A stone has a soul. Unexplored like the center of the Earth. Impenetrable like the DNA of our universe.
The stone contains the records the prehistory of the new beginning. As: Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before (Ecclesiastes; 3,15). Or HaGanuz – the light which was hidden by God 36 hours after it was created. The mystical light which brings matter to life.
A shiny glow. Once ago, Kazimierz had such a glow. After the war, this glow faded away.
This year we would like to take you on a journey to the interior of the Jewish town of Kazimierz. Its symbol is the stone that hides the light.
The long gone Kazimierz – Kuzmir of blessed memory, beautiful with the Jewish presence is no longer here. And will never be. Yet we can still restore it in our mings and in our thoughts. Let us do it.
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Here I stand in front of the Kotel – the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I face the place where the cornerstone of this world lies. I kiss it. I pray. I listen out.
I speak to the stone and listen to its voice. An echo of eternity. The names carved into the mighty wall with prayer awaken my tenderness. Beneath the surface of the names, a journey into their lives begins. For those who can hear and understand the language of stones, it is a story of love, faith, charity, pain and death. It is the story of Jerusalem. It is also the story of the Jewish town of Kazimierz.
We restore the memory of the stone, the foundation of Kazimierz’s existence, the substance of the vessel filled with the sparks of the idea, the essence of the Jewish civilization. The stone hides the promise of eternity, the time that is forever unfinished. Even if ground into sand, stone remains stone at its core, just as earth remains earth, water remains water, fire remains fire, and air remains air, regardless of their form.
Stone is the fifth element of creation.
There is a memory of those who passed away and the memory of those who remember. For many of us, flowers are the sign of love and memory. Yet the flowers quickly wither, rot and die. Stone – like fire – is the symbol of permanent memory, love and profound respect for people and places. That is why, instead of flowers, we put stones on matzevahs.
We erect the triumphal arches of stone and we decorate the thresholds of our homes with stone. In some, sparse already, stone frames of the doors of Kazimierz, leading to the yards or inside the Jewish houses, some painful breaches are seen: these are the traces of mezuzah.
They remind of empty graves carved in stone.
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A commonplace: both Jerusalem and Kazimierz were built of stone. Both cities have their They both have their philosophers’ stones which are the quintessence, i.e. “the fifth essence”, combining the four elements – earth, fire, water and air. This is – de facto – the cornerstone, the pure idea which lay at the origins of the city. I am less interested in what is visible and may be deformed, while I am more interested in what is hidden deep down in earth, resistant to the force of corrosion and human aspirations, greed and destruction.
Deep inside the earth, the time has a different dimension. A return to the primaeval form of our world, the times of “past glory” takes place through the respectful and discovery of the center of the Earth which hides the stone testimonies of civilizations more or less distant, untouched by the corrosion of time. They bring ever more knowledge and understanding of geological history. This is especially significant today when it is so easy to falsify this history
The quest of the philosophers’ stone is not solely a metaphor. The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Psalms: 118,22). It is not the world that has your treasure. You have it. Inside yourself
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The place sanctifies the stone – the builders of the Temple hewed stones outside the Temple Mount to respect the sanctity of the place and not disturb its dignity and silence.
The stone sanctifies itself – in an act of defiance with acts of desecration, it closes itself within the silence of its perfection. Hence, the seven synagogues of Kazimierz remain in silent protest against the effects of widespread gentrification – this external one which changes the function of the city and the internal one which emanates from with the dark trinketry indicative of the different mentality of the “aliens” who reap benefits from the achievements of Jewish generations.
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The stone hides the secret of existence. In Jerusalem, the holiest stone is the Foundation Stone – Even ha-shetiyah – more or less since the year 700 until this very day, it has been covered with a golden Dome of the Rock. Tradition has it that this was where God started to create the world.
The Holy Book of Zohar says: When the Holy One, blessed be He, about to create the world, He detached one precious stone from underneath His Throne of Glory and plunged it into the Abyss; one end of it remaining fastened therein whilst the other end stood out above; and this other and superior head constituted the nucleus of the world, the point out of which the world started, spreading itself to right and left and into all directions […] He, made it the foundation and starting-point of the world and all that is therein.
This is a flat piece of rock hiding an unknown source of water, which may be the source of all sources which give rise to all the rivers, seas and oceans, whereas the thirsty world drinks the water of life.
And later, it was where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his only son to God.
The legend has it – and the legend is more true than reality – that when King David was digging the foundations for the Lord’s Temple, he discovered the holy name of God – JHWH HASHEM carved in the Foundation Stone.
And later on, when King David’s son – Solomon was erecting the Temple, he place the stone with God’s name in the holiest place of the Temple.
The temple built by King Solomon had a foundation in huge hewn stones. At the king’s command they removed from the quarry large blocks of high-grade stone to provide a foundation of dressed stone for the temple. (1 Kings 5, 17 ).
In a stone – word after word – Moses carved the commandments that God gave him. Until this day, the stone tablets have remained the testimony and the witness of what has become the foundation of the Judeo-Christian civilization.
