The Said Symphony: move 18 with cadenza

To Netanyahu’s leopard, via this lovely quote from Isaiah 11.6:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Comment:

Different moves can be seen as the “heart” of the game from different perspectives: this one presents the heart of the game’s (and my) metaphysics.

Specifically, there’s a great deal more I want to say in terms of the move content, laying out in more detail the relationship of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” to the Wedding Supper of Revelation, the Eucharist, the Seder, ritual in general, time and eternity. For the sake of clarity, I’ll lay this out in a cadenza, an excursus — please read it as part of the move content for purposes of play.

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Cadenza

Time lies at the heart of this move – or more precisely, time with eternity.

The thing being, that “time” contains “eternity” in the hidden heart of every moment, while “eternity” simultaneously contains every moment of “time”. Christ seems to be thinking along these lines in mind when he says “Before Abraham was, I am” – and the Zen Master Hui Neng‘s koan, “What is your face before your mother and father were born” carries a similar implication.

Indeed, this whole business of time, space and the Lamb is highly paradoxical, when viewed from a linear, secular perspective.

I am aware that this perception of the symbolic superposition of one time on another — like washes of watercolor on a painting and with “eternity” like the white canvas beneath them all — is an unfamiliar one in our clock-driven world. But it is an essential mode of perception if we are to understand the long memories of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, and the eschatological hope that each of the three Abrahamic religions perceives in the spiritual topography of the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem.

In playing this move, I wish to give the reader a background awareness of this style of perception: for it is this manner of thinking which allows centuries-ancient scriptures to map to the disputed terrain of these contested times.

It may thus serve us well as, moving further into the game, we encounter the more urgent and immediate voices of our contemporaries, friend and foe, skeptic and believer, warrior and peacemaker alike:

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Within Judaism:

It was ever thus with prayer and sacrifice, as Martin Buber observes:

… prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish the reality …

We find this sensibility spelled out explicitly in Jacob Neusner‘s account of the Passover seder, in his Introduction to Judaism:

Through the natural eye, one sees ordinary folk, not much different from their neighbors in dress, language, or aspirations. The words they speak do not describe reality and are not meant to. When Jewish people say of themselves, “We were the slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt,” they know they never felt the lash; but through the eye of faith that is just what they have done. It is their liberation, not merely that of long-dead forebears, they now celebrate.

Here lies the power of the Passover banquet rite to transform ordinary existence into an account of something beyond. … Now, in the transformation at hand, to be a Jew means to be a slave who has been liberated by God. To be Israel means to give eternal thanks for God’s deliverance. And that deliverance is not at a single moment in historical time. It comes in every generation and is always celebrated. Here again, events of natural, ordinary life are transformed through myth into paradigmatic, eternal, and ever-recurrent sacred moments.

Indeed the Haggadah, the liturgical text of the seder, itself expresses the need for this folding of time upon time:

In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt, as it is said: “You shall tell your child on that day, it is because of this that the L-rd did for me when I left Egypt.”

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Within Christianity:

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