A Jewish friend gave me the original interpretation of the Abraham and Jacob sacrifice story. I liked it very much and was very bothered by taking credit for it myself. I want to thank my friend for discussing these stories with me. He helps me think. However, at his and Robert Alter's urging, I have thought about the story again and have another possibility that follows.
Abraham is the Patriarch of the Jewish people. In the story, God speaks to him directly, but I think it is possible that God spoke then as He tends to speak now, thruough the minds of people and not directly. I think it is possible that the ancient Jews lived among other peoples who did practice human sacrifice while the Jews did not. Possibly, at some point, some number of them may have felt that they would be better off if they imitated the customs of some of these surrounding tribes. The Five Books of Moses have many stories of the Chosen People abandoning the One and Only to worship surrounding gods (Baal of the Canaanites) or showing dissatisfaction with God and murmurring against Him. Keeping Jewish culture pure and free of corruption by other cultures was a constant battle.
Maybe Dissenting Jews considered practicing human sacrifice. The storyteller perhaps made the idea more acceptable by having God order the Patriarch to do what may have been unthinkable for most Jews. Jews always sacrificed the best, most valued lamb or crop or other item. Hence Abraham would have to sacrifice his first and most beloved son. Abraham follows the word of God in the story and prepares to sacrifice Jacob. The narrator tells us about this flatly, without horror or shock. The killing of a human being to placate God does not seem at all unthinkable to either the narrator or the Patriarch himself. However, God intervenes and orders the sacrifice of a lamb. Whether the Jews ever considered or practiced human sacrifice in times before history, this story makes it clear that He does not want His people to kill each other in His name. The story may be parable that warns the people against a temptation they may have been surrounded with.

Sacrifice

Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his beloved eldest son, Jacob/. Abraham is a just man and follows God’s word to the letter, so he gets a knife and takes his son to the rock where such sacrifices are made, binds the boy and prepares to cut his throat in the ritual manner. At the last minute, God intervenes and orders Abraham to sacrifice a lamb instead. We read this story with a kind of horror. What possible reason could God have to make such a demand? The standard answer is that God is testing Abraham. Abraham passes the test, and God spares Jacob. However, I think there is another possible explanation.
This may be one of the oldest stories in the Five Books of Moses. Human sacrifice has been practiced by many groups all over the world. I think it is possible that the Jews practiced such sacrifice as a matter of course as did the peoples around them. In that case, such a demand would not be unusual or unexpected. One gives God the very best. In the case of Abraham, that would be his dearly loved son. There is no tone of shock or horror in the story. Abraham simply follows God’s command. The important fact is that God stops the human sacrifice and requires the sacrifice of an animal. This would be a new requirement by God, a new law. The Jews would no longer practice human sacrifice because God no longer required it. Jews sacrificed the best animals of their flocks for generations. If this is the case, the story is older than the Cain and Able story. The men sacrificed the best of their produce. Abel, the farmer, sacrificed grain, and Cain, the shepherd sacrificed his best lamb. The tradition of sacrifice is still remembered in the Communion services of many Christian faiths. God gave his only Son to die for the sins of man

Jorge, the Bilingual Snow Leopard

a cookie for each hand
mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch
sleeping curved into my body
he loved to suck corn cobs
spat creamed spinach back every time
saber toothed growl
at six he threw himself on me
the last of a lifetime of children
my friend

Christmas
I brought him Jorge
the bilingual snow leopard
at Easter Jorge needed heart sugery
and got it
large stitches running down his middle

his thirteenth summer
he walks through the room
eyes averted
how was your day, sweetie?
no answer
he is suddenly tall
dressed in black
his voice dropping
he has to go

fall shift

sunday brutal blue
sky light stabs eyes blind
Monday rain drifts soft

Penguins

The propensity for tuxedoed birds to enact something like a gay marriage has since provided a memorable skirmish in the culture wars.(Engber, Daniel,Slate, October 1,2010, "Do Animals Masturbate?")

cooking dinner

my daughter perches
on my old red kitchen stool
sunday evening peace

christmas night

cold dark night skates hit
concrete spinning wheels sparks fly
canonball children flash

Morning Light

pottery cups flowered
white cloth, with embroidered spring
silver coffee pot

fence

rosemary spikes stand
wet, aroma drifts over yard
fall, bloom purple moths

orange liqueur

summer grass has gone to seed
basil is purple with end of summer
somebody is going to die
I'm really scared
Robert lost a foot and his sight
Dick can hardly breathe
my heart's going
things break

