A Sourcebook On Jewish Poetry

THE BOARD OF RABBIS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
PRESENTS
ONE PEOPLE, ONE BOOK 5770
Each of Us Has a Name
Great Poems of Jewish Life
Great Poems of Jewish Life
...Verse tells the story of our people...

A SOURCEBOOK FOR
EVERYTHING HAS A NAME: POEMS OF JEWISH LIFE
featuring the poetry of YEHUDA AMICHAI and ZELDA

Compiled and Published by
The Board of Rabbis of Southern California
as part of ONE PEOPLE ONE BOOK 5770

One People One Book is a citywide year of transdenominational learning produced by The Board
of Rabbis of Southern California. Several hundred people from over 25 area congregations, plus
unaffiliated readers, engage in a year‐long study of a significant Jewish book, connecting it with
traditional texts, through community‐wide programs and smaller discussion groups. The 2009‐
2010 program focusing on Great Jewish Poetry marks the fifth season of One People One Book.

General Editor: Jonathan Freund

6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, California, 90048
323 761 8600  boardofrabbis@jewishla.org  www.boardofrabbis.org

Copyright © The Board of Rabbis of Southern California, 2009
All rights reserved

Except for limited use in educational contexts, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

gratefully acknowledges congregations participating in
the interdenominational Jewish learning of ONE PEOPLE ONE BOOK 5770

Adat Ari El
Beth Chayim Chadashim
Congregation Kol Ami
Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue
Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center
Temple Beth Am
Temple Beth El
Temple Israel of Hollywood
Temple Kol Tikvah
University Synagogue

(list in formation)

Contents

Introduction – Rabbi Mark S. Diamond 5
Everyone Has A Name: Yehuda Amichai and
Zelda – Rabbi William Cutter 6
Zelda's L'chol Ish Yesh Shem – Rabbi Susan Laemmle 9

Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open:
An Introduction – Rabbi Miriyam Glazer 15

Discussion Guides / Lesson Plans 18
Naming the World and Ourselves (Zelda) 19
Open Closed Open (Amichai) 22
Yehuda Amichai’s Poetry as Midrash – Rabbi Ilana Grinblat 24
The Ancient Roots of Jewish Poetry: Psalm 104 31
The Diameter of the Bomb (Amichai) 35

Appendix
Biographies 39
About the Contributors 41
Selected Poems from "Def Jew Poetry Slam" 44

A Sourcebook for Everything Has A Name: Poems of Jewish Life
Introduction
Rabbi Mark S. Diamond
Executive Vice President, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

O ur tradition teaches that when even two people gather to study holy words, the presence of
God dwells with them. We are pleased that so many of us will, over the course of the year,
gather together to study words and ideas, learning from and with each other and our shared
tradition.

The Board of Rabbis of Southern California, as a transdenominational member organization of
rabbis, is proud to promote Jewish learning and living in all areas of life: Social Justice, Healing
and Spirituality, Professional Growth, Interfaith Activities and Media Relations. Our One People
One Book program stands at the core of our Community Learning Initiatives.

This year, we are delighted to study a variety of Jewish poems, focusing on the works of Yehuda
Amichai and Zelda, two of the most renowned and influential Jewish poets. Zelda Schneurson
Mishkovsky, known simply as Zelda, was devoutly religious, and her unique poetry draws from
classical Jewish texts and also portrays a world of personal mystical imagery. The Spectacular
Difference, published posthumously in 2004, is the first major compilation of Zelda’s poetry to
appear in English. Yehuda Amichai published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels,
and a book of short stories, and his work has been translated into thirty‐seven languages. In
Open Closed Open, his last volume of work, Amichai weaves together verses on his own
biography, history, culture, identity, love and the Bible, to create a rich banquet of words that
explore the full scope of Jewish life.

The One People One Book series is designed for a variety of educational settings, including formal
presentations; discussions in classes, book clubs and havurot; and traditional hevruta (partnered)
learning. We hope that this sourcebook will help you to understand and appreciate the many
Jewish and universal themes in these diverse poems.

To guide your study and help you gain a fuller appreciation of the richness and complexity of the
author's work, Rabbis William Cutter, Miriyam Glazer, Ilana Grinblat, and Susan Laemmle, and
Jonathan Freund, have prepared essays and other resources on Zelda, Amichai and Biblical verse.
In addition, for teachers and group leaders, we have developed a series of self‐contained lesson
plans/discussion guides on poems found in our featured books and beyond.

Rabbi Miriyam Glazer serves as the 2009‐2010 chair of the One People, One Book program, and
Rabbi Ilana Grinblat serves as a committee chair; and we are indebted to them for their devoted
leadership.

We are delighted that you have decided to join us on this journey of learning. Mishnah Peah 1:1
teaches us that there are many things in our world that are priceless, but the study of Torah is
equal to them all. Now go and study the extended Torah of our people!
Developed as part of One People, One Book, a transdenominational community learning program. 5
Copyright © Board of Rabbis of Southern California 2009. All rights reserved.

Everyone Has a Name: Yehuda Amichai and Zelda
Rabbi William Cutter, Ph.D.
Hebrew Union College‐Jewish Institute of Religion

Everyone has a name Names are not forgotten….
That God gave For we are changing. Yet the name
And that was given by one’s mother remains. What is our right
and father to bear our names, to call the Jordan
the Jordan….
The Poetry of Zelda
trans. Wm. Cutter/Marcia Falk Elegy on the Lost Child
Yehuda Amichai
trans. Barbara and Benjamin Harshav

P oetry is one of the grand achievements of the modern Jewish experience. It helped to
nurture the miraculous reemergence of the Hebrew language. It early on reflected the
diversity within the state of Israel. And it gave voice to our desire to participate in the
cultural models of the West. Our poetry reflects history, humanity, God and home.

Among the most celebrated of Israeli writers, Zelda and Yehuda Amichai embody the fullness of
that poetry. Though no two poets could be less likely companions, their disparate tones and
philosophies offer the tough and thoughtful lyricism that helps define the Jewish state and the
Jewish people.

Zelda Schneurson Mishkovski was born to a distinguished Hasidic family in Russia in 1914 and
blossomed as an artist only in her adult life. She wrote, sometimes with humor, sometimes with
awe, and sometimes with a suggestion of spiritual skepticism, about her relationship to her
husband, her experience of moments in the Jewish sacred year, and elusive moods of her own
soul. There is a surprising melancholy in many of her most subtle poems, which sometimes draw
on elusive metaphors from the depths of kabbalistic mystery. Zelda immigrated to Israel when
she was 12 and practiced her art despite the traditional gender roles in her Hasidic community.

While Zelda was known mostly in Israel, Yehuda Amichai became world famous using bold humor
and writing verse that was intended to be “subversive” in a rich variety of styles that shared a
certain accessibility and transparency. Amichai came to Hebrew poetry from a religious
upbringing in Wurzburg, Germany. He arrived in Israel in 1936, when he was 12 years old and
ripened intellectually and artistically as an Israeli. But he, like so many immigrants from Europe,
took a new name, for “Yehuda Amichai” was born and educated in Europe as Ludwig Pfeuffer, a
playful and curious youngster with a strong background in Bible and liturgy and the Hebrew
language. With an equally strong modern sensibility, Amichai developed his poetic uniqueness,
combining such experiences as warfare and lovemaking, public debunking and family attachment

into his work. (He was a soldier at five different times in his life, and much of his early poetry
reflects that experience.) He became – by mid‐life – the best known modern Hebrew poet since
Bialik, and by the mid 1980s he was one of the best known poets in the world. Israelis love the
fact that his themes and metaphors are drawn from the most concrete instances of daily life, and
Americans seem both to understand those references, and to learn a bit about that daily life that
links spiritual or textual reference with mundane activities.

Though Zelda’s “Every One Has a Name” poem is often read movingly at Jewish funerals in both
Israel and the States, a full collection of her remarkable poetry has only recently been translated
into English; unlike Amichai, she never came to this country nor gave a public reading.

Writer Marcia Falk, who has translated Zelda’s work, recalls meeting the poet the first time on a
hot summer day. Although wearing a head covering to protect her from the sun, Falk was
concerned about the rest of her slightly “relaxed” attire. “You have a secular body but a religious
head,” Zelda told her. In some sense, it seems to me, this recollection affirms Zelda’s decidedly
religious body and her surprisingly modern head, reflecting not only great humor and tolerance,
but an attention to detail that is the hallmark of most poets.

Amichai does not surprise with his secular commitments and passions; but he can surprise us
with his attachment to traditional themes and texts of Bible and liturgy, and with his earnestness
about human integrity and search for spiritual grounding. Falk met Zelda with her contrasting
body and head; I met Amichai during a walk on Venice Beach, during which he inscribed in one of
his books: “Thank you, Bill, for this walk through the Venice of the Spirits.” Amichai’s playfulness
can be seen in his (perhaps only) English poem written in my backyard in honor of my 26th
wedding anniversary: “Your love is like two trees intertwined, they embrace each other even
though they are of different species; and the sound of the lawnmowers is your 'Song of Songs.'”

Amichai’s fascination with different species – always simply written – continued throughout his
life; and references to the “Song of Songs” show up frequently as he matured. But he always
warned me against “over‐interpreting” his work; while Falk reminds us that we are driven to
interpret Zelda’s “strange anarchic Hebrew, a Hebrew belonging to stories of the pious … mixing
present with past, noun with adjective…But what vitality…!”

The poets often touched on vastly different subjects, using different poetic techniques: Amichai
developed from the traditional poetic forms of Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden and Rilke, into a more
contemporary spoken style. Zelda remained more classically Hebraic and elegiac in style, with
language which was more difficult to translate, and – like the Kabbalah – not even simple at the
basic level of first reading. A mystery from the get‐go.

