A Disturbance in the Celestial Kitchen

The title refers to a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry and Jeff are in a restaurant and told by the manager that their order is being delayed by a "disturbance in the kitchen."

To their frustration, the restaurant manager is doggedly evasive when asked for specifics. Larry goes to investigate but rather than get to the bottom of the situation, he gets into an argument with the chef.

Well, this latest business in Israel has me thinking there's some kind of vertical disturbance going on, and that events on the ground are more or less distant reflections of it. It's also frankly kind of apocalyptic -- I don't mean the apocalypse, but at least an apocalypse, which simply means "unveiling" or uncovering of what has heretofore been concealed.

Unveiled? Like what? Like the fact that for the first time in history the majority of Democrats are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel. Being that the Palestinian cause is known as "genocide," this is not a small thing. Many, of course, are just ignorant, but the shift is also the result of decades of ideological brainwashing coming to fruition, and this ideology is as diabolical as the anti-Semitism it helps to engender and rationalize. 

Back to the disturbance in the kitchen. As one expert put it,

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Okay, but how about some details? 

Within 6:10–12 of Ephesians, Paul addresses spiritual warfare and how to combat spiritual attacks; "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes."

Hmm. I get it, but that's not much to go on.  

Speaking of Paul, I read somewhere that his writings contain an inordinate amount of hapax legomenon, meaning words or expressions that occur "only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text." I wonder if Paul's comments on spiritual warfare are among them? I mean, there's no real follow-up, especially considering such an important subject. 

The first image that occurred to me after the barbarism of October 7 was that this is like a giant axe slicing through history, sheep to one side, goats to the other. Except it's up to us whether we identify as a sheep or goat. Back when I was a boy of the left, I was very much like this guy:

When I was a clueless young leftist I too believed Israel was the oppressor and Palestinians were the oppressed, because that’s what everyone around me was saying, and my empty mind was a vacuum that sucked it all up. Once I escaped my echo-chamber and began to objectively assess the facts, I realized just how unfairly Israel has been demeaned -- not just among leftists and Muslims, but also in media, academia, and on Wikipedia.

Now, if the chosen people are an instrument of divine influence, then it makes sense that they would also be the locus of anti-divine energies, and indeed, one of the most distressing themes of history is how Jews never stop attracting the darkness: “In every generation they arise to annihilate us.”

And us, to the extent that we are grafted onto the original plant.

A generation or two ago, it was the Nazis who arose to annihilate the Jews.

In this generation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic movements have risen to annihilate the Jews.

But 

Radical Islam’s useful idiots on the Left deny this fact. They say that Muslims who seek to annihilate Israel are not motivated by antisemitism but by anti-Zionism, as if there is any real-world difference between the two, and as if seeking to eradicate one nation in the world -- the only one that happens to be Jewish -- is in no way anti-Jewish.

 Useful. To whom? To the Head Chef, of course. 

Gaza must be the most comprehensively spiritually depraved culture on earth, so fighting them is fighting pure evil. But how did they get this way without vertical assistance? It reminds me of reading about Nazi Germany or the USSR, where the evil was so extreme that it defies any natural explanation. Indeed, it's difficult to wrap one's mind around it -- it's as if I read and understand the words, but there is still something absolutely inconceivable at the core. 

Well, evil is like that. Or so we have heard from the wise. The particular wise man escapes me at the moment, but he said something to the effect that it is useless to try to comprehend evil, because it partakes of pure absurdity. It is the opposite of intelligible, in case you were wondering what prompts a man to gleefully decapitate a baby or to gang rape a woman you just murdered.

Excuse me, but what about the disturbance in the kitchen? 

If Paul is correct about those vertical powers and principalities, then local conflicts between good and evil must be a reflection of nonlocal ones, so to speak. Well, details. We want some details as to just what's going on, hopefully in a way that doesn't sound crazy, or primitive, or superstitious. 