I have an old sugar bowl
cream colored with flowers
one flowered plate from an old set
a tea pot without a lid
a cracked cup

we're a matched set
blue eyes, freckles
children running in the street
lined up at the table at lunch
I made Sunday breakfast
bacon crisp, eggs
hot enchiladas from the corner
Daddy breezing in from his walk
eight bowls of oatmeal in the morning

skates at Christmas
race down the sidewalk in the cold evening
sparks fly
red wagons
deliver the fat
Sunady paper
share the comics
sweet peaches from a neighbor's tree

we sit at the table talking
hands cut the air
vintage cloth
bright pitchers of milk and coffee
orange liqueur in the sorbet
I'm really scared

bucket

water bucket red
on garden deck with dipper
plants stand tall thirsty

There are a number of stories in The Five Books of Moses of God favoring younger sons: Cain and Able, Jacob's sons, Joseph, the youngest son. The custom among ancient Israelis, as in many cultures, was to favor the elsest son. I think the reasons those stories are told and stories about elder sons taking their rightful places are not is that it was ordinary for elder sons to inherit land and blessings. When a younger son is favored, that is worthy of not. Each time the story of a favored younger son is told is unique. The story is told because it is noteworthy for its own reasons.

chair

old green kitchen chair
carved wooden dowels form back
worn seat curve welcomes

I've been out of touch for a while, but I haven't noticed anyone noting that Bill Clinton left the biggest budgetary surplus in history, and Dubya managed in eight years to turn it into the biggest deficit we've ever had. Maybe I just missed it, or maybe I'm missing something else, but I think we need to note that fact. Personally I'd like some sort of explanation other than voodoo economics since the Republicans seem to be still pushing the same economics on the theory that they can save us from the Bush Depression.

Birth Pangs

Nothing happens
eternal silence moves nothing
no light, dark
no absence or presence

but One
God does not speak
suddenly (time) dense dark something is
spinning

silent, minute cosmos
explodes, expands
rushing into existing nothing
things coalesce

God looks on
interessted

Gardening

gentle gray man bends
with me over small tomato plants
earth warm with wise love

Crow

black bird sleekly stands
gleaming in sun on the roof
perfect form bright light

bird feeder

sparrow sits solo
bird head briskly checks danger
chirps safe others come

bird

red evening glow shades
tail, lovely bird thing swept wing
F18 sails high death

Deck Garden

rocking chair askew
rosemary shoots tall, cactus blooms
granite cairn worships

The corruption of King David

The story of King David's fall from grace goes that the King sees Bathsheba bathing on her roof and falls inn love with her beauty. He calls her to his palace and seduces her. Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, is on away at battle. Ultimately Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David's baby, and David, afraid that he will be caught in the perfidy of seducing the wife of one of his troops, calls Uriah back, hoping that Uriah will have intercourse with his wife and assume that the baby is his. However, Uriah is practicing chastity in order to save his strength for the battlefield. David encourages Uriah to make love and tells him it is safe, but Uriah refuses to break his chastity. David sends him back to battle and tells Uriah's general to send him to the front of the battle so that he will be killed. Uriah is killed, and David marries Bathsheba and claims fatherhood to the resulting child. King David declines in moral purity and virtue from this time on. David is probably the greatest figure in the Five Books of Moses and Israel's greatest king, and his decline is tragic.
David did decline as king as leader of the people of Israel. He is a great and courageous warrior and brilliant tactician who ends his life soft and corrupt. However, I think the seduction of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah are symptoms of his decline rather than the cause. David is King of Israel with all the comfort and glories of kingship. He is no longer leading his troops on the field but conducting war from the capital. He is surrounded by people who expect to profit from ageering with and obeying him. He has become accustomed to his comfort and agreeable company. He is denied nothing. He becomes self indulgent and soft. Bathsheba is beautiful, and he does not deny himself. But she is married to one of David's loyal soldiers, and David does not want to get caught. So he tries to get Uriah to take responsibility for his child, and when Uriah has too much integrity, he does the shameful thing of having him killed. He then marries Bathsheba and adds her to his wives. This is a shocking glimpse of the decay of a great man, but the man was already corrupted by ease and life at court and thinks nothing of taking another man's wife and killing the man himself.

