December 28, 2006 --- HOLY INNOCENTS

We celebrate today the slaughter of innocents, a Christmas story, aware that the promise is that these innocents are held in the womb of God and suckled in eternity with a divine milk. It is a day of Isaian tenderness and will effect a meditation on cozy spaces…a nest, an egg: (Noah’s rain was 40 days, the period of time we are taught by Rashi that it takes from conception to the formation of a fetus).
So I put down the book of birds (The Bedside Book of Birds) and pick up one describing a search for 6 lost forebears (The Lost), lost to the Nazis, 6 lives of Bolechow (amongst the 6 million), a generation ago in an historical slaughter of innocents. Bolechow was violated; it should have been a nest, rather it was an instance of annihilation: the creation of nothing out of something: that which was became not the wonder of that which might not be, but the anti-reality of that which is no longer…needlessly.
Then the outlandish, tragic correspondence: Those were boxes, too. Those, too, were arks! (like those of Noah … Moses, boxes of salvation caused to float atop the waters of destruction). This a description of the gashouses of Belzec to which the Jews of Bolechow were brought in other boxes, the stifling cattle cars absent air and filled with the foul stench of human offal where urine might be the only slake for thirst. And so the cozy of nests is demythologized and the story of Holy Innocents moves beyond saga to fact. And what of the promise? What becomes of the meditation? At least one of these stories relies upon the homing of birds, the dovecote, the return of the olive leaf, but this is folk tale.