Why I fear Asher Lev

I have written that he writes of revolution. and that is true

but he also writes of redemption, of the giving of the secret to repay the past.

This understanding strikes second, always second, after the clarion trumpets of the revolution have echoed into dusk, into dust. 

It comes after the ties have been broken, the chains shattered, and the very language of the oppressive truth forgotten.

It comes slowly, tasting of guilt first and then a bitter nostalgia.

How this redemption grows- in dreams, in sorrow, in the places where the wounds and wounded have died and forbear to walk again. 

Yet this is what he writes, He writes a resurrection.

The revolution is done.

It was strong and it may have been right but it is no more.

The redemption must come, coiling amidst the thoughts of the rebels, reminding them.

The reminder that spring is not the wealth of the world but summer-summer when the death has come and age has brought beauty again.

 How could they, revolutionaries that they are, ever escape the wealth that they were searching for, the burning strength that drove them away and draws them back so inexorably?

He writes of redemption but there is no mercy. 

This is a restitution, a repaying of wrongs, a righting of what was fallen and in it there is no grace. There is inevitability. 

So the story swells and so it always will for the root is in the ground and must always be so. No matter how the spindling seed may fly, swept away in the wind, that grasping gasping freedom, it must return to earth. It must make peace with the ground and so too these rebels, these revolutionaries, they must return, unwilling perhaps and grudging, but they return to the secret strength of their parents, the solid light that they fought against envelopes them and too their children.

This is the sacrifice,the peace offering, they must make-found in the faces of their children.

Their children who know only of freedom what we have taught them and only of fear what we have feared. 

How then to return to the place we have feared and say- 'freedom'. 

How to turn back on the far place to which we ran and point- 'fear'.

Yet this is what we must do upon our faces and hearts to rewrite the revolution-to be redeemed.

This is retribution, it is restitution that we surrender to truth and in our turn watch our children tear away from it hungry and angry.

For the wrongs we have given such sorrow we receive.

But this is right and fair and as we fall in the glaring truth so greedy for our solitary surrender we learn what it was to be left when we, the hungry and angry, led away the hopes of the old in captivity.

We learn then the truth of a revolution- a point on a circle must always return.

He teaches us this. and leaves us to grow.