TELL May - July 2012 - Emanuel Synagogue

Portrait
no mind can understand
Come, lie beneath the pecan tree
Come lie with me
Come let the blossoms fall
As we lie beneath the pecan tree.
Our skin receives the petals all
Come you, come me
Beneath the lovely pecan tree.
I smell your sweat. I touch your arm, slippery
with the olive. You take him on. For a Jew there is no
genuflecting, no salaaming; somehow or other, he
has made you his equal. You defend the people, the
loved and the loveless, like any prophet-guy would.
Wrestling partners, stripped, circling warily. With his
own compassion in your heart, you throw him to the
ground, your hands slipping on his oiled arms; your
weight is all you have against his strength. You hold him
down and look him in the eye, man to man. Of course, he
has brought you up that way. To challenge him. To resist
authority.
You’re smiling at me. Yes, I know I am using the
male pronoun and the male god-idea. It is for literary
smoothness. Be good enough to recognize the bias. For
instance, it is always Neanderthal man. We of the West
are descended from Neanderthal man. Who has ever
heard of Neanderthal woman? Neanderthal woman
covered the steppes of Russia in the Paleolithic Age. Have
you ever fantasized about a Neanderthal woman?
The Catholic dogma of my upbringing asserts that
all three persons in the one god are male. The creative
force unaided by any female principle! Let’s call it the
Hairy God Fallacy. The thatch is slightly mitigated in the
Eastern churches; they marry, and allow for a somewhat
feminine Holy Ghost.
The female being is your ikon. It takes you into the
Presence. Old Rabbi Akiva said that the Shekhinah comes
down in two instances: when a man studies Torah, and
when he embraces his wife. My long hair cocoons you
in your skin. Shall I anoint your feet, and dry them with
my mermaid’s tresses before you drown? Is that what
happened to the Galilean? At that moment did he drown
in ecstasy?
Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone!
He made them in His image.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!
You and me on the unmade bed. Your fingertips
on my skin speak of shipwreck and screwing up, of pain
and falling darkness. With each caress, from me to you,
from you to me, the depression lifts. You are absolved in
the blessedness of my understanding. I get you.
Do you get me? I fled from Rome and unreality
(my Iraqi friend, Murshid, calls me a new Jew). I fled
from the seven veils of silence. Belief and silence and
obedience and not looking and not listening and having
every mercy on yourself and no mercy on the mummies
and daddies of the little sacrificial lambs, pray for us, is
www.emanuel.org.au
the Roman litany against a collision with the actual. The
veil of the temple must never be rent.
I suspended belief. I was found after wandering
the desert for forty years. The G-d of Israel happened to
be passing. He beckoned. Abraham Heschel and Martin
Buber and Professor Vermes took me in, then and there.
They folded me in their flowing garments, and from their
souls flowed honey and milk, dilating my parched heart;
their skin was warm, and the hairs on their arms smelt of
resins and myrrh.
I loved them with the love of Ruth for Naomi.
Your people will be my people, and your G-d will
be my G-d too.
So look into my Jewish woman’s eyes and see me.
Hold my breasts in your palms as the pomegranates
ripen. Smell the fig and the mandrake, come into my
garden.
With each caress, from you to me, from me to
you, the fear lifts. I am absolved in the bliss of your
understanding. You get me. A thousand kisses deep.
You sat beneath the Holy Tree
While Buddha’s words flowed over thee
Came forth from cave and sky and sea
I saw you then, you looked at me.
I saw a man, old as the sun
His face serene,
His race well run.
I want your sort
Ancient, full
You show me how to be and be.
You hold a stick,
And strum some strings
They come to see
They come to hear and be with thee
To join your shul
And join the one
Who hums and hums
Who eats a fig
And lies in peace
Knowing all, and knowing least.
Humming beneath the Holy Tree.
Beneath the holy pecan tree.
Your little shul
Attracts them now,
Abandon church and holy cow
No longer sacrifice the son, they come
From Book of Common Prayer
To deeper meaning, from despair.
You say you know the least of all
As petals fall, as petals fall
There is no meaning, anyhow
You show the way, but don’t know how.
Continued on page 30.
9