And Jacob (who struggled with God and then, victorious, received a new name of Israel), on the night when he was exhausted with the journey from Be’er Sheva to Haran, went to sleep at some place, having laid his head on a stone. And he dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven .., when he woke up he said: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven” (Bereshit: 28,17). And the stone on which he had laid his head became the house of God. And this “house of God” is nothing else than the Temple of Jerusalem.
Stone is a witness. What passes and turns into oblivion is earlier written down in the stone Book of Life and the Book of Death.
The moment when Joshua at Shechem renewed the Covenant with the people of Israel and gave them statutes and laws: And Joshua recorded these things in the Book of the Law of God. Then he took a large stone and set it up there under the oak near the holy place of the Lord. “See!” he said to all the people. “This stone will be a witness against us. It has heard all the words the Lord has said to us. It will be a witness against you if you are untrue to your God.” (Joshua, 24, 26 – 27).
The Foundation Stone, the center of all things, the foundation of our universe. Psalm 87 (1-2) says: He has founded his city on the holy mountain. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob.
Whilst Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people both now and forevermore. (Psalm 125, 1-2)
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Once I went along the walls surrounding the Old Town and went up the Mount Synai. I looked around until, among hundreds of scattered stones, one caught my attention:
I thought that it could equally become a stone of glory, and a gravestone. It caught attention. It was relatively big and very heavy, yet I bent down to pick it up, and then the stone enclosed me inside. Since then, I have been carrying it in my heart.
My Festival has a form of a stone. It will remain intact when my body returns to the sources of sand. Like an hourglass, it will start to sift the time of those who will come after me.
Long ago, when I was young, I placed a stone on the threshold of Kazimierz. For thirty-seven years, it grew deep into the rock from which this city was built. Itself, it became a threshold.
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“Thanks to memory, we move through time, subjected to the force of mutual closeness.” This is true. Time is not solely a linear construct; it does not simply “run” from point A to point B to point C, and so on. I am no expert in quantum physics, but I cannot ignore the fact that time is not a uniform measure, but it results from connections between events. There have been a few such events in my life, important enough that the relationships between them make up some independent, separate spiritual states contradictory to the illusion of the passage of time.
Ever since I crossed the stone threshold of the Jewish Town of Kazimierz, Kuzmir has become one of those breakthrough “events” that have dramatically changed my life. For good. Time has not so much stopped as looped itself beautifully. With some easiness I crossed the boundaries between the past and the present. It turned out that what was once, becomes new again. Inside me and around me. I have the same feeling each time when I stand face to face with the stone Kotel, the only living witness of the seemingly bygone days of glory.
I comprehended the connection between the events in the history of Jerusalem and Kazimierz. The Jewish Town of Kazimierz, i.e. Ir v’Em b’Yisrael – the Town and the Mother in Israel would not be conceived without the natural, strong and unbroken gravity towards the place which every Jew is missing – towards Jerusalem
Each synagogue in Kazimierz has been and still is a small Temple of Jerusalem. And the fact that Lublin, Lviv, Vilnius, Krakow, like many other places on the Jewish map of Poland bore the name “Small Jerusalem” or “The Jerusalem of the Kingdom of Poland” proves only that love for the walls of Jerusalem – the eternal capital of Israel – has been forever with is forever.
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Among the nine gates of Jerusalem, there is one that has been bricked up for centuries. This is the Gate of Mercy.
Closed within. Impassable. The Tradition has it that only the Messiah announcing the Last Judgment will pass through it.
I stand before it every day. Once I lifted a stone from its threshold and carried it across the boundaries of time, and now this fragment of the Gate of Mercy lies on my desk. Perhaps it is a fragment of the Foundation Stone, the philosophers’ stone, or just an average stone carried to the threshold of the Gate of Mercy by the turbulent winds of the local history.
I do not know. What I only know is that this is “my” stone, and the light embedded in it is sustained by an unknow source of energy. Each time I look at it or hold it in my hand – I feel the energy of Or haGanuz.
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The stones of the Jewish Town of Kazimierz bear witness to its history. They evoke not only the beauty of the past, but also warn against oblivion and indifference. They ask for respect. And even for a pittance of gratitude from those who owe them more than they can comprehend.
Kazimierz without the Jews who built its buildings over the centuries is, for me, above all a stone matzeva of the powerful, continually living Ashkenazi civilization. The cemetery in Hebrew is called Bajit Hajim, meaning House of Life. Throughout history, all so-called “eternal” civilizations have risen and fallen. The Jewish civilization has survived. It continues and will continue to exist.
Those who are dead live on. They live in us. I felt it every time I sat in the Remuh synagogue under the black memorial plaque.
Today it is lit up not only with memory – but also with the light of the Jewish life being reborn.
The plaque is cracked like a pot made of clay with grains of sand seeping through it. Yet once you bow over it and look closely, you will see that these are no grains of sand but scattered sparkles.
The mission of the Festival is to gather these scattered sparkles around the living Jewish culture. So that each day could be an unending celebration of the Jewish life.
This is all we can do and what we have been doing for past thirty seven years.
This is our Festival.
Janusz Makuch
photos: Edyta Dufaj, Janusz Makuch, Caro Nalbandian, Wikipedia
