The holiday of Shavuot is approaching. This year on the secular calendar it begins on Saturday evening, May 19. On Shavuot, we celebrate receiving the Torah, the foundational text of the Jewish people. "Torah" has multiple meanings in Jewish tradition. Most folks know it as the Five Books of Moses/ But “Torah” in a broader sense is much more. It’s the collection of each and every generation’s engagement with sacred text and with our efforts to live lives of holiness and connection — to each other and to the divine. 

In that expansive spirit, we are bringing you a two-part podcast series leading up to Shavuot. In Episode 13, I speak with Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz about modern Hebrew poetry, a recent expression of Jewish text. We talk about how modern Hebrew poets  take apart traditional language and ideas and create something new using ancient building blocks. And in Episode 14, Rabbi Mira Wasserman and I discuss Midrash, the way ancient rabbis read Torah in new and creative ways, giving old words new life, new meaning, new relevance. Shavuot is known as zman matan Torateinu ——  the season of the gift of Torah. I hope that these interviews help to show the resilience within Judaism to create and re-create, and they help you join in the ongoing and sacred conversation that makes Torah. Your listening, your comments have been a gift to me. Thanks for listening! Hag same’akh!



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Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz: Israeli culture is very different about... Poetry is very much a part of the common culture, its's not an elite and intellectual activit,y and I've definitely heard stories of Israelis going into the army and what do they take with them to put in their pocket is the little pocket copy of the poet, Yehuda Amichai, for example, as a little guide they take with them. I think that's one of the things that makes it also a rich resource then for American Jews as well.

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Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. Today I'm so happy to welcome my friend and my colleague and my teacher Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz who serves as the rabbi of Temple Bnai Israel in Willimantic, Connecticut. Jeremy and I have known each other a long time and one of the first things I learned about him is his deep interest in Hebrew poetry and he has really incorporated it in creative and in vitalizing ways throughout his rabbinical work. He's also translated the work of many Hebrew poets into English. Jeremy, thanks for being with us today.

JS: Thanks Deborah. I'm really honored.

DW: I'd love to just dive in and start to talk about what draws you to Hebrew poetry. What draws you to poetry I think, we can probably lose the adjective there, and if we could talk a little bit about why we think it's a rich resource for cultivating resilience.

JS: Sure. I wish I remembered when I started being attracted to Hebrew poetry. When Yehuda Amichai, the great Israeli poet, first came into my life, I don't really know. Poetry is amazing. Poetry gives us a way of meaning and creating meaning and receiving meaning that's different from our other ways. It's different from philosophy. It's different from theology. It's very related to other literature and it somehow breaks down the barriers of the boxes that we create for the world of the Greek syllogisms: A and B and therefore C; and lets us access things that we didn't realize were there, different connections; opens our eyes in a different way to the world. So that's what's always been important to me about it is it wakes you up. It's one of the things I think that makes poetry hard to talk about sometimes, to analyze for some people. I know that there's a world of folks who find poetry a scary concept because it goes in its own direction. It speaks to the heart in a certain way and if you're trying to understand it rationally, you might not get there.

JS: I'll say that this aspect of being put off maybe by poetry is partly a cultural thing and I'd mention Israeli culture is very different about... Poetry is very much a part of the common culture that's not an elite and intellectual activity and I've definitely heard stories of Israelis going into the Army and what do they take with them to put in their pocket is a little pocket copy of the poet, Yehuda Amichai, for example, as a little guide they take with them. It's a part of the culture. And I think that's one of the things that makes it also a rich resource then for American Jews as well because it speaks to everyone, religious, not religious, intellectual, not intellectual.

DW: We're going to spend part of our time today talking about poetry but as you said, talking about it is a different experience than immersing yourself in it. So before we go any further can I ask you to share one of your favorite poems in translation? We'll post the original as well as the translation on our website for the podcast.

JS: Let me read a very brief poem that I don't know if it's one of my favorites or not but I think speaks to this notion of just poetry waking us up, opening our eyes in an important way. This is by the Israeli poet, Israel Eliraz, that I spent some time translating a book of his and the poem says this, "I see how the scene takes to be seen and takes one step forward." And then he has another little segment of that same passage that says, "Here by the table, by the egg, [inaudible] by the names, by the dishes, by the baskets, by the horrors, by the tinged and staggering, by the memory of things, by their ripple. As in myth, this morning memory sends questions along wires of answers. Truly, there's something else going on here that every day is the sweet world's membrane."

