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Notebooks of life · Poems · 4 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

14 April 2026

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day on which the Jewish people remembers, once again, the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Europe between 1933 and 1945, and of the six million of their brothers and sisters who perished in the Nazi extermination camps. Without forgetting the millions more mown down by the Einsatzgruppen, as the historians revealed in the decades that followed, and, more than anyone, through the tireless, courageous, and meticulous work of Father Patrick Desbois — blessed be he.

As every year, my heart weeps first for the Jewish dead, then for the incalculable number of victims of the massacres and genocides perpetrated since the dawn of humanity. The bloods of Abel have not ceased to cry out from the earth, and humanity has still not learned: destruction and killing continue their cruel work a few hours by air from the desk at which I write these lines.

And so I remembered this poem, written during a silent retreat some years ago. It seemed to me that, alongside the more discursive text published today on this same subject, “The bloods of Abel cry out from the ground“, it might bear witness in another way — more intimate, more inward — to what passes through me on this day; and so I share it with you below.

May we each contribute, with our talents and our means, to the day when this seemingly endless chain of hatred is transformed into a thread of blazing light opening onto the Day — the Day of the Return to Eden.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, a journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Kaddish

I heard rushing towards me,
like enormous tireless waves,
— how long still?
the rumour of battles in Africa or elsewhere,
for an acre of land and an illusory power,
so much blood spilt,
the weeping of the poor who have nowhere left to go
while others, poorer still,
pay dearly for their instant
of spinning through the sky.

I saw the vacant, stricken eyes of those
swollen with drugs,
with bad medicine or with alcohol,
who stagger like angry shadows,
somnambulists upon a land
they no longer recognise.

O my Father, make of me a consoler,
that I might take this world in my arms and cherish it,
as Your Second Son did in the land of Palestine!

Kaddish° for Your World in flames!
eviscerated by the voracity and madness of men!
Kaddish for the hungry children, kaddish for the beaten children,
kaddish for the enslaved children, violated, murdered!
Kaddish! kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for the mothers who weep,
kaddish for the mothers who cry out, for the mothers in mourning!
Kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for Your daughters and Your sons who have lost hope,
kaddish for those who no longer see Your path — may they return to You!
Kaddish! Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

August 2021

° kaddish, in Hebrew קדיש qaddish, sanctification, is one of the central pieces of Jewish liturgy whose theme is the glorification and sanctification of the Divine Name, with reference to one of the eschatological visions of Ezekiel. Several versions exist, the best known being that of the mourners, though the kaddish contains no allusion to the dead or to their resurrection.

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

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Dialogues of the New World — Spirituality & Civilisation

Kaddish