Just thinking of our ethnic dishes
can make digestive juices run
and Jewish holidays such fun––
chopped liver and gefilte fishes.
Gastronomy will save the Jews
until they’ve earned another treat,
Leviathan, which they will eat
with recipes that God will choose
when He rewards them for the fact
that they eat fish and liver chopped
until their Jewish hearts have stopped,
their coronaries no more intact.
Cognate Akkadian implies Jacob
believed his liver badly harmed
by Levi, Simeon, in their armed
attack on Shechem, which caused the break up
of friendship with the Palestinians.
Liver made by my good wife
has never harmed my longish life
but since I share Jacob’s opinions
concerning importance of the liver,
it isn’t awful that I’m served
this offal by her, while preserved
by God as well as my caregiver.
According to bBaba Batra 75a, God will serve the righteous the Leviathan when the messiah comes.
Gen. 49:6 states:
ו בְּסֹדָם אַל-תָּבֹא נַפְשִׁי, בִּקְהָלָם אַל-תֵּחַד כְּבֹדִי: כִּי בְאַפָּם הָרְגוּ אִישׁ, וּבִרְצֹנָם עִקְּרוּ-שׁוֹר. 6 Let my soul not come into their council; unto their assembly let my glory not be united; for in their anger they slew men, and in their self-will they houghed oxen.
Professor Edward (Ed) Greenstein of Bar-Ilan University, in his 3/2020 RBL review of Robert Alter’s English translation of the Hebrew Bible, writes:
Both Alter and Fox resist reading kəbēdî, “my liver, i.e., myself,” in the first line, for kəbōdî, which is necessitated by the feminine singular verb tēḥad. In Akkadian, and here in archaic Hebrew, the feminine term for liver, Akk. kabattu, is often used metonymically as a person, like napšî, literally “my throat,” in the first line.
Ed Greenstein’s observation provides a wonderful explanation for the common answer to the question, “Is life worth living,” which is, of course, “That all depends on the liver.” I had anticipated this information in 2010 in my book Legal Friction, where I point out that when God made Pharaoh’s heart כבד, heavy, He was trying to influence his personality. The good professor thus provided a depth to this poem which I had not intended when I composed it in 1998, even though when I worked as a physician I specialized, when not eating my dear wife’s chopped liver, in hepatology.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
