Today’s New Verse News: AGNUS DEI
by Steve Bloom
Inspired by the poem “Agnus Dei” by Edna Shochat, Boise Idaho. Some elements taken directly from that poem with permission.
Religious Zionism will appoint lawmaker Orit Strock as Israel’s first National Missions Minister… Orit Strock is a leading figure in Hebron’s Jewish community and the founding chairwoman of the Human Rights Organization of Judea and Samaria, a controversial settlement group. Her son, Zvi, previously received a 2.5-year sentence for kidnapping and abusing a Palestinian boy. -Haaretz, December 7, 2022
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Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Oh, newborn lamb! But this time you are not the lamb of God. No, this time you are merely the lamb of a young shepherd tending his flock in the hills of Hebron, born on this Spring Day in 2007. Only hours after you emerge from the womb an armed man—named Zvi Strock— enters your life, enters as the angel of your death. First he captures, blindfolds your 15-year-old shepherd, tortures him to the edge of extinction, then turns his rage on you, kicking you repeatedly until nothing remains—except your remains. Oh, newborn lamb! Even in a lifespan of less than a day you find a way to take this measure of the evil that lurks in our world And so you do not see when, on his way to serving a prison sentence of 18 months, Zvi is toasted as a great hero at a “send-off party” organized by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, spiritual leader of the religious Zionist right. I would have told you then, in the year 2010, that Rabbi Druckman and his political movement, were part of a far-right fringe. Oh, newborn lamb! (Still and forever a newborn lamb) I hope you rest in peace today, though I do not when Orit Strock, Zvi's mother takes her post along with others who are of Rabbi Druckman's political persuasion as ministers in the new Israeli ruling coalition, and it dawns on some of us (at least) that those who hail Zvi Strock as a national hero can be called a right-wing fringe no longer. Today, instead, they take the power, planning to organize something bigger than a send-off party for a young man on his way to prison, kick the life out of more than just a newborn lamb. Agnus Dei, miserere nobis. Lamb of God have mercy upon us.
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Steve Bloom is a New York City based poet, composer, and activist. He is the curator of the "Poetry of Protest and Struggle" videos that appear three times a year.