Examine it for imperfections, and if we had all of eternity still you’d find none…
But, of course, many hold that the holiness of the sacrifice has nothing to do with its how or intention, technique — that it depends entirely upon the holiness, or the purity, oy, of the sacrificed souclass="underline" an inner kashrut, makes you think…though if you follow that interpretation, there’s nothing I can do — except slaughter you according to the Law, it’s a mitzvah: giving you at least one blessing on the curse that is your life, that has been, Shalom. It’s a beginning, think of it as, all over again: call it a circumcision of your head. One slice, just a slice, and it’ll be over — quick, and unangeled…the Rebbe’s son-inlaw approaches, holds Die’s head back by a stray tuft of gray greasily sprouted at the back of his neck from between the fats of his bald, a reverse turkey gullet, this warblingly negative jarble at nape, shakily fearful, imperfect as animalistically ugly — exposing the voice of the front…the core of the goy’s humanhalf, his Adam’s apple whose pluck would leave the rest of him bleak: a fruit that’s halved, too, from the sin of its knowledge offyellowed, straining to speak through its wrinkled, thin peel.
Holding the chalaf high, the Rebbe now, without hesitation, slits down, silently fast — and from blameless steel, the stream of a fountain, a gush of blood wandered with the tread of his boots toward the doorway then through it, life heeled, stepped into stain…a heavythick spurt of ice from outside, the latest sky shot through with stars, freezing on their ways down sodden, and smashing: the flow of the artery Most High severed upon the horizon’s own sharpness, it soaks through the air, its purity pouring to empty the other edge of the night: our vessel lacking a single shard and so leaking through such darkness, light…then, there’s a last clasp of thunder from lightning’s strike at the breast — the Rebbe turns on his heel as Die, limp, falls with the sun.
And the moon with Shabbos now rises.
Me, I’m still being me…I don’t have much of a choice, stuck out of the one window of the one remaining wall of a house destroyed atop a mountain, I am. Eheyeh. It’s been many hopes, this structure fallen, mostly ruined save its last windowed wall just last moon, had incarnated the dreams of untold — it’s as if their last dream’s this whitewall itself, with them willing it, from their furthest sleeps, to maintain a last stand against memory’s lapse, and so to maintain my sentineclass="underline" from most recently to its oldest origin, it’d been quartering for Affiliated Forces, then before that a warehouse, before that a stable, just prior a priory church, an orthodox chapel, then a synagogue, a shul, even earlier the home of a family of let’s say peasants, what to do: home of the husband’s parents, home of the parents’ parents, the parents’ parents’ parents’ home, I forget how far forever — their hallways dug out, leading deep into the watery past, twisted passages seeking hospitable wine and the dregs of firm rooting, the native soil of a creation story, an origin myth making much of a Garden’s two trees with their multanimous branchings of telling and told…giving way to the rooms of my others, passing into homes of their own: their own earthgraves, dwelt amidst wells only a little leap further — there at my echo’s other foot, this overlook’s opposite slope.
Enough to say, this had been the house of my ancestors, the ancestral home of my mother’s side, Ima’s, Hanna her name was; though essentially peasants, they were once the richest in this village below, or this town, from which they’d impoverished themselves enough to emigrate from, to immigrate to — and thank God for that…enough to say, this might’ve been my own home, too, think of that, only if.
Their home, it’d actually been a guardhouse, given to them in return for their work, which had been guarding, without fences or gate: these families, mine, had been Messiahkeeps, were kept always on the lookout for the Moshiach, imminent the Redeemer in Whom we believe though as we’re always so quick to say though He tarry—and so theirs was perpetual work, perpetualizing, and yet amply provided for, with a chicken every Friday and fresh milk twice a week, courtesy of those whose salvations they were ensuring, just a fall or shofar’s call down the slope: saviorseekers they were and that’s why, it’s thought, the dwell and its wall had been left atop the hill above the round valley and its settlement squared down below; maybe spared through displaced superstition, as if to destroy the thing would be to destroy future hope, and then again, perhaps it’s survived only out of a moment’s respect, or from symboclass="underline" never know when its vantage might come in handy again…O the handcup, the jubilant summons: they were supposed to wait there until the resurrection of the dead, then muster the living with primitive hoots and alarms. Disturb their mundane’s what, interrupt diaspora for an ingathering to where, they weren’t sure: how the people once here and now dead, they only engaged and supported such watchwards because the town, or the village, was located so far away from everywhere else that they were afraid the Messiah would miss them, or that they might miss Him in His coming, and so their stand and the conflict, again, as to where exactly to paradise to — whether the market city, or Jerusalem, if it’s the capital — once the day would dawn of their reckoning, if. And nu, how it was only my relatives among them who’d hoped that that light would never arise, what with the poultry, the butter churningup the holiday tips, free aliyahs and kavod galore — not the only people, though, for whom exile workedout, meant success…not the only people who’d hoped against Eden in their fortress defense of a livelihood, the health and happiness of their kinder — before relocating to America thinking they’d made it, done with all that custom and boredom, only to hope there anew and this time around with a longing that’s greater than ever: hymn, waiting on the corner for Mammon to show, streetside peddling their apples and patience.