Page 181 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

LAWRIE HARTT

Roses for the Dead

This past week, I brought roses to the dead — 36 white blooms for the 36 righteous ones of

mystical Judaism, the ones who though unknown to anyone keep the world turning towards

justice and beauty and the gathering of light. We had gotten word that the Mt. Carmel Jewish

cemetery here in Philadelphia had been vandalized and I knew I had to go and once again bear

witness. Hoping to be there quietly and unnoticed, we arrived to a wide scattering of local and

national news trucks with their satellite dishes and roving reporters, a hovering drone camera, a

circling helicopter and the mayor, gratefully without an entourage.

Inside the cemetery, headstone upon headstone upon headstone lay toppled. Over 500 of them,

by some accounts, (though news reports only gave credence to 100), massive granite stones

heaved off their foundations over and over and over, over and over and over again. The sheer

physical fierceness of the destruction was assaulting and inescapable. Such vituperative

madness can knock the wind right out of you.

The five of us had come for the dead, for those whose resting place had been assaulted here

and the previous week in St. Louis, for their descendants, for the Jewish community, for all

communities subjected to vicious violence, for any of us torn up by fear, and for the ground and

trees, once again bearers and witnesses to all of it.

We walked among the toppled graves, now and then resting a hand on a stone. We said little.

Two of us were drawn to a small patch of grass near a section of many toppled stones where it

seemed a human bulldozer had come through with an avalanche of destructive zeal. There we

all sang. We asked for protection for what we love. Mostly we were silent.

A couple approached us, looking for their relatives’ graves, not easy to find in the expansive

hillside of mayhem. It turned out we were sitting right beside them. Together we spoke the

ancient words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. We honored the tradition of laying

pebbles on the gravestones, and I offered them white roses to place there also.