poetry – Page 4

For the love of G-d and man

Our Bible, according to my estimation, tells us repetitively to love G-d. How can we comply with this mandate? I love my wife, kids, a few highly select friends who owe me money, even the cat. And I love lamb chops with garlic and lemon. But my Creator and Judge? There’s an inter-dimensional enigma here. An emotional warp. How can it be?

photo - James Henry Leigh Hunt by Samuel Laurence (1817–1884) — James Henry Leigh Hunt by Samuel Laurence (1817–1884). *(photo from National Portrait Gallery NPG 2508 via Wikimedia Commons)*

Strangely, Leigh Hunt, an English poet who probably never met a Jew, answered the question with a Jewish slant. He was a Londoner who lived 2,000 miles west of Chassidism’s headquarters in Poland. He was an aristocratic Englishman who, unlike his Polish contemporaries, wore a frock coat and did his best work on the Sabbath. He was a good Episcopalian, but somehow saw the world through Jewish eyes. The poet, in an inspired mood, wrote a work of 18 short lines, singing the same love-thy-neighbor theme that’s in our prayer book. Unintentionally, it is a very Jewish poem: an angel alights in the room of Abou Ben Adhem, an exemplary soul who:

“… saw within the moonlight in his room
making it rich like a lily in bloom.
An angel writing in a book of gold
the names of those who love the Lord.”

Abou Ben Adhem, in a flash, sits up in his bed only half-awake, but alert enough to know that his visitor is not his cousin from Cincinnati. Am I in your golden book, he wants to know. (“Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold.”) The angel sadly shakes his head.

But the man with a heart for humanity is not disheartened. “Well,” he says, “put me down as one who loves his fellow man.”

The angel notes the words of Abou Ben Adhem and disappears. Next night, he’s back in the dim bedroom “with a great wakening light” and his fateful list of those who love the Lord. “And lo, Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.”

Loving your fellow man is like loving G-d, an insight initially proclaimed by our Tanach.

I’ve heard it said that the hardest part of being a good Jew is loving your fellow man. Now I didn’t originate that – it’s probably in the Talmud or maybe in the Tanach from some bitter prophet like Jeremiah. But, sadly, it’s true. Didn’t G-d Himself tell us we’re a stiff-necked people? Easy-going, sweet, lovable people don’t cure polio, don’t split the atom and don’t win Nobel prizes. They’re too busy displaying their love. There’s some furnace running in the core of great people that keeps them from election as most popular kid in school or fraternity/sorority presidency. You wouldn’t have enjoyed a beer and a bowl of pretzels with Einstein. Your Uncle Louie was probably much better at small talk.

In all the English vocabulary, the hardest word to define is love. It has no synonym, only antonyms. It thinly communicates when it describes our relationship with our fellow creatures, even the four-legged ones. But it miserably fails to describe our feeling to our Creator, even though I count the mandate more than 150 times in the Tanach.

In nature, love flows down, not up. A river originating in a mountain peak flows down to water the animal and plant life at its base. I’m convinced that parents, especially mothers, love their children more than kids love their parents. Survival of the species demands it. Our limited human understanding comes closest to defining divine love by loving our fellow human creatures. And, while we’re talking about love and G-d and man and English poets, let me remind you of Alexander Pope, another famous English Bard. He’s clearly on my side: “The proper study of mankind is man,” he says. “Presume not G-d to scan,” which to my understanding says the Creator lies beyond our telescopes.

What is love? We understand friendship. We know all about lust. We understand why your heart glows when your wife makes kreplach in chicken soup, your favorite. And even closer to your emotional warmth is the sensation of holding in your arms your newborn child. But words fail when we try to cozy up to the Lord. There is awe, respect and reverence, but love?

I’ve never met anyone who loved G-d and could explain that exotic emotion. It cannot be expressed any more than a fish expresses his love for water, his medium. Maybe the prophets and Leigh Hunt were on to something. Love thy fellow man. That, itself, is an awesome challenge. But may be the only road to the celestial palace.

Ted Roberts is a freelance writer and humorist living in Huntsville, Ala. His website is wonderwordworks.com.

