Standing still for a minute in the park, it’s like a Disney movie—the birds and squirrels gather round. 

What’s the difference between this bird, with his mohawk and orange beak, turning sideways to look at me with one bright eye, and the new leaves swaying behind him?

Plants and animals split off from an earlier life-form.  And on the sea floor there are vegetables with mouths.

The tulips, so upright and alive, like a teenage choir.  And this squirrel rising up on two legs to stare at me.

Look at those shoulders, arms and forearms, chest.  Even a navel!

No doubt we communicate creature to creature.  I try to beam him good will.  Can’t eat good will.  He scampers off, with a single curse, then leaps onto the trunk of a tree, powers up the spiral stair.  Our one encounter in this life…

And the tulip.  Little ice cliff of flower flesh. 

The birches are radiant in themselves.   Then amplified by sun from a clear sky, bouncing off them, off other trees, off people carrying their coats–all these waves colliding in a brilliant haze.

Bird with the orange beak, perched on a low wire fence.  I know this will be brief.  But it’s actually lasting a while, through many jerky frame by frame movements of your head… 

Branch of new leaves, you work your magic on me.  You’re not going anywhere.  I sink into you, smiling.  Pure life shining.  Something in me lets your swaying slow my heartbeat.

My mother went down into rainwater and barely-restrained slop.  The water immediately stained the wood, attacked.  It wouldn’t be long till…

My mother who was so neat…

So lonely.  I see her forever embraced by God.  If everything ended in her bed in the nursing home…

No one was more loyal.  She needed you.  To stay sane, stay alive.

Through you she could have a little mercy on herself. 

And she was so obedient.  Not reading Hebrew, she put everything she had into chanting the Shema.  I heard a wild regret in her voice, and piety, and beyond that a kaleidoscope—a fundamental sweetness, love she couldn’t express, the true pain of all that resilience.

Same with the way she took a hand from her walker, reached up and kissed the mezuzah.  The wish to be a good girl for you.  What more could you ask for?

But if there is no you…

*

Me, I like to think of a you.  So October 7^th is, somehow, for the good.

I’m walking, gifts wherever I look.  From you, but indirectly.  Don’t picture you releasing this breeze from your hand… 

More that you, the unknowable, were slightly manifest, in some Eden many removes from matter.  You touched in a point, from which realms unfolded, a whole cascade of invisible infrastructure—each of your qualities a separate…reality.

I like to bathe my head in these silvery thoughts. 

But I know I’m an animal.  What are the chances we’ve discovered the truth?  That you really don’t want us to mix meat and milk?

Atheists and aliens look at me with pity.  My golden retriever is peering intently into space, asking for and receiving your guidance.

Do life forms on other worlds also believe in you?   There you separated the methane from the sulfur dioxide…

Throughout the universe, we all pray together.

Part of me is heavy, knowing the truth.  ‘Truth is (desolate, soul-crushing) beauty’.

Take away the you.  Forbid me to use it, to go there.

And part of me is lighter, cleaves a little bit to you, lifts. 

I do know you fashioned my wife.

As a being in a solar system, I can only know with certainty that this laugh of hers, on the phone with a friend, is Light. 

You imbued her with some of your nature.  Kissed her and sent her off, excited to see what she would do.

I guess many people feel this way about those they love…

I was, to my shame: pale, ineffectual.  Not in my body.  Never carefree.  Slogging, each day a crisis.

In other words, a neurotic Jew.  Could see it in the mirror.  Italians played sports, fucked like porn stars, laughed in big groups at the table.  Friends, family, they leaned and merged, their boundaries fluid…

While I was, in my genes, with the Hasidim–inbred, nearsighted, never looking up from the nitpicking Talmud.  Doomed to miss out.

Which is why I hated them.  Had the urge to bully, knock off their hats, rip out their sideburns.

Decades like this, decades.  The stain, like sexual abuse. Tried to block it out.

Shabbat, the high holidays, Israel, the chai and Jewish star—no.  Jewish authors—no.

The false Messiah, whose followers shat on the Torah—that excited me.

 A Jewish woman—no.

*

And then, yes.  Can’t speak honestly on these early dates, come off like a Nazi.  Held my tongue, listened. And then, slowly, slowly, through osmosis, through love…

The root—Canaan, 2000 BC.  Archaeology of Jericho.  Parchment scrolls.  How did the Torah, not that I read it, come together?

With her on Friday night:  prayers, but then singing, dancing, hugging.  Good wine.  I’m…not quite motionless. 

Proud Jews.  Jews who go to the gym. With bass voices.  And the teachings.  Love thy neighbor.  Oh, my older sister did that, showed me.  I formed, much distorted, around it.

The Psalms, the Creation, Abraham and Sarah.  God, so often needy, but having his moments. 

The Hebrew letters—archetypal, etched, with mysterious antennae.

One night, I bust a few moves!  Flapping like a chicken…

*

And then, October 7^th.  Feels like a Holocaust.  And the backlash.   ‘Hitler should have finished the job!’

Then you know what?  I am part of the us.  Not quite singing Hatikvah.  Not wearing a yarmulke.  But smiling sadly at those who do.  Nodding to the young man wearing tzitzit in the park.  To the scared but defiant. 

Still no flag in the yard.  Sympathetic to the people of Gaza.  But suddenly alive and mourning the centuries of pogroms.  The blacksmith killed by his neighbors. 

Friends with the Jew who bought a gun.  Admiring, not just Sephardic joy, but Ashkenazi study.  Thin Hassid davening on the train—I want to buy you a steak.  I’m smiling at you, even subtly pumping my fist.  You don’t look up, but that’s ok. 

Not just Kafka and Einstein, but you, and the thousands like you pressing their foreheads to the graves of the Tzadikim.  Even the landscape around—the Kineret and the hill country, the dry lifeless soil that I once recoiled from.  

It’s random, to be born Jewish–right?  I don’t know anymore, but a little like Israel itself, when Jews first came from everywhere, many more than expected–my empty places are filling out, with something both familiar and new.