Had Blücher been a little late at Waterloo,
or Cleopatra’s nose been just a little shorter,
as speculated counterfactually by Blaise Pascal,
or had there been a lot of Jews, not just a few,
Napoleon and Mark Anthony would have been
seen as heroes, and the Jewish people as a bigger rascal.
If from Jerusalem God had not turned back all the forces of Sennacherib,
the history of the world would never have included
its fundamentally important three
monotheistically inspired, mostly intolerant religions,
of which Monty Pythonic members of them all regard the others
as stool pigeons,
treating those that aren’t their own as being as deluded
as those misogynists who seem to wish that God to Adam
would give back a rib.
Willian H. McNeill, late University of Chicago Professor History, once stated that the failure of Sennacherib’s forces to capture Jerusalem-shaped the history of the world far more than any other historical event he knew. According to the Sennacherib Prism in the British Museum they were only able to “shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage,” phraseology which Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has pointed out echoes the way that before the exodus God hovered over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt like a mother bird, preventing the destruction of the Israelites’ firstborn while He destroyed all the Egyptian firstborn.
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.