A fine collection of poems

When I saw the table of contents of The Poems of H. Leivick and Others: Yiddish Poetry in Translation by Leon H. Gildin (Finishing Line Press), a lovely little book of translated Yiddish poems by Leivick and other noted poets, two images came immediately to mind. One was a scene with Leivick, a slight figure with a beautiful etched face and a halo of white hair, sitting alone on a circular stone ledge in front of the Hebrew University library, in Jerusalem, seemingly lost in thought. The other, and this goes back decades, is a gathering of Yiddish poets, including almost all the ones collected in this book, in a meeting hall in New York. What a thrill it was for a college boy to be at such a meeting and seeing face-to-face the famous poets he had known before only by name.

book cover - The Poems of H. Leivick and Others The poems of Leivick (1886-1962) range in subject matter: a poem about a very small poem “no longer than an epitaph”; the recollection of a birch rod beating given by his father; a prisoner in a cell at night “swallowing as if it were wine the moon’s bright light”; a man looking for work without success. Leivick was a paperhanger when he came to the United States. He was also a noted playwright; his most famous is The Golem, originally produced by Habima Theatre when it was still in Moscow, and later translated into other languages.

Here, too, admirably rendered into English by Gildin, are the voices of other famous American Yiddish poets – all born in Eastern Europe – singing songs of longing, love and the Sabbath. About half the poems are by Leivick: the rest are by luminaries like Chaim Grade, Yakov Glatstein, Avraham Reisen, Itzik Manger, A. Leyeles, Mani Leib and Avraham Sutzkever. Most of the poems here have a modernist lilt regarding imagery and tone, yet all have traditional rhymes.

My only caveat with this fine ingathering of poems is that too much space is devoted to a relatively minor but good poet, Anna Margolin. Where Grade has only one, why six for Margolin? Additional poems by the other poets would have been welcome.

My favorite poems here are those that have a Jewish core. Hence, Grade’s loving poem “The Sabbath,” recalling his war- and postwar-years wanderings in Russia and Europe, resonates, as does Ephraim Auerbach’s prayer-poem “God of Abraham,” which begins with the opening lines of Havdalah – the prayer for the departing of the Sabbath – and takes wing from there.

In his short introduction, Gildin accents the secular aspects of Yiddish poetry but, by so doing, he puts an artificial divide between religiosity and secularism. He says that, while Yiddish was the street language of the Orthodox, the secular Yiddish created a culture. But Gildin neglects to note that Yiddish was used far beyond the street for Orthodox Jews. Religious Jews also used Yiddish in shul, in studying and in translating Chumash and Talmud, and in creating commentaries and translations of the siddur and the machzor, the daily and the holiday prayer books, respectively. Women created their own prayers in Yiddish, which were collected into separate volumes. This same “street language” was used by the secular poet Yehoash in creating his masterpiece: his magnificent translation of the entire Bible into Yiddish.

In Grade’s “The Sabbath” and Auerbach’s “God of Abraham,” the boundaries between piety and secularity are blurred. The distinctions are not as separate as they appear to be. In a classic photo of Yiddish poets sitting at a long dinner table at a wedding, one can see secular poets like Leivick, Grade, Glatstein, Reisen and noted critic Shmuel Niger, all wearing either fedoras or yarmulkes.

Sholom Aleichem was thoroughly secular. He was not observant and did not keep a kosher home. In fact, he spoke Russian, not Yiddish, to his family. Yet, when his son died in Denmark, he went to shul to say Kaddish every day in New York. And, in his will, he asked those who are willing, to say Kaddish for him, too.

Most significantly, the obviously secular translator of this volume, Gildin, along with his brother, founded a university Yiddish department, not in the secular Hebrew University, Haifa University or Tel Aviv University, but at Bar-Ilan University, the only religious-sponsored university in Israel.

For those who know Yiddish poetry, The Poems of H. Leivick and Others revisits old friends; for newcomers, it is a cogent introduction.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

Poet chooses politics over love?

In times of protracted conflict, can matters of the heart exist apart from politics? An award-winning documentary from Israeli filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin left me at once spellbound, uplifted, sad and restless, as I found myself wrestling with this question.

Write Down, I am an Arab depicts the life of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. The politics is important – more on that below – but what makes the film especially gripping is the story of Darwish’s catapult to national and international fame against the backdrop of his private longings for a woman on the other side of the Palestinian-Jewish divide.

