In every tribe and culture, a wedding is cause for a celebration. And all of those celebrations involve some degree of negotiation among the couple, their families, their cultures and their traditions to make the experience meaningful and powerful for everyone.

Rabbi Adam Greenwald, director of the Miller Introduction to Judaism program at American Jewish University, said when it comes to Jewish nuptials, even born-Jews will have differences. Is one a secular Zionist and the other Modern Orthodox? Reform and Conservadox? The combinations seem endless.

But, for Jews by Choice, there is the added wrinkle of following Jewish practice while making sure beloved non-Jewish family and friends feel included.

When Jazmine Green, who went through the Miller program, and Jeremy Aluma started planning their Jewish wedding, Jazmine’s Catholic mother revealed that she had always dreamed of watching Jazmine’s father walk their daughter down the aisle. The Jewish practice of having both the bride’s parents walk her to the chuppah and remain there with the groom and his family throughout the ceremony was unfamiliar and she resisted it.

Greenwald, who each year officiates at the weddings of 15 to 20 couples in which one person is a Jew by Choice, often meets with non-Jewish families early in the preparation process to talk through these issues and answer questions. He recognizes that, for some parents, there is real sadness when a child chooses a different faith.

“I try to honor those complex emotions and assure them I only want to help create a special, meaningful day for everyone,” he said.

He suggests couples create booklets to explain Jewish terms for attendees who may not be familiar with them and that they make sure the officiating rabbi offers a few sentences of context before each stage of the wedding. These can range from a word about the Sheva Brachot, or Seven Blessings, to explaining to a Christian family that a traditional ketubah is written in Aramaic, the language spoken during the time of Jesus, as Rabbi Anne Brener, professor at the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, has done.

Of course, the wedding itself is not a classroom. Jazmine and Jeremy Aluma kept their printed program informal and friendly with questions such as, “What’s up with the circling?” Their explanation of the ketubah concluded, “It also puts a monetary value on Jazmine’s head so she can hold it over Jeremy for the rest of their lives.” About the glass-smashing, they wrote, “If you’re a Jew, you know that as a people, we’ve overcome adversity and make up a thriving global community. Being torn apart encourages us to grow and gives us the opportunity to come back stronger and more resilient than before. We break a glass as a symbol of this natural process.”

Des Khoury, another student of Greenwald’s, and Moshe Netter found a way to recognize many of their families’ traditions in their ceremony and afterward. They were married by Moshe’s father, Rabbi Perry Netter, who explained to the guests that the chuppah, which symbolized the house Des and Moshe were creating, was open on all sides to indicate that everyone was welcome.

Des is a first-generation American. Her father is Lebanese-Egyptian and her mother Armenian; her family’s faith tradition is Catholic. Her wedding program included ways to express congratulations in Hebrew, English, French, Arabic and Armenian. And after the ceremony, Des and Moshe emerged from yichud, or their moment alone, to the horah, followed by an Armenian song and folk dance, and then an Arabic tune. By that time, she said, everyone was dancing.

The material of the chuppah itself can be inclusive. Brener said she once officiated at a wedding beneath traditional Ecuadorian fabric brought to Los Angeles by the groom’s Catholic family.

Music, explanations and words of welcome are nice, but when it comes to actual participation by non-Jews, every officiating rabbi will have his or her own halachic opinion. Because the marriage liturgy itself can be completed in about 10 minutes, many feel there’s room to add appropriate ritual. The mothers of Des and Moshe, for example, lit a unity candle under their children’s chuppah.

Jessica Emerson McCormick, who was born into a Jewish family, researched clan tartans before her marriage to Patrick McCormick, whose Catholic family is Scotch-Irish. Jessica and her mother found a festive blue, red and yellow pattern, and had it woven into a length of cloth and made into a custom tallit for Patrick, as well as special kippot for him and his father to wear at the wedding.

Along with that plaid tallit, Jessica and Patrick’s ceremony included several rabbi friends reading the traditional Seven Blessings in Hebrew, followed by members of Patrick’s family reading English translations. Both of Jessica’s children from a previous marriage were on the bimah, and her son wrote and read his own interpretation of the seventh blessing.

Rabbi Susan Goldberg at Wilshire Boulevard Temple said having non-Jews read translations of the Sheva Brachot is “a nice way to include friends and family in the ceremony.”

