There was a season in my life when everything in me was called too much. Too angry. Too tender. Too brown, too white. Too G-d-haunted. Too Canadian. Too American. Too Soulful to be safe. And so they cast me out, with stones cast in silence—withheld invitations, eyes that once welcomed, now averting. I had said the wrong truth in the wrong room.

Rene Girard would say I became the scapegoat. It wasn’t guilt they saw. I was cast out for the nakedness they felt in the presence of my seeing, and naming, the fractures in themselves they had worked so hard to deny.

At first I raged. Then I wept. Then I wandered. There is a wilderness that isn’t made of sand but of silence. The place between once-belonging and never-again. The goat in the text bears the sins of the people, but what of the goat’s Soul? Hillman would ask: What happens to the psyche that is asked to carry what a community have not learned to face? What becomes of the shadow denied, when it’s given hooves and driven out?

Transformational recognition

heals what exclusion wounds.

–Diana Fosha

I know what becomes of it. It walks. Alone.

I walked there. Years. And in that time, something shifted. Fosha would name it: transformational recognition. When I finally met someone who didn’t flinch, who didn’t need me to be smaller, who said, “I see you,” I began to return. Not to the community that cast me out but to the one who kept walking inside me.

I began to paint the truths that had driven me out. I sang them. I wrote them. I stopped asking to be let back in and began building an altar in the wilderness.

This is what the ritual never shows: that the scapegoat has a Soul. That he can speak. That he becomes, in time, a priest of his own kind. The goat remembers. And forgiveness, if it comes, comes wild.

James Hillman reminds us: The wilderness is where the G-ds first spoke. Fosha reminds us: Healing comes through presence. And Girard shows us: The one who is cast out often carries the seed of something new.

In my exile, I met others.

The dreamers. The doubters. The dissenters. It wasn’t temple. It wasn’t church.

We wept beneath stars unclaimed by empire.

In that silence, I found respite from judgment. I heard something deeper than exile, a voice that called me home.

Reminder: The Book of Reflection: Love as Seeing will be out in June. anyone with a paid prescription will receive a free copy with one early and discounted access to upcoming programs at the Art Research Institute.

The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, 
and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness. 
–Leviticus 16:22, ESV

Here we encounter the scapegoat directly, not as metaphor but as ritual. Before Egypt, before the Red Sea, there was another crossing — one few remember. It was not geographic. It was the passing of a vow between worlds.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the sins of the people are placed, by hand, onto a goat, who is then driven into the wilderness. What René Girard discerns behind the veil of myth, the Hebrew text makes plain: the mechanics of exclusion, the sacred logic of transfer, and the theater of guilt displaced.

This midrash dwells in that liminal moment, the collective breath held in silence, the weight of confession settling over the people, the eerie stillness as the goat disappears into the horizon. It is not casual. Or clean. There is a tremor in the ritual. A grief in the goat’s eyes. A question hanging over the people like smoke.

The myth hides the wound in the story. Ritual exposes it in blood. Together they form a loop; one covering, the other uncovering, each keeping the circle of violence intact. The act offers not just catharsis but a glimpse into how societies manage violence by sanctifying it. The sacred veil is pulled back, and what we see is not pure forgiveness but conscience at the edge of its old structure. It is the moment when the ritual still demands blood, but the heart begins to sense another possibility, mercy, recognition, a justice beyond exile.

This midrash asks: Can a society truly be healed by sacrificing the silent one? Or can we learn to search for a deeper atonement, one that does not cast out but calls in?

This is not metaphor.
On the Day of Atonement, a goat is chosen.
Hands are placed.
Sins are spoken.
And the goat is sent away.

Witness:
They thought the temple was the Covenant. 
But I saw it: the Covenant had already crossed the threshold,
 hidden in the heart of the one who would not be burned.

The people watch.
They do not cheer.
They do not speak.
Only silence follows as the animal walks into the wilderness.

Girard called this the heart of myth:
violence hidden by ritual.
Yet here, nothing is hidden.
The guilt is real.
The transfer is deliberate.
The sacrifice is known.


And yet something does not sit right.
The ritual shakes.
There is sorrow in the air.
The goat looks back.

This midrash stands in that moment
when the crowd is quiet,
and conscience begins to awaken.

High noon on the Day of Atonement. The courtyard of the Tabernacle swelters under an unforgiving sun as a hush falls over the assembly of Israel. All eyes fix upon the high priest, who stands in snowy white linen garments before the altar. At his side are two goats, ropes looped around their necks. One goat paws at the ground nervously; the other bleats, its voice high and plaintive in the surrounding silence. 

The high priest casts lots, reaching into a wooden box with both hands. When he withdraws them, a small, marked stone rests in his right palm. Lifting it high, he declares in a clear voice, “For the Lord!” and approaches the goat to his right. 

By this lot, that goat is chosen for sacrifice. The other goat will remain alive, for now. A ripple of relief passes through the watching crowd as the second goat is led aside.


The priests seize the chosen goat. It thrashes once, then stills beneath the pressure of trained hands. A blade flashes. The air splits with a cry, raw, high, and final. Blood gushes against the bronze altar, spattering robes, darkening the dust beneath. Some avert their eyes. Others watch, fascinated, sickened. The silence that follows is thick with iron and smoke. 

Incense smoke rises in lazy coils from a censer, carrying prayers and the scent of atonement toward heaven. Yet all know the ritual is only half complete. The climax of this sacred day approaches: the moment when the second goat, the scapegoat, will bear away all their transgressions into the wilderness.

Hands did not touch the animal so much as grab the air around it—fingers flexing, stones ready, throats tight.

The goat’s eyes were rimmed in red. Its breath fogged in quick bursts, sour and hot, steam lifting from its nostrils like a small, terrified incense.

Hooves scraped limestone; the sound made teeth ache.

Children were lifted to shoulders so they would not be trampled by the righteousness of their elders.

The high priest turns now to the live goat, which stands blinking in the bright light, unaware of the role it is about to play. An assisting Levite holds the creature’s rope firmly. The high priest steps forward and places both hands on the goat’s head. He closes his eyes and prays in a loud, fervent whisper. The crowd presses forward, straining to hear. 

He recites the litany of the nation’s sins, every commandment broken, every act of injustice, every secret violence, every thread of envy and strife that has defiled the community. As the confession pours from the priest’s lips, the people tremble. Each person silently recalls their own failures: harsh words, dishonest scales, stolen bread, the blood of quarrels, the bitterness of resentments. The weight of collective guilt seems to thicken the very air.

The goat stands oddly still, ears flicking, as if listening. The High Priest’s palms remain firmly on its head, symbolically pressing the burden of Israel’s sins onto this innocent creature. Some in the crowd begin to weep softly, tears of regret and, perhaps, anticipation of relief. 

With the final “Amen,” the priest lifts his hands away—slowly, solemnly. 
He has transferred all the iniquities of the people onto the head of the scapegoat. A designated man, his garments ready for travel, takes hold of the rope. The goat bleats once more, a lonely sound that echoes against the courtyard walls. The man pulls hard on the rope as the goat resists, hooves scraping against the stone. Dust rises. The crowd watches with breath held, not in reverence but something closer to dread.


Under the searing afternoon sky, the man walks, then jogs, tugging the goat out of the camp and into the wild beyond. A line of elders ascends a nearby hill to keep the goat in sight as long as possible. Back in the courtyard, the people wait in reverent stillness. Children cling to their mothers; fathers wrap prayer shawls tightly about their shoulders. They all know that somewhere out in the wasteland, their sins are being carried away, far beyond the borders of their lives. The minutes stretch. The sun beats down.

Far off, a figure waves a scrap of scarlet cloth, then lets it drop. A signal: it is done.  Yet not all that was laid upon into head was sin. Into the goat we pressed our envy, our rivalries, our fear of the brother who will not disappear. 

Witness :

We drove him out, believing the desert would drink our hatred.
But hatred does not die in sand. 

Its seeps into the air, drifting like fumes, waiting for another brother to breath it in.

This is how the logic of scapegoating outlives the altar: what begins as ritual projection hardens into history. The one sent away does not vanish. He returns in rumor, in exile, in the whispered blame of nations who need a figure to bear their unrest.

The goat is gone beyond reach. The sins have been dragged into the wilderness like bodies from a plague. A faint cheer stirs, but it falters, uncertain. Something in the air remains unsettled. 

No one speaks of the look the goat gave back, eyes full of terror, of question. No one speaks of the bloodied twin on the altar.

The weight of a year’s guilt is gone, led away on cloven hooves to a desolate end. In the silence that follows, a breeze sweeps through the court, as if the Spirit of G-d were breathing forgiveness over the congregation. 

