Standing on the Shoulders of a Cliché

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Many years ago when my friend the great children’s doctor, Lionel Lubitz was still good-looking, I witnessed a Moment in the History of Ideas.

 

Lionel Lubitz

Lionel placed toast in the toaster and took raspberry jam from the pantry. He spread the jam on his toast and stopped. He said, I’ve just had an idea. He rose, returned to the pantry, coming back to his toast holding a jar of chilli powders. Lionel sprinkled the jam with chilli powder. I urged him to get help.

 

Lionel bit rashly into his toast. He said, beaming, Try a bit, Howard. Humouring the lunatic, I took a taste. It was a sensation. This was a moment of invention, a breakthrough in human alimentation, and I was there as a witness. As I remarked above, this was history. Human thought had moved forward.

 

The United Staes of America has been the birthplace of another such stride forward. In 1901, Julia Davis Chandler wrote a recipe in the Magazine of the Boston Cooking School of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. In her article she described a sandwich recipe with crab apple jam and peanut butter. Peanut butter had become a popular spread in New York tea rooms of the period. One tea room, anticipating the latter-day Lubitz, offered a peanut butter and pimento sandwich.

 

If I am to be truthful, I am unable to describe the latest Moment in the History of Gustation with any modesty at all. In a thunderbolt moment of mentation, I thought, What about a peanut butter, raspberry jam and chilli sandwich?

 

I made one. Sitting in an unpromising kitchenette in my Alice Springs accommodation, I applied raspberry jam to a Corn Thin. I covered this in smooth peanut butter, then sprinkled chilli powder on top. Once again, sensation! I was silent for a moment, like Stout Cortez and his men when they stared out at the Pacific, silent on a peak in Darien. I found my voice and offered a bite – just a small bite, it was too good to share generously – to my friend, Rod Moss, the famous artist. (Yes I do have famous friends: with this invention, Rod and Lionel now have one of their own, to wit, this writer). Rod shook his head. No thanks, Howie. Like eating polystyrene. 

 

Rod Moss

How little, how very, very little, does Rod know.

 

Yes, the invention is truly a leap of the human toward high heaven. I must have recourse to cliché: like Sir Isaac Newton before me, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

 

 

While awaiting my Nobel, I will share the recipe with humankind.

 

 

Raspberry Jam, Peanut Butter and Chilli Toast*

 

INGREDIENTS

Raspberry Jam (must be bright red, a bit runny and have seeds).

Peanut Butter (smooth or bumpy, salted or unsalted, all are good).

Toast or *Corn Thins (I have not tried polystyrene, but you could give it a go).

 

METHOD

Combine the above in any order and apply to the farinaceous.

Eat, roll eyes, swallow. Be prepared to swoon.  

Catching Up

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I’m gaining on my parents. Dad died at ninety-two years and nine months, Mum died one week short of her ninety-second birthday. It occurred to me when I turned seventy-eight recently that I’m catching up with them.

It would be nice to catch up with them in the contemporary sense of a catch-up. But in reality, such a catch-up wouldn’t be face to face, but bone to bone. I’m not ready for that, not structurally nor emotionally.

I do catch up with my parents from time to time. One of the two will appear in my visual field when my eyes are closed in sleep. They don’t speak, but we know each other and we understand each other. They smile. I expect I smile in turn. I know I feel smilish, a feeling of being loved and deeply known, a feeling of loving back.

The feelings are sweet, sweet. 

It’s when I’m awake that I muse on the narrowing gap between us. Somehow the musing carries no pain, no fear, no sorrow. This contrasts with the fear I had as a child, of the annihilation of death. Death has no sting now: Dad did it, Mum did it. Their time had come and they went. We wept, we remember and the loving feeling is unquenched. They died, the love loves on. 

It was the love of my parents that formed me and sustained me. They taught me how to live. Now they are helping me as I approach the exit. If, as is written, the task of a lifetime is to come to terms with life’s finity, then my parents have taught me one final time.

Little Old Lady

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You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

Little Old Lady

By Posted in Childhood, death, Family, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

Bird, Wind, Beach

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Somewhere in the far north of the country, a monsoon whips and drenches the land. Here, on a beach one thousand kilometres south, the monsoon’s tail lashes sand and sea and sky. During a lull between rain dumps I take my chances and run across the hard-whipped sand. I have the beach to myself. Clouds lower and threaten. The air is warm and wet.

