c.1848
Enki walked the muddy roads of Galicia, Bohemia, Romania, the Pale, and the shtetls of Russia. He saw the same scene repeat like a fever dream: a synagogue in flames, a child's shoe left in the street, Cossacks laughing as they rode away. Century after century the same wound, the same cry rising from Jewish throats: "How long, Adonai? How long must we wander?" It was the ancient ache of exile, the father's vigil by the window, the promise whispered to Abraham under the desert stars: "To your seed I will give this land." That longing was not politics. It was prayer with tears in it.
Then something shifted.
In the salons of Vienna and Berlin, in the smoke-filled congresses of the new nationalist age, a movement took shape. It clothed the ancient promise in the crisp uniform of 19th-century statecraft. It replaced the prophet's vision of olive trees and shared wells with surveyors' chains, land deeds, and the cold geometry of exclusive claim. It said: "The waiting is over. We will build the house ourselves, and we will decide who enters." The longing for home was still there, raw and bleeding, but it had been handed a crown of iron and told the crown was salvation.
Enki watched Theodor Herzl on the balcony in Basel in 1897, tears in his eyes as the First Zionist Congress sang Hatikvah. He felt the tremor of a people who had been told for two thousand years that they did not belong anywhere finally daring to say "Here we will belong." That moment was human. Wounded. Understandable.
But he also felt the colder current moving beneath the song: the quiet decision that belonging would now be measured, registered, policed, and defended with the same steel logic the Gentiles had used to exclude them. "Never again" had begun, almost imperceptibly, to slide into "Only for us."
He did not condemn the heart that yearned. He mourned the moment that heart was taught to speak the language of walls.
Scrapbook Entry: "Judaism is a father waiting by the window for his children to come home. Zionism, in its political form, became the son who came home, locked the door behind him, and declared the house now belongs only to me. The father still waits outside. The birds still fly over the wall. The promise was never about the wall."