In the space of the last 48 hours, I’ve received 2 email messages from friends – and people I trust – that took me aback. The text of the email included the following, along with graphic images:
This week, the UK debated whether to remove the Holocaust from its school curriculum because it offends the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet… However this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
This email is being sent as a memorial chain in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on, and humiliated… Now, more than ever, with Iran among others, claiming the Holocaust to be a myth, it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
I’m all in favor of the world not forgetting. However, the claim itself isn’t true. Turns out this is an email rumor that has been circulating since at least 2007, and there’s another that goes after the state of Kentucky. Why Kentucky I don’t know. Who started – and maintains – this particular rumor mill, I also don’t know.
The origins of the rumor? A 2007 study found that some teachers in some British schools were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust or the Crusades because they imagined it would upset some Muslim students. From there, we rapidly get to an official discussion about re-vamping the entire educational system. Why is this “truth” so compelling? I suspect some combination of legitimate concern about anti-Semitism and the kind of knee-jerk freak-out that we are so comfortable with (all the world is out to get us, in every time and in every place) (and oh yeah, did I mention that “they” are taking over?).
Anyway, I recommend the following websites for debunking of this and other “truths” that pop up during the day: Snopes, Factcheck, or the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact.
Eleven years ago this week, I wrote this Chanukah love poem to my sweetheart and spouse Bruce. Poetry was very new to me, as was the whole marriage thing. I haven’t thought about this poem in many a moon, but it popped into my brain this morning over granola. I was tempted to tinker with it, edit and revise – but then, that wouldn’t be the truth of who I was as writer and lover then. There’s a naivete about the writing that says: you haven’t yet come up against the full meaning of either marriage or poetry. Both are far more difficult than anticipated, but that’s the truth of what I know now. Time wreaks havoc on our ego and our perspective both. The written word (and its cousin, the picture) makes sure we can hold it all at once with equal measure. Happy Chanukah!
Chanukah Love Poem
I give myself to you wrapped in light,
wicks dancing the length of me
entwined at spine and heart
my eyes, stars to illumine the night
heat from the hidden places
fires that will not go out
in the face of howling wind
blaze that surrounds
but does not scorch
candle by which to read
the secrets of the universe
brightness washing
the remote corners
and beacons to mark your way.
I offer this lamp-light freely
this sunrise and sustaining flame
this firestorm of love.
First, about this week’s poem (see it here): it is one of my rare “happy” and “uplifting” pieces, published in Drash. Why should a weekly Torah portion that brings us the tossing of Joseph into a pit and his subsequent sale to the Egyptians, sexual hanky-panky (twice), jail time and the beheading of a baker inspire such (dare I say it?) dreamy writing?
I love dreams. I almost never have nightmares and my anxiety dreams almost always are about travel (being late, missing the plane, taking hours to pack). Occasionally I’ll dream about interiors (houses, apartments, office buildings) – usually a sign about something going on in my own interior (brain, heart, guts) that I need to attend to. Is it time to rearrange the furniture or my schedule? Is the scenery from this new window satisfying? Is someone trying to break in to my psyche? Mostly my dreams are just plain interesting. Even when they are preposterous, or scary, dreams don’t weird me out. Not even when there are aliens or knives or things that would terrify me during the day.
Dreams, the kind you have when you’re asleep, contain the jumbled-up truth and are worth paying attention to. Joseph knew that. He just didn’t know that sometimes it’s better not to mention that you’re the sun to everyone else’s moon.
The dreams you have while you’re awake, no matter how far-fetched, also contain the truth. Tamar – the protagonist (to my mind) of a sidebar in this week’s Torah portion – knew that. Married to one of Judah’s sons (Judah being Joseph’s big brother) and then another, she approached Judah for the hand of his 3rd son, still young, but very much alive (unlike the first 2). When it’s clear that he is not holding up his side of the bargain, she takes matters into her own hands. Tamar dresses as a prostitute, entices Judah, gets pregnant, and is eventually brought before him for punishment (i.e., burning). When confronted with his belt and other items, Judah – to his credit – owns his participation in the dirty deed.
Tamar gives birth 6 months later to twins, one of whom – Perez – is the ancestor of King David. Which goes to show: what one dreams up during the daytime should not be dismissed out of hand. It could not have been easy for Tamar to put on a veil and sit by the side of the road, but there was something in her that was committed to setting things right. Was she supposed to sit in her father’s house forever?
If ignored long enough, our craziest and most revolutionary daytime notions are likely to show up at night, where the scenery is a bit more surreal. Which brings me back to What the Daytime Cannot Contain, the Night Will Embrace. These are my daydreams. Hope they appeal.
