The Flame of Love
by Rabbi Pamela Frydman © 2015
The flame of love burns in my heart as never before.
I am as a virgin to this flame.
Always a virgin, as if it were my first time
To know true love.
Children and grandchildren, careers and dreams
Do not diminish the newness of this love.
It is true love; indeed, it is the only true love.
Some of us are blessed to nourish it within the confines of connubial bliss
While others nourish it only in their dreams,
And others are blessed with the alternating of fulfillment and emptiness.
True love penetrates the heart stealthily, secretly.
It enters without warning and never leaves.
It plants the seed of hope where there is no hope,
Of possibility amid the impossible.
Jean-Luc Picard pointed out that things are only impossible until they’re not.
Inayat Khan said, there are only two things worth doing –
The necessary and the impossible.
Solomon taught that love is strong as death.
Paul encapsulated its essence when he preached that
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
But this love is both.
It’s never possible and yet, who knows?
Who am I to turn away from G-d’s love
When it fills my heart in the form of love for one of His creation?
That it is unrequited or unfulfilled
Is a mere fact –
A waste of time to contemplate
Since nothing ruins it and nothing seems to chase it away.
If we can’t feel for a human
How can we feel for the One who has no form?
No amount of disappointment quells this love.
No amount of disenchantment numbs it.
No amount of suffering extinguishes it.
It is ever present, like G-d Herself.
Yet how can we believe that there was ever a chance
That this love could be fulfilled
When from birth to death, it is always animus coupled with anima
Never with the partner with whom we wish to fulfill it?
We capture it in epithets: “perhaps this time,” “perhaps this night,” “perhaps this kiss.”
But we never turn the corner;
One of us is always in darkness, clueless at how our beloved could fail to recognize
The simple truth that this is true love.
If they but gave themselves to us, we would show them,
They would feel it and we would both be fulfilled
At least in our dreams.
But alas, how can it be that be that love has two sides
When G-d is One and there is none else?
To which corner of the Oneness does this love
Hypothecate herself to torture and bemuse
Or fulfill until death do us part?
18 Elul 5775
2 September 2015
(a work in progress)