Day 2 – The Journey of the King from Aftersight

2 Elul 5775
by Rebecca Goodman

The journey of the king is not a story. I cannot tell stories. I can give impressions. So this story of this journey is really a way to speak about the journey I cannot describe. His journey is the journey that we all take—each day—throughout our lives—yet what remains so remarkable about his journey is that it is his. That it belongs to him—and that each journey though sharing common threads with all those around us—really, in the end—is only about us—only about our joy and grief and individual experience. So that when I talk about his journey—though you may feel as if there are common elements that join you to him—you need to recognize that—for him—the journey is unique—individual—painful and surprising. That when he wakes up in the morning and realizes that this is the journey he’s found, he also realizes that it’s not the journey he had been expecting. So that now—when he wakes up in the morning—he has no choice but to take the journey he has been given.

Through the passage he knows well he discovers only that he is lost. Each and every object around him is a reminder of how far he has gone into a world he knows nothing about. He has no choice. The journey is the journey that reveals how inconsequential time becomes when faced with the overwhelming and undeniable probability of end. Why begin. Why start out. What is there left to gain. He looks at the picture of a young boy. He asks himself how. How has he arrived here and how is it that the passage he felt he knew so well through the hall to the kitchen has now become a foreign landscape riddled with questions that cannot resolve. Each passage through the house is a sequestering moment of action. Where can he go. How can he go. Why should he. The beginning seems like the surface.