Black&White

​As last week was the 20th Yartzheit of Yitzhak Rabin and my dear friend Shir Yaakov begins The Bearing Witness Retreat I pray that we lift ourselves above the current reality and find a new peace in the world.

As I walked through the gray pained roads of Majdanak 
I could feel the agony of hundreds of thousands of souls as they ascended to heaven.
Double chai in the thousands-the life beaten out of them. 
I watch the ashes of my human family fly through the air like snowflakes in the winter.
Auschwitz, the tracks and the ancient howling screams held fast in the wind.
A bunker empty, I ponder the largess of the appearing sleep space 
quickly realizing that their thinning bodies lay one on top of the other 
as 20 men filled each one, I stifle a scream.
My body shakes and heaves with the intense pain of a world that was mad 
and yet my eyes are dry. 
Maybe it is the separation of years or the shock of it all, I will never know. 
But standing in the center of pain did not bring me to tears.

I step off the plane for the first time and I kiss the ground.
The ground I have been dreaming of for 16 years.
I travel the countryside starting out the window of the bus, 
the bedouin tents dotting the road bring up the deep seated pain 
I have been fed for years, in a world more interested in appearances than truth.
A world where the hyenas of Disney’s Lion King ravaging the promised land 
are represented  by those bedouin tents on the side of the road.
A world where Jews were right and Arabs were terrorists.
A people who claim Torah’s vision in their hatred of another. 
But then, in my youthful naïveté I too believed.
Believed in a world black and white, 
a world where only one group was suffering at the hands of another.

We approach Mount Herzl with heavy hearts 
only five months after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. 
I walk through the maze of steps surrounded by earthy growth,
the smell of life penetrates this space of death
The lush greens of this space juxtaposed 
by the gray of death 100s of miles away in that world ravaged with darkness.
I step around a corner and I see it, I see that which I never saw before.
In clear Black and White the marble of the stones glint in the sunlight. 
Their flash like a sharp needle puncturing my eyes 
as a heaving of my soul reverberates through my body.
My tears like a tsunami crashing against the rigid walls of my heart
as I realize that we are continuing the work that began in 1939.
We who have been murdered and slain in the millions 
stand self righteous in indignation of each other.
We who claim that we are the children of Israel
have not learned from those sacred books. 
We continue the struggles laid out in the opening chapters
Brother killing Brother, war in the name of peace.

"Rabins' Grave" by User:Pharos