Lee Diamond – Before It’s Too Late
The generation of the founders
Of the new Israel
Came here with a deep urge to restart
To rebuild a Re Jew vi Nation
To return to the ancient
But to build the new
To allow the seeds of the their day
To grow in soil of old
And to produce the New Jew
For their dawning day
They were a strong seed
The earth was their fertile womb
And they produced
“The children of the dream”
The unburdened
Unencumbered
The free
And creative new Jew
They returned to the soil
They returned to the language
As of Old and revitalized it,
The carried the plow and the rifle
And became like the tribes of Israel
And their armies
Of yore
Their lives fired our Jewish souls
It was our time to be the normal
Yet heroic new Jew
The world viewed us with envy
For casting aside the dependent Jew
The “Hanging on for life Jew”
The begging Jew
And the metamorphous that
We had undergone
This was the “day the Lord had made”(Psalms 118:24)
But we were a shell
A magnificent shell
A necessary shell
A luminary shell
But an empty shell
In the urgent passion to create the new
We rejected the Jewish soul
We were an army of strident soldiers and farmers
But we left our “neshamot” in Minsk and in Pinsk
And in Bialystok
And created a nation with out a ongoing history
Just an ancient history
And we consciously deleted the diaspora
As meaningless and the years of our Shame
Shemah Yisrael ceased
To be on our sun beaten lips
We were bold ; we were strong
We were sunbeaten chalutzim
But Shema Yisrael was unknown to us
We cast the past
—-Judaism
—-Shema
To the super Jews
The Eastern European black coats
And black hatted remnants of the unwanted
Old , and past, and irrelevant
And they took charge
By taking control
Of the administration
Of birth of Brit, of marriage
And divorce and death
The flame of Shemah Yisrael
Became a
monopoly of documents
And offices
And refusal
And rejection
And power
And immutable clerks
Who spoke a language
That was foreign to us and our language
Foreign to them
They scowled at our clothing
And our uncovered heads and legs and arms
And they transformed Judaism into
A series of forms to be filled out
At weddings
And at divorce
And at death.
And in a kashrut certificates
And that’s how we came to understand
Shemah Yisrael
And then we became
Distant from the new Jew
Who got tired
And the old who never cared
About this world and this day
And the ‘rabbinate of forms”
And sometimes fraudulent rabbis
And their blackmail in our own government
So we are left with the new Jew who has aged and is dying
And an old Jew who is old, and getting even older
Who is unchanged and receding into forms upon forms
And an empty shell of administrated Judaism
Without the wisdom of
שמע ישראל ה אלהינו ה אחד
But it’s not too late at all
To recapture the powerful
Source — because it’s ours
And it kept us kept us alive and will continue to do so
נצח ישראל לא ישקר “It’s there waiting for us”
“If we will it, it’s not a dream”
