A Bread Prayer

Before the down of history, early Levantines domesticated wild cereal plants launching with that the Neolithic revolution and putting humanity on its long road to history itself and to civilization as we know it. The most important of these plants was the predecessor of our today’s wheat, the main ingredient of bread.

Map of the Near East indicating the Fertile Crescent [according to Breasted (1916)]. Shaded areas indicate the approximate areas of domestication of pig, cattle, sheep, and goats with dates of initial domestication in calibrated years b.p. [after Zeder (2008)]. Lines enclose the wild ranges of einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley [after Smith, (1995)]. Shaded area in southern Levant indicates the region where all 3 grains were first domesticated 12,000 years B.P.
Source: The National Academies Press

Syrians have always revered bread. Anyone walking the streets of Syria would notice a peculiar habit. People would bend, pick up a hardened bread crumb from the sidewalk, kiss it, lift it to touch their forehead and then place it on the nearby wall. This places bread with the hands of parents, and the Holly Book of Quran, both are kissed and then touched by forehead as a sign of appreciation and reverence of these blessings of god. As the most important staple in the Levantine diet, reverence for the golden loaf, in one variety or another is deep in our social norms. It was a reverence for the gift of the goddesses of fertility, and as destined, later became the flesh of a god, also revered by all Syrians in both his divine and human manifestations.

Twelve millennium later, thousands years after the launching of history, an anti-historic force, brutal as no barbarians have ever been, malicious more than humanely possible appears intent on ending history as its own demise appears inevitable. This subhuman force wages a war on bread. The first bakery bombed was in Al-Sakhour neighborhood of Aleppo. This was followed by a string of bakeries being bombed during rush hours in the city and its countryside. The horror of hunger brought by the Assad caused shortage of bread, of water, fuel, and electricity are not enough to satisfy Assad’s lust for death and humiliation of Syrians. Yet, Syrians remain defiant of this criminal. Tremendous efforts are made every day by many to provide bread to their hunger stricken people. But these efforts are sometimes hindered by betrayal, manipulation, attempts at profiteering, and by plain carelessness of others. They are also efforts full of heroism from volunteers, bakers, and from ordinary people waiting in very long lines at bakeries for the day’s loaf. All betrayal and greed, however, do pale in comparison with the malice and vicious malevolence of the sub-human Bashar al-Assad, whose iron birds of death continued to wage a war on the livelihood of Syrians. Yesterday it was the massacre at Helfaya, with more than 140 confirmed dead children, women, and men, killed for no other reason than defying the murderer’s lust for their humiliation by standing in line for bread after three weeks of hunger. Today, this subhuman struck again and fourteen people, including ten children, are no longer among us for the same reason. They dared defy this sectarian bastard.

The carnage was real, as real as the slave minded supporters of the regime. A misguided fool wanted to stage a dramatic picture by dipping a loaf of bread in the blood of Assad victims, and with that, the fool murdered the humanity of assad’s victims once more a few minutes after assad’s pack of hyenas aimed  the barrel of death at the gathering bread line. The sub-human wanted to send message to the world before Syrians. A message nodding his understanding of the world’s cynical silence about his crime, and affirming his intention to murder all Syrians who dare defy him and to  benefit to the maximum possible extent from the treacherous deal making among regional and global powers.

It cost Syrians billions of dollars to acquire Russian military jets. It also cost them hundreds of millions to train pilots for these sub-standard jets. Now they are realizing the pay-back from the assadist ideological army built by Hafez Assad as a personal sectarian militia. Air force pilots, once respected and considered a symbol of Syrian pride have become not only complicit with the criminal bashar assad in his genocide against Syrians, but the most despised of executioners of this genocide.

Today is Christmas eve, I will follow the good example set by Syrians in the town of Saraqeb, who put up  a Christmas tree in defiance of all thugs who want sectarian war in my Syria. I will go with my family to meet some Syrian friends. We have become brothers and sisters through this long ordeal. We will eat bread with more reverence than ever. It will not be a jovial evening, there will be no bells, no Christmas Carroll, not even the Grinch. I will pray:

… dear lord, I have become one with you through your flesh, I have become one with you through your blood, and I pray to you,… don’t come back now, for the monster of Damascus lies awaiting you to crucify you again, while humanity looks, as it did before, with cynicism. A cynicism brought about by fear of monsters that aren’t there, which makes them turn their faces and blind themselves to the crimes of the most despicable monster and of his goons and dastardly loyalist.

Thy lord, forgive me for I will sin, forgive me for the monsters that are have left hate in my heart. Forgive me for I am asking you never to forgive them. Never to forgive anyone who still supports them, lie on their behalf, and use your name with sinful disregard for your beloved, the children, who are murdered daily by this monster and by the words of his defenders. May your curse befall them all as mine will, for eternity.

Eat your bread, cherish it as it gives you life, for it has become death where it was born.