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October 23, 2024
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Leaving

Shake the palm, the willow and the myrtle,
grasp a lovely citrus fruit,
leave your home, not shell-shocked like a turtle,
metamorphic as a newt.

The vernal equinox has passed, it’s time
to leave the safety of the dry
indoors, not fearing harshness of the clime
while gazing at the starlit sky.

Change habitat, flee safety of your house
and cast away all roofs like shackles,
transforming nature, swiftly as a mouse
to open air, on Tabernacles.

Staying

By doing this, we echo Israelites
who lived in huts while in a wilderness,
glad to have regained their civil rights,
rights we still must fight for now no less

than when in Egypt, in a pharaoh’s land;
our Goshen homes had roofs, but we, enslaved,
took forty years to grasp and understand
the needed roofs were tribal flags we waved,

our rights based not just on the Torah but
by God and by our tribal flags detected,
while in the wilderness, in a mere hut,
we saw the stars – our rights – by God protected.


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.

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