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I Lift Up Mine Eyes:
Jewish Tradition and
Innovation
Ecclesiastes
1
King James Version
Song
of Songs (KJV)
A
Poem for the Shekinah
On
the Feast of the Sabbath
Isaac Luria (Aramaic, 1534-72)
Good Night,
World
Jacob Glatstein (Yiddish,
1896-1971)
Songs of Zion the
Beautiful
Yehuda Amichai
The Seder Plate
Martha Shelley
Day of Atonement
Jacqueline Lapidus
Lentils
Pete Wolf Smith
Rebekah
Pete Wolf Smith
Ecclesiastes
Chapter 1:1-11 (King James Version)
The words of Ecclesiastes,
the son
of David, king of Jerusalem:
Vanity of vanities,
said Ecclesiastes
vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.
What hath a man more
of all his labour,
that he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth
away, and another generation cometh:
but the earth standeth for ever.
The sun riseth, and
goeth down, and returneth to his place:
and there rising again,
Maketh his round by
the south,
and turneth again to the north:
the spirit goeth forward
surveying all places round about,
and returneth to his circuits.
All the rivers run
into the sea,
yet the sea doth not overflow:
unto the place from
whence the rivers come,
they return, to flow again.
All things are hard:
man cannot explain them by word.
The eye is not filled
with seeing,
neither is the ear filled with hearing.
What is it that hath
been?
the same thing that shall be.
What is it that hath
been done?
the same that shall be done.
Nothing under the
sun is new,
neither is any man able to say:
Behold this is new:
for it hath already gone before
in the ages that were before us.
There is no remembrance
of former things:
nor indeed of those things which hereafter are to come,
shall there be any
remembrance with them
that shall be in the latter end.
The
Shulamite: Song of Songs
1:2-6
Let him kiss me with
the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is
better than wine.
Because of the savour
of thy good ointments
thy name is as
ointment poured forth,
therefore do the virgins
love thee.
Draw me, we will run
after thee:
the king hath brought
me into his chambers:
we will be glad and
rejoice in thee,
we will remember thy
love more than wine:
the upright love thee.
I am black,
but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
as the tents of Kedar,
as the curtains of
Solomon.
Look not upon me,
because I am black,
because the sun hath
looked upon me:
my mother’s children
were angry with me;
they made me the keeper
of the vineyards;
but mine own
vineyard have I not kept.
5:2-16
I sleep, but my heart
waketh:
it is the voice
of my beloved that knocketh, saying,
Open to me, my sister,
my love, my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled
with dew,
and my locks
with the drops of the night.
I have put off my
coat; how shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet;
how shall I defile them?
My beloved put in
his hand by the hole of the door,
and my bowels were
moved for him.
I rose up to open
to my beloved;
and my hands dropped
with
myrrh,
and my fingers with
sweet smelling myrrh,
upon the handles of
the lock.
I opened to my beloved;
but my beloved had
withdrawn himself, and was gone:
my soul failed when
he spake:
I sought him, but
I could not find him;
I called him, but
he gave me no answer.
The watchmen that
went about the city found me,
they smote me, they
wounded me;
the keepers of the
walls took away my veil from me.
I charge you, O daughters
of Jerusalem,
if ye find my beloved,
that ye tell him,
that I am sick
of love.
What is thy
beloved more than another beloved,
O thou fairest among
women?
what is thy
beloved more than another beloved,
that thou dost so
charge us?
My beloved is
white and ruddy,
the chiefest among
ten thousand.
His head is as
the most fine gold,
his locks are
bushy, and black as a raven.
His eyes are
as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters,
washed with milk,
and
fitly set.
His cheeks are
as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers:
his lips like
lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.
His hands are as
gold rings set with the beryl:
his belly is as
bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.
His legs are as
pillars of marble,
set upon sockets of
fine gold:
his countenance is
as Lebanon,
excellent as the cedars.
His mouth is
most sweet:
yea, he is
altogether lovely.
This is my
beloved, and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.
A
Poem for the Shekinah
On the Feast of the
Sabbath
Isaac Luria
(Aramaic, 1534-72)
I have sung
an old measure
would open
gates to
her field of apples
(each one a power
[ . . . ]
whose lover
embraces her
in a surcease of sorrow
Jerome Rothenberg explains:
"Shekhina is the frequently
used Talmudic term demoting the visible and audible manifestation of God's
pesence on earth. In the use of he Kabbalah, the Shekhinah becomes an aspect
of God, a quasi-independent feminine element within Him. The exile of Shekhinah
is the separation of the masculine and feminine principle in God."
Good
Night, World
Jacob Glatstein
(Yiddish, 1896-1971)
Good night, wide world,
big stinking world.
Not you but I slam
shut the gate.
[ . . . ]
Good night. I'll make
you, world, a gift of all my liberators.
Take back your Jesus-Marxers,
choke on their courage.
Croak over a drop
of our Christianized blood.
For I have hope, even
if He is delaying,
day by day my expectation
rises.
Greenleaves will yet
rustle
on our sapless tree.
August 1938
Ruth Whitman
(Source: A Book of the
Wars of Yahveh, p. 154)
Pain
found me in the street
and whistled to his
companions: Here's another one.
New houses flooded
my father's grave
like tank columns.
It stayed proud and didn't surrender.
-- Yehuda Amichai
from Songs of Zion
the Beautiful
(Source: Yehuda
Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson,
NY)
The
Seder Plate
Martha Shelley
Six items are traditionally
present on the seder plate. Each has a meaning, but perhaps that significance
had changed over the two millennia of our wanderings. Once we lived among
the Persians, whose New Year falls at the spring equinox, who place six
items on a special cloth, eat eggs and greens, and decorate the house with
sprouting plants during this holiday season. The ancient Egyptians sprouted
wheat in mummy-shaped planters to represent the resurrection of Osiris.
And the Babylonian Osiris is Tammuz, whose month we celebrate in summer;
we were captive in Babylon and adopted its calendar. Yet aside from the
calendar, it’s often impossible to tell which customs we learned from our
neighbors, which they learned from us, and which have their roots in a
common pagan past, a time before nations, before slavery and war.
First:
Karpas, parsley, celery,
we celebrate all green
things
that spring from black
earth
spring from long-awaited
winter rains
green that splits
granite
and thrusts up to
suckle the sun.
Second:
Beitzah, the egg, the
world egg, haíolam,
the endless beginning
of life,
rich round of creation.
Why is it roasted
in the oven?
The rabbis say, it
stands for the sacrifice
brought to the Temple,
they say it stands
for the Temple’s destruction.
We say it is a remembrance
of women sacrificed
and forgotten,
women omitted from
endless lists of eggless men
who begat other men.
A remembrance of parched
heads of women poets
who opened the ovens
and turned on the gas,
women shoved into
ovens at Auschwitz and gassed,
eggs forbidden to
hatch into
birds forbidden to
sing.
Third:
Zíroa, roasted
bone with bits of meat,
lamb bone, spring
born,
the creation of all
flesh.
Paschal lamb, first
born son taken
from your mother’s
breasts,
lips still dripping
with milk,
your sacrificed blood
drips from the doorposts
to slake the thirst
of the Angel of Death,
blood drips from the
altar, from the bayonet,
the bullet hole.
The rabbis say this
bone stands for the mighty arm
of God who led us
out of bondage.
We say, only when
we stand against the pharaohs,
the priests, the presidents
who lead our sons
to be sacrificed
only then will we
begin
to lead ourselves
from bondage.
Fourth:
Charoset, chopped
apples and nuts mixed with wine,
fruit of our labor
in vineyard and orchard.
Taste it, it’s sweet.
This is the mortar
we made for pharaoh
these are the torah
covers, embroidered
by women forbidden
to touch the torah,
these are garments
sewn by women
in the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory,
books written by women
and claimed by their husbands,
bodies of women sold
into marriage or prostitution.
Tonight we feast on
our own fruit,
reclaim our stolen
property;
tonight we remember
being property.
Fifth:
Maror, bitter herbs,
horseradish,
bitter days of slavery.
Maror is more precious
than jewelry,
maror is memory, there
is no charoset
without it.
For the sake of maror,
each woman
must tell her mother’s
story,
must speak her own
truth without shame.
The rabbis say, speak
as though you were there
with Moshe, as though
you personally
were led from Mizraim.
But we say, it is
not "as though," it is now.
In each generation
the slavemasters come for us,
the plagues, the pogroms.
Speak maror. Let each
women’s voice
guide her daughter
through the wilderness.
Sixth:
Matzah.
Why do the rabbis
call it, "bread of affliction"?
This isn’t slave bread,
pharaoh’s wages, eaten
under the lash.
Our mothers made this
bread.
It could not rise,
it gave its rising
to the Children of
Israel
who rose before dawn,
who stole away
to the battered woman
who rose before dawn
who stole her children
away
to the silenced woman
who began to raise her voice
to the raped woman
who raised her fist
to the striker, to
the refugee
the spirit of matzah
enters their bread, everywhere.
