2. It’s June, and our regular summer guests have arrived, a pair of albino ferruginous hawks. First we hear the harsh kaa-kaa of their rasping calls, and then spot them, perched, side-by-side, on a high branch of the 50-foot eucalyptus tree in our neighbor’s yard. They spend hours circling and hovering over the meadow beneath us, occasionally swooping down and immediately soaring up again, grasping in their bloody talons some wriggling prey, usually a small mammal; last year one of them caught a snake.

3. A Midrash: After Adam/Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden the Holy One of Being prepared for them garments of rawhide. Now these are understood as representing the leather straps of the tefillin, the phylacteries, those instruments of ritual that bind us and direct us with good laws and rules of right living. This is the way we Jews are to worship on this mundane plane of exile. But before the Expulsion, while still in that place of wondrous innocence, how were Adam/Eve garbed? In cloaks of light, we are told.

Oh that I may offer my orisons wrapped in that white light from Eden! It beckons me, but today I cannot reach it. Meanwhile, those leather ribbon-straps lie before me on my desk, demanding, summoning.
Jonathan Omer-Man ©2010

no they said
tell us first why you don’t eat
pork or prawns or lobsters or shrimps
or german blood sausage and do you really think
god hates people like us who eat oysters and frogs’ legs
and creamy beef stroganoff

my problem with praying he tried to explain
no they said
tell us first about the origin of evil
about who made hitler and pol pot
and were there quarks in the garden
of eden

my problem with praying he began once again
but still they scoffed
my problem with praying
he finally shouted
is that there is too much noise
everywhere

Jonathan Omer-Man ©2009