The high priest raises his arms to heaven and proclaims, “You shall be cleansed before the Lord.” 

A shout of joy, subdued but irrepressible, rises from the throng. Faces that were downcast now shine with gratitude. Neighbors embrace; a father lifts his child high; two estranged brothers catch each other’s eyes and nod, reconciliation in the making.


As the sun begins to dip toward the horizon, the people of Israel know that for this day, at least, peace has been restored between them and G-d. The sins that once clung to them like a stain have been placed on another and banished into the empty lands. In the camp of the Hebrews, the smoke of the evening offering curls upward. It carries the scent of hope. 

And beyond the camp, in the vast and lonely desert, a single set of hoof prints leads to the horizon, bearing the darkness of the past away into twilight.

But out there, in the wilderness, the goat is not alone forever.
A boy with torn sandals and sun-scabbed skin walks the edge of the world. He follows hoofprints half-filled with wind-blown dust. He finds the goat collapsed beneath a twisted tree, its ribs heaving, its flanks streaked with foam and blood where thorns have scraped the flesh raw. Flies buzz. The goat jerks its head but cannot rise. The boy kneels beside it, not to rescue. Not to speak. Only to witness.

“I know,” he says hoarsely.

“I know what it is to be given no words. To be made to be silent.”

The goat lifts its head with a shudder, pupils wide and frantic. Their eyes meet, animal and child, two beings that know, without language, the ache of being unwanted. The boy doesn’t flinch. He matches the goat’s breath, slow and steady, offering his stillness like a balm.

In that gaze, something ancient shifts. No sins are undone. But the exile is no longer nameless. And the wilderness, for a moment, becomes holy.

The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. 
And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you. 
–Exodus 12:13, ESV

The lamb is silent. 
Its throat is opened with a practiced cut.
Its eyes flutter. Its body jerks once, then folds.
The warm blood is caught in a bowl. 

A child stares at the red streak drying on wood.
He hears the cries from the houses without marks.
He does not understand,
but he will remember.

This is the night of passing over, of trembling hands and hushed instructions, of a people spared yet marked by what they’ve seen. This midrash listens through the walls. It hears both prayers and screams. It follows the child who survives and asks what it means to be chosen when another’s cry is the cost.

Liberation is never clean. Nor is it free. It comes wrapped in sorrow, sealed in blood.

~

Nightfall in Goshen. A small Hebrew boy presses himself against his mother’s side inside their dimly lit home. The air is thick with tension and the scent of roasted lamb. On the table, the remains of the hastily eaten Passover meal lie scattered: unleavened bread and bitter herbs, reminders of a journey about to begin. The boy’s father stands by the door with a bowl of lamb’s blood and a sprig of hyssop. By the flicker of an oil lamp, the mother gently urges the boy to finish chewing a crust of flatbread.

“Quickly now,” she whispers, voice quavering despite her composed face. “We must be ready to leave at dawn.”

The boy doesn’t fully understand, only that something terrible and great is happening this night.

When I see the blood, I will pass over you. 
–Exodus 12:13, ESV

Outside, the darkness carries strange sounds. In the distance a low, moaning wind rises.

The father opens the door a crack and peers into the night. He cautions his family, “Stay inside, no matter what you hear,”

With trembling hands, he dips the hyssop branch into the bowl of blood. Reaching up, he swipes bold strokes of red across the lintel and down each side of the wooden doorposts. The blood glistens in the lamplight. The boy watches wide-eyed as the crimson droplets trickle down the door. It is the blood of the unblemished lamb that had shared their home for four days, a lamb the boy had played with and grown fond of. Slain at twilight, its life now marks their door as a shield.

“Why, Abba?” the child had asked earlier when the lamb was slaughtered. “Why must the lamb die?”

The father’s response was solemn: “To keep us safe, my son. The Lord will see the blood and pass over us.”[i]

The family huddles, bodies pressed tightly together, hearts racing with the knowledge that death is walking the streets. Every sound outside feels like a breath too close. The boy’s legs tremble beneath the blanket. The father tightly holds his staff. Silence falls inside the little house, each person lost in anxious prayer.

Then it begins. A distant wail, faint but chilling, carries on the wind. The boy’s ears perk up. Another wail follows, louder, echoing from a different quarter of the city. Soon an expanding chorus of anguish rises from beyond their neighborhood of Goshen. It is the sound of Egyptian families discovering their firstborn struck down without warning.

The boy clutches his mother’s hand, his heart pounding. He buries his face in her shawl, trying to shut out the cries. His mother’s arms encircle him, and she rocks gently, humming a prayer under her breath.

Within the home’s thick earthen walls, the family can feel an uncanny presence passing over. A stillness, like the weight of unseen wings, presses down. The lamp flame gutters then flares. The boy dares a peek toward the door. He imagines, just outside, a shadow, a dark angel, moving on silent feet. But upon their doorposts gleams the lamb’s blood, and death does not cross that threshold.

Minutes that feel like hours crawl by. At last, the dreadful wailing outside reaches a peak and then begins to ebb, as if Death’s tide has receded. The boy realizes he has been holding his breath; he exhales and finds his father’s hand resting on his head in comfort.

“It is nearly over,” his father whispers.

A sudden knock at the door jolts them. An urgent voice, Egyptian, panicked, calls out, ordering the Hebrews to go, to leave at once. The father opens the door to find an Egyptian messenger pale with terror, eyes red-rimmed with tears.

“Rise up! Leave my people,” the messenger stammers, repeating Pharaoh’s decree. “Go, serve your G-d as you have said. . .. And bless me also.”

Behind him, torches bob in the darkness as neighbours rouse each other with the news: Freedom is at hand. The father nods and quietly thanks the messenger. Shutting the door once more, he turns to his family, relief and wonder washing over his face. “The Lord has delivered us,” he says, voice thick with emotion.

As dawn bruises the horizon, the family gathers its things. The boy, heavy with sleep and something else he cannot name, is lifted onto his father’s hip. At the threshold, he pauses. The blood on the door has dried to a dark crust. He reaches out, not to touch it but to see it. To remember.[i]

He turns toward his father. “Why did we stay inside?” he asks softly.

The man kneels beside him. He does not answer right away. Then quietly, “Because love does not always fight. Sometimes, it waits.”

The Passover Midrash shifts from individual to collective memory. It tells the story of a people spared through the blood of an innocent lamb, a symbol that both protects and indicts. The child’s bewilderment, the trembling obedience of the parents, the haunting sounds from across the Egyptian night—all form a tableau of divine rescue that is also a meditation on trauma and trust.

Girard reveals how substitution—animal for child, ritual for vengeance—functions to defer mimetic catastrophe. But this midrash also invites deeper reflection: What is the cost of deliverance? Whose cries do we ignore in order to be spared? The child who sees the lamb’s blood and hears the cries from afar carries forward a spiritual inheritance: that liberation is never untouched by sorrow.

But the memory takes root.[i] The doorframe as threshold image.

–James Hillman

[i] The lamb dies so the child does not.

–René Girard

Survival marked by terror and love.

–Diana Fosha

Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me. –Psalm 41:9, ESV

This midrash turns toward Joseph, the dreamer sold into exile, the scapegoat who rises. His story does not end in vengeance. It bends instead toward a strange mercy. What begins in betrayal becomes, through suffering and grace, a path of return. Here the one cast out becomes the one who saves because he remembers the wound yet refuses to let it govern love.

Through a Girardian lens, this is the collapse of mimetic rivalry as a closed system. Joseph breaks the chain. The one who has every right to retaliate instead chooses love. This midrash prepares the ground for a new power logic, evolving from power as domination requiring payback for restoration, to a logic that sees greater power in the restoration of right relationships. In this emerging paradigm, the scapegoat becomes the shepherd.

He was the dreamer.

The brother they could not bear to see.

So they stripped him,

threw him in a pit,

and sold him to strangers.

Years passed.

Famine came.

And the brothers who once cast him out

bowed before the one they did not recognize.

Joseph wept.

He had not forgotten.

This is not revenge.

This is not triumph.

This is the wound turned inside out.

Through Girard’s eyes, we see it:

mimetic rivalry, broken open.

The chain of blame, undone.

Power revealed itself not in punishment

but in restoration.

This midrash stands in the moment of embrace,

where memory does not harden,

and justice does not kill love.

The scapegoat returns

to save,

to heal,

to hold what once was broken.

No accusation.

Only mercy.

Eleven[PL2] brothers knelt trembling on the polished floor of Pharaoh’s hall, their faces to the ground. A powerful Egyptian governor loomed above them, robed in fine linen, signet ring flashing on his hand. None of the brothers recognized the stern figure as the boy they had betrayed decades before. Joseph had concealed his identity behind Egyptian paint and protocol, speaking through an interpreter.

