Early humans are we.

Early humans are we, all evidence directs,
Directly we gloat, most unworthy of pride,
Pride makes us weak, powerless in delight,
For death is delight, in the black hearts of savages.ⁱ

So we hide in plain sight, hiding kippot,
Keeping shy mezuzot, taking gentler names,
Gently integrating, until we almost forgot,
Suddenly 10/7 we remember, hidden meaning again.

“Never again” could never be, not with these crooked timbers,ⁱⁱ
Of humanity so bent, that it’d string up its winners,ⁱⁱⁱ
And celebrate our demise, burning flags white and blue,^iv
So war‘s just begun, its fires are our Truth.

And Truth is our power, its form follows function,
Many forms though it takes, physicality we embrace,
Kinetics dispose what thermodynamics propose,
So upward we grow, until we earn peace.

Far future shalom, early humans are we.^v

[Image credit: Alexei Leonov via Museum of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre]

1. There’s no “justice” in delighting in unspeakable pain. Pure, black evil lies in those hearts who feel otherwise. ↩
2. I have cousins in Israel who genuinely thought – before 10/7 at least – that antisemitism was a regional issue, and that those of us in North America and Europe were so perfectly assimilated that we’d never have to fear for our safety again, at least not on account of our traditions.* But those of us here in the West knew all along what evil lurked in the hearts of men. “Only the paranoid survive,” as they say, and our grandparents survived the Shoah because they didn’t trust the occupying Germans and their sympathisers who said that they just wanted to “relocate” our families and wouldn’t we just hop on this here train for a quick ride to somewhere “safer.” Nuh-uh.

   So, yes, my 10-year-old grandmother intravenously injected my great-grandmother with milk so the elder woman would be too sick to travel. So they stayed together, and bought more time, and procrastinated; from what they didn’t know for sure. But they had a sixth sense – surely honed by millennia of persecution – as to who was trustworthy and who wasn’t, especially in those darkest of hours. So it is that we’re still here today, still not quite utopian enough to believe that the craven masses don’t get exactly the monsters they want.

   The difference in 2023 is that now we have Israel – the-little-country-that-could – which isn’t going anywhere no matter how much the US crumbles, no matter how many Iranian-TikTok-fueled “Phree Palestine” protests there are, and no matter how much HamaISIS lashes out like a sadistically entitled toddler.
   ↩

3. If not “winners,” are we “martyrs” then, per Zohar? Pray tell, could we ever be otherwise? But hey, a little human sacrifice worked just fine for the Mayans and it’s not like we’ve advanced that much as a species in the millennium since. And hey, Ye tried to warn us!
   

   Ye’s very often ahead of the curve. Autotune in hip-hop? He popularised it. Complex foam extrusions in footwear? Same. Brow-beating sitting Presidents? Yup again! I mean really, “George Bush hates Black people” was a full cultural generation before “Not my President” and “Will someone please get Granpa Joe his memory meds?” It was edgy and “controversial” when Ye did it but now it’s just part of The Agenda.

   Does that mean that Jew-hating is on The Agenda for 2035? I guess I hope not, but my bags have always been packed just in case. What, you think I’m into crypto, watches, and tapestries by accident or coincidence? Ha. That’s just part of being the “other!” It’s in the contract, you might say. Not that it’s a fair contract, but hey who said life was fair?

   And that was barely twelve months ago – back in October 2022 – or had you forgotten already? Ok, so my “prophecy” came true in 2023 instead of 2035, but let’s not give your humble author too too much credit. If anything was “inevitable” in hindsight, it was, unfortunately, the ritualistic “throwing of the jew down the well.”

   
   ↩
4. Going out on a limb here but maybe America shouldn’t have spent the last couple decades calling everyone it disagreed with “Nazi” and “Terrorist” to the point where we can no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys in our own midst.  It sure as shit didn’t help the Middle East to call the best foreign policy President in a generation (Trump) every name in the book while his very Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner made more progress towards peace in the region than anyone this side of Shimon Peres:
   But I digress, because one side of this latest war (mostly) mourns for civilian deaths and minimises them, and the other side (mostly) relishes and maximises such tragedies, and it must be clearly emphasised that these are not morally equivalent. ↩
5. “Shalom” in Hebrew means “hello,” “goodbye,” and “peace”, suggesting perhaps that there’s no peace possible (in this world) until we’ve said hello (to our enemies) and goodbye (to our loved ones). Only then can we know One, but even then only in cyclical glimpses. ↩