Sabra's Last Stand

Here's a poem. I wrote it half-jokingly as a pitch for Marvel, recasting Sabra (who started showing up as the "Defender of Israel" in the '80s) as a baal teshuva -- or, at least, someone who was playing with the idea of becoming religious. My friend Nicole had just gotten a job as an editor at Marvel, and she was coming to my show, and I'd always wanted to write Sabra. So then I tried to.


Sabra the Jewish superhero
hides behind a tree
when changing
into costume,

modesty taking precedence
over the instinctive urge
to protect and preserve

Or to pull away her shirt
revealing the bright blue
Star of David
of vengeance
splashed across her chest

In the '80s, she saved
bales of Israelis from their graves
every day

Since then, business has gotten slow
confusion about foreign policy
a canceled comic book,
and she took so much shit about
who she’s supposed
to save.

You’d think
the Second Intifada would be good
for business as a hero,
but no -—

Saving Palestinians makes Israelis mad
Saving Israelis makes Palestinians mad

And the day she saved that
suicide bomber,
sent his TNT careening
into the sea

Sabra got told off enough
to send her into
an early retirement.

After singlehandedly launching
the Jewish look into vogue
ten years ago
girls got reverse nose jobs
Sabra became
a teenage heartthrob

Her uniform sent yeshiva boys
into enjoyable pangs
of premature puberty

Today she lays in bed
not in the mood for anything
except complaining to G-d
and so she does

She picks up a prayerbook
yells the first blessing
like a lightning bolt

yells the afternoon prayers
yells the evening prayers
yells the Sabbath prayers

and she doesn’t stop till
the traveler’s prayer
in the back of the book.

When she’s done,
Sabra takes her sewing machine
makes her cape into a skirt
(it was always bulky, anyway)

slips on her arm-covering gloves
and flies through the night
saying to herself, I fought Magneto
and my worst enemy
is still me

She swoops down
with power like a shofar
and grace like the cedars of Lebanon

whispers a prayer
under her breath
with every blow

saves every damn person in danger
whether they want to be or not

And she doesn’t stop
until Shabbos.

What We Leave Behind

During Yom Kippur services this year, I came up with the best praying strategy I've ever had, I think. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to write it down and look it up next year...except, of course, I never do.

I'm a regular Ashkenazic guy. Blase Hungarian features, thick Carpathian mountain hair, the same prayerbook as half the universe uses...but, for Yom Kippur, I wound up in a Chabad synagogue. Chabad uses a different nusach than most of the rest of the universe. (It's technically called "Nusach ha'Ari," after the Arizal, except that he'd been dead several hundred years when it was invented by the Alter Rebbe, the first Rebbe of Chabad.) To make a long story much shorter, it's mostly the same prayers, in an almost completely different order than, ahem, normal...or, "normal" if you're a Carpathian like me.

We prayed all day yesterday, except for a 20-minute break at 4:30 or so to pop home and see my daughter. Most of it was silent, to ourselves, punctuated sporadically by a call-and-response hymnal, or a sudden moment on the part of the prayer leader of "Hey! This would sound really good sung aloud." (I can only guess that's what he was thinking. I was praying with a 100-year-old machzor that used to be my great-grandmother's; there's no call-and-response instructions, only big text and little text.) Anyway, for about three-quarters of those responsive readings, I was on a totally different page -- in a different section, and on a different mental plane.

And it was totally great.

With nothing to cling to, all I could cling to were the words. As a result of working here (and from a couple years of praying every day) my Hebrew's getting better, and individual words stuck out at me as I went -- healing; forgiveness; screw up. ("Screw up" is my personal translation of "to sin," since there isn't any literal sinning in Judaism.) But the more I went, the closer I got to that ideal relationship that all the rabbis talk about when they talk about Yom Kippur: the idea that it's just you and God alone in a room, and you're not sure whether to say "thank you" or "I'm sorry," and you end up saying both.

That's where this whole confusion about YoKo comes from. Nobody ever says "Happy Yom Kippur!" But people who regard it as sad and mournful aren't getting the whole picture, either. There's a story in the Talmud about how, when we fast, God is fasting, too. Not because God is getting ready to make harsh judgments on us, but because God doesn't want to make harsh judgments, and God's hoping not to have to.

It also got me thinking about the recent exhibition of the diary of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed in the Columbia crash. Thirty miles from the crash site, in the middle of a field in Texas, a farmer found the pages -- literally the last thing in life that he left behind. Paper is one of the most intangible, temporary things to leave. But praying, talking, our secret whispers -- if we die this coming year, that's all that we have left, too. Words? Emotions? Complaints? But if you're saying something good, it's nothing to be ashamed of at all.

crossposted from MyJewishLearning