I’m enchanted by Richard Chess’s new poetry collection, The Loneliest Monk. And by the loneliest monk himself. Though not all the poems are about this (imagined) monk, I want to focus here on some that are—or at least seem to be. Chess, I should say at the start, is not a monk. But he is a practicing Jew and a poet often reaching for the mystical—qualities that his loneliest monk character shares.
The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik calls upon his bird to “Sing and tell me, my little bird, / of marvels in distant places.” It’s a bit hard for me to envision the “marvels” of Israel at the moment. Like many Jewish people, I’m distraught about Israel right now. In “To the Bird,” Bialik imagines an idealized place. It’s a “land of the sun,” a place “of wonders from where / spring springs eternal,” a “land where almonds and date palms bud.”
Fortunately, after a few weeks the acute pain began to subside. Now I am returning to another obstacle, deceptively comforting, that gets in the way of my perceiving and experiencing the Divine in the work of Her creation: familiarity. Leah Goldberg’s prayer-poem, translated from Hebrew by Annie Kantar, reminds me that I am not alone in living with a dulled awareness of the amazing gift of life itself.
When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.
Nonetheless, there are still the hours to stare down. To care for someone sick, even when joyfully, is to watch the painful inching forward of time, just as it is to watch the day fall forward on a Sabbath without electronic amusements. And to bear the breadth of literature can be exacting, but a labor that ultimately satisfies.
Born in Gaza in 1963, Nasser Rabah lives there to this day. He has published five collections of poetry and two novels. With the help of his colleague and friend Saleh Razzouk, a Syrian translator and writer in Aleppo, Philip Terman has been translating some of Rabah’s poems. The poem “14,000,” about Gazan children, was originally posted on Rabah’s Facebook page as “4,000” on December 1, 2023.
Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her “Diary of a Young Girl” in a middle school literature class. But my own first impression of Anne came from her less well-known “Tales from the Secret Annex,” which deviates from the tone and material of her Diary in that it is a collection of mostly fictitious anecdotes and sketches.
A day before the start of Yom Kippur, my friend Aviya Kushner, brilliant poet and writer, posted on her Substack a piece on the great poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141) and the relevance of his work to Yom Kippur. That’s what inspired me to read, during the few hours away from synagogue, a little Halevi. The first poem of Halevi’s I landed on is “Heal Me, Lord.”
Norman Fischer is an influential American Zen-Buddhist, a poet and writer, and a Jew. He wrote Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms after spending a week with the Trappist monks at Gethsemani Abbey, where he experienced for the first time the Christian monastic practice of daily recitation of the psalms. Troubled by “the violence, passion, and bitterness” expressed in some of the psalms but recognizing the power they held for the monks, Fischer decided to investigate the psalms by creating his own versions of some of them.
In the poem “Exile for the Sake of Redemption,” Yehoshua November dares to bring the Divine down to earth. This suggests that it is up to us as it is to God to “engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future.” Teaching and learning are two of those activities. Poetry—writing and reading it—is another.
Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry.
In my workshop, we’ll look at the roads taken in a few poems. We’ll linger over a line and consider the many different lines that could follow it. Call the move from one line to the next a bend in the road. As I hope we’ll see, the poet or writer chose one road to follow. She could just as easily have chosen another, taking a bend that would lead to… Well, the destination remains to be discovered!
This essay isn’t political. It’s about the heart. It’s about the spirit, bruised, battered. It’s about friends, this essay. They feel agitated. They feel helpless. They are limiting their exposure to the minute-by-minute updates. They are turning off their news feeds. Or they are obsessively refreshing their screens. Fueling and refueling their rage, their fear, their despair.
Listening without thinking about what you are hearing or reading requires discipline and restraint. Whenever you find yourself thinking—agreeing or arguing, praising or scorning, composing and rehearsing your response—you need to let that go and return to what’s being said or sung, just that. But it’s difficult if not impossible to stop thinking’s chariot once its wheels start turning.
Karl Shapiro was a leading poet of his time: winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1946-1947, editor of Poetry magazine from 1950 to 1954. And he was included in the 1956 anthology Fifteen Modern American Poets, along with poets like Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Theodore Roethke.
September 17, eight days before the Asheville storm, my wife and I left town. First stop, D.C. to visit our son and his partner. Next stop, New Rochelle, N.Y. to visit our daughter and her boys. Monday, September 30, the day after a “Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry” retreat for the board and staff in Manhattan: head home. Settle back just in time for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That was the plan.
Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. Repentance, it’s translated. “Teshuvah,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew, is “a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.”
Prayer. It never fails. I take my place in the pew. I fling my tallis, my prayer shawl, over my head. It lands like a bird on my shoulders. I put on my reading glasses. I take the siddur, the prayer book, from its pocket in the back of the pew in front of me. Because I never arrive on time, I search for the place where we are in the service.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has been focused on the Holy Land. And not in a positive or hopeful way. So what better time for Bret Lott’s latest book—Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land—to come out? As he notes in his foreword, Lott delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the summer of 2023, when it was possible to find in Israel the subtitle’s “hope.” And find it he does.
This year’s first seder: with strangers. Not exactly strangers. Poets. I knew the work of a few of them. One is a dear friend. Two spouses, one of whom is my wife. Sitting down at the diaspora seder table—(diaspora Jews hold two seders; Israeli Jews, one)—,I assumed most if not all of the twelve of us were Jews. Strangers? Not exactly.