This is All We Know of Er – A poem for Parsha Vayeshev

Now Er, Judah’s firstborn, was evil in the eyes of the Lord,
and the Lord put him to death.
-Genesis 38:7

This is all we know of Er –
that he was evil and put to death
the nature of his evil, conjecture.

This is all we know of Er –
Judah’s son, Joseph’s nephew
husband to Tamar.

What he did remains a mystery.
Did he murder? Did he steal?
did he covet?

Did he jaywalk? No,
they didn’t have traffic lights then.
It couldn’t be that.

This is all we know of Er –
that whatever he did then was
not what should have been done

even though we might do it now
because our sensibilities are different,
we have traffic lights after all.

This is all we know of Er – though
our great interpreter suggested he
spilled his seed on the ground

which could have been an accident
you never know when the ground
is going to come along

and these days, with seed being
spilled all over the place, it
doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

It’s possible the people who
wrote Er’s story invented the idea
that your brother should take over

for you if you are put to death, or die –
All the things you would have done
All the places you would have

put your seed, now their responsibility.
This is all we know of Er.
It is so little.

Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 25 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.