By Christopher Norris
Dad, there are nasty kids at school –
‘Self-hating Jews’, you’d call them,
Who don’t observe our family rule
And say your ways appal them.
They say kids by the hundred die
For every Friday Sabbat
Because some war-god in the sky
Shows land to take a grab at.
They taunt us, say ‘we’d be ashamed
To own him as our father,
To hear ourselves each morning named
A Starmer – blanked, we’d rather!’.
Or: ‘does he think each Sabbat challah
Will somehow ease his guilt
For the dead children of Ramallah
Whose blood his warplanes spilt?’.
Or: ‘who’s he blessing, what’s to bless,
When Kiddush time arrives
And, by its unction, saves distress
At all those shattered lives’.
Father, some say their Mum and Dad
Both fret that things they’ll hear
In Bible lessons might be bad –
Give them a Zionist steer.
‘Take Amalek and all those blood-
Crazed tales the War-God favours
And Netanyahu spins to flood
The air with stuff he savours.’
Those parents say they’ve now no stake
In it, that ‘promised land’
Whose promise veiled a threat to make
Death stalk on every hand.
Those Friday evenings, once enjoyed,
Now leave us kids to think
‘How many lives, homes, limbs destroyed
That we may eat and drink?’.
What of a creed whose savage God’s
Invoked to fire them up,
Those soldiers whose dread killing-squads
‘Protect’ us as we sup.
‘It’s all to save his criminal skin,
That Netanyahu swine’,
Some say, and then I think: ‘what’s in
It for this Dad of mine?’.
Surely it cannot be that he’s
Just keen to get the jump
On trade-deals by his will to please
That gross man-baby Trump!
‘Seek motives nearer home’, say some;
‘Your Dad embraced the faith
Primarily to please your Mum –
Do as the woman saith!’.
But how, come holy day or high day,
Shall we, his family, sit
At ease to Sabbat fare each Friday
And deem that reason fit?
We’ll think: no word of Amalek
In these soft-spoken prayers,
But then: what piles of Brit high tech
He’s classed ‘just routine spares’.
For sure, ‘routine’ means many things,
From bombs to family meals,
But it’s their forced conjunction brings
Smack home how bad it feels
To know that, as his loved ones dine
With him this Sabbat night,
Those slaughtered kids in Palestine
Won’t spoil his appetite.