Because all translation is a kind of interpretation, Greenwald said he also approves of participants riffing on the basic idea of a blessing to create something that especially speaks to the couple. He finds that the needs of the couple can get lost while they’re making sure everyone else is happy, and sees one of his jobs as helping them stay focused on what they need, how they can be kind and compassionate, but still have the wedding they desire.

“The most important thing,” he said, “is that the couple under the chuppah have a powerful, meaningful experience of commitment.”

Because the wedding day marks a transition to what Jewish tradition sees as a new life, many rabbis encourage couples to go to the mikveh before the ceremony. Often for Jews by Choice, it’s their first visit since their conversion and a chance to reflect on how much has changed since then.

It wasn’t clear at first that Patrick would choose to become Jewish. When he did decide, Jessica said, his family was supportive. Like the families of the other Jews by Choice interviewed for this article, his parents were happy that he had chosen to include religion in his life.

Des, who said she spent years searching for a spiritual practice that felt right to her, also found her parents accepting. “To them, it’s all prayer and God. They’ve even started looking forward to invitations to Shabbat dinner.”

Jazmine’s mother, too, witnessed her daughter’s spiritual seeking and was glad that she found a place that felt like home. In recognition of that, she even gave up her front-row seat and walked with her husband and daughter to take her place under the unfamiliar chuppah.

The officiating rabbi, Ari Lucas of Temple Beth Am, spoke to Jazmine and Jeremy about coming together with the support of their community. He reminded the guests that they were there not just to witness. Together, this mix of family and friends, cultures, languages and traditions would help — and go on helping — the couple begin their new life together.

read more:www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses

www.marieaustralia.com/evening-dresses

It harassed free fall, it was affected by the friction force in the absence of the tefillah, the walls became more taxed and accelerated with gravity that exceeded the acceleration of time, gravity triggered the rest that was in the outside walls and made different kilometers apart, with the free fall at more than 9.8 km per second. Beneath the ground the dimension was made lower than the intake embankment, creating placements in revealing swaps in the solar position, for anyone trying to level the force of fall and its acceleration versus gravity around bodies that were moving accelerated and scattered. The earth constantly hurried its mass to preponderate and go where something or someone could rescue it, the air was inked with an offer in the cases of the imprisoned airs, which from the graves adjoining the valley of Kedron kidnapped its areas of lavender physiognomies to link it to the mantles of the Tallit, which in some cases arose with thousands of souls from their graves, to receive the cushioned rubble between which they were electro-magnetized with the blankets, and the wiring they generated, conceiving that they would gather them in the naive and demiurgical plates, for the holistic retransmission of the tract to Patmos, starting from the Cyclades all the way to the Dodecanese.

The sensitive ex-karst plates of Patmos trembled through the passageways of the Cyclades, which permeated in a ratio of the first reflection in the distance vision that approached between both physical episodes, but the second axis of reflection was made aware in an unknown perspective close to the underwater elevation of the Profitis Ilias, close to the entrance sinkhole, between the variables of the inter plates that were assigned to the reflective tapes of the Beit Hamikdash that mutated to the Megaron Áullos Kósmos. Here the omega will resume a minimum of constant forces, emphasizing the friction that bellowed by the hands of the pro-zealots who had left those sarcophagi in the Kidron Valley, in the average anchor values of the great leaks of the friction with the falling water by millions from the inexorable wind that aided the indivisible objects in the Kidron valley ratio, as a reflection of free fall hitting the friction between the Bern Olives, with torrential rains that were made periodic for an esplanade near Mount Scopus. This seat suffered from the force of friction in the fall of the wall, appreciating the burials that were and will be the reactionary phases of the Hellenistic degree. Objects faded to the state of rest and gravity that cavorted through the valleys, replicating distances more than periods of Elijah in the Judah desert itself and in the Dead Sea. From the depth of the valley, aqueous elements emerged with the proportional speed of the falls of the material and immaterial bodies, outlining the second Newtonian law, as the holy water submerged into the flow of the super-atomized savory, which was reconverted into the same Beit Hamikdash, to materialize in the submerged and hidden effects of the pagan force, hinting at the analogy of the equinoctial of the Dyticá that pushed the wave of the Kaitelka whale, in the constant of speed, tensing the force of the rocks that never stopped moving until his body igneous was quintupled in the fifth dimension beyond the consciousness of those who do not understand immaterial physical abstraction, in fractional microseconds.

