Category Archives: Poetry

A Pure Soul – A poem for Parashat Shmot in honor of Moses and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Divrei Torah, Ethics, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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The Book of Exodus is essentially a story about God’s saving love for the oppressed Israelites. It begins with the birth of Moses and follows him as a young prince turned into a rebel and outlaw, then a shepherd, and finally THE prophet of God.

Why Moses? What was so unique about him that God should choose him to be His most intimate of prophets?

Moses is a complex man; passionate, pure, just, humble, at home no where, carrying always the burdens of his people and the word of God.

God identified him because he was unique, and that is what my drash-poem below is about; namely, the uniqueness that would draw Moses out to become the most important Jew in history.

Dr. Martin Luther King, though not Moses, was a prophet for our times, and on this weekend we celebrate his legacy.

—–

So often we walk about in a daze, / Eyes sunk in creviced faces / Fettered to worldly tasks / Blind to rainbows.

I imagine Moses, in Midian, like that, / Brooding in exile, / Burdened by his people’s suffering, / Knowing that each day / They scream from stopped-up hearts / Shedding silent tears.

A simple shepherd Moses had become / Staff in hand / Counting sheep / Until one day / Weaving through rocks / Among bramble bushes / The shepherd heard thorns popping. / Turning his head / His eyes were opened / And he would never be the same.

God had from his birth taken note of him / And waited until this moment / To choose him as prophet.

Dodi dofek pitchi li / A-choti ra-yati yo-nati ta-mati. / Open to me, my dove, / my twin, my undefiled one. (Song of Songs 5:2)

Moses heard the Divine voice / His eyes beheld angels / His soul flowed with a sacred river / Of Shechinah light.

‘Why me? / Why should I behold such wondrous things? / Unworthy am I!’

God said, / ‘Moses – I have chosen you / Because you are soft / Because you weep / Because your heart is burdened and worried / Because you know this world’s cruelty / Yet you have not become cruel / Nor do you stand idly by.

You are a tender of sheep / And you will lead my people / With the shepherd’s staff / From Egypt / And teach them to open their stopped-up hearts / Without fear.’

Trembling, Moses peered a second time / Into the bush aflame / Free from ash and smoke.

His eyes opened as in a dream / And he heard a soft murmuring sound / Like the sound breath makes passing through parted lips.

MOSHE MOSHE!—HINEINI!

Two voices—One utterance! / He hid his face / For the more Moses heard / The brighter was the light / And he knew he must turn away / Or die.

The prophet’s thoughts were free / Soaring beyond form / No longer of self. / To this very day / There has not been a purer soul than his.

God said, ‘Come no closer, Moses! / Remove your shoes / Stand barefoot here on this earth / For I want your soul.

I am here with you and in you / I am every thing / And no thing / And You are Me. / I see that which is and which is not / And I hear it all.

Take heed shepherd/prince / For My people‘s blood  / Calls to me from the ground. / The living suffer still / A thousand deaths.

You must go and take them out! / Every crying child / Every lashed man / Every woman screaming silent tears.

And Moses, know this / “With weeping they will come, / And with compassion will I guide them.” (Jeremiah 31:8) / The people’s exile began with tears / And it will end with tears.

I have recorded their story in a Book / Black fire on white fire / Letters on parchment / Telling of slaves / Seeing light / Turning to Me / Becoming a nation.

The Book is My spirit / The letters are My heart / They are near to you / That you might do them / And teach them / And redeem My world / That it might not be consumed in flames.

Twelve Lines about the Burning Bush – a poem from Yiddish

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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“What’s going to be the end for both of us—God? / Are you really going to let me die like this / And really not tell me the big secret?

Must I really become dust, gray dust, and ash, black ash, / While the secret, which is closer than my shirt, than my skin, / Still remains secret, though it’s deeper in me than my own heart?

And was it really in vain that I hoped by day and waited by night? / And will you, until the very last moment, remain godlike-cruel and hard? / Your face deaf like dumb stone, like cement, blind-stubborn?

Not for nothing is one of your thousand names—thorn you thorn in my spirit and flesh and bone, / Piercing me—I can’t tear you out; burning me—I can’t stamp you out, / Moment I can’t forget, eternity I can’t comprehend.”

By Melech Ravitch (translated from the Yiddish by Ruth Whitman), based on Exodus 3:1-15, appears in Modern Poems on the Bible: an Anthology, Edited with an Introduction by David Curzon, JPS, 1994, p. 161.