spring herb

cinnamon basil
shoots up purple new leaves
seeds blown in fall sleep

Sodom, Gomorrah and the rain of fire

Archeologists think they may have discovered the sites of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. They found two towns very close together that were destroyed by fire, ash, and stones from the sky. They had different names, but other details are consistent with the story in Genesis. We can recall that Lot and his family lived in one of the towns and that God told Lot that he was the only just man in either town. Lot should take his family and flee because God was so enraged at the towns he was going to destroy them with fire from the sky. Lot argues that he can find, finally, just five just men in the towns, and God tells Lot that if he can find five just men, He will spare the towns. Lot cannot find even five just men.
Meanwhile, a stranger passes through the town, and in accord with Jewish law, Lot invites him to stay in his home. The stranger should be treated better than one's own family, so lot is required to treat this stranger with extreme courtesy. The men of the towns find out that Lot is harboring a stranger in his home and come to Lot's door demanding that Lot send out the visitor so that the villagers may "know" him. Lot stands in the doorway of his house and refuses the village men entrance. The men are very threatening, but Lot has a duty to God to protect the visitor. As a just man, he cannot release his guest to this crowd, so he offers his virgin daughters instead. The crowd refuses and continues to insist that Lot send out his guest. God tells Lot to take his family and flee. He is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot gathers his family and flees the town just as fire and stones begin to fall from the sky. The two towns are obliterated.
I may have some of the details of the story wrong, and I have left out the warning not to look back. Lot's wife does look back and is turned into a pillar of salt with interesting consequences which I will not discuss here. My apologies for errors in details. However, I would like to say something about what has always seemed to me to be a very strange story. Why would the men of the towns be so obsessesd with "knowing" a stranger under any circumstances? The towns were probably trading towns, and under any circumstances, settling and maintaining a town requires a certain practicality and stability in the inhabitants. It seems to me that towns where the men were obsessesed with raping strangers would hardly stand long. One rarely hears of homosexual gang rape because someone is passing through and for no other reason. As I say this story seems very strange. I think I may have an explanation.
Ancient Jewish people seem to have considered that all events were the direct result of God's pleasure or anger. People want reasons for things that happen. This is the root of science. We do not simply understand that things happen. They are the result of something. Everything has a cause. The early Hebrews had exactly the same brains we have today but a lot less information. They looked for causes for things they did not understand, and like most cultures, they attributed what they did not understand to God. If the Jews pleased God, things went well. If they displeased him, he punished with drought, fire, and flood. Reading Robert Alter's literary translations, I get the impression that Jews often assumed they had pleased or displeased God when things went well or badly. Two towns wiped off the face of the earth by fire, ash, and stones falling from the sky definitely suggested that God was not pleased.
Like all cultures, the Jews told stories which were passed orally for hundreds of generations before they were put together in the Five Books of Moses. The towns that have been discovered were destroyed by volcanic eruption. People at that time usually did not travel far from home, and the people of the area may have known nothing whatever about volcanoes. These towns have been obliterated in horror from the sky. God was clearly displeased. What could the residents of the town have done to cause such devastation from the Almighty?
As I said, coutesy to the stranger was an important law for the ancient Jews. Defiling a stranger is about as bad as one could get. Two whole towns full of men who wanted to "know" a guest in a man's home would definitely make God very angry. Maybe the storyteller could think of nothing more terrible that the people of a town could do. They had to have sinned grievously to have earned such a terrible fate. The entire populations of both towns would have had to violate the commandments very grievouly. There was one just man in those two towns, and he was spared with his children.
I think this story is an ancient attempt to understand what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah rather than literal truth.

pansies

lettuce shoots seed stalks
garden spring winter plants die back
earth awaits color

athens

Acropolis stones
lie on silent earth, sun beats
ancient secrets blow

Suddenly in March

I brush plum petals
from my windshield in the morning
the kids take to playing
Iraq War in the gorge behind the park
robins consider nesting
in the eave of the porch
framed conveniently by the open door
hummingbirds shoot across the yard
roost in the scrub trees
downtown glitters against the sky
and the market is full of tulips
every year I wake to this feast
and know
that before I can fall in love
morning glory will be strangling the myrtle
the canyon walls will be gold
in the evening
the hawk will circle and circle

Mathew 22

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt alove the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great acommandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The following essay is fairly difficult, but I have been thinking about these things lately and decided to post my ideas. I hope I don't drive people away.

