My musings are below but first a poem
Erev Yom HaShoah
On this night the stars
can twinkle like yahrzeit
memorial candles. In the sky
so-called heavenly bodies are as lively
as kids’ sparklers - their light’s
urgent, shimmers
in the inky darkness, translates
six-pointed yellow stars into
these white resiliences.
After the gases
and the fires, the amazing
energetic thrusts
through the chimneys
they’re our bright nudges, sharp
as glass. When we remember
a child called Anne or Moshe, Yitzak
or Rachel, David or Ruth
our desert memories remind us
of descendants for
Sarah, Abraham. Their perpetuity
was a promise. We count
and count the stars, each
a shining substitute
for a faithful ancestor,
a gravestone.
--- Puah
Well, yesterday I heard that my muslim brothers and sisters are posting their rages into their
own cartoons. This is good - a better place for offenses taken than the streets and a lot less harmful than torching the buildings and cars - or actually killing people. So now shall we Jews also be outraged and start bringing physical harm and pain in retaliation? I'm certainly hurt by the cartoon that has Anne Frank and Hitler in a big bed together. Ah Anne, you've been used by so many people to shore up so many arguments ... But I'm not going to start counting them again.
There are quite a few holidays before
Holocaust Day [
Yom HaShoah] which comes on April 25th [27
Nisan]. But I don't know ... I feel like posting this poem anyway, today. In honor of Anne the almost-still-child - living in the cramped attic from her 13-15th years before being shipped off to be killed in Bergen Belsen: She wrote in her diary, "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and so impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because inspite of everything I still believe that people have a good heart." I like to think of the way children respond to the world. It's good for me to remember, especially after watching all the hate on the tv screens. Did anybody watch the Olympics last night? It was such a good change to just see all the countries coming in together with smiles. [Also the "renaissance/baroque" production was fabulous but that's for another day.]