Something draws my gaze upward, and there – there! – a shape is held in suspension. The shape moves ever so slightly, moves sideways in the air. Closer now, I make out a white undersurface, and as the shape leans a fraction, a silver-grey shows itself. My legs find speed and power, drawn in long-forgotten fluency, towards this bird, this vision. I realise I’m gazing up at a sea eagle.

The sight is a glory. I feel a transport of joy. No sound but wind and the waves crashing, driven by the wind, the wind that this bird defies. He defies the roaring wind, and rides with such ease. Suddenly, he swings, gliding now, wind-powered, and is gone. I thrill to the mastery of the thing. “Mastery” – the word comes to me from The Windhover, that poem of Hopkins that must have hovered above my thought for two score of years.

In phrase after phrase Hopkins captures my feeling:

I caught this morning morning’s minion…

My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird…

This uplift in my spirit stays with me all day.

Simply, a bird, a beach, a wind; simple the recipe for exultation, for thanksgiving, for preservation.

A Yacht Race

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The race had been in progress for the best part of three days. Two yachts crept down the Derwent River towards the finish line. Left behind were the brutal winds of the Start. Here there was scarcely a zephyr. The national broadcaster broke into the scheduled breakfast banalities to cover the final minutes of the race. In a race of 628 nautical miles, the giant yachts were separated by less than one-tenth of a nautical mile.

The Breakfast crew at the TV station were agog. The vision showed two yachts with their so tallmasts, black triangular sails reminiscent of wizard’s cloaks, creeping, overlapping each other, changing tack suddenly, stealing each other’s air, vying for minute advantage. You could not tell from the vision which yacht was leading. The young woman on the TV declared: I can’t tell who’s ahead! Neither could I.

It was clear to me, a mere dinghy sailor, the TV lady was all at sea. She would not know what a nautical mile was, nor the names of the sails, nor her port side from her starboard. She didn’t need to. She was engaged, she was excited and she conveyed the tension of the moment as well as her partiality. This was entertainment. She favoured the boat that had finished in second place twice. In short she cheered for the underdog precisely and solely because it was the underdog.

To cheer for the underdog is familiar to most Australians. An instinct for justice overtakes us. It’s an impulse both noble and immature. It loves the simple story. It has no time for nuance. Insteadthere is romance, a whiff of virtue.

It is this instinct for the underdog that animates the national broadcaster. This is evident in reporting many contests, both domestic and international.

At the moment there are contested narratives in the middle east. The broadcaster can’t quite resist the adolescent lure of the simple story. It sees David, it sees Goliath. It sees moral purity on one side and the opposite on the other side. And it what is clearly to be seen it chooses not to see.

In the course of the war in Gaza and Israel the broadcaster and its like-minded newspapers report the aweful suffering of Palestinian people, as they should. We see and we read and we feel. Our feelings include grief and shock and anger. What the reports seldom remind us is the fact of war both in Gaza and in Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to rocket non-military targets in Israel.

We see much reporting of the suffering in Gaza, some of the suffering in the West Bank, much, much less of the situation in Israel.

In the weeks since mid-October, I have not come across reportage such the following. Its author is a New Yorker named ShaulRobinson:

Israel, December 2023. Not a defeated country. Certainly not a country short on resolve or determination. Or even a country concerned that it might not get through this. But, for all that, this is a stunned country. A grieving country. A country in indescribable pain.

The daily losses of soldiers. The people you meet everywhere – ’ I have a son in Gaza’. The hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. The bereaved, the shattered communities, the shattered sense of security, of safety. The wounded (there are already thousands of profoundly wounded soldiers), the scarred. The families coping with husbands, fathers, children, in the Army for months….

We learned a long time ago to stop saying the words ‘unprecedented’ or ‘unbelievable’. The precedents in Jewish history for people doing this kind of monstrous violence, born of irrational, demonic hatred, are too many to count. And as for ‘unbelievable’ – well we should have believed it could happen, but nobody wanted to. 

