Do It All the Time – A poem for Parsha Shoftim

When you have come to the land the your God,
is giving you, you shall not learn to do like
the abominations of those nations.
– Deuteronomy 18:9

The song says do the right thing,
do the right thing, do it all the time

and this is what I tell my son in
almost every situation.

He’s at that age where it’s becoming
a necessity to say these words.

As he gets older and taller
(He’s already taller than our

family scientists thought possible.)
he’s earned the ability to

walk out the front door as
his whims may direct him.

Just the other day he went for a walk
with a red-haired girl he knows from school

who happens to live in our neighborhood.
So that kind of thing is happening now.

He’s the kind of boy who absolutely
knows the right thing to do

but occasionally he misses the mark
and we realize he’s playing on a field

we didn’t know he knew existed.
So out the door he goes and we tell him

to do the right thing. Actually, we’re
a lot more specific but those details

are between him and us.
Like God told the ancient Israelites

we hope we’ve taught him how to
recognize an abomination, and that he’ll

resist its temptations as he walks
on the streets of our promised neighborhood.

God knows I’ve struggled with this and my parents
weren’t on hand to quote an inspirational song.

Doing anything all the time is a struggle,
and I was never as tall as he’s going to be.

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 26 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 “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii” (Poems written in Hawaii – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2022) 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.