Darwish met Tamar Ben Ami in the early 1960s at a political rally – this one for the Communist party in Israel. Frequently separated geographically – he under military administration (as all Arab citizens were until 1966) in Haifa, she studying in Jerusalem – Darwish documented his feelings for her in a series of letters.

I spoke with Tamar – by phone, Facebook and email – over the course of a few days. A dancer and choreographer (the film chronicles her stint in the Israeli navy’s performing troupe), Tamar divides her time between Tel Aviv and Berlin. She describes her art – and really her entire personal life – as being shaped by her time with Darwish. Her love for him is palpable, still.

Caught up as I am as a political scientist and columnist in contemplating political arrangements – refugees, Jerusalem, borders, one-state, two-state, federation or separation – Tamar operates differently.

“It’s cliché, and maybe I sound naive, but I believe in unconditional love,” Tamar tells me when I ask her what kind of political future she envisions. She is disturbed by what she sees as the artificial divisions of nations, races, ethnicities and religions, including what she sees as a dangerous interpretation of Jewish chosenness. “On this, the occupation has been nurtured.”

And, while it’s hard to disagree, I find myself confounded. Is the Palestinian national struggle one over occupation? Is it about the West Bank settlements, the land appropriation, the checkpoints and night raids and administrative detention? Or is it about the stones and earth of Palestinian towns and villages within Israel itself to which many Palestinians long to return? And, if it is the latter, how can the two national dreams ever be squared?

In the film, we see video footage of Darwish meeting a resident of Kibbutz Yas’ur, which was founded on the ruins of Darwish’s childhood village, al-Birwa. “It’s a moment of sadness and hope,” Darwish says to the man. “The sadness is that I’m not allowed to go back to that place and you have the right to go back there. But if we have the ability to be friends and we are friends, then peace is still possible.”

On one hand, it’s a wholly human encounter. On the other hand, once we put the subject of Israeli towns, cities and kibbutzim within pre-1967 Israel on the table, we are talking about the core of Israel’s identity, one which Israelis – and most Jews worldwide – are loathe to give up. And, if I’m really honest with myself, as a (liberal) Zionist who shares the Jewish national dream of those kibbutzniks, then perhaps the pain is also mine.

Nowhere was the tension between resisting occupation and demanding more fundamental claims more evident than in Darwish’s highly controversial 1988 poem called “Passers Between the Passing Words.” There, Darwish wrote: “It is time for you to be gone. Live wherever you like, but do not live among us…. For we have work to do in our land. So leave our country, our land, our sea, our wheat, our salt, our wounds, everything; and leave.”

With the first intifada raging at the time, Tamar is certain that the poem is about the occupation, not about Israel itself. “What can the occupied do?” Tamar recalls Darwish saying. The irony is that Darwish didn’t even think it was a good poem, Tamar says. To be judged by that poem pained him, and more than anything he longed to be considered a universal poet, Tamar adds.

After the 1988 poem controversy, Tamar found herself in Paris, trying to reconnect with Darwish, who was now at the centre of Palestinian politics. While she was sitting with him, Darwish took a call from Yasser Arafat. They spoke in Arabic. She could not make out what they were saying. The next day, when she called him again, Darwish rebuffed her: “You are not my girlfriend.”

We can never know whether Darwish, who died in 2008, chose politics over matters of the heart, or whether this unkind ending was just like so many ruptures between once-lovers: prosaic and universal.

But Darwish and Tamar did have contact again. After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Darwish reached out to her in compassion. And, in 2000, Education Minister Yossi Sarid attempted to introduce two Darwish poems to the Israeli (Jewish) national curriculum. Stormy Knesset debate ensued, and the government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote. Darwish called Tamar. “My poetry is so important that over it the government nearly fell?” he mused.

Though their romance had ended, they clearly shared a sense of absurdity in how the universal language of poetry can be thrust into the forefront of the ugly struggles over land, narratives, history and invisibility. It’s a story that continues to be told, even as Tamar will always think in terms of interpersonal love as much as in terms of borders and territory.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

Israeli poet talks to JI

After years of writing poems that blend his Algerian/Arabic background and his Ashkenazi-influenced schooling, Israeli poet Erez Biton, 73, this year received the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature and poetry. Born to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, in 1942, he is the first Israeli of Mizrahi descent to win the country’s top literary honor, though he is no stranger to awards for his work.

