The words no longer move me
The rhetoric is old hat
The Greeks were here long ago
The orthodox drivel doesn’t even bother me
Like it used to,
Having been dulled by time and personal failure
There are no new chidushim!
Only poets now,
Have something to say
Rilke, Heine, Heschel,
And Shlomo still makes me cry
Although I have no induction to act.
Rummaging through my father’s papers (at 3 am to avoid his rage!)
Papers going back to WWII, internship, prison camp,
the HMS Dunera , Camp Tatura,
I find a booklet addressed to the British High Commission in Canberra,
with an honorific “To His Excellency the British High Commissioner”
(why did he never show us this growing up?)
Handwritten, blue ink, perfect penmanship, cursive,
excellent English (from an Austrian) going through all the trials
and mistreatment these 2000 prisoner suffered
under the hands of the brutal merchant marine officers and enlisted guards.
The penmanship was remarkable. I am sure this had not been read in 80 years.
His pain, his survival, even mentioning at his first
great grandson’s Bar mitzvah three days ago…how 82 years ago
he too underwent this rite of passage only to never see his parents again
4 years later (1939-40). He gets up early to let me know he has to
redo his speech because he must make his great grandson aware of how
lucky he is. This is his legacy. Survival and luck, a guardian angel having
spared him 3 times during the war. His belief in an angel. He must insist his
progeny understand this luck. He wakens me to revise the speech.
This war left so many scars until this day.
A patient presents with symptoms,
Then, as if 70 years meant nothing, suddenly
Launches into memory, must tell me, as if it has to do with her current pain.
Everything has to do with the past. Her trauma.
Speaks of her escape from the Lachwa ghetto…
Tears streaming down her cheeks…
Marrying another survivor in the DP camp
Who then abused her something awful over many years.
The past is ever present, infecting our consciousness
and producing ongoing symptoms.
After this diatribe,
Watching her sacred body
Having doggedly survived
Two years in the White Russian forests
Sleeping on snow,
With this broken tortured abused soul housed within,
What wise words do I have for her symptoms?
Is she really here for yet another label?
A Latin diagnosis that will soothe her seeking mind?
She knows much more than I could ever grasp!
Of human bondage and divine indifference
For, after all,
Let’s agree,
She’s really suffering from
Betrayal.
The body in betrayal
Her parents, culture, ethnicity, Rabbis
Her husband, son, her very sense of survival,
Most of all her God.
I watch my parents
Perched like doves
On their couch arm in arm
Resigned to aging and the loss of faculty
Yet, with each other, they face the uncertainty
Of the future
In their nineties
I remain amazed as to their optimism
And celebration of daily routines.
I am not far behind
And wonder who will I share this perch with
Inconceivable
After years of bickering
To spend so much time with one individual
Inconceivable
To sit on this couch
Listening to orchestras perform
Identifying musical arias, CNN blasting during dinner,
No overt questioning of
What will be…
No raging but moving ever so gently into that dark night
Pure resolution.
Life has enchantment
The bird’s egg mysteriously appearing on the balcony
The Jerusalem sun setting
Its golden hues pouring into the living room
The quiet Sabbath morning
The sweetness of dawn’s air
Their “wall of love” with twenty something great grandchildren,
placed like trophies, these are their real accomplishments.
They give out blessings! To one and all who enter
These are the currency trades they deal
These move them. They traffic in blessings!
The pouring over photo albums
And the rehearsing of life’s victories in War and Peace
The identification of songs and artists
Movies and heartthrobs
Memories of people who hurt them
And those who they laughed with
Little else interests them
Until families arrive
Each bearing their own relationship
Their own babies
Each to be held and cooed over
This is happiness,
Seeing the next and next generation live on
Biologically
If not spiritually.
Life as blessing others.
I watch in awe
(And horror)
Their son…
Knowing their past
Happy in their current bliss
Despite infirmity and limitations
I intervene less and less
Gone are the trips
The wineries and the museums
The entertaining them, their need for trips,
The ride to and from restaurants has become tedious
They much preferring snacks from their love perch
The lounge couch.
Mum sleeps with her feet on dad’s knees and he gently strokes them.
Each visit of mine a little less
Less of this
less interest in that
They talk to each other
In bed
On their perch
In innocence and purity
About this child or that
Avoiding the painful
Seeing only the pride in accomplishments
They are satisfied with life
It has lasted this long
It has endured as they have
The aperture of their lens is humble
And they bask in the what is…
Not the future.
Past and present combine here
Memory and landscape merge
Images and songs
Meld together
There is a flow
Of past aphorisms and truths
Of claims and prides
Of resentments and grudges now laid to rest.
Our time
Our lives
Interwoven
As time passes without stop
It respects nothing and nobody
Not even God
Who is just as subservient to time as we are
Does He get tired?
Surely!
Our puny lives
Our self-assuredness
Our piety drives Him crazy.
Memory blurs
Times conflate
Facts become fictionalized
Fictions become facts
The media is now the very message of truth
Despite its murky intent
And our impoverished intent to make sense of it all
Likens us to a laboratory rat in an experimental cage
Watched by an omnipotent and omniscient scientist
In a white coat streaked with blood.
In the sanitized bourgeois streets of Rehavia
The intellectuals mix with the Haredim
Each locked in his or her own ideology
Political religious and gendered identities
My father walks to his chapel
Where he is feted as the elder
And they present him annually with a token of his survival.
What has changed?
Each of us desire validation
Crave the respect of colleagues
So that we leave a mark, a trace, an image, a reshimu
That we were here,
That some memory lives on,
That we were not forgotten,
That our lives were not meaningless,
So we create and then perpetuate the medieval divine image within…
He who will hand out merit badges and mitzvah points…
He who needs our sacrifice to make it meaningful.
As if we need such a motive today
After the silence, the deafening silence, of the rising smoke,
from the crematoria.
But it is time to wake up from this spiritual slumber
And see reality in all its horror
The horror of dementia, the ICU, the tremors and rigidity,
the incoherence and disorientation,
Not as some medicalized pathology,
rather as the true representation of modernity
Of technology
of genocide
of mechanized killing (from the first machine gun to Auschwitz and Hiroshima)
the last 100 years of brutality.
Of current spirituality and the violence
fundamentalism produced so effortlessly in all faiths
Of unbridled patriotism which becomes xenophobia
Of modern politics and its use of hatred to gain votes
If we can just see though the mirage of technology to its future use in
controlling more and more of our choices and our ethical values and see how
violent it has become under the mirage of its making our lives better and
adding value to us consumers.
If we can just go back to the collective wounded brutalized child and see how
it motivates and produces the violent collective adult, we claim is so mature.
If we can begin to validate the childhood trauma at the collective level…
Then possibly this insanity might awaken to its own reality.
I close the door on my parents having looked in on them, checked in on them,
They lie like two children locked in each other’s arms
In innocence and purity.
The world is alright after all.