The density of the rain filter that had been volumized from the submerged interstices, created the gravity of the horizontal movement that subdued the equation in kinetics that gave the differential in the unresolved expectation of the cessation of movement. Where the amount of reaction is more than what would go to Patmos, disproportionate to the macro pulleys that oscillated in the meridians, speed, and acceleration. Prior to the decoupling of the forces of fall in the already submerged bodies that were counterbalanced to give rise to the volume cords that detached from the largest chamber of the wall, to record the final sequence of wear generated by the reconversion and balance points of their masses, then the starting pedestal accumulates and is reconnected with this phenomenon of the Invisible Eclectic Portal of Patmos, being aware that they would have to enter the cavern, after having ceased their work for this mass retransmission of the reinverted wall to propel the Megaron uprising. Within three months after the Hellenistic Full Moon, the colors of the Tefilah will become mathematical, fascinating the spiritual intensity that inspired Saint John to build the temple near his cave of the Apocalypse on the reef of Patmos. The sanctity will count the astragali in front of the cyclamen for the delicate advances, wearing the blue-green of the quadrinomial that represented geodesy in its points of order and of its evangelist faction. Confusions were overwhelmed not to stop the movements of splendor in the effusions of the storms in sacred prayers in the room, which takes refuge from Kímolos bringing the souls of Helenikká, for the offices that made the trend of Katapausis after the subsequent full moon. Discounting the three months that never elapsed since Vernarth arrived on the Eurydice.


Kaitelka and the judgment of her abode would determine the corpus and the psyche of the irascible necromances of Borker and Leiak, subordinated to Zefian so that the torrential rains on Patmos are perceived by the colder of condensed water of Cassandra that Beit Hamikdash had been bringing with two anthropomorphic shadows that had been supporting him, that of a Cohen, Levita and a Samaritan, they were the guardians that came from Jerusalem to Patmos to assimilate the enthronement spectrum of free fall converted into free ascent were the fourth arrow that spectrum for the first column to be erected. The breath of all of them became more entropic each time that would be concentrated in a certain haze that was released by its titanic whale snout; Rather, I say of her presence that she was raised by some larvae, which came from certain Zeus dresses that he had expelled to free the larvae that were from her immortal garb, looking like bait for those who stalked him with necromancy. . But this time he would be very contemplative for the construction of the Megaron de Vernarth, because amphitheater was a cause of low politics for his Olympic spectrum. The energy or Evegeia, was primed for objects that took forms of papyri covered with invisible enzymes tried from Qumram, but the cause of Mortis revived the larvae making the oblivion of the era that continued after the Mortis of all legions multiplied by the phrases that were sinister from the true matter of physical remanence.

It's a pity about the posies,
All ashen and planet-like, controlling
The leftover rubber bits of love
Erasing emotions of waking up warm with her
Solemnly slumbering form
When we pluck those mornings and sink our teeth into them.
And

Their wavy stems ballet up from the earth
Blooming into fragile pink tufts like *******.
But now their fragrances tell jokes
Without the punchlines:
Long narratives ultimately pointless.
(The priests and rabbis come to you from their bars
Collars choking and tallit suffocatingly wrapped round their heads)
And

The snake,
Slithering from thousands of years of pop culture
Roots himself in the apple orchards
To hide the answers in her *******
And

Dairy farms grow up from there
And their milk runs down your sloppy chin
And in your teeth as you violently suckle
And in the tangled paths of your veins as you
Ask yourself why you even bother trying
When enslaved by a free world
.

My return trip,
feels like a new beginning

New sights and sounds,
to rediscover.

Judaism’s heart and soul
lies within the city.

Winding streets and twisting turns
lead to the Kotel, the Holy of Holies.

A religious center and
my core.

The cultural hub, tossed salad, or melting ***,
of the religious world.

Burqas and Tallit,
Tzitzis and Crosses,
try, oh they try…
to coexist.

It was chanted for five Sabbaths in a row
in the small synagogue with the charred bimah,
ashes staining the tzitzits of the rebbe’s tallit,
as he raised his arms above his head, closed his eyes
and sang the first alaf of seven thousand dabars,
the oral memory passed down six generations,
a psalm for a hundred sabas and savtas,  
abbas and eemas, nursery rhymes for ben and bat,
stopping, receding, picked up again, one by one
from cantor to congregant in a low moan
until all nine hundred thousand silenced voices
of Treblinka sang in the knesset’s bright light.  
    