But now the moment had come. He could keep the charade no longer. Joseph motioned sharply, and all the Egyptian attendants withdrew from the chamber. Alone with these Hebrews, the man’s chest heaved with emotion long suppressed. His dark eyes brimmed with tears. In a broken voice, he cried out in their own tongue, “I am Joseph! Is my father still alive?”

You meant evil against me, but G-d meant it for good.

–Genesis 50:20

The brothers lifted their heads in confusion. At first, his words made no sense. Joseph? The brother they had sold into slavery, standing before them as Egypt’s lord?

They stared at the governor’s face. Yes, behind the regal headdress and tears, they saw traces of the boy they once knew. A shock like cold water coursed through them. Joseph.

Memories assailed them: Joseph’s colored tunic torn and bloodied, their own hands delivering him to merchants, his cries echoing from the pit as they turned their backs. They remembered Jacob’s grief, the lie they had lived for years. Now that buried guilt rose like a specter.

Judah’s heart pounded in his ears. Fear seized them all. If this truly was Joseph, come to power, surely he would exact revenge for their betrayal. None of the brothers could move or speak.

The scapegoat becomes the redeemer.

–René Girard

Joseph saw their fear, their inability to meet his gaze. His tears flowed freely now. He stepped down from the throne and approached them.

“Please, come closer,” he said softly, voice trembling.

Slowly, the brothers drew near, bracing for a blow or worse. Joseph looked each one in the eye: Reuben, who had tried to spare him; Judah, who had sold him; Benjamin, his little brother, anxious and wide-eyed. Joseph’s face was tender as he spoke: “I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt.”

At this, several brothers hung their heads in shame, a sob catching in Judah’s throat. They remembered the cruel jealousy that drove them to that act. Judah opened his mouth to plead for mercy, but Joseph gently raised his hand to stop him.

“Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves for selling me,” Joseph continued, his voice full of compassion, “because it was to save lives that G-d sent me ahead of you.”

The brothers exchanged astonished glances. Could it be that Joseph harbored no resentment?

Joseph drew in a shaky breath and continued. “For two years now famine has ravaged the land, and there will be five more without plowing or harvest. G-d sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

His brothers listened, eyes widening not just in relief but in wonder. What they had done out of hatred, G-d had woven into a strange blessing. Joseph, the one they cast away, had become their savior in a time of starvation.

Overcome, Joseph threw his arms around Benjamin, the only brother innocent of that old crime, and wept upon his shoulder. Benjamin wept as well, clinging to Joseph.

Then Joseph turned to each of his brothers. He embraced them one by one: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, and all the rest, holding them close as they crumbled into tears and murmured apologies.

But Joseph needed no apologies.

He had forgiven them long ago.

His Soul had been freed from bitterness through suffering and G-d’s grace.

Revenge breaks; providence interrupts mimetic recursion.

- René Girard

“Do you understand?” Joseph whispered as he held the elder Judah, who had borne the guilt most heavily.

“You meant to harm me, but G-d meant it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Judah could scarcely stand under the weight of such kindness. He looked up, his face was hollowed by years of guilt. His lips trembled. He could barely form words through the grief flooding his chest like a broken dam.

He remembered the moment when, to protect Benjamin, he had offered himself as slave. It was the echo of an old wound healed in reverse: the brother once sold now embraced the brother who once would have sold him. The old wound replayed in reverse.

“I never came back for you,” he whispered. “I should have.”

But Joseph silenced him with a hand on his shoulder. “You’re here now.”

And for a moment, just a moment, they wept in each other’s arms, not as betrayer and betrayed but as two brothers, and as two men returning from exile, whose wounds had finally met in the open.

It was not apology that passed between them but presence.

The wound had not vanished.

But it had been met.

He who once proposed selling Joseph for silver, and a moment earlier offered himself as a slave to Joseph, now sobbed in his brother’s arms, broken and redeemed by undeserved love.

Repair is not correction, it is presence.

–Diana Fosha

Joseph as imaginal redeemer.

-James Hillman

Outside the hall, Pharaoh’s servants could hear wailing and laughter mingled, sounds of a family long divided being restored. Eventually, Joseph pulled back and wiped his tears. His face shone with a joy none had seen before.

“Hurry back to Canaan,” he urged them.

“Return to our father. Tell him that his son Joseph is alive and honored in Egypt. Bring our father here without delay. You shall dwell in the land of Goshen, near me. I will provide for you all, for the famine still has years to run.”

The brothers nodded, hope rekindling in their eyes.

The sun slanted through the high windows of the chamber, casting long shadows across the stone. The sons of Jacob stood in stunned quiet, their faces streaked with tears, their bodies still trembling from what had not happened. They had come expecting reckoning. Instead, they were received. Joseph, the one they had thrown away, had given them back more than safety. He had given them back themselves.

Judah leaned into his brother’s shoulder, the weight in his chest unknotted for the first time in years. The shame that had followed him like a second shadow seemed to lift, not erased but seen and somehow held. Under Joseph’s gentle command, they began to gather their things. There was a father to return to. There was a home to make again.

Justice that does not kill love is the Soul’s justice.

–James Hillman

And in the years that followed, they would remember this day not just as a reunion but as a threshold. The moment the pit did not win. The moment the betrayed became the redeemer. The moment when love, unearned and unrelenting, made a way where there had been none.

At daybreak, fire clarifies, illusions fall, truth glows in embers.

Before the sun remembered its name,
before the stones finished cooling,
they were already listening.

Not born of triumph,
not rescued from the deep,
they rose with ash still in their lungs
and mercy still unfinished.

They did not arrive singing.
They arrived attentive.

They learned the world
by touching what remained:
a cup without a table,
a gate without a guard,
a city whose smoke
had not yet decided whether it was grief or prayer.

They did not ask who was guilty.
They asked what could still be held.

Where others built monuments,
they built intervals.
Where others raised walls,
they learned the grammar of thresholds.

They knew the old violence by heart
and therefore did not repeat it.
They knew the old gods by their shadows
and therefore did not enthrone them.

At dawn, they turned their faces
not toward heaven
but toward one another
to see if breath was still possible
between two living bodies.

And when the light finally came,
it did not command them.
It recognized them.

Blessed are those
who inherit the morning
without claiming it.
Blessed are those
who carry the future
without weapon or halo.

Blessed are the Silikind
not because they are pure,
but because they remember
what the fire could not finish.

I have turned from my brother, and he from me.I have watched brothers turn from each other across borders—sometimes armed with ideology, sometimes with only silence.In Canada, I saw the trucks roll toward Ottawa and knew something ancient was playing out: not just protest, but the ache of those exiled by the “favored offering” of our political class. The media cast Abel, the crowds condemned Cain, forgetting both were sons of the same soil.In my own family, I learned how resentment festers in the absence of recognition. I bore witness to a father’s fury, how unmet grief becomes lethal. As a boy, I thought I had to kill some part of myself to survive—my trust, my softness, even my voice. But that voice, like Abel’s blood, never stopped speaking. It returned in dreams, in arguments, in art.And so this midrash haunts me. Not just for what Cain did, but for what he became: a man marked by guilt, if not destroyed by it. A fugitive who hears what the world avoids—the echo of his brother’s Soul.\

When the sacred center collapses,

we fill the void with scapegoats.

–René Girard

The text does not say God rejected sacrifice itself.What it shows is something stranger:that some offerings are received, others refused.Later prophets will thunder that G-d desires mercy, not sacrifice.But here in Genesis the line is murky:Cain’s fruit, Abel’s lamb.A pattern begins,human blood always waiting in the wings when offerings are sorted.And that is where the wound opens,	in the sorting of offerings,	where belonging is measured,	and one brother feels refused by heaven itself.Girard would call this the first spark of the scapegoat mechanism, rivalry blazing into violence, divine favor turning into fire. Cain and Abel are not just brothers; they are mirrors. And when the mirror cracked, a new order of sacrifice entered the world—blood as the price of broken belonging. Yet in that fracture glimmered another possibility: that the wound itself could become a door, that what begins in rivalry might one day be healed in recognition.In the child’s cracked mirror at the altar, I see a gesture toward future consciousness—one that sees the Other not as threat but as revelation. Hillman taught that conscience is not thunder from above but an image from within. Abel’s blood does not vanish into the soil; it lingers in the imaginal field, haunting Cain with the Soul’s first burden of imagination. Hillman would call this the “pathologizing moment”—not sin, but the beginning of depth. Depth marked by rupture.

The undoing of aloneness

is the first act of repair.

