Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

ויהי דבר אדוני אלי לאמר

בטרם אצרך בבטן ידעתיך
ובטרם תצא מרחם הקדשתיך
נביא לגוים נחתיך

ואמר
אהה אדוני
הנה לא ידעתי דבר
כי נער אנכי
ויאמר אדוני אלי
אל תאמר נער אנכי
כי על כל אשר אשלחך תלך
ואת כל אשר אצוך תדבר

And the word of the Lord came to me saying,
“Before I created you in the womb I knew you,
Before you left the womb I consecrated you,
I appointed you a prophet for the nations.”

And I said,
“Ah, Lord!
See, I know not how to speak,
For I am a youth.”
And the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am a youth.’
To every place I will send you, go,
And all that I command you, speak.”
(Jeremiah 1:4-7)

I know that many of you doubt that the Lord has bestowed upon me the mantle of prophet, but I am unsurprised, O Israel, for I know your ways - as it is written, “For like a stubborn cow Israel has balked, therefore the Lord will graze him on the range like a sheep.” Hearken to me, for I have proof of my prophetic status - the Lord has revealed to me a vision of the future.

You see, I haven’t been sleeping well lately, either because of the avalanche of stress, disappointment and heartbreak threatening to bury me, or, more likely, because I ran out of arak to use as a nightcap (see my previous post to discover what happened to my arak). When I don’t sleep well, I dream excessively, mostly about mundane topics. But last night, it was different. Last night, the Lord spake unto me.

I dreamt that I was at the wedding of my friend Mayer and his lovely fiancee Tamar. Mayer, a barrel- and hairy-chested Alaskan, provided me with a couch to sleep on when I had no other, and proved a tireless nargilah-smoking compatriot, a fellow arak imbiber, a study buddy for our (excellent) Bible and English Literature class at Hebrew U, and, most importantly, a cultural sophisticate who could see as I could the deep and abiding brilliance of ’70s-vintage Israeli musical film Kazablan. In return for his boundless kindness, I gave him the gifts of appreciation for Joss Whedon’s unfortunately canceled space Western Firefly, for dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and for trip-hop act Massive Attack (he appreciated my description of their oeuvre as “freaky sex music”).

Anyway, Mayer’s dream wedding went off without any major hitches - as I said, my dreams tend to be rather literal (unless they’re about zombies). When it ended, I got out of bed and shuffled, half-asleep, to my computer. I saw that Mayer was on AIM, and proceeded to tell him of my dream while it was fresh. He asked me how the wedding went, and I informed him that it went fine, but that the dream had also featured one strange detail: in the synagogue in which the wedding took place, one had to make a 90 degree turn in the aisle before reaching the chupah. We discussed the possible metaphorical import of such a detail; I suggested that it was symbolic of the 90 degree turn one must make in life before stepping under the chupah and entering the contract of matrimony, which demonstrates at least that those two years of an English major provided me with the ability to construct meaning on the fly.

Mayer apparently thought the dream, and its mysterious 90 degree aisle turn, was interesting enough to pass on to his fiancee, who had a most interesting reaction. Mayer furnished me with a transcript of the conversation, which follows:

TAMAR: Holy fucking shit, I’m so scared. That’s creepy as hell.
MAYER: Why?
TAMAR: Great Neck Synagogue is famous for its 90 degree aisle. Remember?

I, of course, have never seen, nor been near the Great Neck Synagogue. I didn’t even know Mayer and Tamar were getting married there.

There is only one conclusion that can be reached from this.

I am a bona fide prophet.

And so I will prophesy, and my voice will disturb the empty spaces of the South and the mountains of Judah, it will bring mighty winds upon the calm waters of the Galilee, it will darken the white stones of Jerusalem and it will shake the very cedars of Lebanon.

And ladies: you know prophets be fine. The prediction of the raining down of destruction and retribution upon God’s people Israel is such a turn-on.