My Father's Kingdom

At the dead center of Torah, midway between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 34, comes a group of disparate laws sometimes called the “Holiness Code.” The second of this week's portions, K’doshim, or Holiness, begins by enjoining the whole Israelite community: “You shall be holy, for I, your G-d, am holy” (Leviticus 19:1). How do we accomplish this? The first rule is to revere our parents.

My father could fix anything. The aunts came in procession,
bearing vacuums, beaters, toasters, fans, and he laid hands
upon appliances until they rose up from the dead.
He tightened sprockets, straightened spokes; the bike wheels hummed
the music of the spheres and all their orbits aligned.
He fashioned blazons out of copper salvage, reliquaries
from balsa boxes, still redolent of his cigars; we filled them
with river stones, cicada shells, white cowries he brought back
from some great service rendered to the nation in a far-off place—
each object sacred because he taught us how to notice it.
His bed was high; most weekdays, he descended in a cloud
of talc before we woke, went off to pace the girders, riveting
the I-beams that delimited the corners of our world.
But Sabbath mornings, we could visit him, plump his throne
of pillows, cluster at his feet. We cherubs, whom he lifted
in ecstatic somersaults and pirouettes, we worshipped him.