Both the commonality of their Judaism and their profoundly different sensibilities are evident
from their poems about Shabbat:

When I blessed the candles One Sabbath evening, in summer,
My soul cried out, I told my father my first lie: I
Shabbat Shalom, my lonely ones, prayed at a different shul.
And they did not answer
Out of tenderness Amichai, A Lie on Shabbat

Zelda, When I Blessed the Candles

Zelda’s experience of Shabbat centers around the lighting of candles, which she unselfconsciously
humanizes, perhaps because it is she herself who is feeling lonely. For Amichai, instead of the
intimacy of candle‐lighting, there is rather the experience of youthful rebellion – a boy off on his
own on a summer evening, rather than in shul. Yet it is not a whole rebellion: He did not confront
his father with his rebellion – he skirted the issue by lying. Even for the more secular Amichai,
tradition retains its pull.

So here for your period of study are two of modern Israeli’s great creators – each of whom
participated in the remarkable cultural rebirth of the Jewish people. Both the similarities and the
differences between Zelda and Amichai are evident from the following two selections from their
rich body of work. In the lines that follow, Zelda imagines her “modest house,” not as a mere
house, but rather with the context of a glorious universe. The quotidian, the everyday, exists
within the auspices of eternity. Amichai, too, sees the everyday as potentially transcendent:
Ultimate redemption, he claims, will come when even within the “holy city” we learn to see the
true value not of things, but of simple human beings.

The modest house is partner The Redemption will have come when the
To the celebrations of the sky, tour guide says to his tour group:
The sun thrusts its burning gold into it, “You see that man there, next to the Roman
And night floods it Arch? Well, forget about the arch,
With a darkness of stars. What is important is that such a man has just
brought fruit and vegetables for his family.
Zelda
trans. Marcia Falk Yehuda Amichai
trans. Wm. Cutter


Zelda's L’chol Ish Yesh Shem (Each Of Us Has A Name)
Rabbi Susan Laemmle, Ph.D.
Dean of Religious Life Emeritus, University of Southern California
Editor, CCAR Journal: the Reform Jewish Quarterly

I.
I t doesn’t often happen that a poem enters the public domain, becoming a “fixture” of
community life and speaking to a wide range of people in a meaningful way. This is most likely
to happen in the face of death, when nearly everyone struggles in finding the right words to
capture an awesome and painful reality. For clergy officiating at memorial services and funerals,
modern poetry can helpfully complement traditional liturgy. Its contemporary idiom bridges the
gap between sanctified forms and the ongoing world in which the living remain. When non‐clergy
participate in and lead memorial programs—as they increasingly do these days—they seek out
poems offering reflection without dogma, poems that approach life and death in a broadly
serious, but not necessarily religious, manner.
Over recent decades, a handful of poems have emerged within the Jewish community as
staples, and gone on enter the general culture. This handful includes the following: “Birth is a
Beginning” by Rabbi Alvin I. Fine, “In the Rising of the Sun” by Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, and to a
lesser extent two poems often cited anonymously—“When I Die, If you Need to Weep”
attributed to Merritt Malloy and “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” attributed to Mary
Elizabeth Frye. Above all and increasingly, the stock of memorializing poetry includes a surprising
choice: a poem written in Hebrew by an Israeli Orthodox poet, Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky,
known to her readers before and after her death in 1984 simply as “Zelda.”
The outlines of Zelda’s biography are well known: immigration to Palestine from the
Ukraine with her illustrious Schneersohn family at the age of twelve, the death of her Chabad
father and grandfather shortly thereafter, attending a religious girls’ school and then teachers’
college, living in Tel Aviv and Haifa before returning to Jerusalem to stay, teaching school and
then marrying Chayim Aryeh Mishkovsky, becoming widowed after twenty one years of a strong
marriage, and —most important— publishing five books of poetry between 1967 and 1984.
Zelda won important literary prizes during her lifetime, and her reputation has only increased
since her death.
Zelda’s most famous poem “L’khol Ish Yesh Shem” (“Each of Us Has a Name”) uses simple
words and sentences to generate strong emotional power. Since its publication in 1974, it has
been gaining admiring and grateful readers in and beyond the Jewish community. The poem’s
palpable usefulness to people coming to it in English led to a gradual evolution from its strongly
gendered, literal translation—“Each man has a name”—to other ways of handling the title
sentence that recurs at the beginning of each stanza: improvising a feminine replacement when
applying the poem to a woman (“Every woman has a name”), coming up with a gender‐neutral
singular version (“Each person has a name”), and creatively achieving a formulation that invokes
both the individual and the community (“Each of us has a name”— Marcia Falk’s translation that
I’ll be using throughout this short essay).
The poem has achieved iconic status in Israel, where it is recited on every Holocaust
Memorial Day and at military funerals. The poem fits well within a life‐and‐death setting because
it traces the life cycle; its first stanza refers to the name given at birth and the final stanza, to the
name that is, as it were, given at death. The intermediate seven stanzas gradually expand the
world (and then finally contract it) in the process of adding elements to the “name” of the human
being who is born and eventually dies. As the baby, then child, and eventually adult grows up and
older, internal developments and outward experiences transform a core identity that is fairly
simple into an ever‐enlarging, increasingly complex human being. As the person’s world expands,
their self expands; in the poem’s terms, they gain a new name with each expansion.
As life moves towards its close, a certain contraction occurs—and so we circle back to the
original position. We begin life in the small, contained spaces that replace the womb—the
parent’s arms, a crib, a close‐to the‐body baby carrier of some sort, and so forth; and we usually
end life in another contained space, be that coffin or tallit or burial urn. And yet, the contraction
into death cannot really take away the enlarged, enriched name that has been built up over a
lifetime.
The poem’s process of adding naming elements to a gradually expanding, and then finally
contracting, life becomes clear as we consider the poem’s nine stanzas, one by one. From first to
last, each stanza opens with the same title line: “Each of us has a name.” Then, invariably, this
echoing line is followed by two name‐granting sources. In stanza one, these are God and the
parents (the Hebrew is “father and mother,” with Father and mother counting as one source);
and in stanza two, they are stature and smile (which also count as one element) and clothing.
In a cursory reading of the poem, each stanza’s pairing of what I’m calling “source
elements” seems to be arbitrary, with the second element simply added to the first. But upon
more careful consideration, we see that tension may well arise between the two sources of
“naming” —that they are likely to pull the person’s emerging identity between two poles. And
surely it is identity—personality, selfhood, the core of whom someone is—that “name” betokens
in this poem. Perhaps “name” stands for the person’s soul, in the way that the poet John Keats
uses that word when writing in a letter that “life is a vale of soul‐making.”

II.
So now, let us take up the stanzas in sequence:
Each of us has a name/given by God, and given by our parents.
This stanza, and the poem as a whole, builds upon the following midrash from Tanhuma,
Parshat Vayak’hel (a late fourth century collection from Palestine): “There are three names by
which a person is called. One which his father and mother call him, and one which people call
him, and one which he earns for himself. The best of all is the one that he earns for himself.” It
also calls upon a teaching that there are three partners in the creation of every new life: the
mother, the father, and God. (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30b). Here at the poem and life’s
outset, we initially assume that the hopes and expectations of Elohim (the name of God used in
the poem) will align with those of the parents; in a way, that’s what’s indicated when we give a
Jewish name to the child and bring it into the Covenant ceremonially. And yet, we all know
instances where the religious direction taken by a child or adult—the direction that leads them
closer to God—diverges from their parents. With regard to naming specifically, it is still a popular
practice to give a Jewish child both a generally used name in their native language and a Jewish
name in Hebrew or Yiddish; is this sign of dualistic identity a source of ambivalence or richness, of
a split or of complementary facets? I suppose that from the perspective developed by “Each of Us
Has a Name,” having multiple names indicates a capacious inclusion of possibilities, but I am not
sure.

Each person has a name/given by our stature and our smile/and given by what we wear.
Through reference to stature, this stanza captures the way in which humans are physical
beings whose bodies define and present them, while also pointing to the child’s remarkable
physical growth after having been brought to life. As part of the first naming element in this
stanza (even if in on a separate line in the Hebrew) the poem refers to the person’s smile, which
conveys feelings and creates social relationships. And then the second element takes the social
element even further by bringing in clothing, which disguises us even as it protects us from the
elements. Consider the degree to which babies and young children are already strongly marked
by how their parents choose, or feel pressed, to dress them; think of the traditional pink for girls
and blue for boys, of TV shows and movies generating sleepwear and t‐shirts, and also of the
worn or dirty clothes that are often the best that poor parents can provide their children with.
Consider too the degree to which adults dress to impress others or encourage/discourage contact
with them, among other ways through brand names emblazoned and sexualized parts of the
body purposely exposed or completely hidden. And finally consider how often we pick up mixed
signals from a person’s dress on the one hand and their facial expression plus body language on
the other. Especially during puberty, it’s a challenge to bring stature, smile, and clothing into a
unified personhood.

Each of us has a name/given by the mountains/ and given by our walls.
And so it is that the child’s world expands beyond the boundaries of its own body and
those people to whom its first smiles are displayed. The natural world, with its mountains and
valleys, trees and flowers, impacts all living creatures; and, following Psalm 121, human beings
often look upward to the hills when seeking divine help. And yet, at the same time that we are
enlarging our outlook and identity, we struggle to maintain the boundaries and rootedness that
provide security. We move beyond the walls of our homes, where ideally we have been well
nurtured, with some trepidation; after all, walls keep out bad things and hold us safe, even if they
do limit our scope. Over time, each of us combines mountains and walls in a different way, and
we typically spend our days moving across a spectrum between these two poles, back and forth.