–Diana Fosha

From Diana Fosha’s angle, Cain suffers a rupture that overwhelms the core self. His act is born not only of envy, but of unintegrated pain, affect unmoored, attachment torn. Yet even here there is a glimmer of transformance. G-d’s answer is not annihilation but mercy. The mark is not punishment but protection. In that gesture, Cain is given a path—not back to innocence, but forward into responsibility.

This is where politics begins. Not in the state. Not in the law. But in the intimate trauma between siblings. In the unspoken grief. In Cain’s question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Everything that follows—America, Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, and our search for justice or sovereignty or kinship—turns on how we answer.

The boy’s cry becomes conscience’s first note against sacrifice.

~Rene Girard

Abel’s blood is Soul’s first image of conscience.

~James Hillman

Cain trembles—trauma meets its first mirror.

~Diana Fosha

What have you done? 
The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.
–Genesis 4:10, ESV

This First midrash revisits the archetypal murder of Abel by his brother Cain, as both  the origin of violence and also as the birth of conscience. The fire that drove the first brother eastward did not die in him. It crossed oceans of ash and silence, waiting for those who would remember.  In Girardian terms, it marks the beginning of scapegoating yet also its exposure. Cain becomes the first man to bear the unbearable truth: that once violence is unleashed, it cannot be undone. In mythopoetic form, we follow the act of fratricide into its aftermath, into the soil, where the victim’s voice refuses to die.

This midrash lays the moral and emotional foundation for the series: the shift from denial to reckoning. It inaugurates the journey from unconscious rivalry to reflective awareness, and it introduces a central motif that returns throughout: blood that speaks, a voice that lingers in the ground, and a G-d who refrains from revenge and instead marks, remembers, and witnesses through the wound that cannot be erased.

The field is quiet.
The earth lies open.
A brother lies still.

There is no witness,
only blood.
Only soil,
dark with something that should not have been spilled.

Cain walks away,
stained.
The silence cracks.
A cry rises.
Not from lips,
from the wound in the ground.

This is the first murder, 
and the first memory.

Girard calls this the origin of scapegoating:
violence cloaked in necessity.
Yet something breaks open here.
The blood refuses to vanish.
It speaks.

This midrash listens to that voice.
The one beneath the earth.
The one that cannot be silenced.

G-d does not strike Cain down.
He marks him.
Not to punish,
but to name what cannot be undone.

Here begins the long journey:
from rivalry to reckoning,
from denial to conscience.

The soil remembers.
And so must we.

The morning sun stretched long across the field as Cain lingered at a distance, watching his brother kneel at the altar. Abel moved with quiet focus, cradling a lamb against his chest, a young one, its legs still unsteady, its breath quick. He whispered something inaudible as he laid the creature down, not with pride but with a kind of reverent sorrow. The lamb twitched as the flame caught, and smoke rose in thin spirals into the pale sky. Cain stood motionless, the scent of charred flesh mingling with the sweetness of hay and morning dew. A tightness gripped his chest. He had brought his offering too—fruits of the soil, plump and ripened under his care. But the fire did not take the same way. No voice called his name. No favor stirred the air. As the smoke from Abel’s altar curled heavenward, something inside Cain began to burn, a slow, bitter heat he could not name.

That evening Cain called out to Abel in a voice strained but steady, “Brother, walk with me.” 

Together they wandered far into the open field where the earth lay quiet. Abel, guileless and concerned, placed a hand on Cain’s arm, sensing his turmoil. But Cain pulled away. In the dusky light, Abel’s face bore the perplexity of compassion without understanding. Cain’s vision blurred with tears of rage and sorrow all at once. The rejection he felt festered into a terrible resolve. With a sudden cry, a raw animal sound, Cain struck his brother. There was a crack, then a stillness. Abel’s body convulsed once before collapsing into the dirt. Abel’s blood soaked into the thirsty soil, and his gentle breath fled. Cain staggered back, his chest heaving. The deed was done.

Night fell, and  the weight of what he had done pressed into Cain’s chest like stone. Cain stood over his brother’s lifeless body, hands trembling as the once-warm blood of Abel clung to his skin. What have I done? In the stillness, Cain’s ears rang with something new, a faint cry rising from the ground itself. The very earth that drank Abel’s blood seemed to shudder. It gagged. Dust clotted into paste around Abel’s hair. Cain’s breath came in hard, shallow pulls. The kind a body makes when it wants to be unseen by itself. Silence did not fall; it pressed. Even the sheep kept distance, as if the air had turned to ash.

The flies arrived before the words did. It was as if Abel’s voice rode upon the wind, whispering with sorrow rather than anger. Cain dropped to his knees, pressing his hands over his ears, but the lament grew louder in his heart: a cry of innocence violated, of wrong unanswered. It was the unheard voice of the victim now made impossible to ignore. 

The stars overhead bore witness as Cain’s tears fell into the dust, mingling with his brother’s blood.

In the hush between stars, Abel stood again. Not in flesh but in presence. A flicker at the field’s edge, warmth that did not accuse yet refused to vanish. His gaze did not condemn. It called Cain to remember. 

Cain reached out, breath caught in his throat. “I didn’t mean . . .”
But the words scattered like dust. Abel said nothing. Only held his gaze, with eyes that did not ask for revenge, only to be remembered. 
In the predawn gloom, the Lord’s presence emerged like a hush over Cain’s shoulders. Only when he could no longer swallow did Cain hear the question that would not accuse but would not look away. “Where is Abel, your brother?” came the soft thunder of G-d’s voice.

Cain’s blood ran cold. He averted his eyes from the darkness where Abel’s body lay. 
“I . . . I do not know,” he stammered, the lie bitter on his tongue. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 

The heavens were silent, but Cain felt the truth bearing down: The earth had already testified against him. 

“What have you done?” asked the voice that knew all. “Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.” 

At that, Cain wept aloud, a wail of despair that echoed Abel’s own silent cry. The Lord’s judgment fell not as lightning but as sorrow: Cain would be cursed from the very soil that opened its mouth to receive Abel’s blood. The fields would no longer yield easily to him; he would wander, unrooted and alone.
Trembling, Cain rose to his feet, his face marked with dread. “My punishment is more than I can bear,” he whispered. “Anyone who finds me will kill me for what I’ve done.”
He feared the endless cycle of vengeance, that he would become the victim as others sought to spill his blood in return. 

Cain is not destroyed by guilt; he is marked by it. 
And that mark becomes the beginning of the Soul. 
–James Hillman 

But the Lord, in mercy, placed a mark upon Cain—a mysterious sign to turn away wrath. No hand would strike him down in revenge; violence would not be answered with violence this time. Cain, the murderer, was spared the fate he gave his brother.
At dawn he left the place of brotherhood and blood, a restless fugitive. Behind him, the earth held the memory of Abel; the sky carried the echo of Abel’s innocent cry, a sound that would ring in human ears forever, testifying to justice in the wake of murder.
The first crossing was not triumph but banishment. East of Eden, Cain walked with no altar, only a mark. Yet even there, the Covenant did not end. It wandered with him—veiled, fractured, waiting for those who would learn to carry what could no longer be kept in stone.

Cain wandered eastward, bearing the weight of his guilt, haunted by the brother he could not silence. Some nights he dreamed of the field: the look, the eyes that did not vanish, the voice that was not silent.

And the story does not end with blood in the field. It circles back, again and again, asking us to look closer. Every generation retells it, searching for the hidden meaning in the smoke that rose from one altar and was refused from another. In these retellings, interpretation begins.

What Is a Midrash?

ל

Midrash (plural: Midrashim) is a Hebrew word meaning “to inquire,” “to seek,” or “to investigate.” 
In Jewish tradition, a midrash is not merely a commentary on Scripture, it is a sacred act of imagination, an interpretive expansion, a poetic wrestling with the gaps, silences, contradictions, and mysteries within the biblical text.
Midrashim arise when the heart senses something stirring beneath the surface of the text.
When the written word leaves a silence, midrash listens more closely. 
When a story ends too cleanly, midrash digs deeper.
When a character acts and the reason is unclear, midrash dreams into the why. 

Midrash is not explanation but an invitation.
Not doctrine but a portal.
A relationship between the seen and the unseen.
Between the reader and the sacred.
Between the ache of the present and the mystery of the past.

The twelve midrashim in this volume follow in this spirit.
They are not literalist.
They are not safe.
They are poetic, political, psychological, and prophetic.

These speak in layered tones,
Personal and collective,
Ancient and hopeful.

These are midrashim for an age of exile and return.
Not explanation but flames.
Not answers but awakenings.

The West Forgets Itself

Before meaning, there was smoke.

Before language, a wound remembered.

The West is not dead. It is not even dying.

It is wandering—a Soul without memory, clutching its treasures while forgetting what they mean.