Melech Ravitch is the pseudonym of Zekharye-Khone Bergner (1893–1976), a Yiddish poet, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist. Born in Radymno, eastern Galicia, into a home where the main spoken languages were Polish and German, Ravitch received a secular general education, including business school, and a limited traditional Jewish education. In 1921, he settled in Warsaw, and from the 1930s on, Ravitch lived in Australia, Argentina, and Mexico, until finally settling in Montreal. His main works include a comprehensive anthology Di lider fun mayne lider (The Poems of My Poems – 1954) and his two volume series Mayn leksikon (My Lexicon; 1945–1947) offer intimate portraits of Yiddish writers in Poland. His memoirs, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn (The Storybook of My Life; 3 vols., 1962–1975), describe his life in Galicia, Vienna, and Warsaw. These biographical notes are from the Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews of Eastern Europe.

 

 

“What a Wonderful World” with David Attenborough

26 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Art, Beauty in Nature, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Quote of the Day

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As the year 2011 comes to a blessed close, the lyrics of “What a Wonderful World” originally set to music by the great Louis Armstrong (lyrics: George David Weiss, George Douglas, and Bog Thiele) has been reinterpreted by David Attenborough on the BBC with exquisite nature photography – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8WHKRzkCOY

“I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They’re really saying I love you.

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (zal), filled with wonder always, put it this way:

“Our radical amazement responds to the mystery, but does not produce it. You and I have not invented the grandeur of the sky nor endowed [hu]man[kind] with the mystery of birth and death. We do not create the ineffable, we encounter it.

The awareness of the ineffable is that with which our search must begin…The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide…reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.”

May your soul rejoice and your heart sing!

L’shanah tovah chiloni

Rabbi John Rosove

 

“We are carrying torches” – Anu nos’im lapidim – a poem by Aharon Ze’ev

22 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Holidays, Poetry

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We are carrying torches. / In the dark night / the paths shine beneath our feet, / and whoever has a heart / that thirsts for light – / let him lift his eyes and his heart to us / and come along. / No miracle happened for us. / No cruise of oil did we find. / We walked through the valley, ascended the mountain. / We discovered wellsprings of hidden light.

We quarried in the stone until we bled: / “Let there be light!”

Aharon Ze’ev, 1900-1968

“Again we begin anew, as all begin…” Natan Yonatan

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Poetry, Quote of the Day

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In the morning liturgy, we express gratitude for consciousness and life (Birchot Hashachar), for the workings of the body (Asher Yatzar) and the Divine origin of our souls (Elohai N’shamah), and we begin each day (indeed, every moment) as if for the first time. This poem by the Ukranian born Israeli poet, Natan Yonaton, reflects this wondrous spirit.

“Again we begin anew, as all begin; / The plougher, the collector, the poet, / The falling leaves on the wind, / The pearls of dew / And the returning wave to the sloping shores.

Again we begin anew, as all begin; / We’ll sing the song with the same words / Which never tire, as the waves / That endlessly return / To the vast sea / To the sandy, sloping shores.”

Taken from “Again We Begin Anew” by Natan Yonatan (1923-2004), translation from the Hebrew by Rabbi Maya Leibovich

In The Black Night – A Poem for Parashat Vayishlach

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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In the black night / the river runs cold / slowly passing me by / over formerly sharp edged stones / worn smooth by centuries of churning, / as if through earthy veins – / and I Jacob, alone, / shiver and wait / to meet my brother / and daylight.

Will there be war? / And will the angels carry my soul / up the rungs of the ladder / leaving my blood / to soak the earthly crust?

A presence!? / And I struggle yet again / as if in my mother’s womb / and in my dreams.

We played together as children once, / my brother Esau and me / as innocents, / and I confess tonight / how I wronged him / and wrenched from him his birthright / as this Being has done to me / between my thighs.

I was so young / driven by ego and need, / blinded by ambition, / my mother’s dreams / and my father’s silence.

I so craved to be first born / adored by my father, / to assume his place when he died / that my name be remembered / and define a people.

How Esau suffered and wailed / and I didn’t care. / Whatever his dreams / they were nothing to me – / my heart was hard – / his life be damned!

But, after all these years / I’ve learned that Esau and I / each alone is a palga gufa – a half soul / without the other – / torn away / as two souls separated at creation / seeking reunification / in a sea of souls – / the yin missing the yang – / the dark and light never to touch – / the mind divorced from body – / the soul in exile – / without a beating bleating heart / to witness – / and no access to the thirty-two paths / to carry us together / up the ladder / and through the spheres.

It’s come to this! / To struggle again – / To live or die.

Tonight / I’m ready for death / or submission.

Compassionate One: / protect Esau and your servant – / my brother and me / as one – / and return us to each other.

El na r’fa na lanu! / Grant us peace and rest! / I’m very tired!

