Archive
05/19/12
Dayenu
Whenever I cast back, over the past sixty-seven years, To that day when I was liberated from Dachau's cadaverous stench, I remember how I gasped an everlasting sigh of gratitude, Assuming that the horrific tortures, the gruesome murders Would serve, forever, as a cautionary tale of shameful debasement, Alert the appalled world, in the looming future, To the first signs and sounds and smells of the slightest resurgence, And I recall repeating, in my speechless, emaciated jubilation, "Dayenu . . . Dayenu" — this should be more than enough.
And I also recollect how, till the early sixties, at least, While those of us displaced persons, refugees, survivors Were still relocating to new lands, learning new languages, Shaping, from the barest scraps of dignity, new identities, new names, Piecing together a semblance of new homes, new families, We really believed that the mass exterminations were just an aberration, Believed that Eretz Israel would be a place of milk and honey, Despite our ironic UN-mandated displacement of its Arab landowners, Which our Zionist arrival from smoldering Europe was creating,
As we incessantly built our settlements, lit our Shabbas candles, Said our Shemas, our Kiddushes, our kadosh-kadosh-kadoshes, Our reverential Kaddishes, atoned during the Holy Days of Awe . . . Until, in 1964, the PLO started targeting Jerusalem's tender womb, And, in 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan breached our borders, And, in 1973, the same enemies engaged us in the Yom Kippur War — Putting us on notice that Ishmael's followers of Muhammad Intended to make us suffer, for having stolen their space, Letting us know, after less than three decades, that we were doomed.
And now, many altercations, skirmishes, incursions later, Many terrorist bus explosions, hotel and street-café bombings later, Many Intifada missile strikes later, by Hamas and Hezbollah forces, Inspired, supplied, guided by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iran, Many rants later, by Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Whose genocidal ideology is as evil as paroxysmal Hitler's, I suddenly realize that my Dayenu was a delusion, That a second coming of the Holocaust is, indeed, close at hand, As near as Tehran's first nuclear-tipped Judenrein-reprisals.
05/19/12
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