… the most profound moments are with the individual encounters. We met the parents of three heroes – Rabbi Shmuel Slotki whose two sons Noam and Yishai Slotki died on the first day, rushing to defend Kibbutz Alumim, and Robert and Lisa Zenilman whose son Ari, who was born in to the LSS community, died in Gaza two weeks ago. 

We met parents and family members of hostages. We met people who had survived the attacks of October 7th, and relatives of people who did not survive. We met wounded soldiers, and soldiers on their way to battle. We met parents who do not sleep at night (in fact I do not think we met anyone who does sleep at night).  We met bereaved family members sitting by their loved ones’ graves in Har Herzl military cemetery.

…we found ourselves viewing the dozens of fresh graves of heroes of the IDF at Har Hertzl, and with one of the heads of Psychiatry, and one of the head Neurosurgeons at Icholov Hospital who have a caseload of trauma both physical and emotional that is beyond belief. And finally found ourselves an almost unbearable memorial to the Nova Music Festival, with burned out cars, piles of abandoned personal belongings, the bar, the stage, tents and camping chairs staged as a reconstruction of what had been.

That last visit, to the Nova memorial, filled me for the first time with Anger. Rage, at the injustice, the evil brutality of what those monsters did to those beautiful innocent young people, who came to dance. 

I reflected on the stories of Har Hertzl. Not just stories of tragic loss, but of Heroism. Of friends who saved the lives of friends, and strangers, and gave up their lives doing so. Stories that obligate us all to fight back with all our might. I reflected on the words of the Neurosurgeon who unhesitatingly stated ‘I am proud of what we are able to do here, the lives we are able to save through our work.’ 

And I reflected on the Nova Festival. We had met one of the organizers of the October 7th Festival, who recounted what happened on the day, and what has happened afterwards – a mass effort to counsel, hold, heal, protect the survivors, remember the murdered and dream of the future.’

Everywhere in the incredibly moving memorial you see the same four words. “We Will Dance Again’.

And on that note, we sang HaTikvah. Israel is the Land of Hope. And we are the People of Hope.

WE will dance again.

We WILL dance again.

We will DANCE again.

We will dance AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

 

 

 

Visions, Dream and Prophecy

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A gentle lady visited me in a bush hamlet. She was fifty and fair, softly spoken, with an air of sweet naivete.

Sighting my kippah she became excited. She asked, Do you have dreams, visions and prophecy? Almost apologetically, I said no, I didn’t.


In the days and weeks that followed I did have a dream. My Dad was suddenly, quietly present. In the dream I was aware Dad was dead. But here he was, standing at my shoulder, smiling. No words were spoken, none expected. This was a dream; in my dreams nothing is expected. Dad was just there. His gentle smile was a smile of sadness. I knew, as I always have known, that Dad loved me. His smile said that and more. The more was Dad’s sorrow for the world. He smiled in the understanding we shared, that I would have to live in this world of pain, that he had left, and had left to me.


Last night a vision came to me. Or perhaps the vision came as I sat in the early morning sunshine, looking out over the sea. It was a vision composed of words and phrases.


Joy to the world

The Lord is come.

Woe to the world

The Lord is hid.Joy to the world

A child is born.

Woe to the world

A child has died.

****

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings…

In that vision I was aware that words of hope should follow: and learn to fly…but hope eluded me.


***
I spoke to the rabbi and he said.

There is always hope.

The rabbi is not filled with a sweet naivete. He carries the burden of family, every one of his father’s kin, slaughtered in the Shoah. Yet the rabbi counselled hope. He argued for it. He commanded it.

The hand of the Lord was upon me…

And He set me in the midst of a valley;

It was full of bones:

Son of man, can these bones live?
O Lord, Thou alone knowest.

***


The soft lady in the bush said: We believe in dreams and visions and prophecy. She spoke the words with the fluency of mantra, with the ordinarinessof a shopping list.

I wish I had the gift of prophecy. The Prophets always spoke of the worst:

I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley.

And they spoke always of hope:

Prophesy, son of man, and say, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.

The Man said to the Woman

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The man said to the woman, look how beautiful is the wide blue sea. The woman looked at the sea and saw what the man saw. She saw how the sea sparkled in the light of beginning. She saw its beauty and she knew this was what she wanted. She wanted to share it with the man. She felt something in her hand and when she looked she saw the man’s hand was holding hers. The two hands looked comfortable and strong together.
 

