Belleville

This Canadian Jew

 

Is sitting on a wall 

 

Outside Vienna’s Opera House, 

 

In the midst of traffic and people and construction 

 

With words barely under the surface, 

 

With a heart straining into new places

 

In a post-reconciliation city, 

 

Manhandled for over a century, 

 

Clenched in fits of hate,

 

Choking to death a people 

 

Who only wanted to pray,

 

And love, 

 

And contribute:

 

To live.

 

 

I visited Freud’s home 

 

And office 

 

And study,

 

Without its couch, 

 

To help make sense 

 

Of it all:

 

Of all of it.

 

 

The world knows 

 

About Id and Ego

 

And Superego 

 

Without knowing 

 

His four sisters 

 

Gone for wanton neglect 

 

And active evil. 

 

 

Or of the 64,000 in one city,

 

Alone.

 

64,000 blank pages 

 

Solidified in concrete.

 

Unwritten.

 

Unread. 

 

6,400 books, 

 

Each a Minyan of pages, 

 

Each

 

Without fingers to trace 

 

The breadth of lives.

 

Closed.

 

Left alone. 

 

Abandoned. 

 

Unfinished. 

 

 

On Kol Nidre 

 

I went to daven in

 

Stadttempel,

 

The sole survivor,

 

Of the pogroms of death. 

 

 

Sadly, 

 

God was not there 

 

For me.

 

 

Standing in a throng of people 

 

van Gogh, instead, spoke to me 

 

In unexpected Holiness 

 

In urgent strokes

 

Of utter beauty.

 

The hills. 

 

The trees. 

 

The abundant meadows of flowers. 

 

 

I wept.

 

 

The Sacred

 

Does not appear 

 

Through expectation.

 

 

It appears in the smile

 

And the softness

 

Of a 90 year woman 

 

Wearing wedding rings 

 

Sitting alone 

 

Eating her favorite coffee cake 

 

At 10 AM 

 

On an ordinary Tuesday morning. 

 

 

Maybe it takes a century 

 

To burn out 

 

The energy of hate.

 

 

36 hours ago

 

Belleville synagogue 

 

In childlike Canada 

 

Had 20 or 30 bullets pierce it

 

On our holiest day of all.

 

 

In my homeland 

 

The hate is only beginning. 

 

 

May God 

 

Save us all. 

 

 

Door of the Stadttempel Synagogue, Vienna. Courtesy of the author