bimah-  lectern from which the Torah is unscrolled on
tzitzit- the knotted fringes of a Hebrew prayer shawl
tallit- a Hebrew prayer shawl worn by rabbis
alaf- the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet
dabar- Hebrew for word
saba- grandfather
savta- grandmother
abba- father
eema- mother
ben- son
bat- daughter
knesset- the members of a synagogue

Therefore, the Lord himself will give them this sign: "A ****** will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will name him Immanuel." From this calami lapse, all of Patmia was refracted in the chromatics of Emmanuel, alluding to Isaiah as an infallible God of Salvation after having sent Sennacherib's mesnadas to his turn. His ministry came to be established along with all the soldiers who did not finally confront each other, but he came to support them from the waters that came from the eastern sea. The kingdom of Judah appeared in glory and solemnity anticipating seven centuries before the Mashiach came to the world of Israel. Hezekiah appears again after seven centuries in Patmia, to decline the fraternal help of Isaías, to save the collective quasi shipwreck in the mountains that would strike the edges of Patmia later after the conclusion of the battle, Etréstles intervening from where he entered the Hydors, as the sixfold brightest star of Aquarius of the Gulf of Skalá to protect all the landowners of the Oikodeomeo, litigating the swells of the sea that should refer to the synchronous beats of the Ruach Hakodesh. Etréstles entered the pointed mansards on the tops of the allotropic waves, carrying a scarlet ribbon in his right hand and in the other with an indigo hue when he swam he did not hold back from moaning for fear that the whole island might disappear, he deprecated while He floated imploring in Hellenic all the Prosas of Rhodes, thus leaving hanging on his neck the suffering of mercy that looked at him from the expectant shore, but the scarlet ribbon cried out for the Emmanuel who would be born among the cerulean granules, concomitant with the Mashiach that clung to him on the blue ribbon when a fragmented chroma emerged from the rib that divided the seven colors into fourteen, from where he propelled Etréstles over the calvaries of the water that prevented him from seeing how undaunted Saint John was reflected with his staff. The Vernardicidal ***** harassed the ministry of Isaiah who came to save Vernarth from the Hercules vortex, where everything will guide him with the conception of Vernarthian and Saint John the Apostle, with from afar they encouraged him saying: "Epoikodomeo" with the aim of building geomorphological waters of the Dam or blood of the Mashiach, forging, increasing wisdom and security to preserve and encode them with the Talmudic essences of Spirit / Pnevma that is the essence of the Messiah to make the ephemeral phase of Jesus with the prosopon of the fit in the primordial scale of Patmos, along with all those who entrusted their ministry to him. Isaiah stated that from a Maltona the Messiah will be born soon, the same one who has accompanied Vernarth throughout this journey par excellence from Judah when he sublimated the iconography of Saint John the Apostle on his return to his inheritance, thus the requiems said that Isaiah had been sawn. by Manasseh, indicating that his prophet's remains would gather on Patmos to materially reintegrate themselves before the panorama of any, beyond the scriptures, only the Pnevma prevailing, which ingratiated itself with the apocryphal papyri. The laws of the sea opposed the arms and chinstraps that Etréstles wore in the joints of each arm, creating with them psalms that indicated the presence of the divine mother of the Mashiach, with the divine contribution that embroiled the scriptures by the Psalms of Etréstles by besieging at once on the cusps of the waves, making use of the same phalanxes and of the Apsidas Manes with watery and ****** meddling by Sennacherib's troops, who by a narrow imbalance in the authorship of the debate segment on a defense that was with the angels, who had already slipped through the opening of the dying parapsychology, to enter the purging compass of the blanket with a Venerable who would speak to them in the first person about the lashes of the breakers enclosed in the annunciation of the Emmanuel that was going to radiate with his counterpart Jesus Christ in the scarlet and indigo Hydor of the Kosmous water compendium of all Patmia. The exegetes were all in their robes on the top of the mountain, they were all and at the same time, they were not. Isaiah wanted to predispose the messianic perception to unite the generous ends of the Majestic Tikun and the Gam zu Letová, so that the scarlet tekhelet itself merges with the chinstraps in the joints and Etréstles that came from the Seventh Cemetery of Messolonghi, to present them the chants of the seventh parapsychological regression of Vernarth's wounded hands that he could barely hold, having the Pisan Verses of Ezra Pound, agglutinated with the Psalms of Etréstles saying thus:

“Humiliate your vanity, You are nothing more than a dog beaten under the hail, just a swollen magpie in the fickle sun, half black, half white, and you can't even distinguish the wing from the tail. Humble your vanity, Petty is all your hatred nourished by falsehood. Humble your vanity, eager to destroy, greedy in charity. Humiliate your vanity, I tell you, humiliate it. But having done instead of doing nothing, this is not vanity. Having decency, called for an obtuse to open, having picked up a living tradition from the air or from a magnificent old eye calls it undefeated, this is not vanity. Here the error is everything in what was not done, everything in the shyness that hesitated ...

