1. Then Leora the New Jerseyite replied, saying:

2. “William Landsmann, I do not wish to speak,
Yet all the people in your slides could not hold my tongue.
I do not ask why you curse God, but rather:
Why do you curse God only now?

3. You curse the day your parents met, and yet
You did not curse the days they died.

4. You did not curse God upon your mother’s death,
Nor when your father cast you out,
Nor when two countries did the same.

5. You did not curse God when you found your father’s corpse,
Nor when you buried him in the wilderness, desolate and alone.

6. You did not curse God when you learned your granddaughter lay dead,
Nor when your son abandoned you to streets inhabited by ghosts.

7. Yet now your slides are scattered on the waves,
Images of people you neither loved nor knew,
Distant strangers now wandering free at last—

8. And for this, for this alone,
You turn and curse your God?”

V.

1. To this William Landsmann turned red and roared, bellowing before her:

2. “Woe to you, New Jerseyite, who knowest not the ways
Of heaven nor of earth, who thinks in terms
Of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’

3. With your supermarket ethics! Philosophy of Costco!
Morality of strip malls; theology of home videos;

4. You who think of unearned suffering only as
A blow dealt cruelly by the heavens
And not by people here on earth,

5. You who ask of suffering, ‘Where was God?’
And never ‘Where was man?’—

6. You who make of your belief in God
A Disney World religion!

7. No, you New Jerseyite, you know not
The ways of men upon this earth.

8. When that young girl, your friend, did die,
With whom I never shared my tears,
I sought not God, but you, her friend—
Yet you chose not to hear.

9. My father’s mother left her life behind,
My father left my mother’s life behind,
And then he left his life behind, and mine.

10. But those decisions, they made! They!
Not some God who breaks the skies.

11. I cursed not God until today:
Because in this great world of freedom and of choice,
Only floods and plagues and hurricanes are still the fault of God.”

VI.

1. And then Yehudah the Brooklynite spoke, saying:

2. “Fear not, William Landsmann, all is not lost!
Restrain your curses, contain your threats!
God builds a better world for those who wait.

3. Those stricken slides you witnessed as your fate,
Carried off by water, drowned among the waves,
Sink not alone into the depths of time:

4. Our God is one who loves to flood the world to cleanse it.

5. One time, when all was lost on earth, God called
Upon his servant Noah to build an ark,
To rescue what he could from floods
That God poured down upon the land
To turn all land back into sea.

6. Only thus could God save the earth from evil;
By beginning it anew. For water is
The only thing on earth that God did not create.