Rachel And Aaron Poem by gershon hepner

His name is Aaron, and he is a priest.
His sister Rachel doesn’t have the least
objection to a marriage with a gentile,
though doing this would lower the percentile
of Jews with Jewish babies, Rachel claims
ethnicity of Jews is based on dames,
and not their husbands, so it doesn’t matter
if they have babies from a goyish pater.

He’s proud to have the gene of kohanim,
but Rachel’s view of this is somewhat dim,
since she neglects her patrimony while
he guards it closely in his priestly style.
The Jews have long relied on priests like Aaron,
and while I’m with his sister him comparin’,
I wonder whether Rachel is aware
that it’s not just her family who care
about the choice that she will make in marriage,
but all the Jewish people whom she would disparage
by choosing as a partner someone who
may well be fine, but sadly ain’t a Jew.

“How lovely are thy dwellings, Jacob! ” Balaam
declared. These are my thoughts, and I’ll e-mail ’em
to Aaron and to Rachel. If I’m cursed,
that’s too bad, but the thoughts that I have versed
come from my heart, since I believe that Jews,
although they surely have the right to choose
their partners, have a duty to survive,
and not their gene pool of themselves deprive.

Inspired by an encounter at a Thanksgiving dinner at the apartment of Phyllis Horning, where I had the pleasure of meeting her two delightful children, Aaron, aged 21, a kohen who is studying biochemistry at UCSD, has a delightful Jewish friend called Tiffany, who is part Polish, part Libyan, and is determined to marry a Jewish man, and Rachel, aged 19, who is studying sociology at UC Berkeley, and has never dated any Jewish boy who was not an Israeli soldier, and may or may not be the girlfriend of a gentile who has just enlisted in the US Army.

1/27/09