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2021-

2021-05-01 a
MAY DAY. MAY DAY.

It Is Our (Frightful) Duty
To Study The Talmud

by Alice Walker
© 2017

The first time I was accused

Of appearing to be anti-Semitic

The shock did not wear off
For days.
The man who charged me
Was a friend.
A Jewish Soul
Who I thought understood
Or could learn to understand
Almost anything.

He could not understand
However
Why I thought Israel should give back
The land it took
From a poorly defended
People in a war that lasted
Six days. I cringed
About our small house
In Mississippi (where black people
Often assumed he was a racist)
Deeply offended by his attempt
To insult my character
And spoke to him
Earnestly of “dignity” “justice”
“honor” and “peace.”

Sometimes, later in life,
You do laugh at yourself.
You understand, finally,
That you’ve understood
Nothing. Nothing at all.
That in this case, for instance,
That of the famed Six Day War,
It was all a show,
A true “Theatre” war;
The battlefield a stage,
Though bombs and bullets were real.
Only the people who lost the battle
Got a close-up
Of the set.
And the set-up.

Later I would march
Or be arrested
Protesting this war and that
And marvel how it never mattered.
On days we marched in our tens of thousands
The people we hoped to influence
Were taking a holiday. Bush was
good at this. He let the media
Spread the word he was chillin’ on his
12,000 or is it 20,000
Acre ranch.
Bill and Barack made themselves
Scarce.

When I was in Palestine
As an elder
Doing my job
Of keeping tabs
On Earth’s children
I remembered my concern
And how my friend
Had brushed it off.

“Israel needs that land to protect itself.”
He said. As though this should be
Self- evident. It wasn’t then;
It isn’t now.

The land taken
Has never been returned.
In fact, more stolen land
Has followed the first assaults
And thefts.
Palestinian children, after years
Of throwing stones
At grown up assassins
In helmets and armored tanks
Are killing themselves
These days
To save their murderers
The trouble.

Unlike most Americans
I have witnessed Palestine
Under Israeli rule. It is demonic
To the core. But where to look
For the inspiration
For so much evil? Where
To find the teachings that influence
And sanction such limitless cruel behavior?

Where to find that part
Of the puzzle that is missing?
We’ve intuited there must be one.
And we were right.

*

We must go back
As grown ups, now,
Not as the gullible children we once were,
And study our programming,
From the beginning.
All of it: The Christian, the Jewish,
The Muslim; even the Buddhist. All of it, without exception,
At the root.

For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,
Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,
Of the creeping Palestination
Of our police, streets, and prisons
In America,
Of war in general,
It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.
It is within this book that,
I believe, we will find answers
To some of the questions
That most perplex us.

Where to start?

You will find some information,
Slanted, unfortunately,
By Googling. For a more in depth study
I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The
Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way
Into our collective consciousness.

Some of what you find will sound
Too crazy to be true. Unfortunately those bits are likely
To be true. Some of the more evasive studies
Will exhibit unbelievable attempts
At sugar coating extremely disagreeable pills.
But hang in there, checking
And double checking, listening to everybody,
Even the teachers with the twisted pasts
That scare you the most,
And the taped rants of outraged citizens that sound
Like madcap characters on Car Talk
Except they are not laughing
But are righteously outraged.

Study hard, with an open
If deeply offended mind,
Until you can sift the false
From the true.

Is Jesus boiling eternally in hot excrement,
For his “crime” of throwing the bankers
Out of the Temple? For loving, standing with,
And defending
The poor? Was his mother, Mary,
A whore?

Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?
Pause a moment and think what this could mean
Or already has meant
In our own lifetime.

You may find that as the cattle
We have begun to feel we are
We have an ancient history of oppression
Of which most of us have not been even vaguely
Aware. You will find that we, Goyim, sub-humans, animals
-The Palestinians of Gaza
The most obvious representatives of us
At the present time – are a cruel example of what may be done
With impunity, and without conscience,
By a Chosen people,
To the vast majority of the people
On the planet
Who were not Chosen.
Not chosen to receive the same dubious
“Blessing” of
Supremacy over the Earth,
Humans, and Beasts of this realm. As is
Stated plainly in the first chapter
Of the Bible we all read.
The Unchosen who, until now,
Were too scared of being
Called names
To demand to know why.

It is a “Blessing” Jesus did not want.
One that, risking crucifixion, he refused.
One reason he is loved
By those who recognize a good
And righteous person
When they encounter one.
Seen in this light he wasn’t even
A spiritual progressive, but a committed
Revolutionary: a Che Guevara
Of the ancient past.

A past as scary, if not scarier, than
Our own time: A past that,
Unfortunately, is not even past (quoting
Faulkner).

We discover this
To our enlightened grief
As we study
The Talmud,
Our own ignorance,
And the devastating impact of both
On our abandoned world.

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