History and Heritage

Ample remnants of both describing the
unqualified reality of what was in the ancient
past in the land of history that has left its
ineffable imprint on time and events even as
archaeological remnants pay silent witness to
their place in that distant past and those whose
names have passed into posterity. In Rome
the Arch of Titus gives grim testimony to the
destruction of the Second Temple of Solomon
chronicled by the Jewish-Roman historian
Josephus whose witness account laid bare
the agony of the Israelites who paid dearly
for their insubordination to the conquest of
the Roman Empire refusing to pay homage
to an emperor and his centurions recognizing
only devotion to their monotheistic and all
powerful god who failed to intervene in
punishment to a people deemed feeble in their
devotion yet certain that terrible punishment
would descend, not on their pious heads but
on their tormentors. Before the Romans the
Assyrians rampaged, sacked and destroyed
Solomon's first glorious temple wherein sat
the holy of holies, the sanctuary of the Ten
Commandments given Moses through the 
medium of a burning bush speaking in god's
voice: I am who I am. Ah, where lies
myth and where sits reality? It lies in the
following millennia in a tribe's death by a 
thousand scimitars, massacres, atrocities
pogroms and the final solution whereby six
million Jews were sent post-haste to their
terrible god who loved his people yet saw
no reason to extend divine mercy. Now that 
stubborn people has resurrected their ancient 
land dedicated to survival of the fittest even 
now surrounded by threat of genocide 
refusing to fade in the fullness of time for 
those who oppose their survival claim they 
never existed, nor did threats to their existence 
occur, determinedly revising history and
heritage to the bleak vacuum of oblivion.