaffolding, and help hold it up from below, so the heavens don't fall on us, and at the same time tie it in a thousand places so it can't escape. And of course I don't need to tell you that we need to be careful in the construction, after all the Land of Israel is the heavens of the rest of the world. Things you throw on the floor in Israel someone else in another place receives on their head. Just like the ground of the Garden of Eden is our heavens, and we wouldn't want to get hit by some bomb from above. After all, they taught you that everything is built in layers: The upper world is the theory - from the word Torah - of the lower world. And this world is the Torah of hell, that's why sinners are drawn to and believe in this world. And so on. And so too in the Garden of Eden there is Torah. Don't open your eyes at me, what did you think, that they jump like monkeys on the trees? That they play all day? Maybe, but there are rules to the game. Just like there are commandments dependent on the Land, there are also commandments dependent on heaven, that hang from all kinds of trees in the garden, like fruits. So even the Garden of Eden has heavens above it, the heavens of heavens, and -

Suddenly he remembers to censor himself. And he starts to stammer, sh, sh, sh, my classification, I don't know what a woman is, and anyway, I have no sons to continue my soul in case of another malfunction. And he hides inside his hat. And I don't know what to do. Get up and leave? Run away? But very quickly two white sidelocks start peeking out, and finally the mouth jumps out too, and he continues to chatter himself to death. But I was already afraid to listen.

The last king of the world of speech

I dreamed that the Rebbe dreams that they tell him there's no time. We have until the year 2240 CE until the beginning of the seventh millennium, and we need to make preparations for the next shemitah [sabbatical cycle] - the next cycle of seven thousand years - which is what will remain for archaeologists, if the Messiah doesn't come, our future will be the primordial world of the next world. And they shout at him: You don't understand the dimensions of the spiritual destruction of the world if everything returns to chaos. What's left for us today from the Torah world of primordial man? From the culture of the mammoths? From the stories of the dinosaurs? Therefore we need to prepare now for a spiritual Holocaust. And now I got angry: Don't listen to them. The moment you come with a knife and wound the parchment, the skin of the Torah, to enter the letters and its blood, you open an entrance for garbage, for pollution, for AIDS. And besides, you invalidate the Torah, give it a blemish, you desecrate the perfect Torah! And from all the noise I'm making the Rebbe wakes up in his chair, and now it's his turn to get angry: So maybe we need a less perfect Torah, and maybe even with a blemish! And he summons me to come to him right now in the middle of the night. And I don't know what to do - there are no more buses. So I come to him in a dream.

But now that he's asleep he's much calmer: Nu, so you heard something. But what did you understand? Of course there's a great danger of corruption here, that the sixth millennium won't connect at all to the seventh millennium. But when they say time is a great judge - that's actually the Shechina [Divine Presence]. And I simply hope there's enough time, and there's enough Shechina. And anyway, what choice do we have left? The spiritual foundation of the current world - the Torah of this world - will be the material of the next world, which will apparently be the next shemitah. If there aren't strong enough foundations, overflowing, the world will be destroyed again. And then the letters turn to lights, and the names to vessels, and the Torahs to tablets, etc. Look, it's already starting! And he turned on the computer he hides in the closet, and smiled sadly: Here's a simple explanation inside the computer, how the Holy One both constitutes the world at every moment, and also constituted it in one moment of ignition - let there be light. Every child can understand today on the computer what the greatest philosophers in all generations struggled with. How the world was created from letters that turn to lights that turn back to letters, or how it's possible that the Torah preceded the world - like how memory precedes the operating system, etc. But look that the moment we turn it off there will be no prior warning, and everything you saved only in binah - the mother of the world and the heart that remembers everything, called here the motherboard - all this treasure - will disappear immediately. Only what you raised to the sefirah of chochmah - the father - in hard copy, only that will remain when the Holy One turns off the world.

