On the Metaphor of a Calf - 6/9/2024

On a wagon bound for market

There’s a calf with a mournful eye

High above him there’s a swallow

Winging swiftly through the sky

Stop complaining said the farmer

Who told you a calf to be

Why don’t you have wings to fly with

Like the swallow so proud and free

Calves are easily bound a slaughtered

Never knowing the reasons why

But whoever treasures freedom

Like the swallow must learn to fly

How the winds are laughing

They laugh with all their might

Laugh and laugh the whole day through

And | half the summer’s nights

Singing Dona 

Today marks the 246th day of the on going genocide in Gaza. According to official counts 37,616 have been killed, more than 10,000 are missing, and 84,500 are injured across Palestine, this includes the 274 people that were killed in Nuseirat. I continue to pray that the missing are found, the injured return to full health and that the memories of those martyred live on in those who knew them. 

I have long ceased having words that adequately capture the scope of the horror. I do not know how to talk about the growing list of people to grieve. What we are seeing day after day, the bombs raining down in Gaza, the ground campaigns, and settler and military violence sweeping through the West Bank is beyond the spoken word. This is maybe why I have found this song playing in my head over and over for the past two weeks. 

I started hearing this song on loop after attending Torah for Palestine - hosted by the online trans, anti-Zionist yeshiva Shel Maala, this past week. In this hour, we read a story from the Talmud - specifically Bava Metzia 85a. In this story, or sugya as it is called, we are told that Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who was said to have many chronic illnesses, was approached by a calf who “went and hung its head on the corner of Rabbi Yahuda HaNasi’s garment and was weeping. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said: Go, as you were created for this purpose.” The Talmud goes on to say that “Since he was not compassionate to the calf, let affiliations come to him.”

You might be wondering, what did I sing and how are the song and the sugya related to this current genocide in Gaza. This song, titled Dona Dona, was originally written in Yiddish in 1941 for a play, and the music was composed by Sholom Secunda, a Ukrainian Jewish composer born in 1894 who came to the US as a child as a result of the pogroms. Dona Dona is based on this sugya in Talmud. I learned this song when I was a child as we used to sing this song at my camp during Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day. 

In the song and sugya - there is an implicit assumption that some are condemned to death at birth. Just as the purpose of the sparrow is to sore, the purpose of the calf is to be bound and slaughtered. Even though Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi could have saved this crying calf, or at the very least provided the crying calf some final comfort, he reminds the calf of its purpose. He does not regard this calf with the smallest shred of decency or compassion. Similarly, the farmer in the song balks at the calf and implies that the calf could simply have chosen a different life for itself and it could choose to grow wings and fly - but what if we clip the wings, and shut the fence, and deny any attempt of salvation.

Unfortunately, I see too many parallels between the story of the calf and the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. This is not to say that Palestinians are defenseless like the calf, but the world has continued to sit idly as Palestinians are being condemned to a stoppable genocide. The US could stop the flow of weapons and call an end to this violence tomorrow. And they could have done this every day since October 7th. Our government has had so many opportunities over the past 76 years to stop Israel’s violence against Palestine and end the Occupation. But like Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, our government and the Israeli government have stood by their actions and let the calf go to slaughter.

Like the calf, Palestinians are being condemned to this fate because of where they were born. In no world should being born to a specific nation be a sentence to military rule. Palestinian culture and history is so rich of beauty, generosity, kindness and resilience and we have a duty to humanize. While we can easily take up the role of the farmer or Rabbi Yahuda HaNasi - in complacency, in inaction, in accepting that our government fuels the genocide in Palestine, we can and we must quesion why anyone is in the position of the calf in the first place. We can help to open the gate or at least we can try. I do not want to live in a world where we take as fact that some live under the ax of another.