Etréstles answers with his Psalm:

"In the main, I attend to his voice that undresses small when they fall cliffs ...when the fierce sentinel hides the Xiphos from the evil ones who shield them inthe iniquity here on Patmos of his tongue-lashing sword that spills bitter blood,that she is thrown on famous vices of Pronoia and dry crops in the storehouse ...
with dormant grasses between lashes of hunger, thirst, and angry sleep.

This is where the Mashiach sleeps and does not lavish the drowsiness of the world! that he shoots and is not afraid of spitting a splendid Hercules cloaked with fullerides of necromancy and flashes of unsustainability in the bitter Pashkien eating the sores from the ferments of his hemlock fingers.

Who will be in the glory that calms his fingernails over the joy of Anubis? inquiring pustules of bolted injustices that stagnate in the
Sagittarius tongue flaring up trilingual on their own languages ...
If there is the blood that I can retain, it will be by submission with declined sphincters or not! seeing where everyone is without pressure or punishment of stuttering or fact that will never happen on a Patmian Reichstag, understanding that their voices
They are the proscenium of the Elohim containing the glory of the fallen when the periphery of the incisive tenebrosity are slices of the Vernarth Psalm, and of Rabbi Masoretic that shelters you when you sleep, however in a thousand years ...

I've been stragglers collecting extreme remains of immortal bones,
In invisible frames with the vanity of seven verses that escaped from my hands, thousands of them being built away from my Duoverse of love towards them atavistic ... almost become adopted children of Masoretic ignorance ... and in the confusion of the
Elohim translated into a genome after an open heart between the Alef and the Tav, between the arrow that serves as accommodation in her mind, unable to sleep if she is not there…! but high up where I can dwell, I see and I abide by being silenced in my vanity, seeing that nothing is mine and of those around me on the battlefield, who sublimate themselves by walking a lifetime on the side of my enemy wounded by the Dorus, and that I have never tried to take it off completely with slight iniquity, only avoiding zafrales and scrutiny in its search.

My vanity will perish undefeated but failed to revive itself with dazzles and sagites that pierce the saps in your children and mine, being poles of renewal of a Hoplite Raeder, cutting the thymus of the cattle and saying that their wounds are the same splendor of the Sagittae Parvulum, like Seraphim children prior to a hyperonym, fracturing sacred bravery that they enumerate him to lose himself in the numbering of infinity ...! As gladiator children, eternal infants and children of Zeus, also being Seraphim of Zeus and Cherubim who will make mustard its fragility, unstitching the time that it carves from the thyme trying to be the Kashmar "