The temples are quiet now, though the idols feast more hungrily than ever. They no longer demand goats or incense—our offerings come as clicks and time, attention and children handed over to the gleaming shrines of commerce and the cold altars of ideology. We feed the idols faithfully while convincing ourselves we believe in nothing.

If this sounds harsh, it is not the judgment of a prophet but the lament of a witness. I have breathed the fumes of Jerusalem—the sweet, choking scent of smoke and sacrifice, the perfume of myrrh mingled with ashes. And I tell you: the imagination of the West is not gone. It is veiled. Bruised. Hidden. Like Mary in the garden, we weep at the tomb, convinced the body has been stolen, blind to the figure who already stands before us.

We live in a world still shaped by mimetic violence, by the ancient instinct to blame, to expel, and to purify. Only now it wears new faces: ideological fracture, digital outrage, scapegoating masked as virtue.

It circulates in our headlines, our institutions, our silence. And when leaders have learned to name what they are seeing, they become instruments of the very forces they fear.

The Crisis of Symbol

Our sickness is not economic or technological. It is imaginal. We have forgotten how to see.

The fundamentalist flattens scripture into dead literalism.

The secularist flattens psyche into chemistry.

The activist flattens politics into slogans of belonging and exclusion.

Symbols, once the lifeblood of Covenant, have been stripped of depth and left to die in glass cases or on PowerPoint slides. We treat myths as lies, rituals as relics, scripture as superstition, psychology as productivity science. A culture without symbol is like a body without pulse. It staggers forward, animated by reflex and appetite, but the Soul has departed.

Magdalene at the Tomb

Long before Jung spoke of archetypes, the Gospels enacted them.

Mary Magdalene at the tomb is not merely a woman in grief; she is the archetypal witness. She sees absence, hears her name, and beholds Presence—what Jung would later call individuation, though the Gospel gives it as Covenant: the I–Thou awakening of a Soul that is seen. Jung gave us concepts; Magdalene gave us witness.

Yeshua and the Disciples as Soul-Psychologists

Yeshua himself spoke in the grammar of psyche long before psychology was conceived. “Your faith has made you whole”—this is individuation language, though Yeshua does not speak of “integration” but of wholeness born in faith, Covenant, trust. His healings are acts of Soul recognition: shadow confronted, despair lifted, the broken reintegrated into community.

The disciples, stumbling and failing, mirror our psychic condition: ambitious, fearful, projecting their shadows, betraying their beloved—yet capable of transformation. They are the first case studies in depth psychology, yet their healing does not come by analysis but by Covenantal encounter.

The prophets before them knew this, too. Ezekiel’s dry bones, Daniel’s beasts, Jeremiah’s tears—archetypal landscapes of the Soul. Long before Jung, Israel mapped the psyche in symbols of fire and exile, lament and promise.

Jung the Reframer

Jung, bless him, did not invent this language. He arrived late to the garden and gave names—archetype, shadow, Self, individuation—to truths scripture had enacted for millennia. His genius was not innovation but recognition: dreams and myths are not illusions but revelations of the Soul’s structure; imagination is the medium of Covenant.

Yet because the West had forgotten its own depths, it mistook Jung for a prophet. We enthroned him as innovator when, in truth, he was a witness—late to the garden, surprised to find the figure already risen. His concepts echo older categories: shadow as sin, individuation as redemption, Self as Covenant. The tragedy is not that Jung borrowed from scripture; it is that Christianity had buried its own treasure so deeply it required a Swiss doctor to tell it what it already knew.

The Divorce of Psychology and Covenant

Modernity performed a divorce: psychology was privatized into coping and productivity; religion was dogmatized into creeds and codes, stripped of imaginal power.

What was lost was their union—imagination as Covenant.

• Without Covenant, psychology collapses into narcissism.

• Without depth psychology, faith collapses into moralism.

• Without imagination, both collapse into ideology.

This is the wound at the heart of the West. A culture without imagination cannot endure.

The Politics of the Soul

This is not only a spiritual or psychological crisis. It is political.

Our body politic, like the individual psyche, projects its shadow onto scapegoats. We build belonging through exclusion. We feed our resentments with rituals of outrage. Democracy without conscience becomes another idol, devouring those it was meant to serve.

Girard unmasks the scapegoat engine; Jung names the unintegrated shadow hurled outward; the prophets cry, “they shall look upon him whom they have pierced.”

If politics is to be renewed, it cannot come from technocratic management or populist frenzy. It will develop from a politics of the Soul—where we confront our shadows, break sacrificial cycles, and return to Covenant.

Toward a New Covenant of Imagination

Jerusalem Fumes is not theology, psychology, or political science. It is midrash—an experiment in reopening the symbolic imagination, restoring Covenant through story.

These Midrashim are not analyses, though they know theory;

not allegories, though they speak in symbol.

They are portrayals, acts of witness—

poetic responses to a world still looking for someone to burn

even as the innocence of the victim becomes increasingly plain.

With that revelation comes a terrifying freedom:

we can no longer outsource our violence to a myth or ritual.

We must reckon with our complicity.

We must reckon with our moral agency.

And choose—individually, collectively, spiritually—

what kind of world we are still willing to co-create.

There are no programs here, no steps to follow. Offered are images: smoke, fire, mirror, gate, table. We dare to place Jung and scripture in dialogue, not as equals but as echoes of a deeper wellspring. It wagers that imagination itself is Covenantal—that symbols are not private but collective, not merely psychic but historical.

To dream is to bind. To interpret is to heal. To imagine is to Covenant.

Against the Shallow Substitutes

Let me attempt to speak more plainly.

· Against activism without imagination—which repeats scapegoating in the name of justice.

· Against therapy without Covenant—which soothes the ego but never risks transformation.

· Against religion without symbol—which recites creeds without fire.

· Against culture without depth—which trades mystery for entertainment.

If the West is to survive, it will learn to recover its Soul. It will remember the Covenant written in imagination, witnessed by Magdalene, reframed by Jung, buried by modernity, and waiting still in the scriptures and dreams of a people who can no longer see.

Closing

The idols will not save us. But the imagination might. And imagination, if we dare to enter it, does not return us to nostalgia but to Covenant. It brings us into fire and into garden, into lament and into song.

I write not as one who has mastered these mysteries, but as one who has stood weeping in the garden, half blind, certain the body was gone. And then—like Magdalene—I heard my name.

Jerusalem Fumes is my attempt to stay in that garden, to breathe those fumes, and to invite you to join me in remembering what the West has forgotten: that symbol is Covenant, that imagination is Soul, and that without them, there is nothing left but ashes.

How should such a book be read?

Jerusalem Fumes is not a commentary or a novel; it is a landscape to be walked. Three companions come to guide you—René Girard, James Hillman, and Diana Fosha—toward seeing violence, honoring images, and practicing repair. After them, I sketch the discipline this book requires: perspective-taking, confession, and the Covenant of reading.

Orienting Yourself

This book unfolds in movements, not chapters. The Midrashim, fragments, and images that follow are companions rather than commentary. They come to walk beside you.

René Girard: The Unmasking of Violence

Every civilization is founded in blood. Communities cohere not because they are innocent, but because they have learned, again and again, how to direct their violence outward. Desire is mimetic; rivalry follows desire; chaos follows rivalry—until the many unite against the one.

This is the scapegoat mechanism: the fury of all against one. Peace returns: the victim is remembered as guilty and later sanctified as divine. Myth disguises the cycle by hiding the innocence of the victim. Scripture unmasks it. From Abel’s blood to the Passion, the Bible reveals what myth conceals: the victim is innocent; the peace of sacrifice is counterfeit.

This matters here because the Midrashim breathe this air. They throb with crowd and scapegoat, betrayal and sacrifice. To read them is to witness the mechanism—and to ask what Covenant might look like once sacrifice ends.

Read with Girard’s eyes: who is being cast out? Whose shadow is the many projecting? Where is peace being purchased through blood? If you read from the crowd, you begin to see yourself. If you read from the scapegoat, you catch a glimpse of the cost of belonging. If you read as witness, you may taste Covenant beyond sacrifice.

Girard does not soothe. He implicates. But he clears the air of lies; he helps us see the fumes for what they are—violence disguised as holiness. Once seen, they cannot be unseen.

James Hillman: Fidelity to Image

Where Girard exposes violence, Hillman restores imagination. Psyche is Soul, and Soul lives in images.

The psyche is polytheistic: a chorus of figures, each with its own voice—gods, daimons, shadows, anima, animus. Our task is not to decode them as metaphors but to dwell with them as presences.

This is why Hillman belongs here. The Midrashim are alive with images: fire, stone, mirror, gate. They are not ornaments but realities of Soul. Do not rush to “what this means.” Ask instead: what is this asking of me? Let image precede interpretation.