The woman said, yes, it’s very beautiful. It looks like it has no end.

 

The man said, we’ll need to build a boat. The man and the woman looked down and both saw how each hand held the other; how the hands were comfortable and strong together. The woman said, we can build this boat together and we can sail it together on this sea that has no end. And the man said, we’ll build our boat and we’ll care for it together and we’ll sail on the endless sea together and we’ll never stop.

 

The woman and the man understood it would take a long time to build a boat. They had long dreamed of the beautiful voyage that had no end. In their dreams their longing moved to their lips, and one murmured about the beautiful sea, and the other murmured about the voyage that has no ending, and the murmurs entered their sleeping ears and when they awoke they both knew they would build and sail together.

 

They knew too a boat must be safe and strong. They both knew that the beautiful sea could become fierce and dark and stormy. Their boat would have to be strong enough for great storms, for hot weather and for cold, for rain and for long dry times. Their boat would need high walls to keep out the sea, especially if children might come aboard.

 

The man and the woman worked hard and patiently. In childhood they had floated sticks in the rain that ran down the gutters into the great drains and they had pretended their sticks were sailing ships. But neither had never built a real boat before. They chose the good stout timbers of the kauri tree. They weathered the timbers and after one year the timbers were ready for shipbuilding. The man and the woman measured and sawed and glued and soon their timbers took the form of a boat. Then the man and the woman caulked the gaps between the timbers, and they daubed the inside with tar. Finally they painted the hull with marine varnish, and below the waterline they applied anti-fouling to stop barnacles from spoiling the stout kauri timbers.

 

The boat was ready to float. The man built a cabin to keep the sun and the rain and the wind from his crew; and the woman built bunks inside the cabin and a galley where food would be made for the crew.

The man and the woman slipped their boat into the water and they saw it floating and their faces shone like the sun that blazed upon the bright blue sea.

 

The final task was to create a crew. This took time and care. The crew arrived one at a time. They were very, very small. The woman placed each one gently onto a bunk that she had made. After a good many years the man and the woman had a full crew of small children, and the children knew no home other than their good safe boat and they grew there and became strong on the face of that shining sea. The woman looked at the crew, all hale and bronzed from the sun, and she said to the man, let’s set sail on our journey of no end.

The journey took them years. The children grew bigger and stronger. All of the children suffered falls and cuts and bruises and burned in the strong sun, but all of them healed. The man and the woman steered their boat away from storms and pirates, away from icebergs and reefs that might crash or tear their boat apart. Together the man and the woman and their crew visited islands and ports, from Mombasa to Saskatchewan. They saw volcanoes from Vesuvius to the great extinct Mount Erebus. They saw the great leviathan that leaped and blew, they loved the merry dolphins that escorted them, they knew the flying fishes and the jelly fishes, the octopus, the inky squid, the dignified seahorse. Their strong boat housed them and moved them and kept them afloat and the crew and the woman and the man knew their planet as they knew their boat, which was their world.

 

Sometimes a sudden tempest would arise. The children would cling to their bunks as the waves threw the craft high upon crests then plunged it deep into troughs, and the winds shrieked in the sheets and the rain fell in torrents that ran down the decking and into the sea. The children looked at the great waves of dark green and the foaming crests of white and their world was angry and unkind. Deep inside themselves they feared their boat would break and they’d all be lost. And they felt a mighty fear for the man and the woman who made their world and kept it afloat. The children wept but their cries could not be heard over the scream of the wind and the thunder of the skies. And the woman did not come and the man did not come and each child feared and cried and shivered alone.  

 

And as suddenly as the squall arose it would subside. The sun shone upon a gleaming world and the terrified crew came up from below and joined the man and the woman who commanded their boat. And in that sunshine the world was at peace, the craft sailed on and the crew recovered.

 

In every storm the children knew those fears. And in every storm they understood the man and the woman could not comfort them. But luckily, after a few frightening storms the children found their own way to feel safe. The biggest child opened his eyes just as the boat climbed up, up, up a mighty wave then down, down, down the far side, and he saw the smaller crew weeping through closed eyes, and he sang to them. And as he sang the smaller ones heard snatches of sweet sound, a lullaby, and they opened their eyes and saw the singer was their big brother and they managed to smile. From that time, when storms came the crew would all climb onto the big bunk where the man and the woman slept, and they would hold each other and sing or hum and all knew they were not alone.