Each of us has a name/given by the stars/and given by our neighbors.
Once again, this poem stretches the emerging person between two physically and
emotionally divergent poles: from the stars billions of light years away to the neighbors right next
door. Spiritually and morally, one’s obligations to what is universal can pull against what’s due to
those close at hand. A variant reading of this stanza focuses on the Hebrew meaning of
mazalot—translated by Marcia Falk and others as “stars” but referring also to the constellations,
hence potentially to the zodiac and horoscopes, and so also to fate or to luck. This meaning of
mazalot expresses the reality that aspects of the selves we become are determined from outside
ourselves and even outside our parental inheritance. At the same time, how we draw upon
what’s close at hand can soften, even change, our fate.

Each of us has a name/given by our sins/and given by our longing.
As the emerging self negotiates the territory between the vast universe of what’s fated or
luckily bestowed on the one hand, and what’s in the neighborhood of easily available support
and allegiance on the other, bad things will inevitably happen and mistakes will be made. Judaism
does not emphasize sin except during the High Holy Days, but it does stress tshuvah, best
translated as “returning”; and it knows full well that people do things of which they are ashamed
and other people, critical. At bar/bat mitzvah, parents traditionally cease being responsible for
the acts of their children, and so the reference to “sins” at this point in Zelda’s poem may allude
to that stage of development. As for “longing” (or “yearning” in other translations), doesn’t this
too enter the arena with puberty? Moving toward adulthood, and for the rest of life except
maybe near the end, longings pull us beyond established practices while the teachings of home
and religious community warn us of sinning. In the end, we are shaped by what we yearn for and
where we stray, as much as by what we stand strongly against.

Each of us has a name/given by our enemies/and given by our love.
As we move through life, it’s hard not to make enemies; that is, people who don’t like us
and don’t wish us well. It goes with the territory and is part of who we are—as much as “our
love,” which derives both from our loving of others and their loving of us. The mutuality of loving
requires greater maturity than did mere longing. Intimacy with friends and eventually with a life‐
partner is the counter‐part, in a way, of being enough of a self to have enemies. It’s worth noting
that sociopaths are loners who typically have neither friends nor enemies.

Each of us has a name/ given by our celebrations/ and given by our work.
Having achieved a certain level of selfhood and maturity, an adult stands able to fulfill
Freud’s definition of what a normal person should be able to do: “Lieben und arbeiten”— to love
and to work. That kind of loving normatively brings the Jew under the chupah (the wedding
canopy), which ideally comes about the same time as the capacity for meaningful, productive,
and socially acknowledged work. And then, again ideally, further ceremonies take place, as a new
generation bends the life cycle back toward its beginnings. At this ceremony‐rich time of life,
people’s actual names often change, directly or indirectly. With marriage, many women take
their husband’s name, while some couples handle the coming together of two family names in
other ways. With the birth of children, parents’ Jewish names are affixed to the ben/bat of their
offspring when entering the Covenant and later, when rising to the Torah. In good times and
environments, love and work complement one another to provide a foundation for the next
generation and for moving the world forward. But too often, life seems like a “zero sum game” in
which people have to choose between them.

Each of us has a name/given by the seasons/and given by our blindness.
With this reference to “seasons,” we are reminded of the yearly cycle (indeed, the
Hebrew here is literally “seasons of the year”) in which spring and summer are inevitably
followed by fall and winter. As Kohelet puts this, “a season is set for everything, a time for every
experience under heaven”—beginning with “a time for birth and a time for death.” As people get
older, they are challenged to comfortably inhabit the stage of life that they’re at, to fulfill its
responsibilities and enjoy its benefits. As the psychoanalyst Eric Erickson put this in describing the
human life cycle: “Gradually, then, and with every new strength, a new time sense appears along
with a sense of irrevocable identity: gradually becoming what one has caused to be, one
eventually will be what one has been.”(The Life Cycle Completed, page 79) And yet, in both
positive and negative ways, adults in the prime of life wear blinders, for they must focus on the
maintaining the world, both the smaller world of their private lives and the larger social world.
Then also, the “blindness” of this penultimate stanza suggests the diminishment of physical
capability as well as the narrowing of concern that some people experience when growing older.
Following that reading, this stanza’s pairing of seasons and blindness reminds us that
philosophical equanimity about life’s stages is far easier than moving into the later of those
stages yourself or being there as someone close to you does so.

Each of us has a name/given by the sea/and given by our death.
The pairing of this final stanza raises an immediate question: why is it “the sea” that pairs
with death, the stage of life toward which all the seasons and years have been heading?
Remembering that Zelda’s pairings in each case bring two things together and also place them in
opposition, we consider the sea as the amniotic fluid of life. Just as the Jewish People was “born”
when crossing the Sea of Reeds, so each baby emerges into the world on a flood of salty water.
From another slant, the sea flows back and forth endlessly, while death appears to be a fixed
point. And yet, consider this oft‐quoted parable: A horizon is a limit, not an end. I am standing
upon the seashore. A ship sails out to sea. Then someone at my side says, “She’s gone!” Gone
where? Gone from my sight—that is all. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. Just at the
moment when someone says, “She’s gone!” there are other voices on the other side ready to
take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

III.
So then, Zelda’s well‐known, much beloved poem turns out to be meaningful at time of death
because it deals with the fullness of life. It captures the way in which a person grows and
changes over time, adding layers of experience as a tree adds rings around its core. Alternatively,
we can read the poem to mean that at each stage of life, it’s as if we are starting over, in a good
way, by gaining new possibilities—new “names.” There is something to this reading, and finally
we don’t have to choose between the two.
On the literal level, each human being typically has a basic name, usually of two or three‐
words, that remains partially/largely/totally the same throughout their life, as does their genetic
make up. At the same time, the flux and flow of growing into and beyond adulthood modifies the
person and so, in effect, changes their name. To translate a French maxim: the more things
change, the more they remain the same.
I find it takes self‐discipline to start calling someone by a new name. Furthermore,
because we look at others from our own vantage point, it’s hard not to circumscribe or reduce
people as we name them, ignoring how they have changed or scaling down the broad fullness of
their being. We rarely have world enough and time to let others be all that they are becoming.
We allow their insecurity, and our own, to interfere as we simplify for the sake of comfort and
easy reference.
We also do this with ourselves, making one small aspect of our lives into our name and
presenting only one side of ourselves to the outside world. The minister Tim Kutzmark urges us to
let go of unskillful, ungenerous ways of naming, both of ourselves and others. He counsels thus:

We need one another to point to the light in the midst of the darkness. This
need is similar to the need for an astronomer to take the infinite unknown of
the night sky and name names and connections. By naming the stars, and
connecting those names, the astronomer finds order, design, balance and
harmony
Sermon “I Got a Name,” November 2001 at http://chuckshomeworld.com, rev.
February 2008 at http://www.uureading.org/sermons/sermon080203.htm)

Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky—Zelda— was such an astronomer. She added and also
removed layers from her own name, even as she named the bright spots and the dark material of
our human lives.

Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open:
An Introduction
Rabbi Miriyam Glazer Ph.D., American Jewish University
Executive Committee, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
In the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
Within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are. (O pen Closed Open, p. 6)

F irst published in Hebrew in 1998, the rich, extraordinary, autobiographical, often elegiac
Open Closed Open was the last book written by Israel’s renowned and beloved poet,
Yehuda Amichai. Amichai had been born as Ludwig Pfeuffer into a modern Orthodox family
in Wuerzburg, Germany, in the pre‐Nazi era of 1924 – and thus his, like that of so many Jews, is a
story of interruption, migration, profound transformation: from one world to another, one
culture to another, one name to another, one set of beliefs to another. He became a profoundly
questioning Israeli and, indeed, haunted by centuries of Jewish history and Amichai’s own
experiences as a soldier in Israel’s wars, Open Closed Open is an embodiment of those questions.
“You are commanded to regard yourself as if you, yourself, have come out of Egypt,” we
say at the Passover Seder. The Jewish experience, the words insist, is our experience; Jewish
history is our history; it is not about others, it is not about them. In the words of a medieval
lament:

A fire kindles within me as I recall – when I left Egypt
But I raise laments as I remember – when I left Jerusalem.

