Prose Poem: My Contract with the Jews

Born of a mother and father who dodged cattle cars and dug forest holes for cover, I became at conception a permanent member of an exclusive tribe from which there is no easy withdrawal or temporary suspension.

I read the fine print haltingly, the Hebraic alphabet running left to right, in our centuries-old sanctity for a single higher deity, in our scrolls of Torah and Talmud and our rabbinical courts of law, and in the rigorous debate echoing through impermanent temples.

There is a gravity, a joyful timbre to the songs of prayer and biblical passages whose words I can chant by heart, their hieroglyph engraved like a tattoo of despair and reminiscent glory.

My signature is a lone ink blot on the page, our family cut mercilessly short in number, and yet as a collective we are perennial. Bell-shaped lilies stubbornly connected to shoots underground.

A quest compels us across physical space in the quantum world, in the recharging of our digital lifeline, in our drive to cross tested boundaries.

As battles rage in a fraction of promised land, we bear the ravaging human cost of tunnel war. In my safe room, I hear the clamor of voices of revulsion, blame and moral rectitude. I shirk back to the margins, which I have metaphysically inhabited for ages, familiar with the illegible scrawl, the blood red seal.

I can find no trace in our long journey of the proportionality statesmen of the world demand.

Only a vestige of faith, a converse if mythical Jewish narrative that lives in small exacting measure across time.