God and Time

Time moves, and infinity does not. Time begins, ends, and changes. Infinity is static because movement implies time. The cosmos is thought to be finite. We have not reached the end of what exists in time, but there is, in theory, an end. Planets, stars, constellations, and dark matter exist in time and are therefore, finite. Time is countable. The cosmos began at some moment, and at some moment will cease to be. In theory, we could find the end of what we know to exist. The question that rises is, "What is outside time. When the cosmos ends, what is there?" The question is a strange one. In one's mind, one comes to the farthest part of the universe, and we find what? Whatever is out there beyond time and what we know to exist is infinite. Physicists have wondered and suggested maybe outside time there is nothing at all. Not an absence, like a vacuum, but infinite nothing. Time arises out of infinity and will go back to infinity. Infinity is unchangeable, the everlasting now. Change implies time and finitude. Infinity does not change. It cannot because change implies the end of something and the beginning of something else, movement. Beginning and ending happen in time, and time is finite. Life as we know it is finite. It begins at a point in time, and ends at another point.
There are two possibilities regarding the infinite. Something is there or nothing. If nothing is outside time, then in theory, we could come to the end of the cosmos and stop. There is nothing else. The cosmos will end, but outside the cosmos there is nothing at all, and nothing is infinite. It neither begins nor ends. The other possibility is that there is an infinite something outside time.
Consciouness exists in time. There are days, months, years, and eons, but they are countable, and they begin at some point and end at some other. Consciousness moves and is aware of itself. Human consciousness begins at some point in development and ends at another. The subconscious knows nothing of time. It has only the never ending now. It does not count and does not move and does not know that it can end. If something exists outside of time, we can calll it God and posit that God is subconscious. God is infinite, eternal, and exists in the never ending now. I have spent years of my life uninterested in the existence of God. I can neither prove that It exists or does not exist. I can find no terms on which I can determine one or the other. However, if the infinity outside the cosmos is not nothing, we can call the infinite subconscious outside of time "God" and then think about what qualities such a being might have.
Time and finitude rise out of eternity and will sink back into it. If the eternity outside the cosmos is defined as God, then we can maybe say some things about It. It is not conscious, but subconscious, but the conscious mind rises out of the unconscious which rises out of the subconscious. Animals exist whose minds are probably no more than subconscious. They are entirely instinctive and decide nothing. Alligators come to mind. One can move and alligator from one swamp to another, and if its needs are met, it is fine. No alligator needs time adjust to change as far as I know. Many animals probably have nearly no conscious minds, but functioning unconscious minds, for instance cats. They don't think, but they do learn. They are very instinctive animals with some ability to synthesize and act according to new information. However, they do not communicate much in any sort of conscious sense. A cat does know when it's time to eat. They exist in time, but are nearly without consciousness. Conscious animals manipulate the environment. Whales are social.They have communication systems about which we know almost nothing. They could be very complex. And they do manipulate the environment. Whales have been trained to play ball and perfom for rewards. If consciousness rises out of the unconscious which is in time, and the unconscious rises out of the subconscious which exists outside of time, then reasonably an infinite existence outside of time would be subconscious. The infinite subconscious could occasionally exist in time and give rise to unconscious and conscious life in time and therefore begin at a given point and sink back into infinity at another point. A subconscious God could in fact give rise to a mortal Son in time who gives his life in empathy for the agony of mortal beings. One of the most ancient and important questions in human life is the problem of evil. If God is infinite, merciful, and just, how can he account for concentration camps, starvation and the other horrors of human life?
An infinite being that can rise to consciousness could have given rise for His own reasons to both time and mortality. Such a being would decide nothing about temporal affairs. He would set them in motion and they would progress according to laws of nature. Humans decide for themselves who they are and how we behave.
Sartrean existentialism states that man defines all of nature including himself. We observe whales to figure out what they are, and we can observe human behavior to understand human nature. In other words, an eternal, non conscious God exists and can rise into time to do things. It will, however, sink back into unchangeable eternity. Humans exist in time and love, suffer, give succor, or abuse each other. God simply permits us to exist. However, God can rise into consciousness and offer empathy for the sufferings of man. We can, if we choose, believe that nothing exists outside the cosmos or that an eternal infinite Being exists outside of time. We have, as far as I know, no information either way other than an apparent human need to believe. Faith is a decision, at least until we reach the end of the cosmos and find out what if anything is out there

For St Anne Patron Saint of Mothers

native stone bare against the hill
Los Angeles cool, damp
rain soaks
runs down the stairs, the hill

bright nasturtiums blow
between stones run down slopes
delicate, temporary as grass
myrtle sculpture in the kitchen window

sky bare tender blue as Jerusalem June
desert Eden
orange flowers rest gentle
between stones

children play handball against the pink wall
school starts in searing heat
backpacks tear tender shoulde
the people stand holding hoses in the dry evening
they hold those green hoses fall after fall
the children go, come back, buy homes falling down the slopes

For David the Great Warrior

the ancient desert bore heavy stones
Jacob resting for the night
placed one on another
and sacrificed to the one God

the ancient marked his path
one stone on another
for the follower
himself on return

I place one stone on another
in my green garden
nearly eternal, stones fall
my altar tumbles

David the great warrior
danced before the Lord
exposing himself
silent stones before the Lord
the Eternal spins silent unconscious
I love you