Amichai’s sensibility is like that of the medieval poet, particularly in this book. He writes
as a son, a father, a lover, a husband; above all, he writes his final book as a twentieth century
Jew, surveying the whole panorama of the Jewish experience, from the world of the Bible to the
present, so intimately that he can see even the experience of Moses within him:

I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah
I wasn’t even among the survivors.
And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.
I came to the Promised Land by sea.
No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke
within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me
by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search
For emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness
of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope,
I still have within me the lust to search for living water
with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows.
Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers.
Jewish history and world history
grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes
To a powder. (p. 7)

The matriarchs and patriarchs of the Bible are vividly real to him, ways of grasping his own
nature:

Life, I think is hard work:
As Jacob labored to be with Rachel seven years
plus seven plus seven times seven, I’ve worked
to be one with my life… (p. 12)

Indeed, the book has a whole section called “The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and
Other Midrashim” – a perfect opportunity for readers participating in One People One Book to
turn to the biblical stories about which Amichai writes, read the story about which he is writing,
and then compare what he says and how he portrays them with how participants in the group
relate to the story.
Arguably one of the most riveting of the poem sequences in this book is “Gods Change,
Prayers Are Here to Stay,” a poem haunted by the line: “After Auschwitz, no theology.” On the
one hand, the poem evokes tenderly moving memories (“Whoever put on a tallis when he was
young will never forget….”), and on the other, it challenges fundamental assumptions about God:
“God is a staircase that ascends/ to a place that is no longer there….” Or “God packed up and left
the country….” The poem reminds us of something most of us have never thought about:

We are children of Abraham
but also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham’s father.
And maybe it’s high time the grandchildren
did unto their father as he did unto his
when he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith.
That too would be the beginning of a new religion. (p. 46)

What are the “idols” and the “images” that have accrued to Judaism in our own age?
What are the “idols” and “images” we need, like Abraham, to smash?
From an Israeli perspective, one of the most moving poems in this collection is What Has
Always Been (p. 61). Drawing on the words, “zachor” and “sh’mor” – “remember” and “keep,”
words associated in Torah with Shabbat – Amichai keeps the memory of the founding of the State
alive – memories of the wars, of the early days of the State, of people the poet both loved and
lost. “Nineteen forty‐eight,” he writes, “that was the year. Now everything is different here.”
The poem conjures up the landscape of the country, as do the poems that follow – and the power
of memories associated with its towns, villages, landscapes –

We lived in many houses and left remnants of memory
in every one of them: a newspaper, a book face‐down, a crumpled map
of some faraway land, a forgotten toothbrush standing sentinel in a cup—
that too is a memorial candle, an eternal light. ("Houses (Plural); Love (Singular)"
p.89)
– and memories associated with Jerusalem. But Amichai’s Jerusalem is not the over‐
idealized place that American Jews too often conjure up. It is Jerusalem as a city lived in every
day and at the same time one burdened by theology and history. The poem, “Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?” demands that we look at the city from a radically different
perspective, recognize the knotted, burdened reality of it, the religious weight it carries, the
political realities – particularly as compared with other cities, San Francisco, Paris, London! And,
like the medieval poet, Amichai imagines the power of being a witness to history: in the form of
seeing David with Bathsheba, General Allenby … and … God. Can we begin to imagine ourselves in
any of those scenarios?
As the book draws to an end, Amichai includes “Verses for Memorial Day, a psalm of
remembering/ for the war dead. The generation of memory‐veterans/ is dying out. Half at a ripe
old age, half at a rotten old age./ And who will remember the rememberers?”
Later in the poem he asks, “How do you preserve anything in this world?” One of the
most important questions we ourselves can ask, based on the questions that Amichai poses, is
what about OUR Jewish experience do WE most remember? What role do we see ourselves and
our own family histories as playing in Jewish history? How would we imagine our stanza in
Amichai’s story?
Ultimately, in Open Closed Open, Amichai has managed to embrace the whole panorama
of Jewish life, from the days of the Bible to the end of the twentieth century, in its beauty, its
traumas and its religious overtones, its most pressing and often painful issues. He does it not as
a prophet, but as an utterly vulnerable, searching, man, a father, husband, lover, and son, a
deeply human, gifted, questioning, Jew.
Discussion Guides / Lesson Plans

 While the following Discussion Guides/Lesson Plans are designed primarily for teachers or
group leaders in a structured learning format, they may also be useful and illuminating for
casual readers or informal reading groups.

 Most of the plans are designed to encompass a single 60‐90 minute learning session. Others
are geared more towards 2‐hour or even multiple sessions.

 The plans focus primarily although not exclusively on poems found in Open Closed Open by
Yehuda Amichai and The Spectatcular Difference by Zelda. We encourage leaders and learners
to explore the other works found in those volumes.

 We advise the discussion leader to review the plan ahead of time, to determine if additional
texts or materials (a whiteboard, maybe) will be necessary, and to decide how the lesson will
best work with her or his individual group.

 Several of the lesson plans contain source sheets for distribution to the group. Poems that are
not included may be found in the featured books.


NAMING THE WORLD AND OURSELVES
Discussion Guide for Group Study of Zelda’s “Each of Us Has a Name”
by Rabbi Susan Laemmle, Ph.D.
Dean of Religious Life Emeritus, University of Southern California
Editor, CCAR Journal: the Reform Jewish Quarterly

For additional discussion material, see Rabbi Laemmle's "Zelda's L’chol Ish Yesh Shem
(Each Of Us Has A Name)" in the essay section of this sourcebook.

Zelda’s iconic poem speaks to Jews and non‐Jews, at times of loss and in other situations. Many
of Zelda’s poems—like those of other poets, especially modern ones—speak in a personal voice
and bring readers into the speaker’s inner world. In contrast, “L’chol Ish Yesh Shem” aims
directly and forthrightly at the universal human experience. “Each of us,” “yes, each of us,
every human being alive [and by implication, who has ever lived, or will ever live] has a name,”
it declares. The universality of this poem’s attention attracts us and also warrants analysis—
especially in combination with its having been written by an unequivocally Jewish poet, in the
Hebrew language. In a way, this poem exquisitely captures the way in which modern Jews are
citizens of the world while also belonging to a particular people. It also captures the way in
which each human being moves through the life cycle from birth to death.

I. READ ALOUD the poem in the English translation, pausing between stanzas. Use volunteers
or take turns. If comfortable for your group, also read the poem aloud in Hebrew.

II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS. Ask the group:
a. What are your first reactions to the poem?
b. Are there aspects of the poem and your response to it that are distinctly Jewish?
c. In what ways does it speak to you personally – and also universally, as a human being?
d. Have you ever encountered the poem before? Where?
i. Have you ever heard it in a death‐related setting?
ii. Could you imagine yourself reading it—to yourself or aloud—at a memorial
service, funeral or other commemorative event?

III. APPLYING THE POEM TO OURSELVES AND OUR LIVES
a. Break the class into pairs or small groups, and assign one of the nine stanzas to each
group.
b. Each group selects a member who will report to the class when it reconvenes.
c. Tell each group to take 10‐15 minutes to
i. Consider the meaning of each pair of “naming elements,” and then to
ii. Apply these elements, both individually and as a pair, to their own lives.
 Emphasize that there are many kinds and forms of names, including descriptive
and metaphorical names. Use their imaginations.
 See the Outline of Stanzas (following this lesson plan) for possible
interpretations. You may want to use stanza 1 as an example to the whole
group, and provide the other examples to the group examining that particular
stanza. If you prefer, you can hand out the examples themselves.

IV. RETURN TO GROUP AS A WHOLE.
a. In stanza order, have the "reporter" from each group provide a brief (1 minute) capsule
report of what their group discussed and discovered. Go through this without stopping
for questions or further discussion, so the flow of the original poem is maintained.
b. After all nine groups have reported, encourage questions and observations between
the groups concerning their stanza.
i. Ask members of a group to share some of what they discussed, how they arrived
at interpretations, etc.
ii. Ask the class if they discovered new connections or meanings within the poem
through this process.
c. Offer the opportunity for anyone to share something they learned—about the poem,
life, or themselves—in the close reading

V. CONCLUSION.
a. If leader feels the group will be comfortable with this: Invite the group to sit silently for
a few minutes and imagine Zelda’s poem being read aloud at their own funeral.
i. What echoes and memories would the various naming elements summon in
your family and friends?
ii. What “name/names” do you hope to leave behind you?
b. Alternative:
i. Give the class time to write their own versions or responses to each stanza, using
either the above question – or based on who they are at this moment in their
life. (For example: what is your name given by your stature and your smile?)

VI. READ THE POEM ALOUD AGAIN in English, and also in Hebrew, if appropriate for your
group.

OUTLINE OF STANZAS and POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS for
ZELDA'S "EACH OF US HAS A NAME" – by Rabbi Susan Laemmle
Stanza 1: God (directly and within the Jewish community) & parents (can also focus on mother
and father separately, and if one has more or less than two parents)
Stanza 2: stature and smile (physical attributes, sense of your own body, and also how you
relate to others through your body, especially your face) & what we wear (clothing; how we
present and adorn ourselves, in different situations; other kinds of "wearing").
Stanza 3: mountains (the natural world; also whatever inspires, enlarges and elevates you;
where you go for enlightenment) & walls (home; physical and psychological spaces in which
you feel secure and/or that limit you; both self‐imposed and otherwise).
Stanza 4: stars (the universal and what’s universal about you; also the zodiac, fate, luck,
bashert, predestination vs. free will; also, limitlessness) & neighbors (other human beings
beyond your immediate family; what are your obligations and your fears).
Stanza 5: sins (small and serious mistakes, personal failings that have been mended or resist
mending) & longing (sexual, spiritual and other pulls or drives that have been powerful in your
life; aspirations that have been actualized or not; dreams).
Stanza 6: enemies (people who clearly or apparently don’t like you—and people whom you feel
anger/hatred/envy/rivalry toward; past enemies who became neutral or even friends) & love
(people, creatures, and features of the world that you love—also, who and what gives you a
feeling of being loved yourself; different kinds of love).
Stanza 7: celebrations (key ritual and communal occasions in your life—personal, familial,
public; how you remember and draw upon them) & work (what you’ve done to earn money, be
a professional, be useful and/or contribute to the ongoing preservation of yourself, your family,
society and the world).
Stanza 8: the seasons (the annual cycle of each year in your life, how each season speaks to
you; how the stages of your life have progressed; what you expect/hope from the stages still
ahead) & blindness (what aspects of life and the world are hard for you to look at; where might
you be “stuck” because you are afraid/unable to look squarely at something or someone; what
things are best for you to ignore and avoid).
Stanza 9: the sea (the flow of life and the life force, from infancy until now, and forever into the
future; its eternal nature; its place in creation—and in Jewish and human history) & death (the
death of others as you have experienced it, any kind of death; your own death, as you can
imagine it in the future; your sense of finite limits, or that there is not enough time).

