You're Wrong

An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board

Let us, however, in our plans, direct our attention not so much to what is good and
moral as to what is necessary and useful. --Protocols of the Elders of Zion

“And you're just going to tell everyone?” he asks. “Pretty

soon word'll get out.... Ruin everything... It would destroy
thousands of years. Let me tell you: Forget it! Only don't come
running back to me. Once you do this, it's over. Like I said
before, you won't survive.”
“I'm an old man, George,” I tell him. “I don't have much time
left anyway.”
I'm talking with George Tabb. We're in the dressing room of
The Continental. I'm there for Revival Two, the second annual
reuion of ever-older farts. Downstairs is the dressing room. In a
corner of that room, George and I talk about... well, you'll read
it.
“After this blood libel thing with Sarah Palin... I gotta
speak out.” I tell him.
“Ya gotta do what ya gotta do,” he tells me. “But you're
destroying 5000 years of history in the process. It's worse than
the holocaust. It might even lead to another one.”
I nod grimly. We hug. It's like we're parting forever. Maybe
we are.
Flashback: The year is 1952. Six months before my bar
mitzvah. As with every Jewish boy, it's during this time we're
introduced to the wonders and mysteries of Jewishness. My parents
have driven me to the synagogue.
“You won't forget today,” says my father as I get out of the
car. Are his eyes wet?
It's early April, a week before Passover. An air of
solemnity... awe... fear... blankets the inner chamber of the
synagogue. There is no Hebrew school teacher today.... just the
rabbi, Rabbi Alterkake.
Looking back, I guess he wasn't a very tall man, but to me,
he seemed like a giant. A fierce looking face with a long gray
beard and big eyebrows... two fat caterpillars above deep set
eyes.
“Mykel,” says the rabbi. He speaks with a slightly Eastern
European accent.... like my grandfather. His deep voice sounds
like the voice of GOD.
“You will never forget today,” he says. “It is time for you
to know what it really means to be a Jew. You might have heard
whispers... rumors dismissed with a wave of the hand. Still, you
wondered. Today you will know.”
If you've ever been inside a synagogue, you'll remember that
on the Eastern wall, facing Jerusalem, is a tall boxlike
structure. It's called an ark. It contains one or two scrolls...
dressed fancy with chestplates and crowns. If you've attended a
Jewish service, you might have seen the rabbi read from one. When
not being read, the scrolls rest on velvet in the back of the ark.
Rabbi Alterkake takes me by the hand and leads me up to the
ark. He removes the two scrolls and sets them on a stand. Then he
reaches to the blue velvet. There is a snap or zipper or some kind
of fastener. I'm not exactly sure. Whatever it is, he unfastens it
and pushes against the wood underneath. It is a door. And it
silently swings open.
On the other side, a staircase leads downwards. It looks
unimaginably old... wooden... rickety... like those staircases in
horror movies. The rabbi leads, entering the back of the ark and
going down the stairs. I follow.
If this were a movie, the rabbi would have a candle in his
hand. We'd be casting eerie shadows on the wall. It isn't. We
aren't.
I'm not exactly sure where the light is coming from. There
must be bulbs in the staircase ceiling that I don't notice. What I
do notice is that the stairs end at a large door... like a giant
refrigerator door... white, with a metal handle. Rabbi Alterkake
pulls the handle and it silently swings open. We step inside a
room.
It's dark. Before my eyes can adjust, the door swings shut
behind us with a little whoosh! I feel like I'm in a church
crypt... like those I read about in old European cathedrals.
As my eyes adjust I make out a very plain room: four concrete
walls. On each of the four walls is a white scroll with a giant
Hebrew letter on it.
Aleph, Peh, Lamed, Feh. And hanging from the ceiling in the
center of the room is another giant Lamed.
In the middle of the room is a cross. It's on an alter, and
it's big. Bigger than my 4 foot eleven inch self. A Christian
cross. Why?
I wonder if the synagogue is constructed over an old church.
But why did they keep the cross there? Why would the rabbi take me
to visit it? I can't imagine what Jesus has to do with getting
ready for a bar mitzvah.
We approach the cross, circling around to the other side...
facing the Aleph on the wall.
It is not Jesus on the cross. It is a little boy... naked...
tied to the cross beam by his wrists.
“This is the fate of the goyim,” says the rabbi. “God made us
His chosen people. In every generation, the goyim have tried to
destroy us. We survive because we respect God. We follow God's
instructions.”
He walks to a shelf attached to the concrete wall, just to
the right of the Lamed. On that shelf lies a huge pair of
scissors-- like the Jewish tailors use to cut cloth in midtown New
York.
“We survive,” continues the rabbi, “because we follow the
rituals of our fathers... and our fathers' fathers.”
He walks up to the Christian boy... a blond kid, about five
years old... Dutchboy haircut. The rope around his wrists is red
with blood. He must've scraped the skin off trying to escape. His
knees are about eye level to the rabbi.. His face wrinkles in
fear. Tears smear his cheeks. His nose drips snot.
A small bucket lies on the floor, directly beneath the child.
I recognize the Hebrew letters etched into the metal. One looks
like a fiery N. I recognize it as Aleph, the first letter of the
alphabet. The other is long, a bit like a P. It's the Hebrew Feh.
The F-sound. I have no idea what they mean. They must be related
to the symbols on the wall. It's all mysterious... foreign.
A drop of blood falls from boy's tiny wrists to the floor.
The rabbi reaches up between the boy's legs. The kid tries to
twist his knees to protect the tiny glands he will eventually
surrender. Slapping the offending legs, the rabbi presses onward.
Pushing his right hand between the child's legs, the rabbi
uses the scissors in his left hand to point to the bucket. Then he
points to a spot on the cross, under the legs of the naked boy.
“Hold that here,” he says.
I lift the bucket and hold it where I'm told.
The rabbi's right hand is tight between the kids' legs. He
hooks his fingers around the tiny testicles. He pulls and a
horrible scream comes from the kid's mouth. Reaching up with the
scissors, he puts the two tiny glands between the sharp edges,
then presses the handle together. A worse scream issues from the
child's mouth. Worse than anything I've ever heard.
That sound still haunts me, 60 years later. It was a scream
like the pain of the world. A scream that pierces every bone, like
the cold of a wet winter day. A scream that made my 12 and a half
year old body tremble as if it were happening to me.
“And they think matzo ball soup is made from balls of matzo,”
says the rabbi with a small ironic smile.
The scream dies to a whisper. A kind of sob/hiccup. The
bucket I'm holding fills with the blood dripping from the open
wound between the boy's legs. At first it's a torrent, splashing
out, over my hands, onto my shirt. The torrent turns into a river.
The river to a stream. The stream to a trickle. Time slows as the
flow of blood slows. TICK... TICK... TICK... DROP... DROP... DROP.
Eventually it's over.
The boy is quiet now, his naked legs covered in red rivulets,
like a Jackson Pollock painting. The terror is gone from his face.
It's almost like he's sleeping, his chin resting against his small
chest. His skin is as white and pale as the paper I'm typing this
on.
The rabbi walks to another shelf, this one next to the giant
Alef. He takes a book from that shelf. It looks like The Koran. At
least my 12 year old image of what the Koran looks like. The
writing is certainly Arabic, not Hebrew. The book looks old-- but
gilded... and holy.
He rips a page from the book and places on it the two little
testes he's snipped from the goy on the cross.
He folds the paper around the glands and puts them in the
pocket of his long coat. He then spits into the book, rubs it on
the seat of his pants and puts it back on the shelf.
I don't know what happens to the little body. My guess is
that it's taken down, and walled up behind one of those giant
Hebrew letters. It's one of the many things I never find out.
I follow the rabbi back up the stairs. The blood of the
little blond boy swishes in the bucket I'm carrying. Kerblub!
Kerblub! Telmwirl! Telmwirl! It sounds like it's talking to me.
Tell the word! Tell the world! it's saying.
It's a scene that every Jewish boy has witnessed for the past
thousand years. Two thousand. Five thousand. And until now, no one
has ever told... or if they have, their reports have been
ridiculed as blood libel.
Now you know. Blood it is. Libel, unfortunately, it is not.