JS: So both of those pieces by Eliraz are about that there's something... What is that something else going on here? And in an extended interview with another poet, Eliraz says that the material raises something for you and what is it? It's the material. Can you actually open your eyes to what's around you? We walk around by habit, by in a fog so much of the time not paying attention. And then sometimes we're able to stop and say, "Wow! What is this?" Anything in front of you could be a miracle, but the paper in front of me is a miracle. It's related -- I did listen to the first podcast about Shabbat and Rabbi Staub talks about Shabbat as a time when you take that space that opens up the miracle. And the poetry then itself does that, it reminds you and in that second piece, the miraculousness of existence might contain what he says, "Horrors, tinged and staggered by memory," but you still open your eyes in amazement.

DW: Well, when I was thinking about why bring poetry to this conversation about resilience, and I think that for myself about... That I turn to poetry sometimes for inspiration, sometimes for consolation. And that dynamic interchange, that sometimes twin sides of the same experience, that's the definition of resilience, I think. Committing yourself to making meaning out of everything we encounter.

JS: In thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of a passage in Larry Kushner's Book of Words, and he has a section, the Hebrew title of the section is "Seder: Order", and his English title is "Remembering". Memory is the connection, meaning comes from what something is connected to, something unconnected, unassociated with, unrelated to anything is literally meaningless. Conversely, something connected, associated, linked with many things, is supercharged with meaning. And then he works through how memory works, and ordering our memories, and telling our stories, and telling our great story of Exodus at the Seder. And so, that is, right, that's what poetry does. It connects things that maybe we didn't realize were connected, and allows us to make meaning.

JS: I want to talk about one of the classic characteristics of Hebrew poetry, which is its use of old words in new ways. In the Middle Ages, they had a technical term called Shibbut, which has to do with inlaying gemstones in a piece of jewelry. And so they would inlay Biblical quotations, or quotations from the liturgy, or other sources in their poetry and make it new. So it might be a poetry about romance, love, sex, wine, war, education, anything, but they would build it somehow out of these gems of our tradition that makes the whole experience new and shine in a way. My RRC teacher, Ari Elon talks about, in Hebrew he calls it Peruk Tikkun. Peruk is pulling things apart, and Tikkun is repair, like Tikkun olam: Repair of the world.

JS: And one of us came up with the translation "deconstruction and reconstruction". And Ari is a big believer that you need both of those. Our freedom demands deconstruction, it demands peruk, being able to say, "But wait a second, just because our ancestors put the blocks this way it doesn't mean that's going to work for us or for me right now." You have to be able to pull the blocks apart, but just leaving them scattered on the floor doesn't do very much good. And so, you need also tikkun: The reconstruction. And the new structure that's built with the old bricks somehow has some of their meaning, some of their weight, some of their holiness. I think that's been a core piece about what's so wonderful about Hebrew poetry for centuries, that ability to take apart, to deconstruct, and then to make new tikkun through poetry. And that's right, that's also resilience, isn't it?

DW: That's exactly right. That's right.

JS: Right.

DW: It's funny, when I think about resilience, I'm often thinking about it from the lens of either catastrophe, or to use a less dramatic word, just challenge. Something hard has happened, either on a personal level or on a communal level, and we need resilience to bring ourselves or our community back to life. But resilience is also the ability to renew ourselves and that's certainly --  Hashivenu is about renewal. And you're talking about how the undergirding language and concepts can be reconstructed, can be taken apart and put back together to either better suit the moment or joyfully suit the moment. Whether or not, better or worse, just that most happily suit the moment.

DW: I guess I want to ask you to talk a little bit about liturgy. You were talking about the medieval poets and much of their production got incorporated into our daily prayer book, especially our Shabbat prayer book, when there was more time to luxuriate over poetry. We see a lot of it in the High Holiday, the machzor there, High Holiday prayer book. But I think part of what I've seen you do, and we see it in the Reconstructionist prayer book, is that contemporary poetry stands in for the liturgy. Not only gets incorporated into it, but becomes part and parcel of it, or in sometimes even replaces the contemporary liturgy.

JS: Right, you can go various steps. I want to start by acknowledging the more traditional. I'm thinking of Lekhah Dodi's poem that one of the... For people who go at all to Friday night services, they probably have heard Lekhah Dodi, a welcoming poem for Shabbat. And, "Lekhah dodi likrat kallah: Come my beloved to meet the bride. P'nei Shabbat nekabelah: Will greet, will accept the face of Shabbat." So Lekhah Dodi is a 16th Century [work] by a Kabbalist, Alkabetz, and taught in Israel and it does exactly that magical thing. It opens up a hidden world and it can work on various levels. At its surface level, it's a poem that celebrates Shabbat, that expects redemption, that gives consolation to an exiled people, that pictures a redeemed Jerusalem and Zion. And then if you do know the source text both in Tanakh and the Kabbalists' source text, but especially Tanakh, then it starts to make another level of connections. I'll give one example. There's a verse, "Mikdash melekh ir melukhah."

