A Community of the Spirit – Rumi
May 24th, 2009 § 1 Comment
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepard’s love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.
– Translated by Coleman Barks
Name me one Israeli poet who equals Rumi in scope, beauty, and awareness. There is none. Rumi, who appeared in the 1200s, when Jewish settlements were producing small-minded hacks incapable of poetry or grandeur of the spirit, wrote words that made the Spirit soar.
Rumi held three University Chairs at the the university in Persia. (Tabriz?) At that time, Jewish religious scholars didn’t even know to entertain the idea of participating in a university; that’s how substandard Jewish intellectual thought was; although once Jewish scholars escaped the shtetls, they were briliant.