As Christians celebrate Easter, Muslims fast for Ramadan, and much of the world moves into Spring, Jewish people memorialize the Holocaust on “Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah”, the Day of the Remembrance.  HaShoah falls on the 27th of the month of Nisan on the Jewish calendar (April 28), a week after the Passover holiday that celebrates the Jewish exodus from slavery.

For this confluence of holidays and season, we are publishing Michael Gurian’s “We Are A People.”   Gurian writes, “The closeness every spring of the Jewish memorial service to Easter’s celebration of Christ’s ascension makes me believe that no matter our religion, identity, or people, we are all united in experiencing both the joy and the agony of resurrection.”

We Are a People

We are a people of gardens and storms,

of prayers and history and holiness.

We are a people who have survived

the excesses of God’s masterpiece.

We saw the worst that could happen,

now we know for sure: there is nothing

more worth living for than the road of joy

we must find just off our road of sorrows.

We are a people grateful for everyday things:

to complain with hate in our hearts is self-pity.

We will fight to imitate God in all our actions,

and we are a people who know how to fight.

We are a people who seek justice for those in need;

our good acts are God’s love breathing inside us.

We are a people who argue with the universe,

and so we eat, quite often, from a feast of losses.

How do we manage the human appetite for power?

What should we do with this wild absurdity, this life?

Make a safe home for our children.  Trust

a vast wandering light we will never understand.

Live with courage and purpose so that when we fall,

we fall into the arms of an infinitely greater Being.

Copyright, Michael Gurian, 2022