The Sacrifice

A staccato rap at the door, and there he stood,
Zanvil, the rain still running down his hair,
that black midnight hair, like streams of darkness,
down to his beard.
                            Even as he strode in,
he was lecturing me, his words like the snap of a whip.
“And another thought,”
                            “Another?  Back so soon?
You just left.  You stood in the rain thinking?”
The hot-head prophet, our Rabbi used to call him.

“Another thought.  Does anything at all have meaning?
Answer me straight.  Does anything at all mean anything?
What means what?”
                            “Sit, Zanvil.  Some tea?”
“Tea.  I’ll pace.  It helps me think.  Now speak:
What has meaning?  Anything here on earth?”
Back and forth he went, like a caged panther.
“Love?”  I said.  “Well maybe love.”
                                               He stopped,
grinned at me for a moment—snapped,
                                                          “So, love?
Good!  If love, then hate.”  Pacing again,
“Then also hate has meaning.  With all respect,
your grandfather, he was maybe a bit of a fool.
With due respect, wrong, he was all wrong.
More tea!”
             This deeply wounded crow, I thought—
this crow with a broken wing striving to fly,
to leave the ground—this was Zanvil’s way,
but always worth the listening.
                                     “No, no insult,
but wrong!  He said those Jews in the killers’ camps
simply plodded along from day to day?
And some were alive by chance and some were dead,
at the end, and it meant nothing?  That’s what he said?”

“Yes, something like that, but you must remember,
He lived through four long years steeped in death
in the Nazi camps, so he knew…”
                                                “He knew nothing!
Love has meaning!  Hate has meaning!  And death?
Death has none, you think?  Listen:  Nothing…”
And he knocked his fist on the table over and over,
“There’s nothing that has no meaning, including death,
and most of all, the Jews consumed by fire.”
Again pacing, splashing his tea as he spoke:

“Why is it horrible, what your grandfather said?
Because if it has no meaning, there is no God.
Where was God?  They ask.  I’ll tell you where—
at Auschwitz!  There He stood and gathered the flames
to Himself in the white heat of His transcending
embrace.  Our eyes are too dull to see.
Too dull we are, far too blind to see;
and that’s what we should mourn: our stupid grief,
our anger, helpless rage, for we were forced
to sanctify His name.  A bestial act
by a bestial nation drove us into the fire
of total transformation, flame and smoke
for God to consume, an immense dazzling deed,
climactic immolation—an ascent!”

I couldn’t stand another word.  I shouted,
“No ascent!  To pardon evil is evil!
You make excuses for the blackest filth?
You say that God…”

    “Yes, I say that God
was there and laughed and cried and sang aloud
Isaiah’s words that God Himself created
light and darkness, peace and evil. Evil!
I, the Lord, did all these things.  Evil!
And why?”

             He dropped into the nearest chair
and lowered his head and covered his eyes, and wept.

After a minute, he raised his head and spoke,
quietly now, as though some seizure had passed.

He said,  “Sometimes I think,  I’m about to know,
about to seize that truth, that dazzling truth
that spins horror into a golden thread
binding our bloody, wounded, wounding world
to all that is light.  So Moses did by singing
as Pharaoh’s cavalry drowned in the Sea of Reeds—
but then I recall that God forbade His angels
to celebrate the drowning of the troops
who also were God’s children, yet He Himself
contrived their death.”

                                 Zanvil slowly rose
and started to pace again.
                                “Another thought:
The temple sacrifice—why kill that heifer?
Why splash her blood or burn her down to smoke,
or should I say up to smoke?”  He vaguely smiled
at his own quip.
                       “To save us from something secret?”
He said, “Something hidden?  Speak, teach me—
Isaac bound for the knife by Abraham,
and the ram, trapped in the bush, killed instead—
you once said that episode marked the end
of human sacrifice?”

                             “Yes, I did say that.
The horror of nearly killing his treasured boy—
amid pagans, that shock would save us Jews
from a dark descent to human sacrifice.”

Zanvil stood, looked at me, then chuckled.
“I’m going.  Thanks for the tea.  And another thought:
If sacrifice means making something holy,
who is to sanctify us?  Who will raise
the souls of our people—God’s own precious treasure?
Thanks again.” 
                     He closed the door behind him.

I sat for a few moments, then I was filled
with anger, rage.  I yanked open the door;
he was down the stairs, his hand on the outside door
into the street.  “Zanvil!”  I shouted.  “No!
No!  Not God!  God is not some wild
Moloch priest who slaughters his own children!
The Auschwitz ovens were not some Holy of Holies!”

Zanvil’s voice resounded through the stairwell,
his words echoing up as though from afar.

“A sacrifice of complete ascent in flames—
Holocaust in Greek.”  He laughed loud
and called, as he passed into the drizzly street,
“I bequeath to you the golden thread.  It’s yours!”