A Last Tribute to Passover

One last Passover post before I leave it behind for another year. This one prompted by a very meaningful service I attended at Temple Micah on Monday morning. Our rabbi Esther opened the service with this poem from Marge Piercy’s “The Art of Blessing the Day”:

Zeroah: Lamb shank

It grosses out many of my friends.
They don’t eat meat, let alone
place it on a ritual platter.
I am not so particular, or more so.

Made of flesh and bone, liver
and sinew, salty blood and brain,
I know they weren’t ghosts who trekked
out of baked mud huts into the desert.

Blood was spilled, red and real:
first ours, then theirs. Blood
splashed on the doorposts proclaimed
in danger the rebellion within.

We are pack and herd animals.
One Jew is not a Jew, but we are
a people together, plural, joined.
We were made flesh and we bled.

And we fled, under the sign
of the slaughtered lamb to live
and die for each other. We are
meat that thinks and sings.

The last line in particular painted such an interesting image for me. Isn’t that a great way to describe humankind?