Want Santa to bring you 2 additional cup sizes this holiday season? All you have to do is buy the new miraculous push-up bra by Victoria’s Secret. Now, call me picky, but this seems a bit of an untruth. I don’t think that Santa or any heavenly host is going to grow my breasts overnight just so that I can put on that sexy black whatever and look fabulous. This is what I would call a definite sleight of hand.
I’m not being a grinch here. I’m in favor of hair coloring, make-up, slimming colors, and an occasional high heel shoe (though preferably on someone else). Men and women should be able to dress up and down whichever way they want. But leaving aside the question of free will (after all, can anyone know what they really want in a consumerist & gender-bound culture?), this push-up seems over the top of untruth. Everyone understands that make-up comes off and 4 inch heels mean you’re really 4 inches shorter – but what are you gonna say when the cleavage you present to the world turns out to be fake? Pardon my preaching, but I’m reminded of this totally paraphrased, quasi-greeting card saying here: If you tell the truth, then you never have to remember what version of the story you told to whom.
Enough with that. I just found out that one of my poems has been accepted on Scribblers on the Roof, a quite cool place for Jewish fiction & poetry. The poem takes place well into the book of Exodus (you’ll recognize the scene) and I offer the link here just in case you want to skip ahead.
Sometimes I get lazy. Case in point: the title of this week’s blog entry. Case in point: this week’s Torah poem. I went straight for the easy pickings: Jacob’s famous wrestling match with an angel/human while he waited by the Jabbok for his brother Esau and a gang of 400 men. Agreed, this is rich poetic material, and somewhat easier reading than what follows: the strange give-and-take between the brothers and the whole terrible story of Dinah’s rape (or not)(see: The Red Tent). To be honest, I was less interested in Dinah than in her brothers’ murderous reaction: the slaughter of an entire village of men as they lay recuperating from circumcision. I felt bad about my disinterest, still do, so I avoided the whole darn mess.
Anyway, I wrote the first draft of this in the aftermath of a Hamas suicide bombing in 2003. The destruction and senselessness seemed to fit with what the angel/human tells Jacob after he wins the wrestling match: you have struggled with things divine and human – and you have prevailed! As reward, Jacob is now to be called Yisrael, God-wrestler, but I wonder if human-wrestler would have been more apt. Not just for him, but for all of us: we spend so much time trying to knock the the next person/tribe/nation/god to the ground – but we never really win. We lick our wounds, limp around, pray to the heavens, and do it all over again.
Stopped in for a couple decafs for the adults & 2 old-fashioned frosted donuts for the kids. Spotted what I thought was a foreign language tattoo on the forearm of the guy working the cash register and asked him to tell me about it. Turns out the word was “faith”, written in Old English. Ooops, now I see it. Bonding, showing off – or both – I unveiled the “truth” on my own arm. That led to a spirited conversation with all 3 employees in the place about whether Jews could get tattoos.
There I was, a Jew with a tattoo, talking about Jews with tattoos when one of the employees rolled up his sleeves to show me small Hebrew words (with vowels, no less), one near the crook of each elbow — Adonai Yireh, God will see. And a large Jerusalem coat-of-arms up near his shoulder in full color.
Why these particular tattoos? His father is Jewish, his mother Puerto Rican. He doesn’t really know anything about Judaism, but his father is a kohen, a priest, and this is the symbol of his tribe. The words are somehow related to the coat-of-arms. Next year he’s getting his mom’s family emblem tattooed on his other shoulder: it makes him feel proud of his multiple heritages.
One small problem. The lion of Jerusalem belongs to the tribe of Judah, not the priestly tribe of Levi, and God-will-see comes from Genesis: they are the words that Abraham spoke when the angel provided him with a non-human offering in place of Isaac. It’s sometimes translated as “God will provide”. I doubt that the expression has anything to do with the coat-of-arms, but I could be wrong.
Not that any of this matters.Like the guy with “faith” written on his arm, who said he felt close to his ancestors, this young man is totally invested in his connection to a history he doesn’t really know – except that it’s regal and glorious – and he wants that heritage marked on his body forever, somehow in lieu of the real (and illusive) thing.
This week’s parsha (Vayetze) has one of the most famous lines in Torah, spoken by Jacob as he escapes his brother Esau’s wrath & heads towards his fate: a life with the daughters of Lavan and all the intricacies and complications thereof (you try marrying 2 sisters and you’ll know what I mean).
He awakes from an amazing dream, dreamt while using a rock as a pillow. Angels are climbing up and down the ladder to Heaven and he (Jacob) is promised descendants spread out as the dust of the earth. Upon awaking, he says “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I, I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”
I, I did not know where I was. How many times have I had that feeling? I’m here, but I’m not even sure where here is. And I certainly don’t know where here is leading me. I imagine that’s what it must have felt like to Jacob, a guy on the run.
