Israel Blog
6. Blog: 17th Sept 09
Who is Josef Kryss?
- Laibl Wolf, Dean, Spiritgrow – The Josef Kryss Wholistic Centre
Finally, my fifth continent in as many weeks, but this time to my spiritual destination, Eretz Yisrael. The modern day pilgrimage has none of the colour, dust, richness, and discomfort of the days of old. Modern person flies enwombed in a gleaming metal eagle winging across oceans in less time than the twenty four hour pas de deux of the sun and earth's daily dance.
It's in the stones. On those stones are engraved the tread-marks of thousands of years of history. These same stones bore the boldest of history's warring armies, marching through and across this miniscule piece of earth called Israel. These stones witnessed their victory as well as their annihilation. Wars would be won yet none survived the test of time - except Jerusalem's stones. Jerusalem of gold gleams its spiritual radiance off the stones, reflecting a regal setting sun. I see ordinary people leading ordinary lives in a city that is anything but ordinary.
The most recent historical revival of Jewish life in Israel came on the heels of the ravages, inhumanity, and philosophical perversion of the architects of the holocaust. The Jew who finally found spiritual refuge through land ownership in one's own country was a very different Jew than the Israeli of today. I recall my first visit to Israel in 1967. The Jew was lean in appearance, a working class Jew. He possessed a coarse sabra exterior but in whose breast beat warmth, courage, and conviction. These Jews rode Egged buses with egalitarian ease, their eyes reflecting purpose and significance.
Today's Israeli seems different: loud, honking, impatient, living for the moment, and maybe less certain of the raison d'etre of his country. But the holy stones of Jerusalem are also trodden by our heroes. The country stands on the shoulders of those who leave their families regularly to stand at the borders, defending life, property, and history -steadfastness in the face of world pressure and neighborly enmity.
At this moment I am sitting on a street bench in a busy Rechov Yaffo where the noisy impatience is sublimated into the cacophony of trumpet horns heralding a permanent roadway log-jam. But I read these metallic blasts as the call of the Shofar. Israel needs soul. It has demonstrated heart and might. Now it seeks its national Neshama – a quest that seems quixotic in the face of political horse-trading that seeks to carve up the proud Biblical horse into an awkward Obama-ed giraffe, Netanya-ed on a grill and served up on a Hezbollic Iranian platter.
Is this what the heroes who stumbled out of the camps, dazed and skeletal, had in mind when they spent night and day tilling the soil of a country that for two thousand years had been a faded painting on a bare wall?
Josef Kryss survived Hitler against all odds. His son Leo tills the soil of many a Jewish community, especially in the Holy Land. Our center, Spiritgrow, bears the name of Josef Kryss, his father. Who is Josef Kryss? To many his name remains a mystery but the informed know that he possessed the hero's courage, conviction, principles and vision that now breathe the breath of Jewish life into communities where it might have otherwise faltered and died an ignoble death. Josef Kryss was a survivor, and he passed on survival skills to family and world.
On this Rosh HaShannah, I acknowledge this man of mystery whose vision eventually led to the planting of the flower of Spiritgrow in a distant land of Australia. Such motivation contains the inner spirit of the Land of Israel, a spirit that beat in the heart of this man. And the renewed Ohr (creative energy) that will course into the world on this Rosh HaShannah will find its way to the most distant of communities, via the Land of Israel, Israel being the gateway for the new energy that will characterize the year 5770, as taught by the Kabbalists. This mystical energy of recreation emerges from the Ein Sof (infinite Source) and flows through the 'Land of Israel' that is also within the Neshama of each person. It is the isseruso d'l'eyla (response from Above) to the initiatives from below (isseruso d'l'tata) initiated by the heroes of our day – those few who died so that many could live.
posted by Laibl Wolf at
5:54 PM
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