Ha’Emet, or The Truth I Learned From You In Good Faith
[vc_row][vc_column][title type="subtitle-h6"]Eva Jacobs[/title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]
My mother is an atheist, any notion of God
obscured by the weight
bearing down on her bent back,
obscured by the burn
from the crack of the whip,
down her spine
neurons firing,
incomplete—
—they can't reach their destination
A benevolent God wouldn't do this.
He wouldn't take the human body
and turn it in on itself, eating away at itself,
for he created it himself, and he said it was good, right
He wouldn't take her legs and wrap them
in the resounding silence of questions unanswered
She is Atlas, holding up the world
Holding up the weight of everyone else's faith
that she was chosen to bear arbitrarily
but cannot share—
I guess that's why she always seems so tired
He wouldn't steal away her livelihood,
her autonomy, my childhood
Wouldn't render us immobile, make us
perpetually paralyzed,
me pathologically petrified
to move forward
for fear of leaving her behind, no—
a benevolent God wouldn't do this.
I want to tell her I found Him, for her,
but sometimes I falter,
What does it mean to find God today, anyway
Too often I lose him in the skies, asphyxiated there
by the fear that I’ll become her successor,
holding up the world like her, and her mother before her
Like mother, like daughter, I guess
he meant it when he said
he’d punish me for the sins of my father
But for her sake I search and for her sake I tell her
that in my temple, I find no fear of a diagnosis
In my temple, I hear a promise:
Lech-lecha m’artzecha el-haeretz asher arecha.
“Go from your homeland, to a land that I will show you.”
I hear, L'shanah haba'ah b'yerushalayim.
“Next year in Jerusalem.”
I hear go, but don't forget from whence you came,
don't forget who paved the way,
Go free, but never forget to come home
I can tell her that, in my temple,
I hear the voices of Ruth and Esther,
the wisdom of the Song of Songs
I hear “I charge you, O daughters of
Jerusalem, not to give your love
away until it is ready.”
I hear live, but live steady—
even if your gait isn't.
I hear don't be ashamed of your identity—
even if it makes you different.
I hear live with unabashed integrity,
an open heart in the face of misfortune.
I hear value your community,
no matter how small or strange,
I hear always be a voice for change
with your eyes ever on the horizon.
Be better than the generation before you,
and teach your children what you lacked then.
And so I put my faith not
in the word of a book, but
in the heart of a living document
that aims to explain identity.
An identity that began before a dream
of a dream of a distant time, that survived
oppression, prejudice, exile,
Exodus, and mass genocide.
An identity that could not be exterminated,
refused to be terminated or lost in our Diaspora.
Not burned away by the multiple sclerosis,
it seeps from under the floorboards
at home, Dor l’dor, it goes:
“Generation to generation,” it grows
Teaching me resilience, spirit, community,
tenacity, and that is my
true inheritance.
I was raised with all
the evidence I needed
to believe in
something.
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