JS: "The sanctuary of the sovereign or of the king, a royal city." On the surface level, we think that's Jerusalem. But actually if you go back in the source, in the Tanakh, the Bible source, you'll discover that both those phrases don't refer to Jerusalem. One refers to Amman, Jordan. And one refers to Bethel, the site of the rebellious in the eyes of Hebrew Bible of Tanakh, that rebellious temple of the Northern Kingdom. And so, the poet is saying, it doesn't matter where you are. You could be in Amman, you could be in Bethel, you could be in Rome, in New York, still somehow Jerusalem is actually there. That's where the divine presence is, where you are in this hidden world. "Kumi tz'ee mitokh ha-hafeykhah," he says, "get up and leave the upside down world", the up-turned world where it looks like it's just whatever it is around you, the trouble. And notice that there's something, again, like Eliraz said there's something else going on here.

JS: So to enter that into the liturgy that was already in that century an incredible, radical, wonderful thing. So even liturgical poetry has been a big renewal. If in a Reconstructionist world or other liberal Judaisms, we continue to do that, we're not inventing. We're continuing something that Jews have been doing, to say: In our language, in our time, in our world view, how do we continue to open up whatever the divine is? The renewing and life-giving process.

DW: Is there another poem you'd like to share?

JS: I would.

DW: That's great.

JS: Well, since I talk so much about Amichai, I feel like we should read at least one. This is "Tourists by Yehuda Amichai", one of his most well-known poems. This translation is by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. 

They come here to visit the mourners. 
They sit in Yad Vashem. 
Wear brave faces at the Wailing Wall and laugh behind curtains in hotel rooms. 
They take pictures with the important dead at Rachel's Tomb and at Herzl's Tomb and Ammunition Hill. 
Weep for the beautiful heroism of our boy. 
Lust for our tough girl, and hang their underwear for fast drying in a blue, cold bathroom. 

Once I sat on the stairs at the gate of David's Tower and put two heavy baskets next to me.
A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I served as their orientation point. 
You see that man with the basket? A bit to the right of his head, there's an arch from the Roman period. 
A bit to the right of his head. 
But he moves, he moves! 
I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, 
"You see over there the arch from the Roman period? 
Never mind, but next to it, a bit to the left and lower, sits a man who bought vegetables and fruit for his home."

DW: So lovely. For me, that moment, "He moves, he moves." This living process, the poetry. It's a snapshot, it captures just a moment that's gone the next moment.

JS: Yeah, and the tourist objects. [chuckle] Right? He moves, we don't want to look at Yehuda Amichai.

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JS: Right? So it's a stone.

DW: Yeah. Yeah.

JS: And redemption only comes when you say, oh man, let's look at the guy, at the human being, at the moment, at the life. And in some ways, that's what so much of his poetry and his whole generation of poets does is, they make our lives to be the object, right? Our history is the tool. It's not we're the tool to serve the history, it's history is the tool to serve us, right? And so, the Jerusalem Arch is the way to find Yehuda Amichai or to find a human being, right? This Eliraz talks about... He objected a little bit to this whole process of Hebrew poetry, where things are built out of the old bricks. And it can get so complicated that if you don't know the old bricks, you have no idea what's going on. And he says, "Can't I speak about place without it being Hamakom?" (A Rabbinic name for the Holy Blessed One). "Can't I speak about house without it being the Beit HaMikdash?" (The Holy Temple). He wants to be able to just be in that moment. But, "Can't I walk in a desert without having to be 40 years with our ancestors?" But Amichai and that group of poets, not only Israeli, but really even medieval poets, it's not that they make themselves walk in the desert with our ancestors. It's that they make our ancestors walk with us.

DW: Lovely. When people ask me, "Why am I religious?" I hear a lot, "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual." And one of the things that I say why I am religious is because I want to join myself to something larger than myself. I want to be a part of a larger conversation that ultimately points toward the ultimate. I'm profoundly anti-fundamentalist. So I can be no more confident than saying pointing toward the ultimate. I believe there are a lot of different pathways toward that ultimate, but I want to be in a conversation that situates me in this very conversation where it's me in conversation with Amichai, with the stones, with the tourists. They're all part of the conversation. And, I want to recognize the holiness of that. Even as it's also frustrating sometimes or painful sometimes.

DW: I want to make certain that we have time to talk about practice because at the end of the day, this is a podcast that aims to identify practices for people if they're so drawn to incorporate into their lives. You and I have a friend and a colleague, professor Jeffrey Shoulson who I know makes a practice of posting, I think it's daily, just on a very regular basis, poems from across the breadth of world literature on his Facebook page. And I really think of that as a very redemptive practice. And when I think I'm in my most open hearted place rather than in a sucked up into social media and just kind of scrolling through maximum amounts of information feeding my brain, I read the poems and I feel like my world view is... And usually I sign off after that. I stop looking at Facebook. [chuckle] It's kind of an antidote.