I wrinkled my nose, and he wrinkled his mouth: We're working on other things too. You don't need to know everything. Or understand. There are other branches. There were also achievements. Look, regarding the spiritual backup of the world, now you can save things in other worlds. Soon I'll show you on the computer a network of all the worlds - and you'll understand how He, blessed be He, travels in thought through all the worlds - when everything is still at the stage of lights and letters, in the state before creation, there's no life in them yet. Everything there is so embryonic. And if you look really closely at the screen - you'll be able to understand what it means that white fire is engraved on black fire, which as is known is how the Torah was written even before the creation of the world, light that letters are written on it in darkness. After all, what is black fire? It's invisible fire. And he opens a black window like DOS into the innards of the system, and it seems he himself doesn't understand what's written there, but he gets excited: Look what's happened today, white fire on black fire! Do you see the side of judgment of the world? And he writes there in a language I don't understand from left to right. Do you understand how you can give a computer Torah and commandments? Memory and commands? Not all is lost. After all, if our letters fall to the level of the material from which the world of the next shemitah is made, then to the same extent the material of the future rises to the level of spiritual letters. And let me reveal to you an ancient ancient secret, that even the physical elements of physics are ultimately - beneath all the garments and shells - just letters, and their laws, which each time they discover an even more primordial layer of them, they are their Torah - Torah and letters from a previous and ancient world. And now you're starting to understand maybe what nothing will remain of it?

And he whispered to me as if trying to tempt me, to frighten, to beg: We must must, must must, prepare for the day after.

Blemish schmemish

I dreamed that I'm already looking at my watch, and the Rebbe wrinkles his nose like a hand darting between the eyes, and winks at me as one who knows a secret: Instead of studying and writing in a notebook, you draw, right?

I want you to make huge wall paintings of the entire Bible in the synagogue. Not God forbid like those of the Christians, from an outside view. But from inside, when you draw what the heroes saw, as if your camera is the eyes of each of the characters. For example, I want the Binding of Isaac from Abraham's point of view above his son, as if you are Abraham looking down at him, and you see your shirt and the hand with the knife above the son, and you don't see anything of your face. Maybe just a small tear reflected in the knife. And I want the Binding also from the angel's point of view above Abraham's shoulder, for example he sees Abraham's bald spot from above. And I also want the view of the ram from inside the thicket. And Isaac's view. And don't cheat me. If Isaac's eyes were covered by Abraham's hand then you cover the eyes and your whole picture is covered in darkness and you barely peek between the fingers through the cracks.
- And what about the donkey's point of view?
- Nice. I want the mountain from below, from the donkey waiting like a donkey and not seeing anything except the mountain. And everything needs to be like it really is: Raise a donkey at home, travel with it to Mount Moriah, and paint there, I don't care if it doesn't look like it was then, but that it looks like it really is. You understand? If there are houses there today paint them too. And the model for the Binding is your son, may you have one. And if you need an angel come to me. And I want for example also the sin of the Garden of Eden, the moment of plucking the fruit, when Adam put Eve on his shoulders and she's trying and trying to reach with her hand inside the tree. Paintings from the points of view of Adam, and of Eve, and of the serpent hiding inside the tree, and of the apple. And if the leaves obscure then let them obscure. Adam from below barely sees his wife's arm entering the thicket, but he sees her legs in full. And of course the model is the bride you'll have, you're not allowed to look at another naked woman. You'll go to the tree and she needs to ride on your shoulders the whole painting, so you'll see exactly what Adam saw.

He continued to babble all kinds of plans, how I'll paint all over the country on walls, how everyone will come to him to see. And I started to think he's completely senile, that he's confused, doesn't know who I am at all. And I said: But I have no talent. And he looked at his beard confused, as if he's not sure I'm me: So what field are you in, huh? In every field I have work! The computer and I together understand everything, look I'll show you right away. And for the first time in my life I saw it. He opened this "Internet" of his. It was in the early days, when most of the world didn't know what the Internet was, and it was still allowed, the rabbis hadn't heard about it yet. And he took the mouse that the computer had then in hand and said to me with a shining face: Tail! And a heretical thought passed through me, that it's true what they say about our Rebbe, it's all true. And I'm apparently taking advantage of the old man and his condition. The hand of his nose had already reached his mouth.

