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Older?

“Grandpa, how come

You’re not older,

like a hundred?”

asked five-year-old Yehuda

On New Year’s Day.

Taken aback, I replied.

“And how come you’re not twenty?”

“Because I was only born

just five years ago.”

“And I was born

seventy-five years ago.”

“Oh, now I know,” he concluded.

But now I’m not so sure.

How do circumstances

So far back in time

Make me who I am today?

Perhaps only last New Year

I was born once more?

Perhaps I should take

Only one year at a time

Now that my birth has receded so far.

And how old, then,

My beloved State of Israel?

Remote circumstances,-

European Horror

Unheimlich orientals

Socialist arrogance

Ancient God-given grievances

Fumbling enemies,

Messianic aspirations,-

All rehearsed

Endlessly.

Can we become just

One new year old?

About the Author

Alan Flashman was born in Foxborough, MA, and gained his BA from Columbia, MD from NYU, Pediatrics, Adult and Child Psychiatry specialties at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Bronx, NY. He has practiced in Beer Sheba since 1983, and taught mental health at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University. Alan has edited readers on Therapeutic Communication with Children (2002) and Adolescents (2005) in Hebrew, translated Buber's I and Thou anew into Hebrew, and authored Losing It, an autobiography, and From Protection to Passover. He recently published two summary works of his clinical experience (both 2022) Family Therapies for the 21st Century and Mental Health in Pediatrics and a short novel in Hebrew "NO WAY!" about the abuses of "parental alienation" in Israel.