JS: Right. Okay, I've got something important finally.

DW: Right, right. That's his practice and I wanted to talk about if you had any suggestions for people about incorporating poetry into some kind of personal practice.

JS: It's just reading and also if people are interested in reading more, there are a couple of really good anthologies of the whole spread of Hebrew poetry. There's a Penguin book of Hebrew verse that I've liked quite a bit there. Various anthologies of more contemporary, specifically Israeli or the last revival of Hebrew period. The last 150 years or so, if people are interested in Yehuda Amichai, this great poet who passed away only 10, 15 years ago, I can't remember exactly the date. His last book is really a tour de force incredible book and it's available in English as "Open Closed Open" online. People want to surf around Hebrew poetry, I've got a couple of websites here to recommend. There's a site called poetryinternationalweb.net. You can search by country. Click Israel and actually it's not only Israel, they've got all kinds of older Hebrew poetry as well pre-Israel, even ibn Gvirol was mentioned in that last poem, from the Golden Age of Spain a thousand years ago. Poet is in the Israel section.

JS: There's a blog that I quite like called "Soul and Gone", by I think his name is Michael Yaari, S-O-U-L and Gone, G-O-N-E. He's a very talented translator, I often turn to him if I'm not going to do my own translation and hope that somebody has done one and a quite broad range of material. So those are some places to dip in, to surf around. I want to mention also, if you're in Jewish community and you talked about where do you go beyond literature, I did want to mention something that my community does, we're a Reconstructionist community in Eastern Connecticut, and we started discovering that we had a good solid group of people who are interested in coming and praying some fairly traditional service on Saturday morning.

JS: But Friday night we didn't have that group of people and yet people wanted to meet Friday night. They wanted to make sure that every Friday night and every Saturday morning you could come and say Kaddish if you wanted to say Kaddish, and so we decided what are we going to do with all these Jews and fellow travelers who are cultural but not davenners, not traditional worshippers in any sense. And so, we started a rotation of a Friday night Shabbat thing, Shabbat celebration. So one of them is once a month is called TGI Shabbat, and it's a wine and cheese celebration. We say Kiddish over good wine or sparkling grape juice. Manischewitz is banned, it has to be something a little better.

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JS: Although there are folks who love Manischewitz. That's okay, but on TGI Shabbat, we don't allow Manischewitz, that's one of the rules. And we listen to some music and people eat and schmooze, wine and cheese and fixings, and then I teach the text of one of the songs that we've done. I might teach that song for J'ovah that we just did, if it's a song - it happens that it's not yet but maybe it will be. I might teach a medieval Yemenite song, "Im Nin'alu": If the gates of the leaders are locked, the gates of Heaven are not locked." A wonderful, important text by Shalom Shabazi, 17th century Yemenite poet all over the place, secular Israeli poets, everything. The community might decide to celebrate Shabbat with poetry. With song and poetry and wine and that's been very successful actually for us.

DW: That sounds like a wonderful practice and absolutely community building and nourishing to each participant sounds wonderful.

JS: Should we close with the end of this poem The Jews by Amichai?

DW: Sure, that's a great way to end.

JS: Amichai has a poem called The Jews: Ha-yehudim that addresses some of the trauma for sure of our Jewish history. But then at the end he says, "Some time ago, I met a beautiful woman whose grandfather performed my circumcision long before she was born. I told her, you don't know me and I don't know you but we are the Jewish people. Your grandfather and I, the circumcised, and you, the beautiful grand daughter with golden hair. We are the Jewish people. And what about God? Once we sang, "There is no God like ours: Eyn Keloheinu." Now we sing, "There is no God of ours: Eyn Eloheinu." But we sing, we still sing." Amichai, in the secular Israeli context, unlike what you'll hear very much in our context, says we don't sing. Eyn Keloheinu. We don't sing, "There is no God like ours," because we're not so sure. We might even sing, "Eyn Eloheinu: There is no God like ours," but in some ways, even that isn't the core as we wrestle with meaning. It's that we're together and we're still singing it. I find that very, even as an Eyn Keloheinu singer, I find it very inspiring.

DW: That we're together and we're... Whatever it is we're doing, we're doing it together. And the conversation is both with the people in the room around us and with the people who came before us and presumably, the people who come after us.

JS: Yes.

DW: Thank you so much for this conversation, for the extraordinary poems that you brought and the others that you referred to. We'll bring them all together on the website so that people dive in more deeply. And I hope to be with you some time on TGI Shabbat for that experience.

JS: Excellent.

DW: And just thank you for your insights and the poems that you brought.

JS: Yeah, thank you, Deborah. It's been a perfect pleasure and honor to explore poetry with you.

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DW: And you can find more resources on this topic on ReconstructingJudaism.org and on ritualwell.org. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.

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