When the New Year Turns to Questions

 

This is the year a people can feel small, tiny portion
among American dreamers. You’d never know from
television’s array of personalities—so few Jews
among the mountains of New England, and fewer
in Montana. By percentage.

 

Which is a reason to seek some synagogue
packed with celebration and prayer.  Be one of many,
feel temporarily ordinary. Familiar melodies
old phrases and welcoming faces. It’s the Jewish
new year. Praise these days.

 

Yet at home or shul, alone or crowded,
questions seep into the air as if Passover poked tendrils
of insistent vines through the prayer book. Who
died in Israel last night? Who sent bombs flying,
stars exploding? When?

 

Will peace ever walk those sere hills again? Cousins
bearing babies in Tel Aviv. An aunt buried where
it’s not safe to visit. Who took passage to America,
those great-grandfathers, then sent silver dollars
to plant trees in Israel?

 

This is the year the answers can’t be simple, won’t come
quickly. This is the season of harvest, seed-bent grasses,
death among sorrowful nations, upon worn roads,
beside the river Jordan. Along the Red Sea and
floating on Kinneret: