Lament for Jerusalem

Several days ago Jews world-wide fasted and commemorated the Ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. That date marks the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, of the Israelite kingdom and the final expulsion of the Hebrew nation from the Land of Israel. Last Tuesday at the Wailing Wall - the last remnant of the Second Temple - 100,000 Jews gathered together from all over Israel and the world to weep and pray.

The story goes that Napoleon when told about this Jewish fast day said that a people who recall the exile from their land thousands of years past are destined to return home. The first Zionist?

Throughout the long exile, the Jewish people - homeless and oppressed - refused to relinquish their faith. The shock of the Holocaust caused the United Nations to vote for a Jewish state in the ancient Land of Israel. The Arab lands of the Middle East didn't take this well and declared war against the young state.

Today, a fundamental element of Arab anti-Israel PR is their claim that there never was an Israelite nation or a First and Second Temple on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem [on those ruins the Moslem Golden Domed Mosque now stands]. No prophets, no King Saul, no King David, no King Solomon. All figments of our imagination. The Jews are just some European colonial tribe that invaded a region foreign to them in the twentieth century. Ishmael was the inheritor of Abraham. [By the way, there was a constant Jewish presence in the Land of Israel - later called Palestine - throughout the centuries of exile.

The following poem-story appears in my English language collection, "Poems of Love and Exile."

Exile

In the year 70 AD Titus's army
set up camps on Mount Scopus
and the Mount of Olives
that overlook the Temple Mount,

dragging great wooden posts
round the walls of Jerusalem,
the Romans laid waste the bright gardens
and orchards to prepare for murder and siege.

Our resistance gathered on the Temple Mount
fought the bitter fight, the stubborn battle,
but on the 8th of Av the Roman Legion broke through
and many of us were killed that day.

Titus's legionnaires brought tens of thousands
the Jews of Jerusalem onto the Mount,
and on the place that we had rejoiced and
prayed to the Almighty,

for eleven days we lay dying, without food and water
as Titus selected who would be sold into slavery
and who left to starve and die on the Mount
and cast into the ruins of the lower city

After that Titus set about the destruction
of the beautiful upper city and
of the Holy Temple, burning and smashing
everything in his wake

for that was his way,
to conquer a people who would not
bow down to Rome's false gods
and to leave desolation and destruction.

In the year 70 Titus looted the Temple
he carried off the great Golden Menorah
and the Holy Temple treasures
to his camp at Ceasaria,

and from there to Rome.
----
LAMENT
[from the Book of Lamentations
written by the prophet Jeremiah
after the events described above.]

Our skin burns with the famine
the children faint with hunger on the streets
they cry to their mothers
- where is our corn and milk,

young and old lie on the ground
the dead fill the alleyways and burnt houses
fallen by fire and the sword.

Our inheritance has been given to strangers
to those who hate us without cause.

Fallen is our crown, we are captured
like caged birds, to be taken to distant lands.

(c) Shira Twersky-Cassel

Passover - Past and Present

The Talmud writes that the Temple of Jerusalem was whitewashed annually in preperation for Passover. It is recorded there that the Israelite families trekking on foot on one of the three annual pilgrimages would call out in excitement when they reached the foothills of the city of Jerusalem, "Look, the Temple is cresting the Temple Mount as brightly as the pure snow!"

When I first read this it amazed me as the solution to a riddle I had always wondered about. It is a racial memory-link to Jewish pre-Passover mad obsession with whitewashing our homes, more prominent among the Sephardic and Israeli Jews who did not wander as far as the cold exile of the European and Soviet continents when we were cast out of the Land of Israel.

At my home in Jerusalem the shlepping up and down ladders and getting rid of leavened products and kitchenware is at is most intense today. And although we grump through the ordeal and the feet hurt, I have taken a blog-break to express my feeling of joy and renewal.

We were enslaved, experienced exile from our homeland, suffered the Spanish Inquisition and countless pogroms and were almost wiped out in the unspeakable Holocaust. We were written off countless times, but here we are. Cleaning our houses, innovating and giving new life to a flowering and fruitful land that lay barren for centuries. And most important of all, raising beautiful and clever children.

For my graceful and slightly crazy cats, blue-eyed Kinneret, born on the shores of that northern sea, and his sister green-eyed Rachel, their 14th Passover cleaning is accompanied by lots of temporarily empty cartons lying about which as any cat knows are heavenly havens to scratch about and cuddle in while the world passes you by. For like children who do not live in great houses and have rooms for themselves, cat also have the ability to create a magical self-sufficient world under a table or inside a carton.

This is the translation of my poem about Passover at my father's table which appeared in the Israeli poetry journal "Mashiv HaRuach," [translated loosely as "Master of the Winds".]

Dad passed away when I was twenty-one and with each passing year I grow closer in memory to him.

MY FATHER'S PESACH SEDER

At my father's Pesach table

the ten plagues burned into my living flesh,

the wine spilled to signify each plague.

No small drop from one finger

the wine flowed into each Pesach saucer

taken down from locked closets

and polished till it shone

then poured into a great crystal bowl.

For the wine becomes our own blood,

when we weep and recall the slavery,

the treachery of Egypt which betrayed Father Joseph,

and we remember the blood of the infants of our wombs

buried alive between the great slabs of pyramid stone

worked with our hands.

At the Pesach table of my father

I fled Pharaoh's legions to the burning light of Moses's eyes,

I danced to freedom with the Prophetess Miriam

on the shores of the parted sea.

***

*Pesach – Passover in Hebrew

© Shira Twersky-Cassel

The Blackbird of Israel - Inspiration for my poetry

ABOUT MY LOGO: Blackbird emerging from an inkwell

The blackbird - shachrur in Hebrew - was my first bird-love in Israel. Blackbird is the title of my first book of Hebrew poetry which won the prestigious Haim Hazaz poetry prize.

Although the local nightingale is the thrush identified with the Land of Israel in the Bible, within Israel's current borders we rarely enjoy a visit from the multi-songed nightingale whose habitat today is in TransJordan among the rushes of the Jordan river. So the blackbird our chief thrush.

It is with excitement that I await the season of the blackbird's unique song, which begins in the Hebrew month of Shvat - December-January for everybody else "out there." Shvat is the month of my own birthday so I feel personally serenaded when my courtyard jet black beauty with golden beak and throat begins his seasonal mating song from within the branches of the Jerusalem pine in my yard.

When the Beatles sang, "Blackbird singing in the dead of night," they approximated the truth. The blackbird begins his song in darkess one hour before sunrise, thus playing Orpheaus.

The source of the bird's name, shachrur in Hebrew, is "shachar", - sunrise - and "shachor" means black. Typically, in the Hebrew language, one word carries many meanings. This is reflected the writings of the Bible and the centuries of rich Jewish scholarship when Hebrew was a language of prayer and learning and was not spoken every day.

The rebirth of the Hebrew tongue is one of the miracles of modern Israel. I longed to write poetry in Hebrew in order to tap into the rich history of my people.

After publishing three volumes of Hebrew poetry, I enjoy writing again in English and have begun translating many of my Hebrew poems.

I hope to print some of these poems on my new site.

And as we say in Hebrew, Lehitraot, see you soon.

or in short
Lehit'
Shira