What do the chosen people themselves say? The first book I pulled out yesterday was The Thirteen Petalled Rose, because Steinsaltz has a fairly detailed account of what goes on up there. Here are some excerpts from previous posts:

"The physical world in which we live, the objectively observed universe around us, is only a part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence.... 

"Which does not necessarily mean that they exist somewhere else, but means rather that they exist in different dimensions of being. What is more, the various worlds interpenetrate and interact in such a way that they can be considered counterparts of one another, each reflecting or projecting itself on the one below or above it."

This reminds me of something Terence McKenna said -- that whole universes are but a micron away. In his case he meant a micron of psilocybin, but the point is well taken. For example, we talk about the "unconscious" as if it's a separate space, when it is actually the non-conscious aspects of this and any human space. The unconscious is right here, right now, exerting its influence.

Which begs the question somewhat, because while we have a signifier for it -- "unconscious" -- just what it signifies is... well, for starters, it is infinite, or where infinitude comes into contact with the mind. And infinitude is not in us, rather, vice versa -- we in it. 

This is a bit romantic for my tastes, but the psychoanalyst James Grotstein described it thus in an old post: he

attempted to rescue the concept of the unconscious from its unfortunate reduction to a mere cauldron of uncivilized desires and impulses, and restore it to its true place as a sort of alter-ego, or “stranger within” that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being “primitive and impersonal” (although it surely includes primitive “lower vertical” elements as well), it is “subjective and ultra-personal,” a “mystical, preternatural, numinous second self” characterized by “a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.”

What we call O. In that same post, Bob wrote of how blogging is not so much a creative outlet, but inlet, and I still think he was on to something. At the very least it must be both, because the one implies the other, After all, "Does anyone actually know where thoughts -- much less creative thoughts -- come from?" 

Don't look at me. I have no idea where ideas come from. Well, I do, but it reminds me of asking a songwriter where songs come from. Almost always they will say that they come from some other source, and that they just open themselves to, and cooperate with, it. Or It. I just now googled "Leonard Cohen on songwriting," because I knew he'd have a good description:

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often,” he said in response to a question regarding his songwriting technique. “Being a songwriter is like being a nun: You’re married to a mystery....

Married to a mystery. Or the Mystery, rather. 

So, the celestial kitchen is just a mystery? That's not very helpful. 

Let's get back to the Rabbi: 

Steinsaltz discusses the distinction between the vertical and horizontal.... Obviously, in speaking of the vertical, of the qualitatively higher and lower, he is not speaking of an actual physical location. Vertically speaking, "to call a world higher signifies that it is more primary, more basic in terms of being close to a primal source of influence; while a lower world would be a secondary world -- in a sense, a copy."

This may be important in terms of understanding the Disturbance: 

As Steinsaltz explains, "just as there are holy angels built into and created by the sacred system, there are also destructive angels, called 'devils' or 'demons', who are the emanations of the connection of man with those aspects of reality which are the opposite of holiness."

This would not only explain bad songwriters, but bad people:

Just as there are evil beings, there are evil worlds. These are simply the "space" inhabited by the evil beings. Wisdom is a space, or "mansion." So too, creativity, love, beauty, peace. You can sense it when you enter one of those mansions. You can also sense it when you are near one of those haunted mansions where the dark ones reside. Enough malevolent wishes and wicked deeds, and pretty soon you have created a world.  

As Steinsaltz describes it, "the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates.... as long as man chooses evil, he supports and nurtures whole worlds and mansions of evil, all of them drawing upon the same human sickness of the soul.... as the evil flourishes and spreads over the world because of the deeds of men, these destructive angels become increasingly independent existences, making up a whole realm that feeds on and fattens on evil."

Now we're getting somewhere, because it means that evil, whatever else it is, is a closed system, enclosed in its own darkness. It is no longer open to the Light which would negate it. It can only flourish in a kind of impenetrable darkness -- a darkness that we can see, but they cannot. You and I see Hamas, and know exactly what it is and where it comes from. But they cannot see us, except insofar as we are obstacles worthy of genocide. When they say "death to America," they mean it.

To be continued...