Eyeless in Gaza:
A Prayer for Chanukah 2023*
by Joel Savishinsky

There are more ways to soil a house than
to cleanse one. Pouring water or burning sage
will sometimes do the job of purification.
But injecting taboo foods, alien altars, and
gods with faces, make up a sample
of defilements that can last until
the place is rubble and ashes.

The foreigners of empire were inventive, vindictive,
turning Jerusalem’s Hebrew temple on its head,
casting darkness as its own spell, battering
the sanctuary untill it was empty of words and awe.
When the Jewish rebels rose up, throwing in
their lot with Maccabee zealots, they re-claimed
the sacred with the sword, and sanctified it anew
with oil and light. The eight-day miracle stood
long enough to re-make history into myth,
a tale for Sunday school lessons and hopeful books.
But being warriors not prophets, the victors
could not foresee that the dynasty bred
of their triumph would one day become
tainted by its own anointments, caving to
old corruptions and rivalries, and so know
the fate of every other holy realm.

The Middle East–a former garden, soon home
to hundreds of more wars, thousands of questions,
millions of answers. Over two millennia after
the Jewish shrine knew its oil-lit reclamation,
we can once more hear hopeful, haunted voices recalling
the ancient command to “Let there be light,”
echoing its words in the very realm where Jacob
–who once wrestled all night with his angel–was
re-named Israel, “the man who perseveres with God.”
But to listen now to the lamentations rising from
all quarters of that land is to know how–like Samson–
we have again become betrayed, bound and
eyeless in Gaza, asking anew for the strength,
the wisdom, the chance to get it right at last.





* The phrase “Eyeless in Gaza” is taken from John Milton’s
poetic drama Samson Agonistes:
                    “… Promise that I
                    Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver
                    Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
                    Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.”

The author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, who had been partially
blinded by a childhood illness, used Milton’s three-word phrase as the
title for his autobiographical novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936).



 

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