Ever felt a sense of reluctance over doing something you deep down know is yours and yours alone to do? This parsha tells of the red heffer. She is the perfectly red cow whose ashes are the only thing which can cleanse the Priests for their ultimate service in the Temple. This cow is eagerly searched out today in hopes that she will be a good tiding of the approach of the building of the Third Temple. Politics aside, the red heffer has become a symbol of long-awaited redemption. Nu, why doesn’t she show up already? This poem ponders her delay...and why we too are prone to delay the work that we are destined for.
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Why red cow stayed in dark cave
Far from green
And destiny
Why to stay astray
Than set a-straight
Did she glean
was best for she?
Why not confront her call
and hoof heroic to house of God?
why instead she lid her eyes
in comfort chewed
her cudd?
Perhaps she’d faith that they would find her
Instead of finding them
Perhaps she prayed a prairie
Hide her - Rather than offer up her limbs
Perhaps she feared the politics
That plotted in the field
Or power housed the havoc
in her, imaginative and real
Instead she’d keep
far from the priest and pageantry
far from the furnace and force of history
This cow, calf red
half cuz of ox
was a Creature of comfort
and indolent thoughts
Hid herself, thinking self
was a thing to feed
not to be fired
And strewn onto priests
Not a thing for to function
According to call
To be bound beneath blade
Beneath sharp eye of all
Not a thing to be reaped
and repented through
not a thing to teach
To be read of
- And rid of -
Once through
Not a thing to be found
When time would be lost
Not a thing to be held up,
Heralded, then tossed
Not a heap of ashes
To prove a prophecy
Not a pile of magic
No theodicy
She thought all these things
And so chose to chew
In seclusion with stalactite
Stagnant, unused
To Not give up existence
-That great greed of girth-
Not give up the cloven, the caven, the hearth
For one need be too brave
To so bullock away
To the house of the Lord
Far hoof-falls away
One need be heroic
to shutter, yet stay
accepting the fate of the blade,
blood, and flame
So she preferred to hide
and let time yet abide
she preferred to demure
the rare red of her fur
for it was up to the world
to redden and curl
to step courageous out from their caves
before she would budge
and offer her blood
to preserve those not worth the save
instead she echoed so human and cried
- with her mouth stuffed saliva and hay -
‘why chose to die, when you could just as easily dine?’
and went chewing her cud away
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