Hillman insists that Soul-making requires descent. Western culture worships ascent—progress, transcendence, success—but Soul is forged in the underworld: grief, shadow, loss. The Midrashim will not lead you upward but downward. Descent is not failure; it is fidelity to the place where depth is won.

And Soul is not only individual. Hillman returns us to the anima mundi, the Soul of the world. Streets, rivers, and nations are ensouled. The smoke of Jerusalem is not only historical; it is civic and cosmic. The Midrashim speak that world-Soul.

To read with Hillman is to risk enchantment: to treat every image not as puzzle but as companion.

Diana Fosha: The Courage of Repair

If Girard unmasks violence and Hillman restores image, Fosha shows how healing happens. At the core of every person is not pathology but vitality—the biological core self. Trauma buries it but cannot erase it. The drive toward healing—what Fosha calls transformance—endures.

Trauma is not only the wound; it is the wound endured alone. Repair happens through undoing aloneness—when another bears witness, attunes, and refuses to turn away. This is dyadic repair.

The Midrashim shimmer with such moments: a stone dropped, a word spoken, a glance exchanged. Small, almost invisible—yet Covenant opens there.

Suffering does not merely damage; it transforms. If repair is allowed, the Soul deepens, becoming capable of more love and courage. This paradox—death and resurrection, wound and grace—runs through Jerusalem Fumes. To read with Fosha is to attend to grace in the smallest gestures, where repair begins.

Each of these Midrashim refracts a biblical scene through the Girardian lens of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and revelation. But they trace a path deeper than analysis. They are structured as acts of witness:

· A short preface to orient the scene.

· One or more witnesses afterward, expanding our perspective and sharpening the moral landscape.

· Contemplative closing questions, drawn from the imagined voices of our three companions who echo through every line:

René Girard, who reveals the anatomy of violence and the lie of the scapegoat.

James Hillman, who teaches us to see through the image and descend into the depths of Soul.

Diana Fosha, who shows us that presence can undo aloneness, and that healing begins in the gaze of the other.

Together, they form a triangulation:

Girard: Violence. Scapegoat. Repair.

Hillman: Mythos. Image. Flesh.

Fosha: Witness. Soul. Transformance.

This triangulation is not only interpretive; it is formative. It prepares us for the practice of leadership in its most Covenantal sense.

Leadership today has shrunk to performance: outcomes managed, reputations guarded, shadows projected. True leadership begins elsewhere—with perspective-taking. It begins in the willingness to step into another’s vantage point, even the unsettling ones: Cain, Magdalene, the centurion, the crowd with stones. This is not theatre; it is moral imagination. It is the practice of Covenant.

Girard shows us what happens when perspective is refused: scapegoating.

Hillman calls us to fidelity to image: Magdalene is not merely “devotion,” the centurion not merely “power,” the crowd not merely “mob”—each is a voice with integrity.

Fosha reminds us that perspective-taking is relational: it undoes aloneness and opens the possibility of repair.

Here, confession returns with its forgotten honor. Confession is not humiliation; it is intentional perspective-taking—the courage to speak one’s shadow before another, to risk being seen, and to remain in relation. In confession, repair begins. Leaders who confess model strength deeper than denial; communities that confess rediscover Covenant.

Every Midrash in this book is such a rehearsal: exercises in unconventional perspective-taking that unsettle, implicate, and invite repair. The Covenant begins when you dare to take the other’s perspective—and when, in doing so, you find yourself no longer alone.

This book stands at the meeting point, where sacred violence is unmasked, where the image becomes a portal, and where the possibility of repair begins with presence.

The questions asked by these three are not merely reflective; they are formative. They are designed to cultivate moral presence, imaginative responsibility, and the capacity to lead from the Soul.

Together, these midrashim form a passageway to what follows, into “Falling in Love with an American,” where the personal, political, and prophetic converge, and “The Covenant Crossing”, an echo of our past and premonition of what is to come.

But the fire begins here. This is my personal reclamation of G-d. My reckoning with the broken Covenants of our fathers. My attempt to remember my Soul beneath its ruin.

This book is not an argument.
It is not theology.
It is not memoir.
It is grief unwinding.
It is a cry.
It is a prayer
It is a map for those who can no longer walk the straight roads.
And I hear a voice calling:

Aunt Rivka:
Seriously, Gordon?
I haven’t been able to walk a straight line in decades.
My bunions are killing me.
You think this is the first time the world has ended? Please.
I buried two husbands before I was thirty
and watched Jerusalem burn twice.

The world ends all the time, child.

The trick is not to pretend it isn’t ending.
The trick is to keep someone at the table
when the soup is ready.
That’s how we begin again.

Gordon:
I am the voice of what could not be lived—
lives half-forgotten,
choices never chosen,
the shadows that pressed against my ribs
until they asked to be spoken.

Together we walk this text,
bantering between ruin and mercy,
turning ashes into witness.

These Midrashim do not offer answers. They open space for reflection. They invite us to witness what we often turn away from—pain, projection, complicity, grace.

They ask us to stay present where violence once rushed in. To see what power conceals. To imagine what mercy might rebuild.

This is not a return to innocence. It is a movement toward responsibility—toward a city not yet seen, where no one is cast out, and the sacred is held in the space between us.

If these pages stir longing, discomfort, or memory, let that be enough.

What follows is not a solution. It is a path cleared through fire. A witness to what breaks, and to what endures.

Four Faces Turned Toward the Whirlwind

And so, we turn from breath to vision.

For hatred is not the only inheritance.

There are faces that still look upon us.

Four faces turned toward the whirlwind,

 not to flee it—

  but to see through it.

The Lion guards the line

 between justice and vengeance.

The Ox bears the weight

 of what we carry in silence.

The Man remembers—

 even when memory burns.

The Eagle flies ahead

 to witness what has not yet come.

They do not speak.

They do not strike.

They look—

 and in their gaze,

  we are seen

   and summoned.

These faces are not idols but invitations.

They are the oldest language of vision—creatures who bear the weight of what no single human can hold. Each face mirrors a witness who appears in these pages.

· The Lion’s fire recalls Yohanan ben Zakkai, standing between zeal and survival.

· The Ox’s burden echoes Nicodemus, caught in silence and shame.

· The Man is Mary Magdalene, remembering even through grief.

· The Eagle is Barabbas, whose survival forces him to see what others have not yet learned to.

מ

Together they form a compass: justice, endurance, memory, foresight.

They turn toward the whirlwind, not to flee but to see through.

This is the work of the Soul. This is the work of Jerusalem Fumes.

Yet vision alone needs companions.

Every Midrash requires its keepers—voices who help us remember, interpret, and endure. Four such witnesses walk beside this text, each bearing a lamp at the edge of ruin.

René Girard — The Mirror of Desire

Symbol: a broken circle, shards reflecting one another.

He unmasks the scapegoat, showing how crowds bind themselves through violence, how sacrifice masks fear. When the victim lives, the system cracks.

James Hillman — The Image of Soul

Symbol: a mask half-lit, half-shadow.

Like Mary Magdelene, he calls us into the imaginal heart, where archetypes constellate and myth carries us deeper than reason. He reminds us that suffering is seed, not waste.

Diana Fosha — The Trembling Hand

Symbol: a hand outstretched, trembling yet steady.

She teaches that aloneness is unbearable until met by presence. Trauma heals not by doctrine but through the gaze of the True Other, and the Core Self rises again.

ב

Together, the Faces and the Witnesses form a double-quadrivium:

one drawn from the vision of Ezekiel’s whirlwind,

the other from the broken ground of modern conscience.

The faces remind us how to see.

The witnesses remind us how to speak.

They do not preach. They keep watch.

They do not close the story. They keep it open.

And in their gaze, we are summoned back to Covenant.

There are moments when a work no longer belongs to the one who carried it. It begins to breathe on its own, to take on its own gravity, and to step into the world as witness and companion. Jerusalem Fumes has reached that moment.

For the past three years, this book has lived inside me like a chamber of fire: twelve midrashim, a chorus of witnesses, a procession of sigils, the Mirror Trilogy, and a closing invocation that refuses to let the world collapse into cynicism. It is a descent and return text, a civic prayer, and a threshold manual for an age that has forgotten how to see.

Today, the Gate opens.

Beginning this week and continuing for a full year, I will release Jerusalem Fumes here on Substack. It will not appear as an inert manuscript or as a finished artifact. It will unfold as a living cycle aligned with the Jewish calendar, moving through festivals, fast days, and seasons of return. This is not simply a publication schedule. It is a liturgical procession, a journey through exile, mercy, violence, recognition, and covenant. It is a walk through fire. It is a return to the imagination.

