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Sunday School
Antioch Review, The, Spring, 2003 by Arielle Greenberg
SUNDAY SCHOOL
No, Hebrew school kids, after-school kids, Sunday school kids, you don't
get it--
this was school-school, the only school--there was no candy for reading
transliteration--
this was no pre-mitzvah jack-off with the rabbi, what color, who's doing
the invitation--
this was all-day work camp, memorize, my brother's keeper--
the dent between your nose and mouth the place Hashem wiped out your
baby brains--
put in all the stuff He wanted there--his heavy scale--
and we didn't do just the haphtarah, it was the whole bleeding parshah--
not sung, lained, with crowning vowels and nasal trill, voice cracking--
and no, not boker tov for good morning and some apple juice and and
aleph-bet bingo--
tref Oreos and glitter menorahs made from Styrofoam--
this was Whitting-out the mishnah--in Rashi, we could read Aramaic!--to
cover up the stuff on menstruation--
its permeating unseemliness, the dunking baths, the bald women, the
shorn fingernails--
the sin we tried to flake off--this was about sin, pals--
not a cute cartoon snake but I am naked, I am known--
it was about martyrs, the Shma leaping up in flames when the holy man is
burned at the stake--
and no, it did not last an hour, an afternoon--this was an education--
full-time, a lesson you bound to your forearm like leather straps, like
a tattoo.
So be all about your birthright tourist trips, your summer camps, your
Yom Kippur reservations.
Join the youth group, the singles mixer, the egalitarian,
Reconstructionist congregation.
Mazel tov. I have danced at your birth, your coming-of-age, your
wedding:
I will dance at your funeral, as long as it is strictly kosher:
no ashes, no roses, just a pine box and stones, and the worms to come
and eat through to your souls.
ARIELLE GREENBERG's first collection, Given, was published by Verse Press in 2002. Her poems appear in current issues of the Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, and other journals.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
