What we know for sure, what we can feel in our bones, is that it all took place in the desert and the hill country. 

In the Jezreel Valley and Jericho and Jerusalem.

Among the tribes of the Canaanites.

When a god was carried from the south, from the wilderness.  A god of war and rain.

The shepherds brought their first lambs to be sacrificed on his altar. The farmers brought their first grain in early summer, their first fruits in fall.

The men were circumcised. 

Back before Ashkenazi and Ukraine, and pale skin and glasses.  Back before rabbis and bibles, before even the First Temple!

I was a Canaanite.  But not eating certain things.   

And you, who I sit with at brunch:  you were on line with me at our hilltop altar.  You lugged sacks of plums and lemons; I brought dates and persimmon, scraped from the rocky ground.

The blood of my lamb oozed onto the still wet blood of yours.

Who was our God?  Was he the god, even then, of love thy neighbor?  Of pay your farmhands?

There is no image of him up here.  Our minds work in the empty space.  Beyond the altar, the valley stretches out… 

Please bring rain so we can stay here.  Be with us, give us the advantage, as we fight for this valley.

With empty grain sacks, washing our hands, we stop for a moment to catch up, to kibbitz.  We share a local slang—the first Hebrew.

“You have returned within me my soul with compassion; abundant is your faithfulness.”

Because it’s not a given.

At times the dream blazes, and I can’t turn away.

But for most of the night, I shrink and withdraw, go off to hibernate in some wrinkle, or deep down near the thalamus.  The last of me.

Now the heartbeat dominates and breathing emerges.  This is the time of the body.  Of cells that can work in peace, like the great upwelling of plankton each night.

I was not at my best today–lashed out, was a bully.  And on the worst days of my life, when I crossed the line—still you restored my soul in the morning.

If there was punishment, it took other forms.

Each night, I’m reduced to a single spark, and you watch over me and keep me alive.

And you do this for billions of us.  Shelter us.  Till the sun gets closer, then rises; the light spreads…

And you guide the return of personality across the brain.

You do this for my wife.  She sleeps, wrapped in the comforter, with one hand protecting her face.  You’ve always seen fit to continue her in all her details and give her the gift of the day. Thank you.

With someone else, the exception proves the rule.

One morning you did not restore my mother to her bed-ridden body, to that jewel box of dissolving skin.  There was no transition, no opening of the eyes, no separation.  Just warmth and enclosure, her cheek against your hand.

All the different subcultures and opinions made a crude body politic. The parts did not quite reject each other; the livid stitches had healed over into just skin.  We could lurch around, drink water from the stream, appreciate the flowers, grunting and cooing at them.

We had lactating breasts for the growing population, and the genitals of both sexes; we used birth control and we didn’t.

And we watched the news.

Then one night a man appeared at my bedside in the dark.  Restrained me in iron cuffs.  And for hours, he ran his fingers over me, searching out the lines between parties, between races.

I had always been indecisive, of course, but I could function.  I heard voices, but they were whispers; the overriding voice was me.  And I could control my limbs, my movements, with decent precision, passing laws meant to help.

But his fingers—it was uncanny the way he knew where to press.  As if I had scurvy, my old scars reddened, opened… 

The cognitive dissonance I’d always lived with began to shriek.  Two voices shrieking incessantly, clawing at each other.  Right there on the bed, I started to hemorrhage.  And separate.  There is my hand, bleeding from the wrist into the blanket.  To move it now would take telekinesis.

I can’t unite the voices anymore.  The man is kneeling at my bed again, his fingertips searching.  Mercifully I’m going away.  I hate him, my enemy, my destroyer.  With my last bit of consciousness, last bit of will, I vote for him.