After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Hear, O Israel

Hear, O Israel At age sixty-four, waking in the night not with a hard-on, alas, but indigestion, I, son of Jews from the shtetls of Poland and Russia, of a father with the eagle profile of a sheik and a mother with a goyish nose, give my testimony for the Moslem world, maligned as fanatic and backward, even evil. What a privilege to have been to Morocco, where people are robed like in the Bible, and over the high Atlas to the Sahara, the beginning of the silk route to Asia . . . and Tunisia with desert roads that end in salt flats or an oasis, that’s the chance you have to take when you set out on your journey, and to have breathed in the dust of Cairo, the germ repository of the Nile . . . and holy Jerusalem, built over a spiritual fault that can never allow peace, but heightens the spirit . . . and beyond, the long overland route to Afghanistan on a bus, with intimations of the Gobi Desert and China in the nostrils. My God, how much I’ve learned in that world, not least, that I was a man. Those Wise Ones, they look in your eyes and see what you’re worth, and I don’t mean in camels or Cadillacs—though baksheesh, a gift, is never amiss. Still, they are the ones who always give gifts, making one’s soul flower in gratitude. That world that feeds the soul taught me that I was a man and had a soul, and if mine 161 is a tormented one, at least it experienced itself fully on the journey through the desert, squatting in the slender shadow of a palm tree, of a broken-down bus, or among oleanders with robed men, drinking mint tea bees hover over. It is a world where, unlike ours, men like each other, where, looking deep into your eyes, men are not afraid to take your hand and say, Come stranger, break thy journey and linger awhile so that we may open our lives, our hearts to each other, before we move on refreshed. . . . How many times have I lugged my valise through the turmoil of peddlers at the bus depot, down a dusty road, past shops and hovels closed up in the midday heat, past long walls that shut you out absolutely, revealing only white domes against a blue sky and a minaret with loudspeakers for the recorded muezzin call at prayer times, or sometimes even a white-clad figure on the high balcony, chanting to the four corners of the town for all to come and pray— a long, weary trek. Any voyage there begins at dawn and lasts all day, but after dust and thirst, you might arrive at green palm groves crisscrossed with rivulets, and at the heart a blue pool where holy beggars are washing themselves and someone is always doing his laundry. There is somehow a hotel nearby or at least a tea shop to come out of the sun, a melon to share, and coarse desert bread one could live on. It is of its essence 162 that after you go beyond despair, lugging that damn suitcase in the sun, plagued by beggars and flies, surrounded only by desolation, poverty, and waste, and are ready to give up, this world can transform itself from a garbage dump into a garden, enveloping you in attar of roses. On my floors are rugs I have brought back, a bit of . . . The Mysterious East. Here, where so much is phony, the wool retains something of the caravan, the nomad flocks, that makes cats go crazy on it. Woven into the patterns with bits of straw and dung are fragments of a forgotten language, glimmers of meaning . . . about ancestry, about honor, memories of our history even, that special strand reminding me what Jew means: one who remembers, one who has it woven into his being to remember. Tonight, with the Shema—Hear, O Israel—on his lips, let this old Jew give his tribute to the Moslem world, that has preserved our connections to ourselves, to the old times, that can remind us what we have lost, that can still teach us what we were, who we are. Hear me, Israel, before the insanity of the world, the lack of love for our brothers, leads to the destruction of us all. I seal this testimony...