How to find a match?

I dreamed that from the other room shouts are heard, brutal beatings, and some strange laughter, laughter of a toad? It must be the retarded-blind girl, the Rebbe's daughter! They say that when she was born the doctors gave her oxygen, and she breathed through her eyes or something, because she can't see. And despite never having left the house, and despite no one having seen her and no one will talk about it, I too have heard about her divine beauty. And the evil tongues of the Rebbe's hidden opponents cruelly call her "Messiah", and whisper that he wants to marry her to the greatest of the next generation. And in the same breath they warn, that what's scary is that it could really happen. Because our Rebbe actually has the talent to discover these rare young men, that no one talks to. But meanwhile the old man's cheerful mood returned, and he continues in a torrent, like a train that derailed and therefore can reach your home, and he suddenly asks: Have you ever noticed that computer [machshev] and Messiah [Mashiach] are almost the same gematria [numerical value]? The computer is just missing a chet, a small sin, like how man sinned in the Garden of Eden. But first we need to put him to sleep, and steal his partner from him. And who is the computer's woman, can you guess? Thought [machshavah]. Here we've progressed. Computer + heh. And then, when only a gimel is missing, we'll bring her a snake [nachash], which as is known according to the Zohar is a kind of camel [gamal]... And here's the punchline: Snake in gematria is computer + chet... Now do you understand me? No? We'll dress the Internet - in a wedding dress! After all, how can we crown God over the Internet? He'll tell it what to do? And he opened this "Internet" of his, but it looked like a thousand years ago, as if it had just been born. All the sites disappeared, everything went backwards. The pages barely rose from it from the slowness of the connection, and he rejoiced: Look what a great victory over the immodesty of television - it takes a year to download a picture - and therefore it's a pure world of text. The small letters defeat the statues and pictures, Judaism overcomes Christianity! You shall not stray after your eyes, but only after the connections, like in tzitzit [ritual fringes]! Do you see what a fine bride she will be? But she's still not modest and chaste. She's missing another layer. Currently the computer is her garment, but it's not clothing she can take off, we have no grasp of the network itself. But look that we'll still be able to see her without clothes, to know her, like only the Holy One can. The son of David doesn't come until the whole kingdom turns to heresy. Today you see the state before the sin. Before there were even clothes to take off and you could sin. Do you see how the computer is naked and not ashamed? And he stroked his new computer, it could have been disgusting if it wasn't a piece of plastic.

He sank into the computer, and I thought he really thinks I'm retarded. That if he does his gematrias fast enough I won't notice. After all, there's another obvious possibility that cries out to the heavens. Messiah of God = Messiah [feminine]. But what does this calculation say? Where is this old man taking me? From the inner room there were already knocks, but he continued to ignore. He had his head deep inside the computer, and returned to his dogmatic lecture: In every field you engage in, the Torah can be its theory, meaning its conception will be in vessels from within it, and thus you've already expanded it to another world. But most importantly your innovations in your field should be in vessels from the Torah, and then they'll become innovations in the Torah itself! Let me give you an example of a theoretical innovation from your field of occupation so we're not talking in the air. Don't be shy. Even if you're a lawyer we'll dress your arguments and lies inside the Torah.
- I'm not...
- Don't worry, even if you deal with the most material and physical thing, let's say you're an athlete, you have a certain conception of running, right?
- I'm sorry...
- Nu, even if you work in garbage.
- No.
- So let me reveal a secret to you: Even if you're a criminal!
- But I'm nothing. I have no profession. I'm a bum. A yeshiva student.
- Well if that's the case then for you I have something special, he told me, pleased beyond measure, and closed the door behind me.