From the eye of heaven, everything was supplied when Emmanuel himself, who was tried at the end of the battle of Patmia, was recognized. It was six o'clock in the afternoon when the omnipresent presence of Isaiah's interface antiphons was marked from where he would make them hold onto the mega Nazer as the offspring of the uncontrolled branch of his hyper parapsychology that expiated itself from the trunk of the descendants of Vernarth, alluding to to Wonthelimar as one of them who was on the wheel of Capricorn as an internal element of Hydor when it was made effective between the golden hands of Isaiah, with full genuflection enumerating from sinister to right the upright derivation of the Psalm of Etréstles with the Nazer, which is It would take refuge in the foundations of omission as a new shining principality, from where the light of the fifteen hundred years between the seventh heaven and space of this same inaugurating the stolon from where the angel Gabriel would make of all the natives of the Notsri of Nazareth the energy that surpass the masses of matter above the average of its brightness, implanting the Duoversal advance where the Mashiach. From Ofel will come the palmar remains with Marie de Vallés propitiating from the Notós or the South of the Mandragoron of Patmia, like a Bull of Concession of collective rights from Jerusalem with the remains of Isaiah in his living Status. The vernacular spirits of the Bethany journey were incarnated as the ruling planets, which would thus all be similar to Saturn, leaving all the rest with the same unrestricted semblance of cosmic materiality, with this transfer of Saturn's atmospheric outer pharaoh overshadowing all others. planets, under a stepped level towards the Messianic primogeniture, dislocating the vibrational levels above the primary embankment of the lithosphere, like a Qliphoth or shell of Saturn's debauchery when experiencing the bonds of emerging Christianization of the emotional state that made up this external preferential layer, of which of this genre they would create multi-natalist phases with the Qliphoth of the configuration of the vibratory cessation of the physical body of Patmos. In this way the seventieth Qliphoth or farfara of the compendium of exteriority and interiority would culminate, giving way to the Fos or light that would constitute the hybrid Greco-Hebraic componence on the braids that lowered from the Tekhelet of Etréstles when it levitated towards the Megaron, specifically the Naos that It would incite an end that just headed the engagement of the spaces that will be covered by the reviewing archetribe on the acroteria as the Lux of the beginning of the transfer of quantum of energy, which would begin to form the browbones and chin of Euclidean incidence in the cockades of Etréstles, by structuring itself in the cosmic rhythms of the tzitzit of its right hand, and in its left the Tallit that westernized all the supreme dogmas of eternalism, that carried a brand new covering of Áullos Kósmos with this mantle of hegemony, hanging from the tzitzit that would finally be the dragging ropes of the body of Etréstles to the cosmic ridge of Skalá. From a Genioglossal Muscle; where the Etréstles stimulation tendons were inserted, great impulses of language opened towards the pre-Adamic gates, radiating like wide puffs of the superior process that strangled the phraseologies that indicated error of omission, making everyone could conceive of each other before heading towards conversion, and to be able to aspire to the Naos from the Megarón. The most experienced used to expectorate and move sharply with their jaws when the membranes of this region fled from the tip or hyoglossal of their mouth, shuddering from its sublingual base when they saw that the Mashiach carried Etréstles half-dead from the sea, amid so many prosaic waves consuming him from a breath that was separated from it by a thin layer of adipose cell tissue, and by the Middle Septum towards the definitive Seventh Heaven of God, speaking to them of spaces that will be filled by the magnanimous who have reaped him from his Eternalism. This was neither more nor less than the protruding border of the Messiah speaking through those mouths with insignia of enunciation, and portents of words of reconversion.

Last-ting Pleasures (Leonard Cohen)


“Morning coffee on the balcony of this old duplex, the cat at my feet, and a couple of biscuits. Notebook near by. No one coming over.“

Leonard Cohen
                                 <>

aging with graces saved from so many spectacular failures, I took droplets of wisdom where they were free to drink, yet  
the best, were the most costly, for which you never end paying

but here I sit, well traveled, in Los Angeles sunshine, do my calculations, my final preparations, memorizing the blessings
so they flow easy, no stumbling, unbefitting a poet-writer lover

obligations diminished, bills paid, goodbyes said and spent, so long Marianne, lines of jewish buddhists wisdom seekers not too long, a few women come, last looks, a reminiscence for themselves

lovers seeking preservation, a signatory on their diaries, proofs, of what I know no longer know to state, sated, the statuary
sentence almost served, and last scribbles, to notebook dispatched

It is His Will, and yet here I am, asking forgiveness, as tradition demands and more, understanding, for it was all transcribed into praise of You and your god-sparked creatures, ah, bon chance, until we meet again, bring your robe and tallit, let us recite psalms

for if there was ever a wilder king, finer poet, lusting for life and god, all of us just birds on the wire, gambling which course to fly, where to, so waiting patient, resolution of the only remaining unanswered question, who by fire?

anyone, each of us, who first asked ourselves why not! before we ever thought,

                           why?

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com


                         Those Who Straddle the Temple Walls


                    “Choose you this day whom you will serve”

                                               -Joshua 24:15


For those who are desperate to be accepted as cool –

You cannot straddle the walls of the holy Temple
You cannot straddle the barbed wire of Auschwitz
You cannot straddle the banks of the Red Sea
You cannot choose two sides and call them one

Since the ****** time there have not been two sides

You cannot wear both the tallit and the snakeskin
You cannot break bread with your grinning executioners
You cannot dance to circled drums and bullhorn chants
You cannot forswear your family murdered in the gas chambers

Since the burning time there have not been two sides

He who chooses the fashionable, the clever, the cool
Chooses to be a kapo, a funktionshaftling
His people will despise him, so too his masters
                    (Who in the end will **** him in his shame)
And his memory will be a curse, not a blessing

But you –

Choose bravely so that your name will be written in The Book
And written in the hearts of your proud descendants