The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
ANGELS
The vegetable man leans in close and proclaims that the Hebrew words for cabbage and cherub are exactly the same. Buy two, he sweats, one tooth missing, and I’ll throw in another for free. It will rot before I eat it, I tell him, avoiding eye contact. On the way home, I listen to a tiny woman playing the harp on Yafo Street. Her skin folds over itself as I drop a few shekels into her case. Empty, other than a bruised banana. Hours later, I recognize the song: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” At home, I tell my husband I want more. More of what? Our apartment is built from Jerusalem stone. Our daughter, wearing wings, is making me a plastic sandwich in her toy kitchen. Mommy’s tired again? she asks, voice small and high. There’s an angel, I think, whose only job is to fly around God’s throne and sing. The song has three words: holy, holy, holy.
MORNING PRAYER
We spend all morning in bed, doing things considered forbidden, although I know them to be holy. Did you remember to pray? I ask as your hand slowly roams the snake of my spine. You kiss me softly, then harder, cover yourself as you walk to the den. I imagine sticky fingers probing the pages of open siddur, wet tongue praising all that you believe divine. Tell me, when you lift your heels and proclaim life sacred, do you envision my hips in your mind? I once beheld your morning prayer, watched the tallit as it broadened your shoulders, the binds of your tefillin as they tattooed lines upon your skin. I’ll never forget that morning’s release, how I laughed, then cried, for no reason at all, how somewhere, deep in the dew of the moment, I found God inside myself, and wasn’t ready to release her. She was a creature, soft and wild, licking her wounds, baring her claws, fiercely arching her back so she could worship whatever she wanted.
Natalie Chetboun is a writer and educator whose work is published in The Ilanot Review, The Jerusalem Post, The Museum of Americana, and others. She holds an M.A. from the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. She recently moved to Atlanta, Georgia, after 10 years living in Jerusalem.
Featured image in this post: Street musician in Montmartre – harp 1, Paris April 2011, Cristian Bortes from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Fire Cleansing Memory
I had a great grand uncle who I did not know Just like my father, And my grandfather who never met him, So Perhaps it’s okay, It’s even fair, If it was something I couldn’t share With the family I knew.
But I wonder, And perhaps they did too, What I might have said To the great grand man I did not meet.
I might have asked him What he thought of the Czar? And if he traveled did he ever go far, Far from everything he’d known before Or, because he was poor, Did he only know what he didn’t know?
But most of all I’d like to hear His favorite color, His favorite meal. Were we at least somewhat the same? And, what was his Hebrew name?
Life for my great grand uncle was never fair Just like my father, And my grandfather, But even more So. His house was burned down, He was inside. But just like me, The Cossacks did not know him when he died Either.
Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Writing Disorder, Daily Science Fiction, Space and Time Magazine, and elsewhere. Her full-length play, “Generation Pan,” was published by Pioneer Drama. She can be found online at jessieatkin.com
Featured image in this post: Mikhail Clodt Village in the province of Orel, Mikhail Clodt, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Jerusalem, Sept. 2. 2024
The stone glows rose In the early morning Like an open hearth Its warmth Welcoming little children As they set out to school – first day boisterous, backpacks swinging Clutching parents’ hands
The stone blazes white In the midday sun Sirens blare, there’s grief everywhere Parents gather for a funeral, to watch, to listen To bear witness
On the sun-honeyed stone day wanes Parents fetch their children, hug them Tight, so tight
Others collect theirs, one last time Six black body bags As dusk, starless, descends on Jerusalem Shadows darken the stone
Ronnie Scharfman 9/7/2024
Ronnie Scharfman is Prof. Emerita of French and Francopone Literatures, SUNY-Purchase. She has been writing poetry and midrash with Alicia Ostriker and Sharon Dolin for many years. Her chapbook, “In Poem and Prayer,” was published in 2013. Her poems and translations have appeared in “The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, ” “Opposed to Indifference” (Haybarn Press), “Daughters of Emily” (Haybarn Press), “Angles and Naked Vision” (Haybarn Press). She was part of the first cohort of poets at the inaugural Yetzirah conference in Asheville, N.C., 2022.
