When Israel finished its retraction of the rights of all immigrants, women, queers, and others, and reduced the Knesset to an advising body for a permanent non-elected executive, when that nation stripped away the rights of the remaining Palestinians, all rights, until they were but animals before the law, the day came when soldiers entered East Jerusalem and rounded up everyone and sent them on trucks to the Negev to live or die, it did not matter, and those who stayed behind were annihilated by missiles, the hospitals, the schools, the people, all gone—on that day, the bulldozers at last arrived on the Temple Mount and drove through the protesters like Moses parting the Red Sea and in the end it was so sudden, one moment there was a shrine, the next debris, and from some of that very material the Israelis began to build the long-yearned-for Third Temple and when it was done, so too ended an entire era of Judaism, and good riddance—it had served us well enough for two thousand years but we turned to the East and saw a Bet-Ha’Mikdash and a Kohen Gadol and a Sanhedrin, and now all halacha was obsolete, no reason to do teshuvah when we now had korbanot, and so we returned, millions of us, though not everyone, not the converts or the half-Jews or the queers or the atheists or the undesirables—and when we arrived we hugged and kissed and danced and ate and sang and drank from the West Bank’s aquifer, we drank and drank until not one drop remained, and we cried out, we were stricken with such terrible thirst that our skin cracked and our health failed and many of us died yet still no amount of rain could replenish what we had taken, and then came the floods, all around the world sparing not the Holy Land, submerging Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the lowlands, and then came such a terrible storm that the parched hills couldn’t contain it and there were landslides, whole towns were lost, and the sea swelled, and the remainder of us fled to the Temple Mount and under a gray sky huddled and held each other’s hands as the water of the deeps lapped at our feet.
July 2023
