Confined
“Shabbat Shalom Kinder! Rabbi Krause has come to tell you a
story”
He came every Sabbath to my young class—all of us greeted
him with glory
We gave him a special chair, and fussed over who helped him
each week
The contained candles, cushions, and kippot made his sermons
unique
He recounted mythic parables about many a Jewish knight
Majestically darting across lands to bury their plight
As babies we sat entranced listening to such fantastic tales
Encaged by the “history” the Jewish culture unveils
Ultimately we believed everything he said to be true
Why would he lie to us? He was a teacher, a Jew.
In class we would recite prayers of all kinds
The teachers explained these brachot would expand our minds
Blissfully confined by the naiveté that we children
possessed
I delivered these invocations, honored to be so blessed.
I believed in the sanctity of morning prayers like, Modeh
Ani, and I chanted
I agreed that God was watching, my convention would never be
recanted.
In T’fillah I would Howl
beautiful melodies with one ringing lung
In violent harmony with the children who loved the songs
that were sung
I believed that God loved me and was proud of me as His
creation
I thought I was customized by the divine, Adonai, who did
not capacitate detonation
I was blindly imprisoned into a sect that thought the world
of me
My community embraced me securely, determined that I would
not flee
At home I was greeted by parents who relished the Jewish
faith
Feeding me with tradition, our ancestors from Old Country
came alive with great wraith
My mother sang Yiddish songs while she stood in the kitchen,
cooking
She happily made blintzes and kugel, while I sat restless
but still looking
My father would attend morning services at Synagogue quite
often
He encouraged me to go too, knowing my agenda was easy to
soften
I believed that our Jewish ideals delightfully incarcerated
us as kin
Protected by Latke walls and Pesach Seders—we never wore
thin
However, my family always made the importance of my personal
faith known
That if I were to abandon their beliefs, they would not
hesitate to disown
My grandfather,
Bill, had especially strong feelings about my Jewish connection
So much so that my views about God flitted in perfect
symbiosis with his affection
He would exuberantly express his pride and joy for my
religious education
Elated that Jewish practices were being passed on, in spite
of the once popular “Aryan Nation”
I believed that understanding values like the Ten Commandments
were important to my grandfather’s tomorrow
Especially after he divulged such personal sorrow
When I was eleven years old, my grandfather and I sat at his
fancy Upper West Side table
And with tears in his eyes he told me what he was able,
“I was thirty at the time and at school in Prague
I returned to my home, horrified to find it cloaked in smog
The story painfully transpired from there
With my head glued to the ground, my heart encaged with
despair
My whole family was taken in nineteen-forty-two
My father, amongst them, was a leader, a Jew
They were corralled off like cattle for being who they were
And what happened in between, I imagine, was a blur
They arrived at the camps and got into lines
Panicked by the towering electric fences that were now their
confines
My mother was separated, never to be heard from again
She was murdered in a gas chamber; a lifeless female fen
The soldiers put my father to work as an old man
And after too many brushes with death he devised a plan
He decided to escape from the treacherous place
But he was caught before he had even left base
The soldiers took him and the others who had been “bad” on a
“walk”
Each man went naked in the snow, without so much as a frock
By the time they reached the end of the trail
The men were exhausted -- far too weak to inhale
And when they finally stopped vomiting enough to see what
was in sight
A gun was cocked to their temple, the bullet mid-flight
Blood dribbled like tears down my father’s frost bitten
cheek
Down to the iced lips that could no longer speak
Alongside him was a frosted sea of skeletons; naked, mangled
and cold
The million lives surrounding him, ended “unimportant” and
untold
The breath my father drew that was once powerful and booming
and strong
Was all lost at Auschwitz, a place that very few considered
wrong…”
My grandfather’s voice trailed off after that
We sat in silence, my face wet from the chat
Eventually, his voice quivered uncontrollably but his
thoughts carried on,
“I believe this is why you must be a Jew Shaina Matel. Remember what I lost and captivate your
spawn”
As I grew older I recalled my family’s story with gravity
But my thoughts were graciously manipulated by what my
grandfather considered depravity
My mind was set free from its cell and danced with the
powers of time
And I finally discovered the beat of my rhyme
I fell upward from my prism, and religion stopped being
important at all
God, Judaism, and prayers simply became cracks in The Wall
I began to celebrate freedom and speech
I began actualizing possibilities that had previously been
out of reach
My identity stared at me in a kaleidoscope-like fashion
As an individual I became a multitude of ineffable vitality
culminated by experience and passion
Each aspect of my inside colorfully reflected off another
In order to create an infinite spectrum of dimension, traced
back to The Great Mother
I believe that “religion is a system of wishful illusions”
This has become my pragmatic conclusion
I believe in “a life devoted to one’s own improvement and
the service of all mankind”
This is a product of my progressive mind
I believe that “freedom should ring from every mountainside”
This too was supported by thousands, who marched together in
Utopic stride
My community is mankind because I am a fraction of the human
race
My culture has been integrated
into infinite space
I developed and finally came into my own
Proud of new ideas that I had put in my mind, now sown
However, I still wish that our family believed just one
thing:
“Blessed is thou who let the caged bird sing.”
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