Within My Walls

This anger. This anger. It’s making her heart thump so hard that her body aches, and her face burns. Why did her mother not fight for her life? For her child? If she, Bilhah, were a mother, she would never have succumbed to illness and left a little one alone. Why does she care? Why is she so filled with rage and sorrow? Bilhah looks up. “I do not know what I think. Just that if I…if I ever had a child… I would love her and protect her until my last breath. With everything I had.” She knows, then, why. Because she is an abandoned child. Abandoned by her mother. No, abandoned by her father. No, abandoned to her father. And what of the Almighty? Her Third Parent, as Eliyahu liked to say. She can almost touch it, that great gash inside her. Is there an answer? Can there be an answer? Where is home when your people have been expelled, and those whom you love are dead? Forty years after the Spanish Expulsion, the Jewish people are still haunted by forced conversions and false messiahs. Mash