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03/29/10 - (2)
Passover 2010
This wondrous first evening of the Passover Seder, Though it's just below sixty, With the sun rapidly reenacting its dramatic exodus, I sit outdoors, alone, on this restaurant's patio, Reveling in my unorthodox festival of deliverance. And I'm filled with a reverential sense of kinship, Oneness with those fathers of my fathers' fathers, Those scions of the most ancient heroes of my faith, Those desperate ragtag captives of Pharaoh's ghettos, In the time of fabled Moses — Elohim's voice. How my solitudinous heart quietly echoes theirs, tonight, Those Israelites from the olden days of the Pentateuch, Laboring as slaves to the chains of racial hatred, Religious discrimination, humiliation, isolation, Struggling for the life of their tenuous, almost-lost tribes. Don't imagine all that history is wasted on me; it's not, Not for a millennium B.C.E. or A.D., not for a second. This "celebration of one" I'm conducting, this Monday eve, Covers a vast diasporan planetscape of civilization and time, And I'm the dubious beneficiary of their accumulated weight. Tonight, I feel a deep spiritual obligation to write a psalm, Some wise, emotional proverb David might have composed, To encapsulate the entire past and future of his people, Poetic music his children's children might, one day, recite Long after Armageddon has settled into mythic dust. If only I were a modern-day patriarch Instead of an isolate, a pariah, a lonely creator of secular verse, I might tell my son, who abandoned me, About the horrendous pain I've suffered, over the generations, Starting long before my Lord sent me forth, out of Egypt. Sadly, I'm not anyone approximating such a mensch. Neither did I give up my life, in fifteenth-century Spain, Confessing my Hebraic roots, in an auto-da-fé, Nor sacrifice my greenish-blue left-wrist tattoo To a prussic-acid gas chamber and a coke-fired double-muffle oven. Mine is a history yet to be recorded, By the next Mosaical patriarch to summit Mount Sinai, The next David, of wise king and lyrical Psalms fame, The next Ben-Gurion to found 1948's State of Israel, Five millenniums after Palestine, Canaan...if it is to be recorded.
03/29/10 - (2)
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