Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
This world you value so much is just a vapor.
The human love you strive to find will die with the flowers,
And the work you do will come to nothing.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
All your philosophy is missing the mark.
Your efforts at understanding come nowhere close,
And there is nothing you can grasp about nature that will not one day slip out of your hands.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
There is more than what this world seems to offer.
There is greatness outside that of man.
There is understanding too great to name.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Source of all loves you.
He gives power to the weak,
He gives His wisdom to those who seek it.
He give purpose to the toil of this lost and painful world.
All you need do is ask,
all you need to do is sit at his feet,
Call him Lord, call him Father,
And let him carry you “close to his heart.”
He has always been there,
He will always be here,
And it is never too late to come home.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
“Here is your God.”

A day in love is like a thousand years,
With a heart beating but time moves no more.
I know the timelessness of loving you,
Is God-like as in Psalms ninety verse four.

To be in love with you gives me my soul,
Your love is the breath of life from Heaven.
The love my lungs breathe is like the spirit
God breathed in Genesis two verse seven.

Your love shows me mercy, grace, good and truth,
Patience, forgiveness and absence of hate.
It awes me like when God showed Himself in
Exodus thirty-four seven and eight.

The more I love you the simpler it gets,
It’s something I just naturally do.
Love’s forever inscribed in my heart like
Jeremiah thirty-one thirty-two.

I remember my dreams of a holy place,
a library where I ran, just a little boy with other boys,
with a great stained glass window filling up the space
on the pointed ceiling above the sacred text
that left me perplexed
and mouthing a few syllables when I could understand,
and wishing to feel the soft cloth on my head,
over a short haircut that I didn't have.

I can't truly say if it was a dream,
but I remember walking outside into the desert with those little boys, feeling jealous of their kippahs,
and eventually we stopped at what I thought might be like a stream,
but was only a canal in the wasteland.
The tumbleweeds whispered and rattled,
but no snakes slid out of them with a tail that rattled quite the same.

I grew up though, far away now,
with the heavy weight of knowledge on my back
and the feeling of sweat on my brow.
I have heard a lot, and that soundless world where I spent all of my time looking and none of my time listening
is gone. I listen and I look now,
and I tell a girl about my observations
while she marvels and tells me what to do with them,
but there is nothing much to become
when despite my ambition
I hold myself back with the most unholy things.

To be submerged in world and Word, in Word
That is the world, in words that are the Word
Written in holy fire, the eternal Song
In which and through Whom the world is breathed into being

The Torah scroll unrolls the years of creation
The pages of the Talmud frame the law
As in the statute-structure of the ark
Or as a tabernacle of the soul

To read the words, to chant the Word, to sing -
To be the yad in the great Hand of God

Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter.
                                      --Kafka*


This is a day
like the many days I've spent

empty handed
among the shadows at dusk

that cast no reflections
in the reflecting pools

and hold no illusions
as to what really is illusive.

But on this day my illusions
are changing

imagining that for once my world is based
upon three things;

The rule of law

The five books of your hand

And you, the prophetess that wrote them.

And as required
I will build a hedge for you.

And if this hedge
should ever over grow,
I will then trim it
like a true guardian of the law

Allowing none other entry
and I alone will hold fast

to the five books of your hand
and the only other existing copy.

after Yona Wallach (1944-1985)


Let's have it!
I came for the show!
Strip the Torah
to its essence
where not one word can hide
caress it with your Yad
singing in a lovers voice
an ancient burlesque
and when it's done and dressed again
parade it dancing through the congregation
a fitting encore
to a fine performance
as we almost fall over each other
to touch it
slipping spiritual dollars into its belt
the temperatures rising
like a finished prayer
that even makes the Malachim sweat
in their heavenly heights.