“Poetry is like a tale of an elusive dream, but one must not give up,” Biton told the Independent. “One must, to a certain extent, pursue this elusiveness and try to catch it and change it into the poetic expression. The coping is with the controlling, the conscious, the immediate, which prevents an encounter with the twilight sensation that enables the poem to dawn.”

Biton envisions poetry as an independent, physical sense. “The poem is a continuation of you, added to you by the poetic ability,” he explained. “Just as it is difficult to catch the tale of a dream, so does the poem impose, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.”

By internalizing the poetry of such writers as Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Nathan Alterman, Yehuda Amichai, Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, Amir Gilboa, Dahlia Ravikovitch and Avot Yeshurun, Biton said he developed a poetic stance of his own. “If, at first, I wrote love poems of a boy seeking his path to the world of poems, which were defined as universal existential with no description of time and place, then, in my additional poetry, I had become totally concrete, and thus saw myself as different from others.”

Biton started on his artistic journey with the help of Elisheva Kaplan, a piano teacher at Biton’s school who stopped teaching in order to dedicate her life to translating written books into Braille. This was essential for Biton, as he lost his sight at the age of 10.

Kaplan brought some of Biton’s poems to Shimon Halkin, an Israeli poet, novelist, teacher and translator (who passed away in 1987). Upon reading Biton’s work, “Halkin suggested that I send my poetry to [the now defunct literary magazine] Keshet,” said Biton. “I received an enthusiastic letter from the editor of Keshet, Aharon Amir, in response to reading my poems ‘Jaffa Street,’ ‘Variations on One Subject of Bach,’ and more.”

When Biton lost his sight and left hand to an explosive device he found while playing, he recalled, “This was a type of loss, a death of an intimate entity, which until the age of 10 and a half, was a part of me. And, to lose that, [it’s as though] something dies in you. With this death, I am in negotiation.”

Biton decided to become a social worker instead of a writer. “There was no one I could show my poems to,” he said. However, he added, “as a result of my encounter with human suffering as a social worker, I acquired compassion, sensitivity to others, which were later absorbed into my poems.”

Biton immigrated to Israel in 1948 with his family. The year after he lost his sight, he went to school at Jerusalem’s Institute for the Blind. He received his bachelor’s in social work from the Hebrew University, his master’s in psychology from Bar-Ilan University, then worked as a social worker for many years. He also worked as a journalist and was a columnist for Maariv. His first book, Mincha Marokait (Moroccan Gift), was published in 1976.

Biton’s decision to become a social worker stemmed from his identification with the hardships involved with making aliya. His experiences have also contributed to his poetry.

“The process of my growth ripened in me foundations of lyric sensitivity that came to expression in the poetic writing,” he said. “A writing of truth can grow through a deep encounter with different life situations and I say that all human suffering is not foreign to me. Therefore, I find in myself a space of accommodation and also of the unusual and the different.”

Biton expressed gratitude for the recognition he has attained, saying if he is to be considered part of the chain of poets that includes writers such as Bialik, “a great grace will be done with me. And grace will be done with me also by those who will see me as someone who opened a certain door, because it took time until people started to talk my language.”

Biton does not see himself as a man of religion, but said, “Moroccan associations echo in me, biblical associations echo in me. All the materials I treasured, which I internalized – poems of Bialik – all the materials that I absorbed, especially the Moroccan language, it was an immense joy to me to give an echo to something from an entirely different me.

“One of the unique components in the writing of my poems is the use of expressions in Arabic…. During the healing of the internal tears, I found myself writing poems that embed in the Hebrew syntax expressions in Moroccan Arabic, which was my childhood language.”

His work has paved the way for others. “I used in my poetry groundbreaking Moroccan expressions and, eventually, other poets used the expression ‘Moroccan’ as a title to the names of their creations,” he said.

“I’m in a battle of two phases. One says blindness is a great lacking, an endless depravation of encountering the world…. On the other hand, when I am a bit more reconciled with myself, there are also the possibilities of hearing, touching and listening to the speaking of people, as a type of melody.”