Open Closed Open, Poems by Yehuda Amichai
Discussion Guide for Group Study
by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, American Jewish University
and Jonathan Freund, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

Yehuda Amichai's life‐story is one of interruption, migration, transformation: from one world to
another, one culture to another, one name to another, one set of beliefs to another. He asks profound
questions of Judaism, and is haunted by centuries of Jewish history, as well as his own experiences as a
soldier in Israel’s wars. Open Closed Open, his final book, is an embodiment of these questions. Amichai
surveys the whole panorama of the Jewish experience, from the world of the Bible to the present, and
intimately seeks the experience of Moses within himself.

I. AMICHAI, THE BIBLE AND YOU
The stories of the Hebrew Bible are vividly real to Amichai, alive and breathing.
1. Examine selections from the poem The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other
Midrashim (p 17), in which Amichai "re‐imagines" biblical stories.
2. Compare Amichai's portrayal of the biblical characters, and his versions of or additions
to the stories, to the originals in the Hebrew Bible.
3. Has Amichai added to or changed the stories? Or has he expanded upon what is already
there?
4. Do you understand the Bible story differently now that you have read Amichai's poem?
How?

II. SHATTERING IDOLS
Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay (p.37) evokes tender, moving memories of Jewish
practice (“Whoever put on a tallis when he was young will never forget”), while it also
challenges fundamental Jewish assumptions (“God is a staircase that ascends/ to a place that is
no longer there,” “God packed up and left the country.”) The poem also offers a bold,
audacious proposition:

We are children of Abraham
but also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham’s father.
And maybe it’s high time the grandchildren
did unto their father as he did unto his
when he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith.
That too would be the beginning of a new religion. (p. 46)

1. What are the “idols and images” that Judaism has accumulated in our age?

2. What “idols and images” do we need, like Abraham, to smash?

3. Would following Amichai's notion indeed be the beginning of a new religion?

III. HOW DO YOU PRESERVE ANYTHING IN THIS WORLD?

At the close of the book is the poem And Who Will Remember the Rememberers? (p.169),
which begins

Verses for Memorial Day, a psalm of remembering
for the war dead. The generation of memory‐veterans
is dying out. Half at a ripe old age, half at a rotten old age.
And who will remember the rememberers?

Later in the poem, Amichai asks, “How do you preserve anything in this world?”

Questions & Activities:

1. What about your own Jewish experience do you most remember? (Encourage personal
answers about individual experiences.) How do you preserve that memory ‐ for
yourself and for others?

2. What role do you see yourself and your own family history playing in Jewish history?

3. Have the participants write a stanza from their own life, based on Amichai's poem.
Either as if they are adding their stanza to his, or as if they are creating their own poem.
a. Discuss the process of writing the stanza as well as the result.

4. In light of the above, discuss the meaning of the final two lines:

Forgotten, remembered, forgotten.
Open, closed, open. (p.171)

You might also discuss how they echo or connect with stanza 4 on page 6?


Yehuda Amichai’s Poetry as Midrash: The Real Hero
Rabbi Ilana Berenbaum Grinblat

Introduction
In her book entitled Sarah Laughed, Dr. Vanessa Ochs defined midrash as follows:

Midrash is an established rabbinic manner of interpreting the Bible by creating stories that fill in the
gaps in the text and answer some of the questions that a cryptic, enigmatic or troubling text poses.
Since the second century, scholars have been composing, repeating and then eventually writing and
printing midrash, this body of work that has put flesh on the bones of the sacred work. Midrash as an
art form is vitally alive today. New midrash is still being written, as readers and scholars continue to
study, question, and draw inspiration from the Bible. New midrash emerges as theater, music,
poetry, painting, and sculpture. (Vanessa L. Ochs, Sarah Laughed: Modern Lessons from the Wisdom & Stories of
Biblical Women (New York: McGraw‐Hil, 2005), p. xxi.)

In her work on feminist midrash, Judith Plaskow described the “open‐ended process of writing midrash”
as “simultaneously serious and playful, imaginative and metaphoric.” She explained:

While feminist midrash – like all midrash – is a reflection of contemporary experiences, its root is
utterly traditional. It stands on the rabbinic insistence that the Bible can be made to speak to the
present day. (Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper San
Francisco, 1991), p. 55.)

The poetry of Yehuda Amichai is replete with biblical references, metaphors, characters and images. In
this definition, Amichai’s work can been seen as an example of midrash, creatively filling in the gaps of
the text and making it speak to a contemporary audience.
Ochs notes that “the early authors of midrash claimed that their work was divinely inspired and
represented the true explanation of what the Bible really meant.” (Ochs, p. xxi.) Certainly Amichai’s work
makes no such claim, and indeed he expresses great skepticism about God and the religious enterprise.
The Hebrew word Israel means “one who wrestles with God.” In this sense, Amichai is a true Israeli poet,
for he struggles with God. In his creative wrestlings, his work is a contemporary form of midrash which is
both serious and playful, imaginative and yet rooted in the text. Even when Amichai challenges
tradition, his work can be understood as “traditional” because it too insists that the bible can speak to
contemporary experience.
This program is called “One People, One Book,” and therefore this session will focus on “One
poem, one story” We will study one of Amichai’s poems, based on a biblical story. This story is the
perhaps the most haunting tale in the bible: the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in Genesis chapter 22. We
will then study a classical midrash as compared with Amichai’s poem on this story. Both the rabbinic
midrash and Amichai’s poem give new life to an overlooked character in the story, and thereby uncover
a new layer of meaning. Like the rabbis of old, Amichai offers a fresh perspective, bringing the text into
our hearts in a new way. The rabbis and Amichai pull the ram of the Akedah story out of the thicket and
give him his eternal destiny.

Yehuda Amichai’s Poetry as Midrash – Rabbi Ilana Grinblat

LESSON PLAN
(all texts are provided on the following pages)

1) OPENING QUESTION
 Think for a moment of what was the most frightening moment of your life?

2) TEXT STUDY
Text 1: Genesis Chapter 22: 1‐18
a) Introduction: We are now going to read about the most frightening or
haunting moment in the life of the first Jew, the patriarch Abraham and his
son Isaac. It is a story that has haunted people ever since, and therefore been
the subject of much heated discussion and debate through the generations.
b) Break up into chevruta (pairs) and read the Genesis text. While reading: one
question to look for is who are the key characters in the story?
c) The group can rejoin together and discuss the following questions:
i. Who are the key players in the story?
ii. In particular, what is the role of the ram in the story?
iii. Is this a significant role?

Text 2: Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer (eighth century) Chapter 31
a) In the biblical text, the role of the ram in the story seems relatively minor. He
shows up in the thicket and is immediately killed. However, as we shall see,
the rabbis and later Amichai, find greater significance in this character. We
will now read a text from a collection of midrash called Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer
(Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer). This work is a compilation of interpretations of
Genesis, part of Exodus and Numbers, ascribed to Rabbi Eliezer ben
Hyrcanus, and composed shortly after 833 C.E.
b) Read the Pirkei d’ Rabi Eliezer text.
c) Questions for discussion:
i. According to this text, what role did the ram play?
ii. What significance did they ascribe to this character?
iii. Why do you think the ram was important to the rabbis? Why were
the rabbis so eager to find future uses for parts of the ram?
iv. What difference does it make that the ram’s parts survived?
v. What is the message of this passage? What might it teach us?
vi. (The instructor can note the idea that no part of the ram goes to
waste and can explore this concept.) Is this example an ancient
form of recycling?
vii. Do you know any people who embody this attitude?
viii. How can this idea be applied to the physical world?
ix. How could this idea be applied in the spiritual realm?

Text 3: The Real Hero, by Yehuda Amichai
a) Having studied the biblical text and a rabbinic midrash on that text, we will
now turn to Amichai’s poem. The poem was written in 1983 in the aftermath
of the Lebanon war.
b) Read the Amichai poem.
i. What significance did Amichai find in the character of the ram?
ii. According to Amichai, who did the ram represent?
iii. What feelings does this poem express?
iv. What is its message?

d) Compare Amichai’s poem with the rabbinic midrash.
e) Questions for discussion:
i. What do the midrash and the poem have in common?
ii. How do they differ – in style, in message, in tone?
iii. What type of emotion does each convey?

Text 4: Parable of the Old Men and the Young, by Wilfred Owen (time permitting)
a) This poem is by Wilfred Owen who was born in England in 1893. He was
killed in battle in the last days of WWI. Like Amichai, he also used the Akedah
story in his poetry to express his feelings about the war.
b) Read the poem.
i. According to Owen, what does the ram represent?
ii. Compare Owen’s Poem to Amichai’s.
iii. What do they have in common? How do they differ?
iv. How does Owen’s approach to the ram differ from both the
approach of the rabbis and of Amichai?
v. Which poem is more faithful to biblical story? Which contradicts the
biblical account?

3) CONCLUDING QUESTIONS
a) According to the Bible, who is the hero of the Akedah story?
b) According to the rabbinical passage, who is the hero of the Akedah story?
c) According to the Amichai poem, who is the real hero of the story?
d) Who do you think the hero of the story is?

CLOSING
The story of the Akedah has many heroes – depending on one’s perspective. Over time, both
God, Abraham, Isaac and the Ram have been seen as the real hero of the story. Perhaps “the
real hero” is also the poet or the midrashist, who is able to uncover the meaning hidden within
the story. The writer is able to wrestle simultaneously with the problems in the story and with
the pain of life and somehow find the strength to go on. In this sense, both the rabbis and
Amichai could be viewed as heroes of the Akedah story – as can we. Indeed, whenever we study
Torah, we are doing midrash, by adding our own voices to this discussion of the ages. By
studying these texts, we too have become part of the ram’s eternal destiny.

