A Feral Child's Prayer For The Dead - So What's The Deal

I read about Samuel Pisar recently. A holocaust survivor now 80 years old who was talking about the feral child he became by the time he was sixteen, in Hitler's Poland. He escaped the gas chambers twice which was a miracle in itself.

This post is about this man's wild child, their journey together and it's culmination but I'll give a little background first.

Pisar's Feral Child

Despite Pisar's success, the feral, pitiless child that he was is alive and still with him; criticising him unceasingly. However, that's quite natural. Because after his camp was freed by the allies he became a hooligan and black marketeer and then was rescued from his life of crime by a French aunt.



As he so poignantly put it, he had to "... wipe out the first seventeen years of my life ... I turned to the future with a vengeance." He was never able to make peace with all that the wild child in him embodied.

Prayer For The Dead

Before Leonard Bernstein died he had asked Pisar to rewrite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead but Pisar refused. He eventually did it after Bernstein died.

He was able to tap into the force of his feral namesake who had railed against God for abandoning them to the nazis gas chambers.

He said of God "... He may not even be there. But I love him too. We've loved him for thousands of years."

Separation From What Is

Dogma exists everywhere as you know and is part of all religious indoctrination. So when people like Mr Pisar believe that their God is somehow distant and separate from them, it intensifies their pain. This is the sole reason for the strife and conflicts in the world right now.

Connecting With All That Is

God, the Source, Jehovah, the Universe, Mahomet or whatever you want to call it, is not outside of us. This is the greatest planetary hoax we've got! Sure, there's a larger mind out there but this force is part of us, it is within us and we are connected to it.

We are part of God; we are inseparable from the Source. Individually and together, we are one with all that is. Always have been and always will be.

When you meditate or pray and feel that lightness and depth, calmness and expansion, the seeming nothingness, where do you think you go; could you explain it in words?

You can't of course because your mind is unable to grasp such vastness. It's bigger than you and I, yet you feel it deeply all the same.

You reconnected with the Source, the realm of the infinite. And here's the point I want to make. When you see beauty that takes your breath away, when you feel bliss, when you are touched so deeply that you can't find the words, that is a prayer. Accept it and be blissed out.

You are communing with the Source. And I assure you if it wasn't already within you, the connection would not have been possible so spontaneously.

A Peaceful Continuation

Mr Pisar has worked through the unimaginable, like so many holocaust victims, and has made his peace with what is - the mystery of God. Re-writing the Kaddish has liberated him.

He was able to reconnect and embrace and thus liberate the wild, hurting child whose force he desperately needed to survive the death camps. He knows that his God is waiting for him when he decides to make the transition.



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