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website

viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get live links and a chance to
post comments on the column]

-->Credit where its due dept: There are very few big internet
corporations that I like... though I use them. Facebook is a
privacy horror. Apple has turned itself into a God. eBay spawned
the Meg Whitman monster. But sometimes, you've got to give credit.
In December, the U.S. government got a court order demanding
Twitter turn over information about people connected to WikiLeaks.
The court order added a gag demand that prevented Twitter from
telling anyone, especially the targets of the order, about the
order’s existence.
Instead of caving in Google-like, Twitter successfully
challenged the gag order in court. Then they told the targets that
their data was being requested. That gave the victims time to try
to quash the order themselves.
Twitter’s move comes as a ton of spineless companies,
including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America banned
donations to WikiLeaks. Amazon.com voluntarily threw the site off
its hosting platform, though there’s nothing illegal in publishing
classified documents.
By standing up for its users, Twitter showed guts and
principles. Ten punk points for you, Twitter.

-->Did it happen to you? dept: If you have a website that has been
threatened with a suit or received a letter asking that material
be removed... there's help for you. A website called Chilling
Effect (http://chillingeffects.org/) will help you stand up for
your first amendment rights... and least the few you have left.

-->Telling a man by his friends dept: TV preacher Pat Robertson

was told he may not have to testify in the war crimes trial of his
business partner, former Liberian dictator, Charles Taylor.
Robertson got ten percent of the profits of a Liberian company
ironically called Freedom Gold. In 2003, Robertson pulled some
strings for his pal by criticizing GWB for "destabilizing
Liberia," which meant trying to get rid of the dictator. Robertson
had made no such similar comments when GWB tried to get rid of
another leader... Saddam Hussein.

-->Secular sectarianism dept: The French government has banned the

burka in France. The excuse? "We're a secular nation." They have
not, however, banned Jesus bling or mezuzahs on doorposts.