This poem has appeared on this blog at least six times for Yom Kippur. I guess that this makes it an official tradition. It was inspired
not only by my genuine admiration
for the Holy Day, but by an ongoing controversy in my own Unitarian Universalist faith. For
many years UUs have gone blithely on incorporating
snatches of prayers, ritual, and tradition from other
religions into our own worship.
We do it mostly in good faith claiming
“The Living Tradition which we share
draws from many sources…”
But lately we have taken grief from Native Americans for adopting willy-nilly rituals and prayers
which we don’t fully understand and take
out of context, many of which, frankly, turned out to be New Age touchy-feely faux traditions. And from African-Americans for Kwanza being widely celebrated is in almost all-white UU Sunday Schools.
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| The Jewish window from the Centennial Traditions from Which We Draw windows in the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock building. |
Being UU’s, many of us were stung that our well-meaning gestures were not gratefully
accepted as a sort of homage.
Others busily set themselves up to the task of whipping the scourge of cultural
appropriation from our midst, preferably with a judicious dollop of self-flagellation with knotted whips—oops! Stole that one from
4th Century monks…No, what they did
was form committees and commissions to issue long, high minded reports to be translated into deep
retreats. Seminary training was amended for proper sensitivity, and scolding
monitors were appointed to
detect insufficient rigor in rooting out the offense at General Assemblies and meetings.
In that spirit I offer you my poem.
Angry denunciations and heresy trial to follow…
Cultural Appropriation
See, the
Jews have this thing.
Yahweh, or
whatever they call their Sky God,
keeps a list like Santa Claus.
You know,
who’s been naughty and nice.
But before
He puts it in your Permanent Record
and doles out the lumps of coal
He gives you one more chance
to set things straight.
So to get
ready for this one day of the year—
they call it Yom Kippur
but it’s hard to pin down because
it wanders around the fall calendar
like an orphan pup looking for its ma—
the
Jews run around saying they are sorry
to everyone they screwed over last year
and even to those whose toes
they stepped
on by accident.
The trick
is, they gotta really mean it.
None of this
“I’m sorry if my words offended” crap,
that
won’t cut no ice with the Great Jehovah.
And they gotta, you know, make amends,
do
something, anything, to make things right
even
if it’s kind of a pain in the ass.
Then the
Jews all go to Temple—
even
the ones who never set foot in it
the
whole rest of the year
and
those who think that,
when
you get right down to it,
that
this Yahweh business is pretty iffy—
and they tell Him all about it.
First a guy
with a big voice sings something.
And then
they pray—man do they ever pray,
for
hours in a language that sounds
like
gargling nails
that
most of ‘em don’t even savvy.
A guy blows
an old ram’s horn,
maybe to celebrate, I don’t know
When it’s
all over, they get up and go home
feeling
kind of fresh and new.
If they did
it right that old list
was
run through the celestial shredder.
Then next
week, they can go out
and
start screwing up again.
It sounds
like a sweet deal to me.
Look, I’m
not much of one for hours in the Temple—
an hour on Sunday morning
when
the choir sings sweet
is
more than enough for me, thank you.
And I have
my serious doubts about this
Old Man in the Sky crap.
But this
idea of being sorry and meaning it
of fixing
things up that I broke
and starting fresh
has legs.
I think I’ll
swipe it.
I’ll start
right now.
To my wife
Kathy—
I’m sorry for being such
a crabby dickhead most of the time…
Anybody got
a horn?
—Patrick Murfin
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