by William Nelson
But why, why? So strange
—an anonymous oversight
or burnt to ashes in our Holocaust,
or a tractate slipped behind a shelf
in our vast library of right and wrong—that
neither did Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai expound,
nor brilliant Maimonides explicate,
nor any sage Talmid Chakam, ancient or modern, tell
why the Talmud,
which so sternly, so minutely, so expansively
demands we cleanse our hands of their impurity
with water poured from a particular cup
before eating bread,
after eating bread,
before worship,
after sleeping,
after touching a corpse,
after defecation,
before reciting a prayer,
after touching hidden parts of our body
or a menstruating woman,
after leaving a cemetery,
and so forth, and so on, so strange
that our Talmud
omits to command us
to wash our opened hands
up to the wrist
with water poured from a particular cup
after strangling a people to death.
William Nelson is a retired lawyer living in Vermont. He won poetry prizes in college and in law school, and he has published a book of poetry Implementing Standards of Good Behavior (L'Epervier Press, 1972) and poems in various magazines (though not lately). Nelson returned to poetry after a career as a public defender. He has posted some of his poems on a Substack site.