 

After every storm the children came out and looked anxiously at their boat, but the boat looked sound and the children mostly lost their fears. But the eldest child worried: how much violence, how many storms could the boat sustain and survive?

 

The storms came more often and they went on longer. The howling winds and the crashing seas were slower to make peace, and the children clung to each other and sang and hummed as they trembled and tried not to show their fear.

 

From time to time the man and the woman would steer the craft to a port and put in for repairs. And the boat’s invisible tears and strains and cracks and leaks were glued and tarred and caulked, the barnacles were sanded off the kauri and the hull repainted as before. And the boat seemed safe and strong. And the crew and the man and the woman continued their voyage.

 

One day the crew awoke to a frightful storm. They heard roaring and screaming. It was the voice of the wind that screamed and the voice of the sea and the thunder that roared. And the boat shook and the small crew members saw cracks opening between the timbers and water pouring in. The biggest little crew man grabbed a bucket and the smaller crew grabbed cups and bowls from the galley and all the small people filled their cups and bowls and bucket with the sea water and threw it over the side. Each of the crew filled and bailed and threw the waters away, each of them sensing they had to be the one who would save the boat. But it was no use: the waters came up through the floor boards and up to their ankles, then their knees. Now the woman came below and the man came with her and they told the crew what they already feared. Perhaps they already knew. Perhaps the sea waters had told the young crew that their beloved boat could no longer take them on their journey safely.

 

The woman spoke kindly and the man spoke gently. The man said, we will always protect you, and you will sail again in peaceful waters. The woman said, you will always be our crew even when we no longer sail this boat that was so beautiful. And as the two spoke gently and kindly, the children realised the screaming and the roaring had stopped. And the small ones thought, no, that’s not going to happen; this beautiful boat will be made better and we will all sail in it again. But the biggest crew child looked at the boards, all swollen and splintering, and he knew the boat would not sail again.

 

The boat did not sink straight away. The brave man and the sad woman steered it and sailed it to a safe place. The bow of the boat rested on dry land, and the man jumped ashore and the woman lifted the children from the broken boat and passed the crew, one by one, to the man who set them down on the shore. The smallest crew person wasn’t used to the feel of sand and grass underfoot, and started to cry. The other crew tried to comfort the smallest one, but they could not speak; their throats were full of a great ball of sadness, and when the man and the woman tried to cheer the sobbing child their throats blocked too. Suddenly all found voice and the voice they found was the voice of sadness and they wept together. And when at last they all finished weeping they looked one last time towards the boat they loved. But the boat had gone. Only a swirl on the surface of the sea marked where it had been.

My Kippah Speaks

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In 1964 I left my Jewish school and my kippah entered the world. My kippah was the first to appear on a university campus. My kippah spoke to the world. My kippah said, I sit on top of a person who is Jewish. I’m a symbolic expression of that person’s belief in a higher Being.

 

My kippah asked a question of Australia: Can you accept me, can you like me, can you see the person beneath the kippah?

 

An answer came from the man on the train. As the red rattler rattled its way to Oakleigh, Howard Goldenberg nodded off. His sleep was disturbed by a light percussion on his head, a tap, tapping of a newspaper rolled into a cylinder. Howard woke up, he looked up and saw a man standing over him. The man held a furled newspaper above him. The man spoke. He said, Good on you son. You keep wearing that – another tap with the newspaper – you keep wearing that; it’ll never let you down. With that the man turned and exited the train at Hughesdale Station.

 

On campus came a similar response. Here too, my kippah spoke. It said, Beneath me you see a proud Jew. He ventures to hope that the country he loves will love him.People on campus, students and staff alike, were united in their rejection of racism. They knew of the Holocaust. Antisemitism was dead. Never again,said the campus. The campus was yet to learn the mantra, Zionism is racism. The campus embraced the kippah and its wearer.

 

Emboldened, my kippah travelled all over Australia, meeting occasional puzzled looks and many more smiles. My kippah said to Australia, what it had always said, beneath me you see a proud Jew, a happy Australian.

