Tag: poetry2021

Queen Esther, who is Jacob’s rose, and purple, Mordecai, are heroes, for they fought our foes: their names will never die!   Oh hateful Haman, persecutor of all the Jews in Persia: the Queen declares you didn’t suit her–– that’s why all Jews now curse yer.   For saving Hebrews from this killer dear Mordecai, […]

There is no greater condescension thanthe one we show to those whom we do not absolveof any errors that we learn they made before death turned them into history.The problems that they faced are ones that we with the simplicity of hindsight blithely solveas easily as murders that we read about in every murder mystery. […]

Not raped, but seduced, a sister became a cause that unloosed a battle of shame. No person escaped revenge, which is bad, though Dinah not raped: her lover a lad who loved her alas, not wisely or well, a lover, a lass, leading many to hell.   Revenge may seem sweet when it acts as […]

Distance from reality is a dimension that can’t alwayswith great precision be by all people measured,and since it is not physical but mental in unsmall ways,paradoxically it’s most greatly treasured when it is best defined as “most remote,”identifiable as something that most people can notidentify, due to its apparent emptiness  to emote,expressing just one puzzled […]

On Saturday nights in Joseph Epstein’s homehis family would watch the Rome-com of Sid Caesar,whose root was Ziser, not a ruler Romeelected, but Yiddish for a sweet guy, pronounced Zeeser. Jewish comedy has been by tragedy replaced,the zealot Mamdani its unsweet switch-hitterwhose anti-Jewish swerve has an unpleasant taste,not zees, sweet like Sid Caesar, but like […]

The rationale of the brief biblical creation narrative we readin Genesis may be to teach us that its goalreached — on its seventh day, which satisfied humanity’s great needto rest — not just  all people’s bodies but their soul. God’s was the spirit that created all the universe,whose climax was the Sabbath day, and not humanity,a […]

Free love between lovers of utmost refinementcame in in 1816 into stunning alignment.Byron’s personal doctor, one John Polidori,was writing, while Mary was writing the story of Frankenstein, his book which he called The Vampyre,a Vorlage fable that came to inspireBram Stoker to write about Dracula. Thisall happened in Switzerland. Maybe the Swiss, with Byron and […]

Antiochus Epiphanesdeclared: “Let’s sacrifice a pig,”and in the holy sanctuariestook steps to be the biggest wig,far greater than the Jewish Godwho hates the smell and taste of swine,declaring thus the first jihadagainst the Jews of Palestine. The Maccabees were very brave,abhorring gifts of pagan porkers;like Britons, none would be a slave,these ancestors of most New […]