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Who is a Jew?
If I am born into a Jewish family, and I follow the teachings of the Tanukh,
If I observe Sabbath even when the fields call out to me, and tend to my “kosher” home,
If I have faced the turmoil for being a Child of Israel,
If I am the descendent of Canaan,
Does that by default make me a Jew?
L’Chaim! To Life!
We chose to love Him, establish our covenant with Him,
Link all life to Him.
We celebrate time! We dispute on Judgment day!
And everyday, we study the Torah over and over, to understand life, to do God’s will and make the world indebted to us, to be cherished as a friend.
Oh the irony!
It started as the destruction of the Second Temple,
Now we live in an eternal diaspora.
If we are the cause of economic crisis, and racially alien too,
Will we be allowed to observe Sabbath in Auschwitz?
We follow the rules of the Kashrut and kill our food with a quick swift death, yet we die the slow “cyanide” death.
We do not shed innocent blood because all life is precious, yet we are murdered by the millions.
How wonderful is death! To vanish from this agony. Would it not have been better to not be? Not see? Not see the sorrow inflicted on us based upon what we do.
The words of God that were passed down to Moses, then us,
Are now the words of God that were passed down to Moses, and inscribed on the cellar wall where the Jew hid from the Nazis, only to be later found and returned to where he belonged.
We listen to Rabbi Hillel’s loving kindness: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”. What have our own compatriots done to us?
We listened to Rabbi Eliezer’s arguments.
His Carob tree did uproot itself, only to walk fifty of the hundred cubits before collapsing into a pile of green-grey dust; his river flowed sideways.
But God’s voice thundered from heaven!
Our mother was Jewish, by default we are.
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This is a reflective poem written for my World Relgions class during indepth study of Judaism. The poem draws from primary text, especially the Oral Torah, entwined with the persecution faced by the Jews.