The Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus)
is a brightly coloured worm species that can be found living throughout the coral reefs of the world.
Dulcie was a young woman who lived in the walled town of Worms in the Rhineland area of Germany. To begin to encounter Dulcie, we must prepare ourselves to confront a haunting tale of two ageless extremes: the powers of pure goodness and the basest evil. Dulcie's is a story of a dedicated young mother and sage whose life was abruptly terminated in savage murder.
Ironically, it was her brutal end, which occurred just before Chanukah in 1196[1], that immortalized Dulcie. Like that of so many women whose lives were illuminated with the sacred but were ignored by historians, Dulcie's life would probably never have been chronicled had it not been for her husband's anguish and the eulogy he was moved to write after losing her[2].
How sad it is only because of her harsh end that we have a glimpse at the life of such a holy woman as Dulcie.
[1] The Hebrew date recorded by her husband is 22 Kislev (November 15), 1196 (hence her yahrzeit is celebrated on 22 Kislev). All dates place Dulcie's death between the Second and Third Crusades.
[2] Dulcie's husband, Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1165-1230), eulogized her in the opening dedication to his book Sefer Hachochmah, published in 1217. Although the entire book has not been translated, the elegy, Eyshet Chayil, "Woman of Valor", has been. It is from this poem that we learn the details of Dulcie's life.
Source: The Receiving: Reclaiming Jewish Women's Wisdom, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, p.142
image and text credit
Buzzards Bay, MA
Christmas Tree Worm – The Christmas tree worm is named after its cone-shaped spirals of plumes. They come in many colours including orange, yellow, blue, and white. The colourful plumes, or tentacles, are used for feeding on food particles and plankton in the water and for respiration. They can be found worldwide in tropical waters. Christmas tree worms are very sensitive to disturbances and will rapidly collapse into their burrows at the slightest threat.
Kingdom of Heaven
Worms was encircled, as many medieval European towns were, by a great stone wall. In the shadow of its wall ran the narrow, sinuous streets and alleys in which the Jews were confined. Much hatred was directed here; the insults and abuse that Jews suffered in these dark streets during and after the Crusades are famous.
Although the Crusades have been romanticized as the height of Christian ideals and nobility, they were, in truth, tainted by appalling violence and greed. Many of the soldiers who held high the standard of the Cross failed to uphold its truest values of justice and humanity, falling pretty to the bases of human impulses. For much of Europe's Jewry, the Crusades were a time of stark terror, when their villages were plundered and their communities decimated.
There is little information about the two knights of the Cross who stormed Dulcie's home on that winter night. It was a common enough incident during that barbaric period when countless acts of wanton violence such as this one took place. To the two soldiers, the crime may have been as arbitrary as any other night of drunken sport in the Jewish quarter, as meaningless as a child's game of crunching leaves or smashing beetles.
"I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of
nuclear weapons and very much against their use."
~ Sir Mark Oliphant,
Two extant texts tell of the events that befell Dulcie and her family that night. Eleazar was studying Torah with his students in the adjacent quarters of their house while Dulcie prepared food for the Sabbath. Swinging their great axes, the soldiers flew into their home, running after the family, splitting open the heads of Dulcie's two daughters, who died in front of their mother's eyes, and then striking Jacob, the young son, who was knocked unconscious.
Then they came for Dulcie. She was hit in the head yet managed to escape and run out of the house crying for help. None came. The soldiers pursued her and finished their work in the street, "splitting her head down to the windpipe and shoulder, and from the shoulder to the girdle."
Little Jacob did not die until the following week. Dulcie's husband's head and hand were injured; why he and his students were not killed or injured more seriously is unclear.
Source: Ibid p.148-149
Cathedral of St Peter
Worms
The power of evil is understood in Judaism to be part and parcel of creation, built into the very fabric and design of the world. God tells us this directly: "I form light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things." The tension between the polarities of light and darkness, good and evil, is planted into the very nature of all created things. And because human beings are seen as an olam katan, a microcosm or a fractal of the whole, each of us enters life with all of the same polarities found in the universe latent within us.
We will never know what went on in Dulcie's heart as she struggled with the darkness that consumed her physical form. Was her soul wounded or did she emerge on the other side of this life with a shining new identity? Did she lose her faith or was she confirmed in it? Did she feel betrayed by God as she was quartered like an animal in the streets, or did she die saying the Shema Yisrael, ascending to God with greater wholeness?
Heiliger Sand
Worms
The desire to make a difference fades with time. Old age is an age of good intentions but it’s not a time of good works. Australians are curious people, not too interested in the properties of their strange land with its lack of moisture and beautiful scenery. I suppose it’s the driest country in the world. Most people don’t give much thought to Australia and its future... they just exist. And people who do something towards Australia and its future are not that common. And sometimes those who are interested in Australia and its future are cranky. I am cranky, I suppose. I know a lot of cranky people (laughter) but I think one has to care in order to be cranky and those who care are going to build the future of this country.
It was nice to be honoured but I like ‘Mark’ not ‘Sir Mark’. When one’s young, one’s brash and all-knowing; when one’s old, one realises how little one knows. You asked me earlier if I believed in God and the hereafter. I would tend to say no but when one dies one could well be surprised. - Sir Mark Oliphant (1901-2000)
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