POETRY

Why There Is No Hebrew Word for Obey

By Jessica Jacobs     VOLUME 56 No. 3

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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
—Eric Hoffer


א.
What came later
was the real trial. Because God knew

Isaac would not die
while Abraham climbed the mountain believing

he would. With conviction
tempered in the fires of his faith,

he walked up, through the shaded valley,
his son, resolute, ahead on the trail; behind them, Sarah--

Isaac’s mother, Abraham’s wife—a small darkness
in the distance, growing forever

smaller. He bound his beloved son: pulled back
his legs, wrenched back his arms, knotted his ankles to his wrists,

and laid him on that altar like a child falling
through the sky. He held the knife knowing

from every animal he’d ever sacrificed how his son
would jerk and shudder when the blade

opened his throat, the familiar smoke
of offered flesh.


ב.
What came later, even with Isaac alive
in the fields, inside

Abraham was the knowledge
of what he’d been willing to do. When they passed

in the tent, Isaac rubbed a remembered ache
in his shoulder and never again held

his father’s eye. Sarah, smelling the imagined
ashes on her husband’s fingers, the blood

in the crease of his throat, turned from him
in the night. And on every path Abraham walked

from that day forward, his son as he had been:
a small back barely the span of his hand

slung with the kindling
meant for his burning.


ג.
Seconds from the slaughter
of the one meant to carry his line, of the son

he’d wanted all his life, who’s to say
the voice in his head

was God? Judaism is not a faith
but a tradition, doubt

the crux of its conscience. Yet what came
later, on a Sabbath morning,

centuries on, was a congregation
in Pittsburgh, reading this story

of Isaac’s Binding, of Abraham’s
terrible bind, when a man burning

with unquestioning belief
entered with a gun and, with no better angel

to stay his hand, opened fire, believing
the death of Jews would keep our country

safe, believing this massacre--
elderly congregants

bleeding out on the floor--
was God’s work.


ד.
Who would call such actions
holy? And how many more times

will each of us come down
from the mountain, conviction knocking

like a knife in our belt loop, stained
with all we would have done?

My daily gods
are minor ones: of pride, of lust,

impatience and complacency.
Yet how many have I harmed

on the way to what I thought
was right—or,

with hindsight, on the way
to what I wanted?

What if we turn
from certainty and arm ourselves

instead with questions?
Obey, obey, obey is everywhere

in translation. The real word is
shema: listen.


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JESSICA JACOBS is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, forthcoming March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie awards; and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. With Nickole Brown, she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin Random House, 2020). Jessica is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.


VOLUME 56 No. 3