Kaddish For Bob

I'm really angry right now,
and I know it's irrational, blown out of proportion,
and I think I know why.
It's one of those rages whose stump reminds you
how long ago you chopped it down,
and whose backyard-strangling roots
are easily uncovered by a few turns of a shovel.

I went to my mother's apartment
to sit shiva for Bob.
Sitting shiva is the officially proscribed behavior
for jews in mourning.
Being jewish is about as significant to me
as the shape of my fingernails,
or the direction in which my hair grows out of my scalp.
But my mother said she needed me.
There had to be ten jews present
or the rabbi wouldn't show.

My anger sprouted new leaves
as soon as the prayer books were handed out,
and began to bud as the rabbi said,
"Turn to page thirty-eight,"
and a roomful of people, herd-like,
mouthed mumbly words together in bovine unison.
They read in a habitual, listless monotone, distracted,
the droning momentum punctuated
by the rabbi's commands to stand up and sit down
and stand up and sit down and turn to page whatever.

And my anger sprouted like jack's magic beanstalk,
and at the top of the beanstalk
sat my father the giant,
surrounded by his magical, ever-expanding library of judaica,
whose books he eternally consumes,
sucking them in at his top end,
like satan eating souls in hell,
and then shitting them back out his bottom,
only to be reconstituted and consumed again.
And at regular intervals, the excess paper pulp
comes spewing out of his mouth and ears and nostrils,
cascading down like sewage from a busted pipe
and contaminating unfortunate passersby.

And I remembered him trying to feed me
this regurgitated pulp when I was a boy,
like a mother animal tending to it's toothless, eyeless young.
But his paper-puke held no nourishment,
and so I starved and my skin turned to parchment,
and the thinner I got, the more he stupidly crammed
his meaningless book-mush down my gullet.

When my daughter was fifteen,
she brought a non-jewish friend
to my parents' passover seder.
I told my daughter's friend that during passover,
jews were required to stand on one leg for an entire hour
while balancing on their heads
a bowl containing a raw turnip.
...and she believed me!

Oh yes--and jews are not allowed to chew gum on the sabbbath.
And if they're caught with gum,
they have to go out on the street
and find someone less fortunate than themselves
and offer them gum.

And if a jew scratches his ass,
he must never sniff his fingers afterwards,
for to do so would be an unclean impurity in the eyes of god.
And why?
Because two thousand years ago,
some jackoff sitting in a desert somewhere
didn't like the smell of his own doodie
and wrote it down in a book.

I'm sorry, Bob.
I'm sorry that these husks, these bleatings,
are all that we still here on the earth plane
have to offer your soul
as it departs for it's next grand adventure.
These expired rituals, these pantomimes,
spastically bouncing up and down in our seats
like wooden jumping-jack toys,
are all you're receiving tonight for a job well done.
It's like giving you a used kleenex
in lieu of a gold watch upon retirement,
and it pisses me off!

If you're going to mourn, fucking mourn!
Howl out your grief! Your love! Your ache!
Speak words from your depths;
choose them carefully.
Orate! Declarate! Enunciate!
So that everyone in the room
can feel what you feel!
I mean really fucking feel!
And the words will leave your mouth like arrows,
and pierce the heads and hearts of all present,
gathering speed and force like a whirlwind,
accumulating love and pain, joy and regret,
bringing release, purgation, purification,
and finally landing at Bob's feet,
sanctified, juicy and overflowing,
like a diploma from the almighty himself,
like a love letter from heaven.

David Aronson
March 2010