As always, on Ha’azinu, Moses’ last poem to the People of Israel, I share a poem. This one is taken from a Jewish Italian poet named Umberto Saba (1883-1857). He converted to Judaism as a young man, and then, refused to be rebaptized during the Holocaust. This poem speaks not only to the pain of that period, but the pain of ours as well:
“I had a conversation with a goat.
She was tied up, alone, in a field.
Full up with grass, wet!
with rain, she was bleating.
That monotonous bleat was brother
to my own pain. And I replied in kind, at first
in jest, and then because pain is eternal
and speaks with one voice, unchanging.
This was the voice I heard
wailing in a lonely goat.
In a goat with a Semitic face
I heard the cry of every woe on earth,
every life on earth.”
May all our pain be released and may our world find peace.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex