The Daily Kehunah – A poem for Parsha Tetzaveh

…and the kehunah will be a perpetual statute for them.
Exodus 29:9

Today in the Torah two rams and a bull
are going down. I don’t have to worry about it
because the Rabbis who came later said so.

Still, the details haunt me.
There is a lot of blood and descriptions
of what’s to be done with their innards.

I hadn’t read this in 1986 when I became
a vegetarian, but it must have been part of
the internal history passed to me

through the blood of my ancestors
only to become a perpetual part of my non-diet.
The rams had to be perfect, which feels

exclusionary to those of us with imperfections.
As much as I don’t want to slaughter a ram
I want every mammal to have an equal opportunity

to get whatever they feel they should.
Aaron’s sons are being slathered and anointed
and nearby fingers are touching the blood.

This should have the desired effect.
On the other end of it, they will kehunah forever.
I can’t get over the word kehunah

and how it is not Kahunah, which is Hawaiian
or maybe they had a meeting about it
all the King Davids, the Jewish one and

the Hawaiian one, and they decided
let’s share this so even on non-Jewish vacation
I will be reminded of what always is.

I have a long list of things that always are.
I keep adding to it, to the point my wife asks
you’re doing another thing, every day, forever?

It is like our love, my love.
Always room for more. A perpetual state.
My kehunah.

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.