Sunday, August 4, 2024

The Sheep Who Have Strayed from the House of Israel

בארצות הגוים אל תלכו ובערי השמרונים אל תבואו׃

לכו לצאן אשר נדחו מבית ישראל׃

Mt. 10:5,6 (in Shem Tob's Hebrew Matthew)

"To the lands of the Gentiles do not go and into the cities of the Samaritans do not enter. Go to the sheep who have strayed from the house of Israel." (Translation by Professor George Howard.)

Who are those "sheep who have strayed?" My friend Yakov told me that he thought I was one of them. But how could this be? Yakov well knew that, in spite of certain genetics on my father's side, I had been raised as a Catholic. Apparently, it's more complicated than that. Apparently, "the sheep who have strayed" is a category whose boundaries are wider than this life. So my friend Yakov thought.

So Yakov held an extraordinary opinion, He was also an extraordinary person. Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain (the poet L. G. Corey) could have been just another gay poet hanging out in Sausalito. Instead, he reached back into his ancestry and became who he really was: Yakov Leib. This was no distortion of the truth; it was a revelation of the truth. The Leib name was ancestral, as were the kohanim. He was not a Rabbi (he used "Reb" much as an honorary "Col." has been used in the South), but he would have made a good one, had his life followed a different path.

L. G. Corey was not bound by the circumstances of his birth. Apparently, the world does not get to tell us who we are. Apparently we have to search deep inside and decide it for ourselves.

Like Yakov, I write poetry. Like Yakov, I have studied (and even practiced) different religious traditions. Like Yakov, my deep-rooted spiritual home is Judaism. Like Yakov, I will tell the world who I am.

Donald Jacobson Traxler