Text 1: Genesis Chapter 22: 1‐18

And it came to pass after these things, that God tested Abraham, and said to
him, ‘Abraham;’ and Abraham said, ‘Here I am.’
And God said, ‘Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go
to the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the
mountains which I will tell you.’
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of
his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and broke the wood for the burnt offering,
and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day
Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place far away.
And Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the ass; and I and the lad
will go yonder and worship, and come back to you.’And Abraham took the wood of the
burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a
knife; and they went both of them together.
And Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and said, ‘My father;’ and he said, ‘Here
am I, my son.’ And Isaac said, ‘Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?’And Abraham said, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt
offering; so they went both of them together.’
And they came to the place which God had told him; and Abraham built an altar
there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar
upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
And the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham,
Abraham;’ and he said, ‘Here am I.’ And he said, ‘Lay not your hand upon the lad, nor do
anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you did not withheld
your son, your only son from me.’
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram
caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him
up for a burnt offering in place of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place
Adonai‐Yireh; as it is said to this day, In the Mount of the Lord it shall be seen.
And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven the second time, and
said, ‘By myself have I sworn, said the Lord, for because you have done this thing, and
have not withhold your son, your only son; That in blessing I will bless you, and in
multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is
upon the sea shore; and your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in your
seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because you have obeyed my voice.’



Text 2: Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer (eighth century) Chapter 31

“That ram, not a part of it went to waste: the dust of the ram became the
foundation of the innermost altar of the Temple, as it is said: 'And Aaron shall make
atonement upon its horns once a year.' 1 The tendons of the ram became the ten strings
of the harp that King David used to play on. The skin of the ram became the leather
girdle around the loins of the prophet Elijah as it is said, ‘And they said to him, “He was a
hairy man, and with a girdle of leather about his loins.”’ 2 The two horns of the ram were
shofars. 3 The left one, the Holy One of Blessing blew at Mount Sinai, as it said: ‘And
there was the voice of the shofar.’ 4 And the right horn is greater than the left. God will
in the future blow it at the age to come at the ingathering of the exiles, as it is said: ‘And
it shall come to pass in that day, that the great shofar shall be blown.’ 5 Rabbi Isaac said,
‘Everything was only created by the merit of worship,’ as it is said, ‘Exalt the Lord our
God, and worship at his footstool …’ 6

1
Exodus 30:10.
2
2 Kings 1:8. The continuation of the verse is, “And he said, ‘It is Elijah the Tishbite.’” Midrashim (Rabbinic
texts) often cite the beginning of a passage in order to refer to the entire verse.
3
A shofar is a ram’s horn. Shofars were blown in the ancient Temple and are used in synagogues today
during High Holiday services.
4
Exodus 19:19.
5
Isaiah 27:13. The continuation of the verse is, “and those shall come who were lost in the land of Assyria,
and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.”
6
Psalm 99:5.


Text 3: The Real Hero, by Yehuda Amichai
(trans. by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

The real hero of The Binding of Isaac was the ram,
who didn’t know about the collusions between the others.
He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
I want to sing a memorial song about him –
about his curly wool and his human eyes,
about the horns that were so silent on his living head,
and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered
to sound their battle cries
or to blare out their obscene joy.

I want to remember the last frame
like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:
the young man tanned and pampered in his jazzy suit
and beside him the angel, dressed for a formal reception
in a long silk gown,
both of them looking with empty eyes
at two empty places,

and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
caught in the thicket before the slaughter,
the thicket his last friend.

The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.

But the real hero of the Binding of Isaac
Is the ram.



Text 4: Parable of the Old Men and the Young
By Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac, the first‐born spake and said, My father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt‐offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay is son,
When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not, thy hand upon the lad,
Nor do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in the thicket by its horns,
A ram. Offer the ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


The Ancient Roots of Jewish Poetry:
Sefer Tehillim ‐ The Book of Psalms
by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, Ph. D., American Jewish University

Introduction
The Hebrew Bible is rich with poetry: Moses’ “Song of the Sea” (and the
truncated Song of Miryam); the song of triumph that Deborah sings in the book of
Judges; the heart‐rending book of Lamentations, recited at Tisha B’Av; the visions of
the prophets; the glorious sensuality of the Song of Songs. Most of all, of course, is the
collection of 150 prayer‐poems called Sefer Tehillim, the Book of Psalms – the latter a
Greek word originally meant to be a translation of the Hebrew word “mizmor,” a song‐
with‐music, which is what many of the psalms were originally intended to be.
Who wrote the psalms? When were they written? Jewish religious tradition has
always attributed the psalms to David, who, the Bible tells us, as a young man was
called to the side of the anxiety‐ridden Saul, to soothe him through the melodies of his
harp. But scholars have a very different view. From a scholarly perspective, the
psalms, with roots in the rich poetry of the ancient middle east (Mesopotamia, Canaan,
Egypt), were written over the course of many centuries, beginning about 3000 years
ago. Accompanied by cymbals, trumpets, drums, and lutes, many of them were in all
likelihood sung by the Levites in the first and second Temples. Many others, it has
been conjectured, might have been written by poets who then sold them to pilgrims
coming to Jerusalem and looking for words to express gratitude to Adonai ‐‐ possibly
for a recovery from illness, for example, or for the blessings of abundance.
Many of the most moving and evocative psalms have been woven into our
traditional liturgy. There is a psalm for each day of the week, for example, and a psalm
that one is supposed to recite every morning. There’s a psalm for Tahanun, a daily
expression of repentance, and six psalms that comprise what is called “The Daily
Hallel,” songs of praise. We recite special psalms at a house of mourning. On festivals,
our liturgy is expanded to include six special psalms, and seven psalms precede the
Sabbath morning service. The month of Elul, before Rosh Hashanah, has a special daily
psalm, and ever since the kabbalists gathered in Safed, in northern Israel, to welcome
the Sabbath, we have had six special psalms for the “Kabbalat Shabbat” service.
Finally, on Shabbat and festivals, we add a special psalm to the Blessings after Meals.
Psalm 104, recited on Rosh Hodesh, the new month, is one of our most glorious,
and is a wonderful opportunity for communal study. The format for the first mode of
study is an adaptation of the process known as “Holy Reading.”
I: STUDYING PSALM 104 TOGETHER: "HOLY READING"
1. Participants read the psalm to themselves, to familiarize themselves with it.
2. Psalm 104 is divided into 16 sections. Drawing on women’s voices only, go around
the room, reading it aloud section by section. Each person should make note of a
word or a passage that especially moves them, touches them, challenges them.
3. Let there be a moment or two of silence, allowing everyone to process their
individual experience of the psalm.
4. Repeat step 2 – only this time using men's voices only. Again, participants should
make note of any image that calls out to them, or troubles them, or moves them.
Again, allow for silence after the reading.
5. Invite participants to share the responses they noted during the readings.
Encourage free association – what memories, thoughts, experiences, emotions,
does the image, word or line evoke? (If time permits, this step can be done in
hevrutot or small groups.)
6. Finally, ask the group: Does the psalm alter any pre‐conceived ideas you had about
how the Jewish tradition envisions God? Does the psalm effect your own ideas or
conception of God?

II: STUDYING PSALM 104 TOGETHER: "IMAGINING GOD"
1. Participants read the psalm to themselves, to familiarize themselves with it.
2. Go around the room, each participant reading aloud one section of the psalm.
3. Divide into "hevrutot,” groups of two. Ask each group to identify at least five
different ways that the psalmist envisions God’s role in the universe and on the
planet. For example:
 God is often treated, in Jewish liturgical tradition, as Sovereign or Ruler.
This psalm has much more vivid and concrete ways of envisioning the Holy
One than the abstract “Sovereign.” What titles would you give for the ways
God is portrayed here (e.g., “Interior Decorator”)?
 In what ways does the psalmist envision God creating beauty and order in
the universe, and order for the planet?
 In what ways is nature envisioned as an interdependent ecological system?
What role do human beings play in that order?
4. Come together and share each hevruta's insights. As a group, consider why, or
why not, the penultimate line of the psalm is necessary: May transgressors
vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.
a. Does the line destroy the feeling evoked by the psalm?
b. Or would the image of the world evoked by the psalm be incomplete
without a reference to evil?

ROSH HODESH: CELEBRATING A NEW MONTH
Psalm 104

1 Bless Adonai, O my soul,
Adonai, my God, You are very great—
With majestic glory Your garment, You
dress in light like a robe
and hang the heavens like drapes;

2 from the upper waters, You fashion beams for Your chamber,
turning clouds into a chariot, riding on wings of the wind.
You turn the winds into messengers, into blazing angels of fire,
as You set the earth on a site from which it will never be shaken.

3 Once, deep seas covered the land like a cloak—
the waters stood over mountains—
You rebuked them, and they fled—from the sound of Your thunder
they hurried away,
They rose up the mountains, they sank down into valleys—
into the very places You arranged for them,
within the boundaries
You chose.

4 So that never again would they cover the earth,
You send springs into rivers and flowing mountain streams—
the wild animals all drink—wild asses
slake their thirst.

5 Birds of the sky rest above them, and send out their song from branches of
trees.
You make the grass grow to feed cattle,
and You make grains so human beings
can bring forth bread
from the earth, sustaining the human heart—

6 You make wine to gladden the human heart,
to make faces glisten as if from oil.
The trees of Adonai drink their fill—the cedars of Lebanon God planted—
birds build their nests there, and storks
make their home amid cypress.

