Kaddish of the New Year

For the blessed memory of all innocent victims

“Yitgadal V’yitkadash Shmei Rabba - May His great Name be magnified and sanctified.”

Not great and not holy is He,
for in His Name blood is spilled in vain.

Magnified and sanctified are only these:
the impulse of inciters and destroyers,
the heaps of ruin and the rows of graves,
the cries of terror and the silence imposed.

No greatness shall be found in the ruins of a sleeping neighborhood,
in the cry of a child in the darkness of his life,
in the weeping of a mother who warms with her empty breasts
the bodies of her children.

There is no holiness in this blood, no greatness in this bereavement.
And who shall say Kaddish after their beds and their deaths
the multitudes of human lives cut off
by the cruelty of spirits defiled?

“B’alma Di v’ra — In the world which He created.”

God of truth, are You still alive?
Why did You create Your world?

For love.
For playing in the sands of the shore.
For celebrating birthdays and hoping.
For music and for building.
For loving and for creating.
For living and for bringing forth life.

But look down from heaven and see:
Your emissaries in Gaza and its Envelope
ruin worlds with curses,
bind children with bombs,
beloved with graves,
whole communities extinguished and towns wipped.

Who are You, that this is Your world?
Judge of all the earth, whose judgment is annexation and corruption?

“V’yamlikh Malkhutei — And may He establish His kingdom.”

Your Judeo-Israeli kingdom has become a kingdom of wickedness,
its government of malice,
its deeds of hatred and fear,
a kingdom of burned toys and withered childhoods,
its corpses laid in endless rows.

Avinu Malkeinu, our Father, our King,
You and Your kingdom were seized
by angels of destruction, and no one call to them: Enough!

Do not lay Your hands
to the fire and to the slaughtering knife.
Their God of vengeance defeated
our Lord of Peace.

The time has come for a new creation:
O God, create Yourself anew, re-Genesis
other than them, apart from them.

On Rosh Hashana, The New Year,

the day when You conceived the world
let us crown for ourselves a new Sovereign, Most High,
good and beneficent to all creatures of the worlds,
a dominance of compassion and of humanity,
whose reign is speech not slaughter.

“V’yatzmach Purkanei — May He cause redemption to sprout.”

Where is the deliverance?
What can grow from these seeds of death?
What redemption has ever sprung from fields of carnage,
from the kernels sown in the souls of terrified children?

How shall we be redeemed from this desolation,
and how shall hope return where all hope is lost?

What redemption for father and mother bereaved
in the face of the Smugness
of the sowers of disaster?

There will be no redemption complete until we all rise
as one together
and say: Enough.

We shall answer Amen no more
to the howls of Benjamin the ravening wolf.
No more in the name of this false faith,
no more for the sanctity of the saturated with sadness soil,
no more for the leader, nor for the illusion.

“B’chayyechon U’vyomechon — In your lives and in your days.”

Days destroyed and nights laid waste.
Lives become orphanhood and widowhood.
The earth is soaked in blood and tears,
and the heavens are silent.

Why? Why now? Why at all?
Every answer given is false,
and truth cries out from the ground.

“U’vchayei D’chol Beit Yisrael — And in the life of all the house of Israel.”

And in the life of all the house of Palestine.
And in the life of all the children of this tortured land.

Blood does not halt at checkpoints.
Bereavement knows no boundaries.
A Jewish mother and a Palestinian mother, alike in their grief,
bow down beneath the canopy of silence.
A Jewish father and a Palestinian father, hearts broken as one.

All four mourn, and only the names upon the stones differ.
There lie the fruits of their wombs, cut off unripe.

“B’galah U’vizman Kariv — Speedily and in the near time.”

The graves of time have drawn close upon the living.

The children did not wait.
They went out of time and shall not return.
They fell asleep because we did not awaken soon enough.
They have no near future, and our present is hollow.

In the burial grounds, here and there,
rest forever the innocents
who never sought to fight.

“L’alam U’lalmei Almaya — Forever and to all eternity.”

Forever we shall not know what they dreamed in their last watch,
what they longed to become when grown,
to what home they meant to return at nightfall.

For they shall not return.
Only silence remains,
the last image,
and the tears, that have a life of their own.

“Yitbarakh V’yishtabach — Blessed and praised.”

Who shall bear witness to the lives that were?
Who shall tell what was cut off here?

Not the books of history, not the reports of war.
Perhaps the scar in the heart of the child,
or the empty desk in the classroom.

There is none to bless,
and nothing in which to glory.

“Tushb’chata V’nechemata — Praise and consolation.”

What is consolation, tell me?
The words are too pompous, too hollow.
Private grief is heavier than they,
and for orphanhood there is no rest.

If from all this only one prayer might ascend,
let it be this:

“Yehei Shl’ama Rabba Min Sh’maya — May there be abundant peace from heaven.”

Grant peace.

Peace that is not an empty prayer,
not a parable, not a distant dream.
But peace that breathes life
into lands of the shadow of death.

“Oseh Shalom Bimromav — He who makes peace in His heights.”

If You are mighty, O Lord,
raise not the dead from their graves.
Let them rest.
Only restore the hopes.

And until You return,
From captivity, hibernation or demise
we, in our own strength,
shall make peace upon us,
and upon all the dwellers of this land,
and upon all creation.

For this is all of humanity.
And let us say: Amen.