Of course, not only his cultural background has influenced his writing. “On the sensory level,” he said, “I’m in a battle of two phases. One says blindness is a great lacking, an endless depravation of encountering the world … emphasized by the recognition of the memory of seeing until the age of 11.

“On the other hand, when I am a bit more reconciled with myself, there are also the possibilities of hearing, touching and listening to the speaking of people, as a type of melody. The sensation, the touch of a woman, the face of a woman, the lips of a woman – all of these are at the other side of the scale of what there is.”

Integral to his success has been his wife. “In my attempt to understand the proceeds that happened in my work, I cannot ignore the significance of my marriage to Rachel in the year 1982,” he said.

Biton’s wife, Rachel Calahorra, is an architect and graduate of the Technion in Haifa. She was born in Israel to parents who emigrated from Athens. The couple met in early 1980.

“What was special in our relationship was we believed in each other, in the intellectual capability and the emotional side of deep love,” said Biton. “Our connection as a couple led also to a mutual intellectual cultural search toward an integration … between East and West.

“The marriage, the starting of the family, and its expansion in the birth of our children, Asaf and Shlomit, sharpened in me the question of blindness and my place as a blind person in the family, as a father and a husband.”

Biton found himself writing poems like, “The Joy of Your Eyes” and “Arrangement with a Firstborn.”

“Without a doubt,” he said, “my marriage to Rachel was a very significant turnaround, not only in the course of my life, but also in my writing, with the complexity of her life with me as a blind person, in her endless support of my overall actions.”

While Biton has won other awards for his work, with the receipt of the Israel Prize this year, as well as the Bialik Prize for lifetime achievement and the Yehuda Amichai Prize last year, he said he now feels more accepted.

The Israel Prize committee described his poems as, “The epitome of courageous dealings, sensitive and deep with a wide range of personal and collective experiences centred around the pain of migration, planting roots in the country and the reestablishment of the Mizrahi identity as an integral part of the overall Israeli portrait.”

In his speech at the prize ceremony, Biton said, “My parents were like an open book to me. My mother was a collection of poetry in Arabic, carrying an ancient Jewish legacy. And, indeed, so I have become an accumulation of childhood experiences, experiences of lively observation, of freedom of movement in spaces, climbing on trees and on fences, and a lot of running.

“I was an accumulation of sounds, of dialects, or poetry, from my father’s home. Eleven years of freedom of movement and seeing … sensory treasures were collected in me … of which I make use still today.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Poet’s passion shines

From the moment I read Pat Johnson’s interview with Faith Jones prior to last year’s Limmud, I knew I wanted to read The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014).

The title of the collection wasn’t mentioned but the topic was: “erotic Yiddish poetry.” Jones, who translated Dropkin’s work into English with Jennifer Kronovet and Samuel Solomon, gave an overview of the poet’s background, which is explained in more detail in The Acrobat. That Dropkin writes with and about such passion is notable given her life’s circumstances. Born in Belarus in 1887, she and her family had to rely on the charity of relatives after her father died. While difficult, it meant that she could receive an education, and she became a writer. In 1909, she married Shmaye Dropkin, a Bund activist whose political activities forced him to flee czarist Russia, and, in 1912, Dropkin (and their son) joined him in New York.

“There,” reads the Translators’ Note, “inspired by the foment of Yiddish culture she found, Dropkin shifted from writing in Russian to writing in Yiddish…. She became a part of the thriving Yiddish literary scene, publishing widely in Yiddish newspapers and literary journals. Yet, she was publicly criticized by her male contemporaries for the perceived extremity of her work. All this time, Dropkin raised five children; a sixth died in infancy. She occasionally wrote stories and novellas in serialization for money, especially during the Depression when her family needed the income. Although the bulk of her oeuvre dates from the 1920s and ’30s, Dropkin never stopped writing poems. She wrote almost until her death in 1956.”

The Acrobat is not a comprehensive collection, but rather, as Jones explained in an interview with Leah Falk at yivo.org, the translators “chose the ones that we thought we could make into good poems in English…. The poems, even some of her quite important poems, that we did not think we knew how to work with, or that lost something in the translation that we didn’t think would be regained, we didn’t keep…. We weren’t able to capture them in the way that we felt really did them justice.”