Over the next year, this space will become the home of the full cycle of midrashim, their corresponding witness accounts, the sigils and symbolic images that carry the mythic charge, and the integrated reflections shaped through Rene Girard, James Hillman, and Diana Fosha. The Mirror Trilogy will arrive later in the cycle as the turning point of the entire work, and the final invocation will close the year at a still point in the turning world. Each post stands on its own. Taken together, they form a coherent covenant.

I am releasing this work now because the moment demands it. We are living in a turbulent cultural and political season. The rhetoric of our age drifts toward cynicism, fear, and spectacle. Souls are exhausted. The imagination is thinning. Jerusalem Fumes was written for such a time, as a mythopoetic act of repair, as an archetypal mirror of what remains possible. I want this work to breathe in the public square, to meet readers where they are, and to invite a slower and deeper way of seeing.

Today is simply the Gate. In the coming weeks, we will enter the first movements: The Scapegoat’s Path, The Gate of Breath, The Stone the Builders Refused, and The One Who Ran Away. These will lead us into the larger arc of betrayal, violence, mercy, recognition, and covenant. Each Friday, the next flame will be lit.

Thank you for walking this path with me. Many of you have accompanied me through earlier fragments, paintings, drafts, and private readings. Your presence has shaped this book more than you know. Now the work moves outward. The city is burning. The temple is falling. The world is trembling. And still, the Gate is open.

Welcome to Jerusalem Fumes.

Preface

This midrash is offered not as commentary but as lament and covenant.

It gathers fragments from Jerusalem Fumes—especially The One Sent Away, The Man of Sorrows, and The Mirror and the Threshold—to bear witness to what was lost and what must never be forgotten.

Read it slowly. Let each breath be an act of mercy.

Invocation – The Wound Before the World

Before the smoke rose, the covenant was already trembling.
Before the gates were breached, the angels were weeping in the wind.
And yet — beneath the rubble, something whispered:
Do not let hatred write your story.

The day began like any other — music, prayer, the fragrance of harvest. Then came the unthinkable. Not thunder from heaven, but men from the desert, carrying the memory of other wounds and believing another’s scream might cleanse their own. Every sacred narrative begins with a violation: a brother slain in a field, a city betrayed, a god gone silent. October 7th joined that lineage of days when the human heart remembered how swiftly it can unmake itself.

The Cry from the Ground

In Genesis, blood speaks:

“The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”

That cry rose again — from kibbutz soil, from Gaza dust, from every corner of a world that watched and could not breathe. It was creation itself exhaling grief through broken lungs. Rene Girard: Violence is mimetic before it is moral. Desire mirrors desire; hate mirrors hate. And when that mirroring gathers enough breath, it names itself holy. Yet beneath the ashes another current moves: what James Hillman called the imaginal soul — the faculty that refuses literalism, that insists meaning can survive ruin.

The soul knows that revenge is repetition, not repair. It knows blood cannot cleanse blood.

The Witness

I walked where the fire began. The sky was black, not from weather but from memory. A child’s toy lay beside a burnt wall, its melted edge shaped like a star, still glinting. I did not come to understand. I came to feel: to feel what it means when the body of a nation convulses, when mothers bury their sons and still call on God. There are no neutral witnesses after such a day. To watch is to inherit. To record is to remember. To remember is to bear.

The Mirror and the Descent

The mirror returns — symbol of conscience, instrument of pain. To see one’s own face in the eyes of the enemy: that is the beginning of moral life.

When I looked, I saw no sides, only reflections — the human creature cornered by its own mythology. We who claim to love justice must ask: Are we seeking truth, or triumph? The line between them is thinner than ash.

James Hillman: Soul makes meaning by descent — entering darkness without denial. Descent is not defeat; it is initiation. The Man of Sorrows walked that path, carrying not a flag but a cross. He did not justify. He forgave. And in that forgiveness, the myth of redemptive violence cracked. October 7th widened the crack. We saw what happens when sacrifice still governs the world.

If redemption is possible, it will not come from conquest but from recognition — from the slow realization that we are bound together by the suffering we inflict and endure.

Dyadic Repair

Diana Fosha: What occurs when horror meets tenderness? When two nervous systems, once enemies, tremble toward recognition?

This is not politics; it is biology. Mercy is not sentiment — it is repair. It allows the self to re-emerge from collapse. Somewhere, behind checkpoints and headlines, a mother dreams of another mother. That dream is the beginning of the world’s repair.

The One Sent Away

From Midrash V returns the scapegoat — the one who carries the sins of the people into the wilderness. In our time, who will walk that road? Whose suffering will we call necessary so we can feel pure again? The answer must be no one. The age of scapegoats must end. The only offering worthy of Heaven now is the relinquishing of our certainties.

The Covenant Rekindled

Every covenant begins in ash. Abraham’s knife was stayed by an angel. Moses found fire in a bush that did not consume. Prophets walked through ruins and still sang of return. So must we.

Our covenant is not with tribe or empire but with the fragile thread of shared humanity. To honour the dead is to protect the living. To remember October 7th rightly is to turn it from a banner of vengeance into an altar of conscience.

Rene Girard: The unveiling of myth — the moment the victim is revealed as beloved.

James Hillman: The re-animation of imagination — the gods returned as mirrors, not masters.

Diana Fosha: The transformation of terror into truth.

Jerusalem Fumes: Covenant — the breath that turns lament into song.

The Witness Speaks Again

I stood where the fire began.
My breath reeked of grief.
Someone’s photograph clung to a wall — two children laughing in the sun.
I could not look away.
Then I understood:
Memory is mercy when it refuses to forget the living.

There will be anniversaries, speeches, and flags. But beneath them, the soul keeps vigil. Each year, as nations rehearse their narratives, someone must return to the ashes and whisper:

“Do not let hatred write your story.”

Between Fire and Breath

Let no god be smaller than the child who died.
Let no creed be greater than the capacity to mourn.
Let no border hold back mercy.
Let no memory become a weapon.

If there is a prayer left for humanity, it is this: that grief not turn to stone, that rage not become religion, that we learn, at last, the sacred art of repair. The fire still breathes. And in its breath — the possibility of redemption.

Author & Edition Note

Adapted from Jerusalem Fumes: Midrashim Volume One by Christopher Lee Chang and Gordon Godbout (forthcoming 2026).

Image: The Stranger at the Gate: Oil on lead ground canvas by the author.

We continue our exploration of the role of renewing ancient narratives in cultural repair.

This evening is the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

For thousands of years, the synagogue reading has returned to the ancient rite of the two goats: one for sacrifice, one sent alive into the wilderness, bearing the sins of the people.

That image—of a trembling, innocent creature cast out for the sake of communal peace—still shadows our world. We scapegoat strangers and neighbors, rivals and family, sometimes even the parts of ourselves we cannot bear.

This Midrash was written with that ritual in mind. It asks whether atonement requires another’s suffering—or whether there might be another way.

~ From Jerusalem Fumes

The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, 
and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness. 
–Leviticus 16:22, ESV

Here we encounter the scapegoat directly, not as metaphor but as ritual. Before Egypt, before the Red Sea, there was another crossing — one few remember. It was not geographic. It was the passing of a vow between worlds.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the sins of the people are placed, by hand, onto a goat, who is then driven into the wilderness. What René Girard discerns behind the veil of myth, the Hebrew text makes plain: the mechanics of exclusion, the sacred logic of transfer, and the theater of guilt displaced.

This midrash dwells in that liminal moment, the collective breath held in silence, the weight of confession settling over the people, the eerie stillness as the goat disappears into the horizon. It is not casual. Or clean. There is a tremor in the ritual. A grief in the goat’s eyes. A question hanging over the people like smoke.

The myth hides the wound in the story. Ritual exposes it in blood. Together they form a loop; one covering, the other uncovering, each keeping the circle of violence intact. The act offers not just catharsis but a glimpse into how societies manage violence by sanctifying it. The sacred veil is pulled back, and what we see is not pure forgiveness but conscience at the edge of its old structure. It is the moment when the ritual still demands blood, but the heart begins to sense another possibility; mercy, recognition, a justice beyond exile.

This midrash asks: Can a society truly be healed by sacrificing the silent one? Or must we search for a deeper atonement, one that does not cast out but calls in?

This is not metaphor.
On the Day of Atonement, a goat is chosen.
Hands are placed.
Sins are spoken.
And the goat is sent away.

The people watch.
They do not cheer.
They do not speak.
Only silence follows as the animal walks into the wilderness.

Girard called this the heart of myth:
violence hidden by ritual.
Yet here, nothing is hidden.
The guilt is real.
The transfer is deliberate.
The sacrifice is known.

And yet something does not sit right.
The ritual shakes.
There is sorrow in the air.
The goat looks back.

This midrash stands in that moment
when the crowd is quiet,
and conscience begins to awaken.

