"To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.  I am not a teacher, only a fellow student."  (Soren Kierkegaard)

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A FEW PRE-SHABBAT WORDS FROM RABBI AARON

Peace Talks - The Day After
Another day, another story about the intrigue and the impasse and the consultations and the finger-pointing and the boycotts and the new initiatives and another round of meetings and new talks... This tired political theatre has been with us for generations. Beyond jaded, no expectations of sincere offers or a dramatic break-through, more likely: a set of photo-ops and the chance for leaders to polish their credentials. Is this the really best we can muster? And when we hand the stinking mess to the next generation, how shall we explain our pathetic failures?

Below, you'll find a fresco from an unknown French artist, a depiction of Isaac and Ishmael burying their father, Abraham. The Torah is silent with regard to any conversation that took place during the burial. Perhaps there is genius in the silence. We're out of earshot, but we yearn to know what was in their hearts that day.

Here is a poem from a wonderful Polish Nobel laureate. Her words speak plainly to the misery of protracted war but they hint at the elusive promise of peace.

The End and the Beginning 
by Wislawa Szmborska

After every war 
someone has to clean up. 
Things won't 
straighten themselves up, after all. 
Someone has to push the rubble 
to the sides of the road, 
so the corpse-laden wagons can pass. 

Someone has to get mired 
in scum and ashes, 
sofa-springs, 
splintered glass, 
and bloody rags. 

Someone must drag in a girder 
to prop up a wall. 
Someone must glaze a window, 
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not, 
and takes years. 
All the cameras have left 
for another war. 

Again we'll need bridges 
and new railway stations. 

Sleeves will go ragged 
from rolling them up. 
Someone, broom in hand, 
still recalls how it was. 
Someone listens 
and nods with unsevered head. 
Yet others milling about 
already find it dull. 

From behind the bush 
sometimes someone still unearths 
rust-eaten arguments 
and carries them to the garbage pile. 

Those who knew 
what was going on here 
must give way to 
those who know little. 
And less than little. 
And finally as little as nothing. 

In the grass which has overgrown 
causes and effects, 
someone must be stretched out, 
blade of grass in his mouth, 
gazing at the clouds.

Wislawa Szmborska was a Polish poet. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. She died in 2002, at the age of 101. 

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