A page-facing translation – i.e. the Yiddish poem is on the page facing the English version – those who understand Yiddish can not only engage in discussions about a poem’s meanings, but its translation. For example, the title poem, which is generally translated as “The Circus Lady,” gives an idea of the complexity of language, and the different images that are conjured by words that basically mean the same thing.

Dropkin’s poems more than withstand the test of time. Eighty-plus years later, they retain their immediacy. As Edward Hirsch writes in the foreword, Dropkin’s “lyrics come fully loaded. They are erotically frank and emotionally unabashed, deeply engendered, relentlessly truthful. They are terse and musical, like songs, and carefully constructed to explode with maximum impact.”

More than a decade in the making, The Acrobat is, remarkably, the first collection of Dropkin’s work in English, and she could not have gotten a better group of translators. Their love of the poetry comes through, as does their skill. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that Dropkin wrote in English. The Acrobat is truly an inspiring – and sometimes challenging – read. But it is more than that.

In speaking to Johnson, Jones admitted another objective. “I would like people to think about re-envisioning our forbearers as people who were more like us,” she said. “We need to really explore the people in our past and, as a historian, this is what I hope for most: that people will explore the past, understanding that these people were not like us, but in other ways were very much like us.”

In this, she and her colleagues also succeed. This is your bubbe’s poetry, as much as it is yours. And, while thought may be a little unsettling, given some of the subject matter, it is also very cool.

***

He and She
by Celia Dropkin (from The Acrobat)

He is a branch;
she – the green leaves on the branch.
From him to her flows
dark power, thick fertile sap.
She shudders with each touch of wind,
whispers and laughs,
turns the silver
of delighted eyes.
He is simple, mute.
Autumn dyes her deep
colors. The cold wind cruelly
exiles her from the branch,
while he remains the same, simple,
robust, mute.

Carol Rose’s From the Dream

Reading From the Dream, Carol Rose’s most recent collection of poetry, led me to my bookshelf, where her first collection, Behind the Blue Gate, was safely stored. This shelf is home to books that have particularly impressed me, and which I may want to read again, as well as those that have been written by friends. Rose’s falls into both groups, and From the Dream will soon be joining its older sister.

From the Dream cover — Carol Rose’s newest collection of poetry was published by Albion-Andalus Inc. in 2013.

In looking back at Behind the Blue Gate (Beach Holme Publishing, 1997), I not only enjoyed it on its own merit, but enjoyed comparing its themes and style with From the Dream (Albion-Andalus Inc., 2013). While both collections were obviously written by the same intelligent and caring person, the effects of time and experience were evident, and there is a difference in tone: the latter seems more accepting of the way of the world. My first thought was that, perhaps having grandchildren – which Rose now does aplenty – required a person to be more optimistic.

“I am not sure if it is about being a grandparent, or about living longer and suffering the losses and demise that come with age while, at the same time, learning to treasure what we have at this very moment (including partners, children, grandchildren and friends). From the Dream seems to investigate these ideas, even the humorous poems,” said Rose in an email interview, giving as an example the poem “singin like he used to,” about attending a Bob Dylan concert as an older person, which “has us reluctantly ‘aging before our very eyes,’ while still being able to laugh at the life we are blessed to continue living.”

She agreed that the poems in From the Dream are less confrontational or cynical than those in Behind the Blue Gate. “Particularly,” she noted, “when it comes to poems about women in the Bible or women in Judaism.”

Rose was quite involved in the Jewish feminist movement (from the early 1970s) and, she said, “I think that my writing was driven by a desire to create a new myth or a new narrative, or perhaps a more inclusive midrash.

“Just as there were women who were lobbying for political change, or women who were trying to create new rituals – and I was part of that effort, as well – there were also many women who were trying to create woman-centred interpretations of biblical teachings. We realized that women had only heard about biblical matriarchs (or even about Lilith) through the teachings of their rabbis or preachers. I wondered (along with many others, in various faith communities) what would happen if women began telling these same stories – but from their own point of view. To that end, I wrote some midrashic poems, including some that can be found in ‘The Crones’ section of Behind the Blue Gate.

