from Loose-Leaf Scripture

When Abraham was sent to sacrifice his son, before he raised the knife, he remembered how it was when God first ordered him to leave Ur and enter the Canaanite desert.

He had been so alone he had no companion but his shadow, and so lonely that he talked to it.

If he met people, what good did it do him? Even those who understood him couldn’t believe in him and his God. Sarah loved him, not his ideas.

So self-absorbed was Abraham that it was only by chance he discovered his wife Sarah was beautiful—although compared to her all other women were apes. As they waded through a stream he saw what he thought was the reflection of the moon in the waters. Looking up, he saw it was Sarah. That night Isaac was conceived.

And when Sarah gave birth, God remembered all the barren women in the world—they had sons as well. And the blind saw, the lame ran, the dumb spoke and the mad became calm.

At Isaac’s bris Sarah had enough milk in her breasts to suckle the babies of all the guests. From these are descended the righteous Gentiles and converts to Judaism.

Now Abraham was about to kill his son, and he knew that this would make him not merely the only, but also the last Jew.

He brandished the blade in a slow-motion steel-glittering arc, and said,

“If ever a man was more faithful than any human could be, I am that man!”

Something grabbed his upraised arm, and from behind him a voice,

“If ever a god was more faithful than any human could be, I am that god.”

A ram was found to substitute on the consecrated stones. That beast had been a long time ready. God made it in the twilight of sabbath eve in the first week of creation. As its origin, so were its ends extraordinary. Its sinews were made into the strings of the harp on which David composed the psalms; one of its horns was blown at the end of the revelation on Sinai, the other will proclaim the end of the exile.

from Bible Land Blues

Apocalypse

December. Baal keeps running windy fingers
over Mt. Carmel’s curves, flogging back the trees.
He moans, and loud, and for days on end.
Someone’s shutter bangs bangs bangs
in inanimate copulation.
“It’s too cold,” says Asherah, the sleeping earth,
“not now . . . ”

Unlike Baal, I do believe Spring will return,
and unlike Adonai, I’m no longer intrigued by Belief.

The State of Israel doesn’t coincide
with my condition of Israel
which is realized, it seems in motion alone,
mapless as desire,

existing by instants, furtive as a glance,
though ready to steal itself some realness,
an Israel whose scriptures are innocent
as a dirty joke, and truthful as travelers’ tales.

I glimpsed it yesterday—the sea was windless,
the sea Baal’s been whipping white all month,
now still as though time itself had stopped
under sunset gold of incandescing cloud-edge
(my wealth—fairy gold and temporary gems).
I looked and looked, stupid and lucid,
for a moment and finally arrived.

from The Judaism-X Files

October 7, 2023

October seventh changed everything. It was suddenly Tsarist America. We were back in the days of the Kishinev pogrom. The New York Times became The Bessarabian, declaring that the wicked Jews had brought it all on themselves. IDF “genocide” was the latest iteration of the Blood Libel.

I knew better than to offer corrective history lessons. The needful rudiments of geography are no longer taught in American schools. There already is a Palestinian state—it’s called Jordan.

And what could history teach gay and lesbian progressives who believe Gazans hurling homosexuals from rooftops are “allies?”

Most dispiriting was the schizophrenia of American feminists, who closed ranks in solidarity with a Hamas proclaiming “Rape is resistance.”

The keffiyeh became the moral equivalent of the cholera blanket. 

The wound that truly festers is the cowardice of Jewish progressives, who promptly identified themselves with the aggressors. Liberal Jews had long since wholeheartedly embraced American victimology, recently rechristened “intersectionality.” This is the belief that suffering wins every moral beauty contest.  

So the good liberal Jews, ever eager to “fit in,” played along, erecting Holocaust museums—gruesome secular shrines to replace the synagogues they no longer attended. Schindler’s List and the comic book Maus served up the agony of the Jewish people for the entertainment of gentiles.

Not surprisingly, many younger Jews declined this invitation to second-hand martyrdom, and turned to an antisemitic wokeness—which at least looked like strength.

Self respect and regard for facts was exchanged for the seeming security of being “good” Jews—the “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “Jews for Justice in Palestine.” Just like the Jews who trusted in being “good Germans” when being German was anything but good.

The Antizionism of October 7^th was Antisemitism, as the targeting of Jews and synagogues since demonstrates to those impressed by evidence. Antizionism is mob madness motivated by murder. Liberal churches and the nice white people who attend them like to candy-coat their Jew-hatred by calling for “peace.” But to quote from the Book they have hijacked in the world’s most infamous case of “cultural appropriation,”

They mock the wounds of my people, saying “Peace, peace!” where peace cannot be.