Into My Children’s Cups – A Poem for Parashat Toldot

25 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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Isaac is the most misunderstood and underappreciated Patriarch. So often he is cast by commentators as feeble-minded and weak, a passive victim to his father’s zealotry, manipulated by his mother Sarah and his wife Rebecca, taken as the fool by his son Jacob, passed off as a simpleton and follower minus the revolutionary fervor of Abraham and the dream visions of Jacob.

I believe this view of him is unfortunate and wrong. Indeed, without Isaac Abraham would have passed into oblivion because Isaac re-dug his father’s wells (Genesis 26:18+), an act of profound yearning and faith. After he did so God gave this blessing: Al tira, ki it’cha Anochi u-vei-rach’ti-cha v’hir’bei-ti et zar’a-cha ba-a-vur Avraham av’di – “Fear not, for I am with you, and I will bless you and increase your offspring for the sake of My servant Abraham.” (Genesis 26:24)

Like his father Abraham and his son Jacob, Isaac recognized the significance of his Divine-human encounter. The Midrash and mystical traditions understand his re-digging his father’s wells as Isaac’s own spiritual search for God.

The well, with its hidden waters, is a symbol of soul-light covered over by physicality (i.e. klipot), and Isaac’s “digging” and seeking that Ineffable light became the central organizing motif of his adult life and a sign of his spiritual maturity.

Though Isaac broke no new ground, by re-digging Abraham’s wells the son embodies spiritual continuity and the virtue of perseverance, each a core necessity for the perpetuation of the Jewish people and tradition.

Not all of us are revolutionaries digging new wells and forging new spiritual paths, or visionaries intuiting God’s presence and calling us to God, but our role as re-diggers of our forebears’ wells needs always to be appreciated as essential to life itself and the sustenance and future of Judaism and the Jewish people.

The following is my poetic tribute to Isaac, one of my favorite figures in all of Torah, because he was a pre-eminent “digger” of faith.

I am Isaac. / Tradition doesn’t esteem me / as my father and son. / To our people’s cynics / I’m a passive place holder, / set between two visionaries / one hearing God’s voice, / the other communing with angels.

To them I’m the do-nothing / dull-witted middle-man, / neither here nor there, / coerced into submission by a father, / tricked by a son and abandoned by God, / who willed me slain / to test my father’s faith, / and thus become / history’s most misunderstood near-victim.

My father was driven by voices, / left home on a promise / and journeyed to a Place he’d never seen, / a low-lying mountain shielded round about by a cloud / beneath heavenly fire.

My son dreamed of angels / ascending ladder rungs / from land and form / into spirit and spheres.

Tradition diminishes me / insinuating that I merely built a worldly fortune / on my father’s wealth.

Ancestors all / I’m far more than this / for you see / the wellsprings I’ve uncovered / are more than you know / greater that waters deep, calm, cool, and tranquil / their streams flow to the Source of souls.

I dug anew these, my father’s wells / the same the Philistines / with stopped-up hearts / and clogged souls / filled in when he died.

I and my servants dug and dug / our thirst unquenchable / passions unleashing / hearts expecting / souls soaring / on angels’ wings.

And after all our digging / we found the well and the spring / flowing in earthly and heavenly wetness.

The inflowing fountain never dries up. / The well is replenished / continually / and whoever drinks from its waters / merges through supernal faith.

The wells I have dug / are the same as my father’s. / That is our gift to you!

All I yearn for / is to pour the waters into your cups / that you carry on and dig anew / and pour out the same / into your own children’s cups.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isaac and Rebekah – a poem for Parashat Chayei Sarah

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Poetry

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My father Abraham set out alone, / leaving everything he knew, / seeking a better place / where he’d never been / because God promised him / blessing and the future.

I am in mourning / ever since my mother died / after my father stole me away / before dawn / while she slept / to slay me / and destroy his blessing / and my future.

When she awoke / her servants told her / that he placed me upon the pyre / as a burnt-offering / to his God.

An angel stayed his hand, / but my mother never knew / so she died / with a broken heart.

How she loved me, / filling me up as a goblet / with her tears and laughter.

And now I am alone, quiet / amidst the wheat and rocks, / beneath the sun / and stirred-up clouds / swirling like disturbed angels.

Can You hear me / O merciless God? / Bend Your world, if You do / and reverse time / that my mother / may be here with me / and we be / as we were.

…Looking up / a camel caravan – / the people appear / as tiny sticks stuck / in sand / in desert heat-waves-dancing.

There is my father’s servant Eliezer / and a young girl / growing larger / before my eyes.

-Lasuach basadeh- / I pray and weep / beneath this sun / and swirling clouds.

Rebekah to Eliezer: / ‘Who is that man / crying there / in the field?’

‘He is my master Isaac, / your intended one, / whose seed you will carry forward / as God promised his father.’

-Vatipol min hagamal- / She alighted from her camel / and veiled herself / for she understood / that this was her wedding day.

