Jeremy Radin

(((Shylock))) to Netanyahu

God is lonely & it’s your fault.

At the breakfast table you have forgotten

God, & growling about your dry cleaning

& certainly reviewing your various

intelligence reports. God is lonely

though you send to the realms reams

of gardeners & poets & schoolchildren,

though you hoard, as if possessed,

the tools that fill God’s rooms—

it’s not what God wants. God wants you.

God longs for you, Benjamin, sad Bibi,

just as God has longed for every bloodless

lizard wreaking havoc in the celestial desert.

As you writhe amongst your underlings,

as they suck the petroleum out of your ass

at the climax of your unctuous orgies

God watches the bombs fall onto the city,

onto hospitals & pigeons & billions

of olives, which you make every effort

to send in your stead, to send instead

of sending yourself, because you know what

God wants to say to you, & you know you’ll be

from history deleted by the saying, it’s why you say

God’s name so often, so loudly, which makes

God so terribly lonely. When you say God’s name

each God that leaves your sloganeer’s mouth

pushes God a little further away, into the loneliness

to which you have devoted yourself, the loneliness

you long for, but which cannot ever be yours

because everywhere you look, look!—all

you have killed (& all you cannot) keeping

you, keeping you company.

(((Shylock))) on the Human Shield

A human shield is only a human shield

if I thrust the blade anyway. Otherwise, it is

a human. Otherwise it is a choice, & choice

is God. Thou mayest allow the human to live.

If I want to be the moral center of the world

when do I start doing that? If I spill a child’s

blood on holy land is the land still holy—

& what does & does not constitute idolatry?

Only God is holier than anything else, yes?

& God is nowhere & everywhere, yes? So?

Imagine if the men who invented Abraham

knew about Alaska. The holy land is only

holy because it was where they were when

they wrote about a holy land. Now we know

too much. Pangea. Airplanes. A human shield

shields me from my own humanity. If I pull

the trigger I shoot myself in the Book, in the

G-d, in the Song. Inevitability is so Christian.

Imagine knowing what we know, o Abraham,

hearing the Voice that aims us at our mercy,

& refusing to act accordingly. We forsake

a holy land in favor of actual land. We have

carved like a pound of flesh the holy land

away from ourselves, & imagine we have

done it without spilling a single drop

of our own blood. 

 (((Shylock))) on Evangelical Judaism

Israel must not be taken literally, as actual land.

Not now. Now when we know what we know.

Not by a people bound by the elasticity of text,

by a God who, throughout the text, evolved, from

Yahweh the war god to Ein Sof the unknowable

eternal absence enfolding everything. Jesus Christ

was invented because one can’t sell what can’t be seen.

We mustn’t fall for it, no matter how business keeps

booming for them. Jesus Christ is an idol. The Holy

Land is an idol. To not see this fact embarrasses us.

Israel is a verb. What one man, in his stubbornness,

did. Wherever we are we Israel, against the horrors

we Israel, & never finish. If there can be—can there

be, after the slogans & money & bombs & bodies?—

a defensible Zionism, let it be one of stewardship, not

of ownership. The land is not ours, we are the land’s;

all land’s. The stone on a mountaintop in the Canadian

Rockies is the same stone as the stone in the Western

Wall. Only God is above anything. Only God is above

God. Unravel the Mysteries? In this geo-political climate?

Let us ravel them further. Let us look into the Dead Sea,

at the heron, the child, with our most generous confusion.

Let us ravel & revel in metaphor. Banish the literal back

to Westboro. Israel is an inner state at which we must

never, can never, by virtue of its actual definition—

to strive—not having had successfully striven—

arrive. Let us strive together on the fenceless land,

& strive to look at one another, at all that has been

offered into our care, too astonished by the you-

ness of the olive tree—& the human being lying

beneath it—to even think of picking up a stone.

Doikayt

Besides, I’m sick of from, I don’t want to hear

about from. We all come from the same from,

a perfect sphere of heat & density that makes

an olive look like a yellow hypergiant, don’t

talk to me about from. We are from dust.

We are from a single droplet of water clinging

to the bottom of the scale of the cedar cone.

From decides where history begins, from means

nothing but mine which means less. Talk to me

about a stewardship of time, a care of time,

the only homeland, which like any worthwhile

homeland cannot be owned, which owns us—

& in its frankly obscene generosity permits us

roam its vast hall, polishing its floors, shining

its windows with our luminous bewilderment.

Who can establish the origin of anything? You

are my origin—as I am yours, as we are from

a sound, the tuning of a string that starts a song

that we all sing. That song—that song, we are

from. & when I sing against you I sing out of key.

& when I sing about land I sing out of key. & when

I sing about God I drown God out with my singing

because about & from are twins in their inflexibility.

I am from what we are becoming. I sing with you.