My grandsons go to a Hebrew day school and although I’m less than happy with some of what they’re learning (like only boys can wear a kippah) (and that’s the least of it), I do love this song they sing: HaShem is here, HaShem is there, HaShem is truly everywhere… up, up, down, down, right, left, and all around. This is a poem about that very thing, about the possibility of finding God (or your heart’s desire, or your destiny, etc.) at any moment and in any place.
This is one of Bruce’s favorite poems and one of my earliest. I wrote it after reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. It’s the first poem that came to me half-written while I was lying in bed (aptly enough) and I have loved it ever since. It was also one of the first times I felt like I could actually call myself a poet & it was my first published piece, made public by Gumball Poetry, now defunct.
Sunday, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my soon-to-be 3 year old grandson Rami. Bored with eating the fabulous whatever I had set in front of him, he decided it would be fun to race his plastic Triceratops on me. Rolling the sleeve up on my left arm, he galloped a bit with the dinosaur and frowned. Leaning his entire 35 pounds across me, he yanked up my right sleeve, exclaiming “there’s your word!”
As far as Rami knows, people have words. His mom has pictures on her body & I’ve got a word on mine. English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, who cares? It’s a word and it means something and it’s always there. To him, my arm doesn’t look right without the black letters.
It’s my word, alright. It’s there when I sleep and shower. When I have sex and when I do the dishes. In long sleeves and tank tops, it’s there. Isn’t that the whole point of it — to change the body forever, willingly? Unlike the small lines that appear around my eyes or the extra pounds that are piling up around my menopausal waist, I chose this change. I chose it – with forethought and a little bit of risk – and now, it is forever part of the definition of who I am.
So, my dearest grandson: word up! You captured it 100%, dude. That is a word indeed. Take your purple dinosaur and go wild. The truth ain’t going anywhere today.
Here’s the set-up: our narrator Ashley Kemp – who happens to be dead – has a tattoo of the word “Truth” laid out in flowery black letters on her inside upper arm. It was inked there to cover up the scar from a bullet hole sustained years earlier during a robbery where her best friend was murdered by the thief. Ashley identifies the perpetrator in a police line-up because of a date (as in 1/10/01) inked on his arm. He goes to jail. Happy ending… except that it’s the wrong guy. It’s the brother of the guy who’s now in prison who actually did the crime. Ashley figures this out and when she goes to set things right, she is killed once and for all.
This got me to thinking about truth, a word Ashley used as a cover-up of sorts & a talisman to keep her focused on springing the innocent and catching the guilty:
1. The truth can get you killed. Especially when you refer to it in front of bad guys.
2. It’s almost impossible to know the truth when you’re looking at a police line-up after you’ve been shot & your best friend has been killed and you want someone – anyone – to pay.
3. A tattoo can serve as bread crumbs to a crime.
4. Trying to reconstruct the truth of the past is even more difficult than figuring out the truth of the present. Time warps even the best memory.
5. Television is not the truth. The people are way too good-looking and clues always turn up just when you need them.
6. Advertising is definitely not the truth.
7. The truth may or may not set you free. It set free the innocent man in this story line, but got Ashley killed (and in the end, I’m sure that it didn’t matter one whit to her dead best friend). Dead Ashley seemed rather nonplussed by the entire turn of events (she was the narrator, don’t forget), but that doesn’t seem right to me. Or truthful.
8. Where human beings are concerned, there’s no such thing as objective truth. Even something as simple as “the tattoo was black” can run into problems. It was dark blue, for starters.
9. There are always consequences to truth.
10. The more you know, the more the truth changes its once solid shape.
And what a story it is, the poor guy. He marries at 40 and his young beautiful wife can’t conceive. After pleading with God, Rebecca becomes pregnant with twins – who immediately start to kick up a storm with each other in utero. Not a good sign of things to come — the boys, Esau & Jacob, have a nasty case of sibling rivalry that lasts well into their young adult years. Not only that, but Isaac favors Esau while Rebecca (and God) favors Jacob. It’s a hell of a story: Jacob trades his brother’s birthright for a bowl of lentils and and subsequently enters into a conspiracy with his mother to steal the dying patriarch’s final blessing. Soap opera deluxe.
Lots of dualism here. Infertility and conception. Fighting twins. One red and hairy child, the other… not. A man of the outdoors versus a man of the camp. Blatant parental favoritism. Husband-wife deceptions and disagreements. Many broken hearts.
This week’s poem is a riff on the issue of separateness and attachment. It was written in 2003, shortly after the deaths of conjoined twins Laleh and Ladan Bijani. They died in the middle of a controversial and complicated surgery to untangle their attached heads. The surgery was their fondest dream – they were tired, after 29 years, of being unable to be alone.
I am going to brag a bit here and tell you that this poem, “Elegy With Reference to Our Conflicting Desires”, won the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize sponsored by Cutthroat Magazine, a cool little publication you should check out.