“In those years, I was not only reading and studying the material, I was teaching and running workshops on women and spirituality, so it was very ‘alive’ in my thinking. I am not teaching that material as much, now, and there are certainly wonderful contemporary midrashic materials (by and about women) that have appeared in the last 15-20 years, so I no longer feel that same urgency.

“What I feel most drawn to, these days,” she said, “are women’s rituals, women’s dreams, women’s experience of the Holy, the angelic, and women’s encounters with Mystery – in nature, and in the lives of their family and friends. From the Dream, especially the section called ‘Shivering in the Silence,’ explores some of these ideas.”

From the Dream includes work from the mid-1990s through to recent years. When asked about the process for deciding what was to be included, Rose said, “As you know, it can take many years for a collection of poems to become a book. In the selection, many individual poems are left behind. As the new work began to emerge, I noticed that several of the earlier poems were still very much alive. From the Dream plucked them up and wove them into its theme of memory and loss. My friend, poet Di Brandt, once said that we are ‘always writing the same poem.’ I don’t know that I agree with her entirely, but I do believe that we strive to write ourselves out of pain and uncertainty, and that some of the earlier poems seemed to help me understand what it was that I was still wrestling with.”

The idea of “wrestling” in this context brings to mind Jacob’s struggle with God, and many of the poems in both From the Dream and Behind the Blue Gate are inspired by Jewish texts and beliefs, in which Rose is steeped. But her work is by no means parochial, and reflects a broad understanding of and empathy for humanity, beyond the religious, geographic, relational and other boundaries by which we separate ourselves from each other.

Born in New York City, Rose has lived in various places, and currently divides her time between Winnipeg, St. Louis and Jerusalem. Among her academic credentials are a bachelor’s in religious studies from the University of Manitoba and a master’s in theology from the University of Winnipeg, as well as graduate work in cross-cultural and international education. For several years, she has taught imagery and, according to her bio, “she also uses imagery work in a private counseling practice she shares with her husband, Dr. Neal Rose,” who also happens to be a rabbi.

“In terms of spirituality,” she told the Independent, “I suppose I would say that my frame is Jewish mysticism, that I believe that the world was created out of the word (or words); that we are part of ongoing revelation, believing that we can receive or grasp truth (sometimes with the help of a presence, a friend, an angel or a loved one); that we are loved and capable of loving; that the dead live on, that their presence (in our memory or awareness) urges us to live justly; that the created world is a gift, that we take only what we need and that we respect the cycles of time, celebrate the Sabbath, eat permitted food with awareness, offer thanksgiving, extend our hands and hearts to others. I think both books convey these sentiments.”

She explained imagery work as “similar to what we have come to know as ‘visualization,’ though my teacher (psychologist and wise woman Colette Aboulker-Muscat) preferred to call it ‘imagery’ because she believed that we can access information through any of our senses.

“When the mind is brought to stillness, through a brief breathing exercise and a directed intention (know as kavanah), we can gain a deeper connection to intuition and/or inspirational thinking. Clearly, as a writer, quieting the mind and sitting in stillness is a useful technique. But imagery work is much more complex; it is a system based on liturgical, biblical and mystical teachings that can help us contact our innermost thoughts and feelings. Using this technique can offer us healing, increased creativity and a sense of wholeness. I generally teach this method in small groups, on retreats, or as a spiritual director, with individuals of all faiths.”

In addition to being a teacher and a multiple-award-winning writer whose poetry and essays have been published in several journals and anthologies, Rose is also an editor. She knows well the power and weakness of words, and even deals with them explicitly in her work, such as in the poem “etching images,” which forms part of the “Shivering in the Silence,” section of From the Dream.

“Ah, the limitations of language,” she acknowledged. “Yes, this is a constant tug of war! How to express what one sees, senses, feels or understands? How, especially, in those moments of enormous insight, or of injustice and deep suffering, or of great love and amazing beauty? (Is it any wonder that some midrashim describe Moses as a ‘stutterer’ or a man ‘slow of speech’?) How can words capture numinous experiences? And yet, for the poet this becomes the challenge.

“Certainly, the closer we come to describing what we think, feel, understand or experience, the better we are able to communicate with others – the closer we come to the medieval notion of what it means to be human: m’daber, the one who speaks.”