The court buries its instruments,
stone and tree,
sword and scarf,
as if to say:
This was once the hand of justice,
now let the earth eat it whole.
But our court has never adjourned.
Its gallows stand in the wind
from Shushan to Sobibor,
its scarf wraps throats in silence
from Worms to Warsaw.
The Shekhinah,
exiled mother,
stands beneath the blade,
her hair matted with ash from a thousand pyres,
her arms gathering children who will not return.
The sword of history
is sharpened on the whetstone of our centuries,
and its edge hums in the black air of Auschwitz.
Here, the wheat is not burned —
only threshed by boots,
ground in the teeth of hatred,
poured out in the barns of the pit.
Here, the shechita is not a ritual
but a machinery of precision —
a throat cut not for sanctity,
but to drain the lifeblood of a people
into the gutters of Europe.
Yet still,
the Shekhinah shelters,
even as her own neck bends under the knife.
Even as the sword drinks deep,
she cups the last breath of her children
and carries it across the abyss,
into the unburned chambers of eternity.
And when the final instrument
is buried in the graveyard of empires,
when the sword lies rusted beside the stone,
she will rise —
the scar at her throat still visible —
and speak the word that makes the wheat grow again.
Inspired by Talmud Bavli Avodah Zara 62b
The Gemara challenges: But let him bury the wheat in its unadulterated form. Didn’t we learn in a baraita with regard to the instruments used for imposing capital punishment: The stone with which a condemned person is stoned, and the tree on which his corpse is hung after his execution, and the sword with which he is killed, and the scarf with which he is strangled, all of them are buried together with him, as it is prohibited to derive benefit from them.
Rabbi Yaakov Emden's responsum presents a fascinating application of ancient principles to an 18th-century practical situation. When an experienced shochet (ritual slaughterer) sought to acquire "a sharp and polished knife made from the finest metal" and purchased an executioner's sword, he created a halakhic crisis that illuminated fundamental questions about spiritual contamination.