It’s not going to be easy crossing that river
and the rule book keeps getting longer
and we’re going to have to climb mountains
and shout everything we’ve done good and bad
and if that’s not enough, there’s going to be labor,
stones to carve and coat with lime, when we’d
all rather use the lime to coat our mojito glasses,
and we’re going to have to bring our first fruits
to the Temple so the priests have fruits, when
we’d much rather eat our first fruits that we
planted and grew with our own free hands
and the first Temple isn’t going to build itself
and we’ll have to slaughter peace offerings
and wonder how the words slaughter and
peace ever got to be in the same sentence,
did they meet at an interfaith event and
hit it off, and there’s a commitment here
because we were chosen, and we agreed
to choose, and if we’re thinking of running
away at the altar, or the river, there’s a long
list of curses for that, I mean anything you
might do that slightly strays from the pack
and there’s a curse for that, and a curse for
this, and consequences, we really get into
the consequences so unless you want your
children to be captives, and cicadas to eat
everything you grow, and to never drink wine
and to have your corpse eaten by birds,
you’d better consider walking the difficult
path, the righteous path, the path cross the
river, the path up whichever mountain your
tribe has been assigned to go up, and build
the altar, and bring the fruits, and be a standup
guy, or standup girl if that’s how ya go, because
now we have the heart to know what is right
is right, and we have the eyes to see we did
the right thing leaving the narrow place, and
we have the ears to hear the melodies of
freedom we’ve been hearing for forty years
while we’ve worn the same shirt and shoes
every day, that whole time, and they have
never worn out, and still smell as fresh as
they did they day we got them from the store,
and I’m not sure we even had stores back
in Egypt, and maybe after we set up the Holy
Temple, and get all squared away with the
distribution of our first fruits, we can build a
shopping center, nothing big, just a mini mall,
or maybe even a strip mall with two or three
stores, because we deserve it and by God,
and I really mean, by God, it’s a miracle!