High noon on the Day of Atonement. The courtyard of the Tabernacle swelters under an unforgiving sun as a hush falls over the assembly of Israel. All eyes fix upon the high priest, who stands in snowy white linen garments before the altar. At his side are two goats, ropes looped around their necks. One goat paws at the ground nervously; the other bleats, its voice high and plaintive in the surrounding silence.

The high priest casts lots, reaching into a wooden box with both hands. When he withdraws them, a small, marked stone rests in his right palm. Lifting it high, he declares in a clear voice, “For the Lord!” and approaches the goat to his right.

By this lot, that goat is chosen for sacrifice. The other goat will remain alive, for now. A ripple of relief passes through the watching crowd as the second goat is led aside.

The priests seize the chosen goat. It thrashes once, then stills beneath the pressure of trained hands. A blade flashes. The air splits with a cry, raw, high, and final. Blood gushes against the bronze altar, spattering robes, darkening the dust beneath. Some avert their eyes. Others watch, fascinated, sickened. The silence that follows is thick with iron and smoke.

Incense smoke rises in lazy coils from a censer, carrying prayers and the scent of atonement toward heaven. Yet all know the ritual is only half complete. The climax of this sacred day approaches: the moment when the second goat, the scapegoat, will bear away all their transgressions into the wilderness.

Hands did not touch the animal so much as grab the air around it—fingers flexing, stones ready, throats tight.

The goat’s eyes were rimmed in red. Its breath fogged in quick bursts, sour and hot, steam lifting from its nostrils like a small, terrified incense.

Hooves scraped limestone; the sound made teeth ache.

Children were lifted to shoulders so they would not be trampled by the righteousness of their elders.

The high priest turns now to the live goat, which stands blinking in the bright light, unaware of the role it is about to play. An assisting Levite holds the creature’s rope firmly. The high priest steps forward and places both hands on the goat’s head. He closes his eyes prays in a loud, fervent whisper. The crowd presses forward, straining to hear.

He recites the litany of the nation’s sins, every commandment broken, every act of injustice, every secret violence, every thread of envy and strife that has defiled the community. As the confession pours from the priest’s lips, the people tremble. Each person silently recalls their own failures: harsh words, dishonest scales, stolen bread, the blood of quarrels, the bitterness of resentments. The weight of collective guilt seems to thicken the very air.

The goat stands oddly still, ears flicking, as if listening. The High Priest’s palms remain firmly on its head, symbolically pressing the burden of Israel’s sins onto this innocent creature. Some in the crowd begin to weep softly, tears of regret and, perhaps, anticipation of relief.

With the final “Amen,” the priest lifts his hands away—slowly, solemnly.

He has transferred all the iniquities of the people onto the head of the scapegoat. A designated man, his garments ready for travel, takes hold of the rope. The goat bleats once more, a lonely sound that echoes against the courtyard walls. The man pulls hard on the rope as the goat resists, hooves scraping against the stone. Dust rises. The crowd watches with breath held, not in reverence but something closer to dread.

Under the searing afternoon sky, the man walks, then jogs, tugging the goat out of the camp and into the wild beyond. A line of elders ascends a nearby hill to keep the goat in sight as long as possible. Back in the courtyard, the people wait in reverent stillness. Children cling to their mothers; fathers wrap prayer shawls tightly about their shoulders. They all know that somewhere out in the wasteland, their sins are being carried away, far beyond the borders of their lives. The minutes stretch. The sun beats down.

Far off, a figure waves a scrap of scarlet cloth, then lets it drop. A signal: it is done. Yet not all that was laid upon into head was sin. Into the goat we pressed our envy, our rivalries, our fear of the brother who will not disappear.

Witness Voice
We drove him out, believing the desert would drink our hatred.
But hatred does not die in sand. 
Its seeps into the air, drifting like fumes, waiting for another brother to breath it in.

This is how the logic of scapegoating outlives the altar: what begins as ritual projection hardens into history. The one sent away does not vanish. He returns in rumor, in exile, in the whispered blame of nations who need a figure to bear their unrest.

The goat is gone beyond reach. The sins have been dragged into the wilderness like bodies from a plague. A faint cheer stirs, but it falters, uncertain. Something in the air remains unsettled. 
No one speaks of the look the goat gave back, eyes full of terror, of question. No one speaks of the bloodied twin on the altar.
The weight of a year’s guilt is gone, led away on cloven hooves to a desolate end. In the silence that follows, a breeze sweeps through the court, as if the Spirit of G-d were breathing forgiveness over the congregation. 

The high priest raises his arms to heaven and proclaims, “You shall be cleansed before the Lord.” 
A shout of joy, subdued but irrepressible, rises from the throng. Faces that were downcast now shine with gratitude. Neighbors embrace; a father lifts his child high; two estranged brothers catch each other’s eyes and nod, reconciliation in the making.

As the sun begins to dip toward the horizon, the people of Israel know that for this day, at least, peace has been restored between them and their G-d. The sins that once clung to them like a stain have been placed on another and banished into the empty lands. In the camp of the Hebrews, the smoke of the evening offering curls upward. It carries the scent of hope. 
And beyond the camp, in the vast and lonely desert, a single set of hoof prints leads to the horizon, bearing the darkness of the past away into twilight.

But out there, in the wilderness, the goat is not alone forever.
A boy with torn sandals and sun-scabbed skin walks the edge of the world. He follows hoofprints half-filled with wind-blown dust. He finds the goat collapsed beneath a twisted tree, its ribs heaving, its flanks streaked with foam and blood where thorns have scraped the flesh raw. Flies buzz. The goat jerks its head but cannot rise. The boy kneels beside it, not to rescue. Not to speak. Only to witness.
“I know,” he says hoarsely.
“I know what it is to be given no words. To be made to be silent.”
The goat lifts its head with a shudder, pupils wide and frantic. Their eyes meet, animal and child, two beings that know, without language, the ache of being unwanted. The boy doesn’t flinch. He matches the goat’s breath, slow and steady, offering his stillness like a balm.
In that gaze, something ancient shifts. No sins are undone. But the exile is no longer nameless. And the wilderness, for a moment, becomes holy.

GORDON’S MEDITATION: I WAS THE ONE THEY SENT AWAY

There was a season in my life when everything in me was called too much. Too angry. Too tender. Too brown, too white. Too G-d-haunted. Too Canadian. Too American. Too Soulful to be safe. And so they cast me out, with stones cast in silence—withheld invitations, eyes that once welcomed, now averting. I had said the wrong truth in the wrong room.

Girard would say I became the scapegoat. It wasn’t guilt they saw. I was cast out for the nakedness they felt in the presence of my seeing, and naming, the fractures in themselves they had worked so hard to deny.

At first I raged. Then I wept. Then I wandered. There is a wilderness that isn’t made of sand but of silence. The place between once-belonging and never-again. The goat in the text bears the sins of the people, but what of the goat’s Soul? Hillman would ask: What happens to the psyche that is asked to carry what a community will not face? What becomes of the shadow denied, when it’s given hooves and driven out?

I know what becomes of it. It walks. Alone.

I walked there. Years. And in that time, something shifted. Fosha would name it: transformational recognition. When I finally met someone who didn’t flinch, who didn’t need me to be smaller, who said, “I see you,” I began to return. Not to the community that cast me out but to the one who kept walking inside me.

I began to paint the truths that had driven me out. I sang them. I wrote them. I stopped asking to be let back in and began building an altar in the wilderness.

This is what the ritual never shows: that the scapegoat has a Soul. That he can speak. That he becomes, in time, a priest of his own kind. The goat remembers. And forgiveness, if it comes, comes wild.

Hillman reminds us: The wilderness is where the G-ds first spoke. Fosha reminds us: Healing comes through presence. And Girard shows us: The one who is cast out often carries the seed of something new.

In my exile, I met others.

The dreamers. The doubters. The dissenters. It wasn’t temple. It wasn’t church.

We wept beneath stars unclaimed by empire.

In that silence, I found respite from judgment. I heard something deeper than exile, a voice that called me home.

In this story, a goat is chosen, hands press down, and sins are carried into the wilderness. The people wait in silence, uneasy as they watch it disappear.

This moment invites us to reflect on how exile, projection, and sacrifice still shape our own lives.

These questions turn us toward the scapegoats in our stories—the ones we have cast out, or the times we ourselves were sent away.

When have I felt relief when blame landed on someone else—without questioning whether that relief was just?

When have I been cast out not for what I did, but for what I represented?

Can I trace the wilderness in my own story—the spaces where I felt exiled, yet marked by meaning?

Where do I still carry the weight of others’ unspoken fears and projections?

Where am I tempted to “cleanse” by casting out instead of confronting what needs to be faced?