In games we play the best way that we have to silence any doubt
that we might win a game of sports, is winning,
just as the best chance that we have to show God that we love to flout
all rules He might have made is sometimes sinning.
If you consider anybody who obeys these rules a sucker,
and that no violations harm the soul
you’ll be like World Cup players who while playing international soccer
hope to get succor from an offside goal,
or Jews like us who’re sitting in a sukkah hoping we’ve fulfilled
a mitzvah even if the sukkah’s roof
is starlight-proof, as useless as the ten plagues’ wine on seders spilled
to prove we’re antisemitism proof.
While Jews recite the ten plagues during the Passover seder, they customarily spill a drop of wine from their wine glasses after mentioning each plague, perhaps a libation that may be regarded as an apotropaic ritual designed to prevent the sort of antisemitism that was encouraged by Egypt’s Pharaoh and his citizens before antisemitism became normalized in democratic western societies.
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.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.