I entered her / in my mother’s tent, / and she comforted me.

Go Forth – Amir Or for Lech L’cha

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Poetry, Quote of the Day

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Go forth from your land, my Lord, / Go forth, come to me, / travel my skin with your lips. / Come dark, come night, / touch all of me, touch, / leave no soundness. / Rise in omens within me, grant / on everlasting inheritance, a multitude / of seed, my Lord, / because I grant it to you / I will increase your hire.

Go forth from your body, my Lord, / go forth, come to me, / wound my heart, smooth of teeth. / Touch my face, touch my eyes, / truly kill, leave nothing. / Rise within me to the fingers of tears, rise / to the man, until before you / I / shall end.

Go forth from yourself, my Lord, / go forth, come to me, / travel my length, my width, / travel my horizon / I / will burn before you, not consumed. / See my spirit / but some face to your void, see / here I am / no more.

(Translated from the Hebrew by the author. From “Modern Poems on the Bible: An Anthology” – edited with an Introduction by David Curzon, publ. JPS, 1994)

Amir Or was born in Tel Aviv in 1956. He is an editor, translator and poet whose works have been published in more than 30 languages. Or is the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for poetry.

 

The Sign – A Midrash on the Rainbow – D’var Torah for Parashat Noach

28 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Ethics, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Stories

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God looked out upon creation and saw violence and chaos engulfing humankind and the earth. There was neither kindness nor justice. Empathy had ceased, eclipsed by fear and hatred. In Divine rage God determined to destroy everything and return creation to primordial darkness.

The Eternal mourned what He had once called “good” and recalled how great an effort He had made to create the heavens and the earth, to give life to growing things, to design and fashion the birds, sea creatures and animals. Sadness grew within the Divine heart. The Creator stepped back from the brink and wondered; ‘Is there perhaps one human being on earth, different from the rest, who fathoms Me, and for whose sake I can begin anew?’

In a blink of the Divine eye, God peered into every human soul seeking that one person, better than the rest, who might be good and pure enough to hear the Divine voice.

To His relief, God found one man named Noah, and he told him to build an ark, save his own family and two of every creature, for the rest would be destroyed. As the Eternal contemplated the devastation that would soon come, Divine tears flooded the earth for forty days and nights. When, at last, God’s tear ducts were dry the waters receded, land reappeared and the ark docked. God then spoke to Noah:

‘I am God, Noah, Who created you and brought you to this place. Look now and see the cleansed earth. The world is once again new. There is no rage nor hatred, violence nor hubris corrupting the human heart. I will make with you a covenant marked by a sign that will remind us both how I created the world in peace, destroyed it, and allowed it to begin anew that it might be a place of love and peace.

The sign of this covenant will be a smile that will stretch across the heavens and fill the sky. It will be an arc of light shining through the flood waters, a vision of loveliness that will inspire love and awe for Me. This promise, Noah, shall be called the ‘rainbow,’ and it will be My promise that never again will such devastation engulf the earth. Yours and your children’s responsibility will be to protect and nurture My creation, for if you destroy it there will come no one after you to set it right.’

Then God bent towards the earth and stretched the Divine arm across the sky and formed an arc. Where God’s hand had been there appeared a sheltering bow of every color spread out across a blue canvas of sky. And God spoke of the colors and the sign of the rainbow:

‘First comes red for the blood pulsing through human veins that carries My Godly soul and the life of humankind; orange is for the warmth of fire and its power to create, build and improve upon what I created; yellow is for the sun that lights the earth and gives vision to earthly eyes that they might see Me in all things; green is for the leaves of trees, their fruit and the grass that all creatures might feed and be sustained in life; blue is for the sky, sea and rivers that join air and ground and reveal that all is One, divinely linked and a reflection of Me; indigo appears each day at dusk and dawn to signal evening and morning, the passage of time and the seasons, the ever-renewing life-force in all things; violet is for the coming of night when the world rests and is renewed, carrying the hope that all might awake each morning and utter words of thanksgiving and praise.’

God explained to Noah that the rainbow appears to the human eye as a half circle; ‘Do not be fooled! There is more to life than what the eye can see. There is both the revealed and the hidden. The hidden half of the bow extends deep into earth that you and those who yearn for Me might come and discover vision and Truth, and reveal the message of love and peace to all the earth.’

God told Noah, ‘Remember this blessing, My child, and you will remember My promise – Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, zo-cheir ha-brit v’ne-e-man biv’ri-to v’ka-yam b’ma-a-ma-ro.

Praised are You, Eternal our God, Sovereign of the revealed and the hidden, Who remembers, is faithful to and fulfills the Divine covenant and promise.

Inspired by classic Midrashim