What Is It About Us? – A poem for Parsha Vayetzei ~ Genesis 31:36
What is it about us?
Did we win too many Nobel Prizes?
Are our bagels too delicious?
Are they mad we wrote all the Christmas songs?
Are they jealous we have eight nights?
Do we feast too much?
Do we fast too much?
Have we invented too much useful technology?
Are we not sharing the comedy spotlight enough?
Are they still mad about the soup and the birthright?
Would they have preferred the desert not to bloom?
Is it the inability to push us into the sea?
Is it the sheer number of holidays we have?
It’s the potato pancakes, isn’t it?
It’s our hora. It’s our Eurovision wins.
It’s our insistence on living
despite all the efforts to the contrary.
Every decade, every century, every millennium
they keep reminding us it’s something about us.
But they won’t tell us what.
Rick Lupert, a poet, songleader and graphic designer, is the author of 27 books including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion.”