Featured image in this post: PikiWiki Israel 77344 sunrise from rooftops in the jewish quarter, רונית איתן, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Day 332
She called him sweet boy at his funeral.
Cried it’s mama at the Gaza border
days before. Did her words travel tunnels, finally reach him,
pierce his pain? On the podium
mama stands, shirt rendered at the neck.
Day 332, black-inked on tape sticking to her chest.
I’ll have to teach myself how to feel you in a different way.
Oh, Great Teacher! What a cruel education
for a woman who only gives thanks for your gifts.
You hand out huge burdens,
like cheap stinking candy rotting teeth, breaking spirits,
crushing souls. We’re tired, God
of being left in the desert
drowning drowning in thirst.
This story, so old. Yesterday, tomorrow
another and another. Enough
mamas, sweet boys, buried sons.
~ For Rachel Goldberg Polin, for all the hostage families. For Hersh.
Sunday School
I’m partial to old tunes, old people—and midrash.* So much to be gleaned from yellowed notes and rabbis arguing with rabbis and kabbalists who must turn forty before studying the Zohar**—or risk breaking from reality. Mysticism is real. Real scary. Sometimes I feel like I’m breaking though I’ve never studied Zohar and forty has set sail from my shores many moons ago. I’ve been thinking lots about the Torah, rabbis, kabbalists, about Gaza. Is it possible to have a conversation today about Gaza? There are no conversations today about Gaza. Just LOUD voices telling me how I need to feel about Gaza, students—and writers, who should know better— who know everything about everything except which river or sea—or history. I need an old rabbi in black robes and a fur hat and a kabbalist who reads scripture from a matriarch’s point of view. Call me crazy, call me Zionist— but I need a little midrash here. I need help because the Torah, Zohar, Gaza, make my head spin. On one hand, Abraham pleads with God to spare the whole of Sodom and Gomorrah if He finds ten righteous souls. On the other, Moses sings let my people go. When Pharaoh gives chase, Moses says fuck it—or something like that—and parts the sea. It’s the Red Sea btw— which God later closes on the chasing Egyptians. Egyptians btw— won’t let Gazans cross their borders and no one’s telling them how to feel. But that’s a side note. Who wants to get bogged down with details, wade in the weeds, take time to ask questions when it’s so much easier to be right— and scream. I’d rather sing. There’s an old song by The Clash— you know the one. I used to think it was about love, but now I think it may be midrash. It asks a question, its chorus is a question, the whole friggin song is a question, a question that feels like survival: should I stay or should I go? A question as old as Genesis. A question for Abraham and Moses, for Israel in Gaza. Oh, how the world is happiest when Jews are on their knees! It’s all in the lighting. Where we shine it and what we keep in the shadows. History. It’s an old song. Rabbis. Pray tell. How to get people paying attention to history’s lyrics? To study before they’re forty? I’ve got one, just one sentence midrash: if we don’t look back, we’ll all turn to salt.
*midrash is the practice of commenting on the Torah—in prose, poetry, visual art **Zohar is a collection of ancient Jewish mystical texts. It used to be that one was prohibited from studying these texts before one reached the age of 40, as their power could make a younger person go insane or even result in death.
Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions) and the Prose/CNF editor of Emerge Literary Journal. Her writing appears in Brevity, Witness, Colorado Review, River Teeth, Florida Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, 2023 Best Microfiction, Identity Theory, The Rumpus, and many other lovely places. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction, a finalist in Smokelong’s 2022 Summer Micro Contest, longlisted in 2023 and 2024 at Wigleaf Top 50, a finalist for The Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2024 Porch Prize in the nonfiction category. Find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and @DianeGotAuthor.
Featured image in this post: Caspar luyken the israelites crossing the red sea, Caspar Luyken, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
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.