 

 

 

Around the turn of this century, my kippah started to hide beneath secular headgear. No longer sure of itself, my kippah often took shelter, whispering to itself, Never Again has become Once Again. Jewish schools hired armed guards; outside synagogues, men in kippoth with walkie-talkies patrolled the streets.

 

Windows were broken, swastikas appeared, Jewish graves were defaced. A Neo Nazi group showed its face. In 2022 they numbered one hundred thousand. Social media became antisocial media. My kippah remembered Darkest Europe. It decided to go underground. It sat atop a proud Jew, now intimidated. It peeped out and saw a community polarising, fragmenting. It saw and it cried the beloved country.

 

 

Until October 7, 2023. Following those acts of depravity my kippah came out of hiding and found its voice. It exclaimed, beneath me you see a proud Jew. Beneath me you see one whose family has been proudly Australian and proudly Jewish since the 1840’s.

 

My kippah showed itself and asked every Australian it encountered, Can you love me? I’m a Jew. I’m a Zionist. I’m Pro-Palestinian. Can you weep with me for what’s happening to community here?

Prayers

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Not long ago a man holidaying with his family falls suddenly to the floor, crying to his little boy as he falls, Call an ambulance! The man does not speak again. He lies in a coma in the Intensive Care Unit of a little hospital in Bali, with injuries to his brain that can’t be measured or treated properly there.

 

 

Around the bedside of the man his mother and his 10 year-old son and his elder sister stand and try to understand. A mother looks at her only son; a sister, burdened by her knowledge of the brain, gazes at her wounded brother.  The sister’s husband grips her hand. The boy who gave the man his chance of life sees his father, inert, intubated, silent. The child has no language, no words, in his world overturned.

 

 

The mother, the sister, the child speak – when they can bring forth words from their grief – soft, urgent  murmurs of love. The brother in law breathes his prayers.

 

 

The man is surrounded by love and tears. Does he hear the murmured prayers of his loved ones? Will he learn one day of the care and the grief of his many, many friends?

 

 

An aircraft is sent from Australia to retrieve the man, to bring him home, to get the most advanced care. The plane is an airborne ICU with the super-nurse and the intensivist doctor who can keep the injured man safe as he crosses half a world.

 

 

All of this will be hideously expensive. The insurer pauses, ponders, plays for time as time races. How much time does the  wounded man have? The wounded man lies outside time, while his loved ones, their desperation growing, plan to fund the costs privately. 

 

 

 

The man flies home and is admitted to the excellent hospital. The family scrambles for flights, eventually rejoining the man who does not speak.

 

 

 

After all their frantic haste the family falls now into a world of no haste, a world of deliberate care. No idle speech. Words of yearning love whispered into the ears of the stricken. The words spoken aloud are the necessary words of critical work, as gauges flash, tubes drip, drip, drip and respirators observe their slow rhythm of rise and fall.

 

 

All wait.

 

 

Many come, the aunt, the man’s friends from today, and from all his yesterdays, stretching back to early boyhood. Solemnity sits heavily upon them.

 

The man Raj, has a wide, wide smile. He has innumerable anguished friends and a family – to which I belong: Raj is my daughter-in-law’s brother, her younger brother who, from earliest times, she lived to protect. Sister and brother planned this holiday time together, with their spouses and children.

The sister landed in Bali only to learn that Raj had fallen, and had undergone emergency surgery that same morning.

 

In all the deliberating silence doctors search the damage. An early image unveils the haemorrhage-surge that tore through the delicate brain. Later tests answer the question we dread to ask: when stimulated, the unliving brain shows no response.

No flicker, no spark.

 

 

The brain subsists in its inscrutable dark. We in our world of talk and think and act, exist utterly separated from Raj. We are exiles from Raj’s new world.

 

 

 

Raj has known this world before. Before his birth, before his conception, Raj existed as thought, as hope, as desire. This world lacked Raj. When he came into being, Raj was answer to prayer, he completed a world.

 

 

Now Raj and we inhabit worlds distinct, we with memory, with yearning, and with lack.

 

 

Raj’s world is eternal, ours ephemeral. Confined here for our instant of being, we know nothing of eternity. From that place where Raj now abides for all time, time itself is exiled, together with pain.

 

 

Who knows, but perhaps prayer lingers there, together with love?