{post-sermon musings on a Friday evening. The sermon was on Leviticus chapters 1-7 and 17.}

Part 1: The Wilderness, Moses’ time.

            Small fingers wrapped around my hand, and I felt a gentle tug on my sleeve.       “Papa,” my six-year-old son said. His big brown eyes looked up at me, filled with love and curiosity as they always were. Dark curls tumbled around his forehead. I smiled. My son looked so much like his beautiful mother.

            “Papa,” he said again.

            “Yes, my son?”

A valley:
Dark and deep
And hidden in the vestiges of time;
Reserved in shadows for when time is done
Forbidden, dry and bleak and white,
Beyond the hallows of the ancient sun;
Rest place of the reaper’s blade
Of bones

Jacob’s death
Lies old and silent there
Beneath the ceaseless, sunless light of doom
And cries:
Blood-red and dry and dusty tears
For hope cut off, and perished
Beneath a pogrom’s
Snowy moon