7 High mountains are for the gazelles, cliffs of rock
shelter the little shrew mouse.

8 You made the moon to measure the seasons; the sun knows when to set.
You bring down darkness, and there is night,
all the beasts of the forest stir,
young lions roar for their prey, seeking food from You
until, at daylight, they regroup,
go back to their dens to lie down,
just as people go out to work
to labor until evening.

9 How great are Your works, Adonai: You fashioned all life with wisdom,
The earth is filled with Your creations!
Here is the sea, great and wide, where ships sail—
It teems with creatures—small ones and large—
There is the Leviathan You fashioned to frolic with!

10 All of them look to You to provide food in its season.
When You offer it, they gather it up.
when You open Your hand,
they are well satisfied.

11 But they panic when You hide Your face
and when You take away their breath, they perish—
they return to the dust from whence they’ve come.

12 With Your breath, life is created; You renew the face of the earth.

13 May the glory of Adonai endure forever,
may Adonai rejoice forever in these works,
Who makes the world tremble
merely by looking,
Who touches the mountains, and they smoke.

14 I will sing to Adonai as long as I live, all my life I will sing praises to God
May my words be sweet to the Eternal One, as for me, I rejoice in Adonai

15 May transgressors vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.

16 O my soul, bless Adonai, Praise be to God, Hallelu‐Yah.

Translated by Miriyam Glazer
from Psalms of the Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to their Beauty, Power and Meaning: a new
translation & commentary in memory of David L. Lieber by Miriyam Glazer (NY: Aviv Press,
2009)


The Diameter of the Bomb by Yehuda Amichai
Discussion Guide for Group Learning
by Jonathan Freund, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

See separate pages for two different translations of this poem. The leader may decide
to use only one translation, or may use both throughout the lesson, comparing and
contrasting how responses to the study questions might change according to the
different translations.

I. BREAKING DOWN THE CIRCLE
Although the poem describes an ever‐widening circle, it is also very tightly structured,
both formally and thematically.
5. Identify and examine the following possible sections of the poem and the
transitions between them.
a. Clinical. Personal. Global. Divine.
b. What are the characteristics of each section? What differentiates one
section from the others?

II. OPENING UP THE CIRCLE

1. What or who causes the circle to widen? Why?
a. Example: Why does the man mourning the woman's death include the
entire world?
2. What is the most powerful force in the circle? Consider this in physical,
psychological and spiritual terms.

III. CIRCLING AROUND – Looking for Meaning
Amichai wrote this poem in response to a specific bombing, and it has become one of
his most widely published, read and quoted works.
1. Is this poem solely about terrorism and its victims?
a. Can it be applied to the bombs of warfare? To bombs dropped from jets
or bombs left on trains or bombs strapped to bodies?
2. About which of the following historical events could this poem be read or
discussed? Why or why not?
a. Dresden in World War II
b. London in World War II
c. Hiroshima
d. The Vietnam War
e. The Weatherman
f. 9/11
g. The London Bus Bombings
h. The Mumbai bombings
i. Any other you can think of…
3. In any circle, the diameter widens (or lengthens) an equal distance in all
directions. Amichai pointedly does not identify the nationality or ethnic
background of either victims or perpetrator.
a. Does the circle of this poem – and the circle of every bomb – include all
those affected by the bombing?
b. Does it include witnesses?
c. Does it include those who made, delivered, and exploded the bomb, and
their families?
d. Does it include those who see the carnage on television?

III. OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE
Re‐read the last lines: that reaches up to the throne of God and / beyond, making / a
circle with no end and no God.
1. What is beyond the throne of God?
2. If the eternally widening circle has no end and no God, where is God?
a. Optional: compare I Kings 19:11‐12
3. Is there any way for God to be inside the circle?

Additional Source:
An Israeli documentary called "Diameter of the Bomb" (2005) is available online. It
examines a specific bus bombing using the poem as inspiration. It is 82 minutes long.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCIjxQFj_7g
or
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/diameter_of_the_bomb/

The Diameter of the Bomb
by Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

Translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell
from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Harper & Row 1986)
The Diameter of the Bomb
by Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range – about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometres away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

Translated by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes.
from Selected Poems, Yehuda Amichai (Faber and Faber 2000)
ZELDA SCHNEURSON MISHKOWSKY
Zelda (Schneurson Mishkowsky) (1916 ‐ 1984, b. Chernigoff,
the Ukraine) was born into a famous Chassidic family. His
father was a rabbi and her mother, devoutly Orthodox, was
also well‐read in modern Hebrew, Russian, and European
literature. They immigrated to Jerusalem in 1926. She
studied at a religious school for girls and then at a teacher's
seminary. She then studied art and painting in Tel Aviv and
later moved to Haifa, where she worked with handicapped
children. When her husband died she returned to Jerusalem
and taught, retiring after almost 50 years.
Known simply as Zelda, she began composing poetry as a teenager but began publishing
only in 1968. Awarded the Bialik Prize, she published six volumes during her lifetime
before dying of an illness. A complete collection of her work was published
posthumously.
Acclaimed for her directness, precision and simplicity, and well‐loved by the
predominantly secular Israeli readership, Zelda`s memory and symbolism are steeped in
traditional and Chassidic allusions.

Books Published in Hebrew
Leisure, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1968 [Pnai]
The Invisible Carmel, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971 [Ha‐Carmel Ha‐Ee Nir`a]
Be Not Far, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975 [Al Tarhek]
Neither Mountain nor Fire, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1977 [Ha‐Lo Har Ha‐Lo Esh]
Tiny Poems, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1979 [Shirim]
The Magnificent Other, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1981 [Ha‐Sheni Ha‐Marhiv]
Beyond All Distance, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984 [She Nivdelu Mi‐Col Merhak]
Zelda`s Poems, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985 [Shirim]

Books in Translation
The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda
English: Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press, 2004

Individual poems have been published in: Afrikaans, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish,,Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and
Vietnamese.

Copyright©2004 The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. All rights reserved
YEHUDA AMICHAI
Yehuda Amichai (1924‐2000) was born to a religious family in
Wurzburg, Germany, and was raised speaking both Hebrew
and German. His family immigrated to pre‐state Israel in
1936. Amichai served with the British Army's Jewish Brigade
in World War II and fought in the elite Palmach unit during
Israel's 1948 War of Independence. He studied literature and
biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and
was poet in residence at numerous universities, including
Berkeley, NYU and Yale. Amichai published 13 books of
poetry; he also wrote two novels, a collection of short
stories, children's books, and plays which have been
performed in the USA, Germany, Italy, Poland and Holland. His work has been published
in 40 languages, and is included in high school and university syllabuses worldwide.
Amichai received numerous prizes and honors for his work, as well as Honorary
Doctorates. He became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters (1986), and a Distinguished Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences (1991). His work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish
Literature" (2001), and in innumerable international anthologies. His collections of
poetry available in English include Open Closed Open (Harcourt Brace, 2000); The
Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai: Newly Revised and Expanded Edition (1996); A Life of
Poetry, 1948‐1994 (1995); Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers (1989);
Poems of Jerusalem (1988); The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers (1983); Love
Poems (1981); Time (1979); Amen (1977); Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (1973); and
Poems (1969). In 1982, Amichai received the Israel Prize for Poetry and he became a
foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. He
lived in Jerusalem until his death on September 25, 2000.

A Selected Bibliography

Fiction
Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963)
The World Is a Room and Other Stories (1984)

Poetry in Translation
A Life of Poetry 1948‐1994 (1995) Poems: English and Hebrew (1994)
Amen (1977) Selected Poems (1968)
Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (1971)
Fingers: Recent Poems (1991) Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (1973)
Exile at Home (1998) The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai (1988)
I Am Sitting Here Now (1994)

Love Poems (1981)
Copyright©2004 The Institute for the Translation of
On New Year's Day, Next to a House Being Hebrew Literature
Built (1979)
Open Closed Open: Poems (2000)
Poems of Jerusalem: A Bilingual Edition
(1988)
About the Contributors
Rabbi William Cutter, Ph.D. is Steinberg Emeritus Professor of Human Relations at
Hebrew Union College‐Jewish Institute of Religion, where he held the Paul and Trudy
Steinberg Chair in Human Relations, and was Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature
and Education. He has taught at HUC‐JIR since 1965, was Founding Director of the Rhea
Hirsch School of Education, Director of the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies, and
Founding Director of the Kalsman Institute on Judaism and Health.
Dr. Cutter has published over 50 scholarly articles and essays, and over 100 popular
articles on literature, health and healing, and Jewish education. He has edited or served
on the editorial committee for more than 40 books for the prominent publisher
Berhman House Books. He is also editor of the Festschrift: History and Literature, essays
in honor of Arnold Band (Scholars Press).

He has served on numerous community advisory boards and committees, and has been
on the Board of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Committee for the
Siddur of the Reform Movement. Rabbi Cutter remains active in several projects in
Israel, where he assists in the development of chaplaincy programs, and works on his
Hebrew literary publishing projects. He also continues to teach at the College‐Institute.

Rabbi Susan Laemmle, Ph. D. serves as editor for the CCAR Journal: the Reform
Jewish Quarterly and is Emeritus Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern
California. Prior to assuming the dean position in 1996, she was Hillel director at USC
and before that, at Valley & Pierce Community Colleges.

While at USC, Rabbi Laemmle contributed to the flourishing diversity of campus
religious life, both in spiritual/philosophic traditions and in interfaith learning. She
played a meaningful role in responding to and planning for campus crises, and in the
ceremonial and communal life of the university. She taught freshman seminars, modern
drama, and an innovative General Education course, Literature & the Choosing Self.
Rabbi Laemmle brought to USC the highly successful What Matters to Me & Why
program created at Princeton in the 1980’s.