This is the bread
of freedom.
Day
of Atonement
Jacqueline Lapidus
Chants from my childhood
send a prayer
into New England autumn
air
as we slide along
the chapel pew
whispering where are
we?
My ex-beloved’s curly
head,
so much like mine,
is searching, bowed
over Hebrew text she
cannot read,
praying beside me
for the Jew-
ish father she never
knew
and I, though equally
at sea,
suddenly remember
the melody
and sing out. Thirty
years ago
this ardent gathering
of women
would not have been
acknowledged minyan,
let alone a congregation
sprinkled with visiting
fathers;
now the Rule of the
Universe
is God, is One, but
rarely He!
The smiling rabbi,
pocket-size
in her white robe
and tallis,
explains the Amidah
in English;
she wasn’t even born
when I refused
bat-Mitzvah. How could
I have known?
In those days God
spoke just to men.
What is it, then,
that makes us Jews
if not the language,
music, food,
fasting, ritual and
choice?
My grandma would have
loved her voice;
my grandpa, hardly
orthodox,
would nonetheless
have been confused.
O God of Sarah and
Rebekah,
Leah, Rachel, Miriam,
Deborah,
Esther, Judith and
Jael,
to be a Jew is to
be real
in a world of indifference;
forgive us our subservience.
May all our actions
speak thy love
through care for one
another. Yet
our dead live on in
us and move
us to truth. Hear,
o people who struggle with God!
Shíma Yisrael,
adonai elohenu, adonai echad.
Lentils
Pete Wolf Smith
"Thus Esau did despise
his first-born right."
And what if I did?
The buck, my arrow
in his side,
bolted, reeking blood
on the wind,
hooves skidding on
rocks,
dragging his hind
legs along a ridge;
his front legs buckled,
and he fell.
I finished him off
and slit him down the line
from breast to penis,
gutted, and threw the stuff
to the vultures, emissaries
of a god
I liked -- my own,
and not my father's --
and set aside treats
for the old one,
kidneys, balls, such
as he loved,
the savory bits, and
took the kill
on my shoulders and
carried it back.
It was late. The roasting
would not be done
until coins were flung
from the god's bag
across the sky, and
the jackal
at the edge of the
firelight slunk,
and the moon sang.
I came into camp
with the falling sun
in my blood
and a subtle iron
of springwater on my tongue,
dusty, bloody, the
buck hot on my neck.
My brother was squatting
at a ring of stones
and a kettle on a
little fire
in front of Mother's
tent.
He was useless on
the hunt
but like a woman for
stews.
I said to him, Give
me some of that,
smelling the wild
onions he'd gathered, and the beans;
and offered to beat
him, when he refused
and started with his
guff about the birthright,
if he continued to
be impudent.
But he stirred the
red stuff,
and would not hear
any word
but birthright, birthright;
and I wanted lentils,
bread.
The word he kept repeating
--
I didn’t know what
it meant.
Rebekah
Pete Wolf Smith
When I returned from
the house
of my father Betuel
with his servant,
the talker, supple
one,
he who I'd seen at
the well
(and me had seen,
splashing water with
my sisters,
the wet robe clinging
to my skin);
who said his name
was Ishmael
and spoke all the
while of his master
half-brother, his
country, while I
heard only the music
of his tongue
and, inhaling in the
evening cool
his scent, my veil
thrown back,
beheld him kneeling
at my feet;
and discovered my
fingers moving,
touching the hard
close kinks
of his hair, and heard
myself say,
my voice too loud
in the tent,
"Will my friend say
nothing in his own behalf?"
He took the water
jug and washed my feet
and, lifting my garment,
my calves, my knees;
nor will I dwell on
what transpired;
you are a loyal servant,
I said at length.
We came across the
sand and I saw one running,
with a welldigger's
back and arms;
in a shift, such as
a boy would wear;
his lank hair hanging,
and something missing
in his eyes.
I said "Who's that?"
and he said,
"That is my master,
half-brother.
This is your husband,
that will be."
Then I dismounted
-- I did not fall --
and moved away, and
took down my veil.
I didn't want either
one looking at me.
I tricked up a vial
of red dye to break
between my fingers
for a stain. The one,
though older,
stayed on as the other's
boy,
and mended saddles
in the evening
while Isaac labored
in me.
I was indifferent.
But never again did
Ishmael
open the flap of my
tent.
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