Beresheet: a Eulogy(Raanana, April 11, 2019) As it is written,Beresheet bara Elohim et ha'shamayim v'et ha'aretz,In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,And on the sixth day, God made mankind in His image,In His image He created them;Man and Woman He created them.On the seventh day, He rested,As it is written.On the eighth dayMan's progeny made a robot arrowAnd shot it in a wide arcThat flew through the sk...

Red Rover(Raanana, February 15, 2019) “Red Rover, Red Rover,Send Opportunity over (to Mars)”Was perhaps its final ironical thoughtAs Opportunity's battery ran low,After Martian winds failed to blow offThe dust piled thick on its solar panelsFrom that last Martian storm.After fourteen years of plodding explorationLearning every inch of those twenty-eightSquare miles of red sand and rock.With Curiosity rover so near,Just fi...

"Cassini" (Raanana, September 17, 2017) Up until the last few moments The objectives of the mission had been nominal: To receive the project team's requests To see and taste the atmospheres Of planets and their moons And return a steady stream Of digital impressions to the team For their analysis and summation, To make a slow adjustment with one's thrusters, Point antennas back at earth No matter where one was, But nothin...

A Riddle for Shabbat Tommy was carrying his grandfather's pale blue silk pouch with the prayer shawl inside. His grandfather was carrying Tommy on his shoulders. Tommy's other job was to make sure that the breeze didn't blow the kippa off his grandfather's head. After a while, the older man sat down on a wooden bench under the fragrant bougainvillea and carefully lifted his grandson off his shoulders onto the bench beside...

From where she sat at a small round table in the center of the otherwise empty café a wave of quiet rippled outwards languidly in the heavy heat of the midsummer afternoon. I didn’t want to disturb the spell by entering the radius of that quiet, sitting down at a table not too near, and opening my notebook as was my wont in such places to write my own predilections. The book she read was beyond my ken as her exquisite fin...

The Witness (Raanana, January 14, 2018) What did you witness today? Was it exceptional or was it like every other day? What was it about the day you found exceptional? Would you have preferred it last forever or Would you have preferred it never were? Was it lovely beyond words or Was the pain more than you could take? Did you want to die? Was there a tree involved? What kind of tree? Tall or scraggly? Straight or bent? D...

The Muse (Raanana, March 31, 2019) I feel a bitter pleasure in remembering that day In the forest outside our small village. I was walking down a leafy path Toward the little lake where I would sit By the water with my back against a smooth rock To make some modest sketches And write what came to me. Down the shore a ways The woman sat as was her wont Without a stitch of clothing on her Back against the generous trunk of...

 From Jerusalem to Bethlehem (Raanana, February 13, 2018) Panthers lick the wild berries by the sea at dusk Soon the moon will rise and dreaming eyes will close, My hands' blind predilection for touching shapes Prefer their coolness to their colors. It's a time when God turns away from us And spirits deafen themselves to our supplications, When all the views of Jerusalem come together as one, Where stone lions stop to sni...

Songs of Youth My thin memories were born Among the whispering grasses Of an Indiana field sloping down To drink from a nameless creek.   They were suckled by jiggers And sung to by whippoorwills and crickets Under a weeping willow by the creek And endless summers of warm sunlight.   Hopes and expectations shot across the night sky And sometimes danced real slow Pressed against young girls with hair like wheat And tissue...

Kneehigh to an Indiana Jigger(Raanana, January 19, 2018) When I was kneehigh to an Indiana jiggerOnly birds tweeted and their tweets were longerThan a hundred and forty characters,Posts came in and went out tin boxesWith rounded roofs and red metal flagsThat notified you when you had mail,And when you shared somethingIt got divided among those you shared it withInstead of getting multiplied by infinity.I'm not saying time...

"City of Peace" (Raanana, January 12, 2018) On days like these with a high-noon sun Shining on a little courtyard, The bougainvillea silent for lack of breeze, I wonder whether David, the shepherd king, Considered the possibility I'd be sitting here Sipping from a cup of coffee, daydreaming Of his pasture not so far from me And lambs long gone, their progeny roaming The barren hills of Ein Gedi And his dreams of a city of...

"Sabbath Morning" (Raanana, January 6, 2018) Sabbath morning Rainwashed and sundazzled A day as fresh as any you'll ever find. Walking Daisy in the promised land, America still sleeps snugly under night. Here you're just as likely to meet God as anyone else Along the tree-arched paths (Just be careful not to look Him in the eyes). The cats in the courtyard form a minyan For their murmured prayers in the silent warmth And...

"The mountains are my friends." (an Iraqi-Kurdish saying) Up until the point of writing this journal, I would have characterized my life as not being particularly interesting, unless you happened to be in the computer programming profession like me. Don’t get me wrong. I have no complaints about my life. It is just that I have had a certain degree of difficulty in persuading other people that what I do is interesting. I w...

Basic Training: 13 June to 7 July 1983 Monday, 13 June 1983 The bus took us from Tel HaShomer Hospital to the induction center. There we received our yellow cards, were photographed (front and profile), had our mouths x-rayed (deep throat), were vaccinated (both arms), issued uniforms, fed, and got dental checkups. We waited around for several hours until we were told to board a bus. Nobody knew where we would be sent. On...

"What? You don't like chocolate anymore?" he asked them. "No, Saba," Tommy was pulling away. "I still like chocolate. It's just that I don't want to go here." The older man looked inside at the tables and chairs, the shelves of light and dark chocolates, the cloudy displays of ice creams and sherbets, and the nice looking young girl holding the menus standing in the open doorway smiling at them. It looked like nothing had...