Guest Poet/Blogger: Noach Dzmura!

After the second night Queer/Trans Seder last week, I was able to spend a moment with our host, Noach Dzruma.  We talked about, as one might expect, our love of and ambivalence toward G!d.  I am told this poem emerged through that convo.  When he showed it to me, I knew AI had to share it with you.  It's sorta reminiscent of Thich Nhat Hahn's Call Me by My True Names, but for me, Noach's piece is more visceral, more human, somehow.  May it trouble you where you need troubling, and heal you where you're raw from G!d.

Earthodox[i]

Noach Dzmura[ii]

God is one sick father-raping evil bitch.
God is HIV racing through young and healthy bodies
and in pills –just one too many—
taken intentionally when living more becomes
too painful. God
is the decisive twitch of muscles
in the trigger-pulling index finger of the vigilante
who through the red fuse shot Trayvon
and in the smirk
of the killer who still walks free.
God is the cigarette my mother smokes in the garage,
the oxygen canister awaiting her upstairs, AND the gasping, breathless flight of stairs between.
God is in the layoffs, downsizing and in the firings for cause.
God is the Stepford-wife vacancy
in my grown up little brother’s eyes
when he said to my face
with uninvested candor,
“Gay people are dying out.”
God is the blockage
in the septic tank that contaminates
a water supply in a strip-mined mountain village and in the hillbilly’s
grandkids who make a mint from moonshine that blinds
as it inebriates.
God is in fuck you and fuck me and in fucking.

This gentle poet is not a doom shouter but a realist. A god-fearer with the emphasis on Fear as terror, not the kind of benign awe one feels in the presence of movie stars. A believer who longs for the unification of the Divine Name. No simple heterosexual coupling Great Marriage will suffice. Most marriages end in divorce and marriage straight or gay leaves most of us out of the picture and since we are all undeniably IN THE PITCURE, we must come to understand that leaving things out is not God’s way. All of our temple services in one way or another make the Great Marriage the central focus of worship. Increase and multiply was the first commandment.  We’ve done that. The second commandment is to steward creation. Lets get busy.

We shortchange God when we recognize his face only in springtime and the bounty of summer.
We have had our ears tuned to trumpet blasts from Heaven so we missed it - Rubashkin was Elijah. Madoff was Moshiach.
We placate the Redeemer, the Benevolent one
We ignore the child-eating face of God to our own peril.
Moloch is claiming a sacrifice on every milk carton.

A WHOLE God is as eternally absent and as futilely longed for as my dead beloved father
and as unavoidable as a bedsore to a shut-in impoverished American.
Present and active as today’s computer-jamming solar flares.
I love this God passionately, fervently as s/he kills me
just a little bit more each day. The death S/He brings is my entire whistling strut.

We’re counting 49 days of the omer now,
49 days between the seedling and the Reaper’s scythe,
47 days more now toward revelation reaped at
Sinai: God is radically One. All is God. Anything less is idolatry.

–if reaping kills the grain is revelation death?—

This dark side is the same Force
that through the green fuse
shoots the flower.
With or without it
we are stardust.
With it, we know.

The narrow place is consciousness.
Recognizing wholeness is Olam ha Ba.

Who can worship in only one church, one synagogue or one mosque?
Pray in all or give it up and let your life be a reflection of the wholeness of God.
The streets and bridges are My temples;
District 3 in West Oakland and Districts 6 and 7 in East Oakland are the Holy of Holies.
Shopping carts, suitcases and garbage bags are the vestments and regalia of the High Priest.
Fear not:
You won’t be whispering My name from there any time soon.
You know what happens when you see the face of the Divine.
Graffiti and the feces of the marketing empire –billboards and benches
that say Your Ad Here—
are Torah.
Run Cinderella, or the Zombies will eat your brain.
Amen.

---

[i] I heard the word Earthodox first from Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje.

[ii] Noach Dzmura edited Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community, NorthAtlantic Books, 2010. He manages a non-profit, Jewish Transitions (www.jewishtranistions.org), that works with gender variant people in Jewish Communities, especially on two really important Jewish Transitions:  conversion and burial. He teaches at Starr King School for the Ministry, and in your neighborhood.  Contact me at brerrabbi@gmail.com to set up a talk in your town via Skype.

NO. HAM. at Easter!!

Don't get me wrong.  I heart the dead pig.  Enormously.  My love of bacon (and my unwillingness to lay it on the altar of discipline) is one thing that keeps me from formally being Muslim.

As we near Pesach (I get to go to a Queer seder this year!), I felt some porkly info might be relevant.

Ham for Easter?    Appalling.  Here's why.

After Al Andalus fell, the Christian Spanish took over that area.  Al Andalus had been a time and place in which Islam, Judaism and Christianity all lived together in harmony, fostering medical and other sciences (the first eye surgeries were done during this time), the arts, language (it's from this period that Hebrew was reinvented as a poetic language and not just a liturgical one) and even agriculture and watershedding.  Life flourished in Al Andalus; the architecture we have left from this period in the Iberian peninsula still has no parallel or peer.

So then the Christians get arrogant and uppity (it's a long story) and take it all over.  Wars, death, killing--all in the name of God.  God, who loves you and all humans so much that His servants will kill you if you aren't one of them.

Isabel and Ferdinand (oddly enough, mostly Isabel, but hey) come up with this great idea:  Let's get rid of all the Jews and Muslims, and take over!  We can kick them out, confiscate all their possessions--real estate, gold, money, everything--and really run things the right way, the way that God says!

So they did.

Jews and Muslims had a choice: get the fuck out, or convert to Christianity.  Many left, some didn't, not wanting to leave their histories homes, lives, families, careers.  Conversions occurred.  

So Easter--the Christian-adapted pagan (well, human) festival of Spring and renewal and rebirth comes around, and just to make sure that the folx who converted weren't blowing smoke up bums of the Christians, Isabel and Ferdinand declared a public feat day, ostensibly to celebrate Easter.

In case you don't know it, consuming pork is forbidden in kashuit (Jewish) and Muslim law.  So what did Izzy and Fred serve at this public feast day, to celebrate seasonal renewal and the resurrection of Christ at Easter?

Ham.  And one was made to eat it, in public, by way of proving that one's conversion was "real," that one would break with the laws of one's previous tradition and belief system, proving their Christianity.

Ham.  Dead pig.  Anathema to Muslims and Jews.  Ham.  Dirty, forbidden meat.  Ham.  The symbol of Christian control.  And if you didn't eat it, after a conversion, in public, on Easter, you were executed.  Ham or DIE.

The egg, I get, as a symbol of fertility and renewal.  Bunnies?  Sure!  They're profligate (but we won't talk about frequent sex or anything like that).  Lillies?  I get those too--flowers, blooming, new life, yeah.  But ham, at Easter?

Never again.  My family always had a ham at Easter; I thought it was just what everyone did.   But I had NO idea what it meant.  All those deaths, forced conversions, evictions, confiscations, loss of life and knowledge.

I admit: I still eat ham. But NEVER at Easter.