The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.

Elegy: September 1

I couldn’t find the “chet” – ח – the Hebrew letter,
the beginning of life
On my keyboard that I was using as a life- raft to float down the river of tears
Reaching out to the others in their own rafts as we were carried down a rushing river of grief beyond imagining
Our cries and the crash of the water somehow each amplifying the other rather than drowning each other out
Before the news
Before the river
I daydreamed: Rachel’s hand cradling the newly-born head of her son Hersh
The power of the love in that new connection inhabits eternity and no matter
the cruelty the heartless desecration of life and love that power
outlives us all
That power is inside the rushing river of the tears of Am Yisrael
It will carry us as it always has
We will reach tomorrow by reaching out
From our life-rafts
from our keyboards
From our cameras on our phones as we call to cradle each other’s tear stained faces
The dove will see a rainbow
There will be a day after this endless day of devastation that has lasted nearly eleven months
A Kaddish year
There will be a new world
Built on living waters
Made of tears and love
There is a stillness at the center
Of the life force, the waters
A place where they are with us still
Where we cradle them and comfort them
That their lives their suffering their deaths
Will not be in vain
From this place of stillness we will row back out into the waters
We will find each other and carry each other into each next breath
Even when breathing seems impossible
We will see our ancestors’ reflections in the water that surrounds us and carries us
We will see in the rainbow
the faces stolen from this world
And we will not break our promise to see the promise held within it
That a new world is possible
That out of utter devastation
We can create
We can live again

October 23, 2023: There is a Time for Everything, and Right Now is a Time for This:

It is said that between the death and the burial

We whose grief is seared so far down into the darkness of the earth that it reaches the heavens
we
have no obligations

to pray, to do what is otherwise asked of us.

We are Onenim – we are in Aninut – we are in the wordless space between knowing and not knowing, between belief and disbelief

All that is asked now is to take in what reaches for you
to let yourself be held up
By others who remain obligated

But what happens
When the whole Jewish people are Onenim
All unmoored by mourning that hasn’t even begun?

And what happens
When you live outside the place
Where everyone is a loved one or a loved one of a loved one or a loved one of a loved one of a loved one just like
you are
and the world is going on, and you’re dizzy because it’s tilted and spinning upside down
and you still have obligations –
you have to walk your dogs
(and you think of the terrified, abandoned, dogs roaming the blood-soaked kibbutzim, sometimes the only survivors of their families, and thank God you live – you can walk your dogs)?

What happens is this:

You stand on the damp ground that is green and brown – when you squint it looks like the land of Israel from the sky – just how it looked when you cried with joy and gratitude as the El Al plane prepared to land in the land of your soul
You pressed your face against the window like a child because you hadn’t seen it for twelve years and you took a photo of this vast land that is lush and that is dry –
this land that holds the life and the hope for life all at once and
you make it your facebook cover photo as if if to say:
“This is who I am – one Jew, who has the zchut* to live in a time when I can see the edge of the plane’s wing, the plane called “Toward the Sky” in my people’s ancient and timeless language.”
You can see the edge as it cuts yearningly through the sky above green and brown, people in all their yearning and their loving and their living
Precious precious life
In a precious precious land
Improbably planted and sown
So much has grown from it
So so much
So much love
So much pain
So much hope

So you walk the dogs and you stand on the ground that looks like that, but your feet aren’t in an airplane on your way to your people, they’re on the damp ground in a place that feels new and colder and as your dogs look alertly, on watch for anything that might harm you,
For the first time, you wonder, in your own backyard,
Will I be hurt here
because I am a Jew?
That’s what they say, but my people – not all of them want to believe it.
And we didn’t believe it then, either.
But then, after all that happened, we had the zchut to try to be a free people in our land
And now what?
And now we are Onenim
Mourning for each other
Saying kaddish for children with no parents
For parents whose children are no more
And you stand on the damp ground – full of the rain we had just begun to pray for, because when we talk to God, it is as if we live there, not here (here, we had plenty of rain already) you stand on the damp ground and you imagine the rivers of blood streaming through the places where life and joy and care and compassion and working for peace grew and thrived
Until they were all cut down
Flung into the earth
Or into the tunnels below
With captors, torturers
And you stand on the damp ground
And you notice: On the patio table
Still
Lie your lulav and etrog, those symbols we wave in all directions, bringing our people together into us, bringing ourselves out to our yearning people, bringing hope and gratitude and joy and from everywhere, to everywhere
you couldn’t bear to discard them once the dancing turned to shock and horror at the end of the time of our rejoicing, so
They sit there, soaked and weakened, abandoned and silent, unshaken and unknowing,

And you look inside your well-lit windows
and you see the picture in the frame – the painting that says Tel Aviv, with an image of the sea, the buildings, the sky. A bright blue like all horrific days seem to have.

Your heart shatters with the force of the rockets being flung toward this tiny brown green hoping hurting land – where good people live and love and want life life life

You stand on the damp ground much too far away to do anything but long to come to your land, your people – to mourn together. You want to fall through the ground until you reach your people in the depths.

We are all Onenim
No other obligations, now
But to hold each other
In the space between shock and grief
In the space of unknowing
everything we thought we knew

*to have the zchut means “to have the merit, worthiness, right

Audrey serves as Senior Rabbi of Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline, Massachusetts. A lifelong poet, and lover of dogs and humor (she takes great pride in her ancestry, as a great-great granddaughter of the great Yiddish writer/humorist Sholom Aleichem) she finds that her poetry is inspired by nearly everything, and often emerges as the light coming in through the cracks of the broken-heartedness of the world. Holding the beauty and the brokenness together is a sacred legacy and obligation. Audrey graduated from Oberlin College (1996) and Harvard Divinity School (1999), and was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2007, where she was the recipient of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship. Audrey is the proud mom of three boys, ages 10, 16, and 18, and also shares her home with her husband and two large and goofy rescue dogs.

Featured image in this post: Landscape with Noah, Offering a Sacrifice of Gratitude (SM 767), Joseph Anton Koch, creative commons via wikimedia commons.