Rabbi Laemmle was ordained by Hebrew Union College‐Jewish Institute of Religion, New
York. She holds a B.A. from USC, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from
UCLA—all in English Literature. She delights in combining her literary background with
her rabbinic commitment through projects like “One People, One Book.” She also enjoys
helping people include literary works, especially poetry, in liturgical settings. She has
written and spoken widely about religion in higher education, both within and beyond
the Jewish community.

Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, Ph.D. is professor of literature, chair of the Literature,
Communication, and Media Department at American Jewish University, a member of
the executive committee of the Board of Rabbis, and a 2010 Greenfaith Fellow. Her
Torah commentaries, personal and literary essays, study guides and reviews have been
widely published in books, magazines, and journals. Rabbi Glazer has been a popular
lecturer and Visiting Scholar at synagogues throughout the country, and at UCLA, USC,
and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as in Denmark and Finland. Her most
recent and celebrated book is Psalms of the Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to their Beauty,
Power and Meaning: A New Translation and Commentary in Memory of David L. Lieber
(Aviv Press, 2009). Previous books include Dancing on the Edge of the World: Jewish
Stories of Faith, Inspiration, and Love and Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction
and Poetry by Israel Women Writers; she also edited The Bedside Torah.

A dedicated ethnic/healthy/Jewish foodie, she co‐authored The Essential Book of Jewish
Festival Cooking: 200 Seasonal Recipes and their Traditions (Harper‐Collins) and has
written for Bon Appetit and the L.A. Times. In addition to her role at the Board of Rabbis
and frequent teaching in the community, Rabbi Glazer serves on the board of the Jewish
Women’s Theatre and the Editorial Board of the Rabbinical Assembly.

Rabbi Ilana Berenbaum Grinblat teaches Midrash (biblical interpretation) at the
American Jewish University's, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and at the Florence
Melton Adult Mini‐school. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the
Southern California Board of Rabbis. Formerly, she served for five years as the rabbi of
Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach, CA and for two years at Temple Ner Ma'arav in
Encino, CA. She is the wife of Tal (a franchise lawyer) ad mother of two children, Jeremy
(age 5) and Hannah (age 2). Her current writing explores the spirituality of parenthood.

Raised in Washington, D.C., Ilana grew up immersed in politics and the cultural arena of
our nation's capital. She spent her summers working on Capital Hill and other
organizations in D.C., and also worked at the American Jewish Committee in
Washington, strengthening intercultural relations between the Jewish, Latino, African‐
American and Polish‐American communities on a national level.

Her passion for community building then brought her to Los Angeles where she was
ordained as a rabbi at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. She has interned at Beit
T'shuvah, taught at the Milken Community High School, and served as rabbi first at B'nai
Ami synagogue in Chatsworth and then Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach. During this
time, she had her two children and began writing about the spiritual changes of
becoming a parent. She developed a curriculum for parents which she taught at the
Long Beach Jewish Community Center. She continues as a pulpit rabbi in Encino, and
focuses on her writing and most of all her family.

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond is the Executive Vice President of the Board of Rabbis of
Southern California, a multi‐denominational organization of more than 300 rabbis. He
also serves on the senior management team of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los
Angeles. Rabbi Diamond received his rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York, and is a Magna cum Laude graduate of Carleton College. Prior to
joining the Board, he served as rabbi of congregations in metropolitan San Francisco,
Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York.

Rabbi Diamond is a fellow of the 2007‐2010 Rabbinic Leadership Initiative of the Shalom
Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is a member of the Ethics Resource Committee of
Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, the California State Advisory Committee on
Institutional Religion, the executive committee of the United Jewish Communities
Rabbinic Cabinet, and is a past chairman of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders.
He is the author of numerous articles on Jewish life and thought, and founded the "Ask
a Rabbi" forum for America Online. His sermons have been published in Torah Aura's
"Learn Torah With" series. His articles and book reviews have appeared in the Jewish
Journal of Greater Los Angeles, the Northern California Jewish Bulletin and the
Washington Jewish Week.

Jonathan Freund worked for over 20 years in various capacities in theater, film and
television at Manhattan Theater Club, Williamstown Theater Festival, Paramount
Pictures, HBO, Warner Bros. and Punch Productions, among many others. In 2006, he
received a Masters in Jewish Education from the University of Judaism. Prior to joining
the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, he ran programs with the Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation, Storahtelling, and Camp Alonim. He has taught Torah
and Judaica, to adults and youth, at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Adat Ari El, University
Synagogue, Shomrei Torah Synagogue, Milken Community High School and for the
Jewish Federation. As a writer, he contributed to the 2007 edition of the Encyclopedia
Judaica, and to Murder Most Merciful: Essays on the Ethical Conundrum of 'The
Judgement of Herbert Bierhoff' (Studies in the Shoah), edited by Michael Berenbaum.

With the Board of Rabbis, Jonathan is the inaugural Director of Educational &
Interreligious Programs, overseeing the Board's educational and interreligious activities,
including interfaith missions and other programs advocating a positive, nuanced vision
of Israel; the One People, One Book transdenominational literary program; and lifelong
education for judicatory leaders, clergy and community leaders.
Mayrav Saar is the program director for the Board of Rabbis. Before joining the board,
Saar enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist. Her work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, and many other publications.
Saar earned her journalism degree at Northwestern University in Chicago and worked
around the world as a reporter before returning to her native Los Angeles.

Selected Poems from
DEF JEW POETRY SLAM:
Opening Night for One People, One Book 5770

The following poems were performed at the Def Jew Poetry Slam on November 10,
2009, as part of the opening night for One People, One Book 5770. We provide them
here to encourage you to continue to read, discuss, study, examine, and wrestle with
other poems about Jewish life.
Being Jewish in a Small Town
by Lyn Lifshin
someone writes kike on want blond hair
the blackboard and the billowing from their
“k’s” pull thru the car. They don’t know
chalk, stick in my my black braids
plump, pale thighs. smell of almond.
Even after the high I wear my clothes
school burns down the loose so no one
word is written in dreams who I am,
the ashes. My under will never know
pants’ elastic snaps Hebrew, keep a
on Main St because Christmas tree in
I can’t go to my drawer. In
Pilgrim Fellowship. the dark, my fingers
I’m the one Jewish girl could be the menorah
in town but the 4 that pulls you toward
Cohen brothers honey in the snow.
From Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, edited by
Marian Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (Penguin, 1994). Originally appeared in Ghosts
of the Holocaust, edited by Stewart J. Florsheim (Wayne State University Press, 1989).
Copyright © 1989 by Lyn Lifshin.. www.lynlifshin.com
Song of Songs
adapted from the Biblical text by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer and Mayrav Saar

Woman: Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses!
Your sweet loving
is better than wine

You are fragrant,
You are myrrh and aloes
All the young women want you.

Man: My love, I dreamed of you
as a mare, my very own,
among Pharaoh's chariots

Woman: My king lay down beside me
and my fragrance
wakened the night

All night between my breasts my love is a cluster of myrrh,
a sheaf of henna blossoms
in the vineyard of Ein Gedi

Man: And you, my beloved,
how beautiful you are!
Your eyes are doves

Woman: You are beautiful, my king,
and gentle. Wherever we lie
our bed is green
Our roofbeams are cedar,
our rafters fir.

Man: Your breasts are two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
grazing in a field of lilies.

46
Before day breathes,
before the shadows of night are gone,
I will hurry to the mountain of myrrh,
the hill of frankincense.

You are all beautiful, my love,
my perfect one.

An enclosed garden is my sister, my bride,
a hidden well, a sealed spring.

Your branches are an orchard
of pomegranate trees heavy with fruit,
flowering henna and spikenard,
spikenard and saffron, cane and cinnamon,
with every tree of frankincense,
myrrh and aloes,
all the rare spices.

Woman: Awake, north wind! O south wind, come,
breathe upon my garden,
let its spices stream out.
Let my lover come into his garden
and taste its delicious fruit.

Man: I have come into my garden,
my sister, my bride,
I have gathered my myrrh and my spices,
I have eaten from the honeycomb,
I have drunk the milk and the wine.

Feast, friends, and drink
till you are drunk with love!

Translation by Chana & Ariel Bloch
47

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car
by Dan Pagis

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I

Translated by Stephen Mitchell
From Holocaust Poetry, compiled by Hilda Schiff (St. Martin's Griffin; Reprint, 1996), and The
Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. by T. Carmi (Penguin Classics 2006)
48
Shema
by Primo Levi

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
from Shema: Collected Poems by Primo Levi (Menard Press 1976)
49
Why I am a Pacifist
by Franci Levine‐Grater

The parents of my parent's parents The streets I walk are golden,
made their way to where I am more at ease
I would not know than even in their dreams.
from hunger pangs, pogroms, I see this sacred world
a fate cast in fire not through their bloodshot eyes
and for this
Their memories are for blessing to bless them for this blessing
daring to imagine
They cracked the yoke and for my children's children
of violence born I am a pacifist.
of fear and lack
so that I might bear only
what weight I choose. And I do,
carrying hope and my blood's memory
of slavery and sacrifice
like shiny epaulets, dangling
from my clean, grateful shoulders.

from Rebbetizin's Tattoo poems by Franci Levine‐Grater, http://rebbitzinstattoo.blogspot.com
50

Allen Ginsberg's mother Naomi suffered from severe psychosis and paranoia, and was in and out of institutions
throughout her life. She died in a mental hospital when Allen was 30. Kaddish was not read at her graveside because
there wasn't a minyan.
Kaddish, Part I
by Allen Ginsberg
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894‐1956

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of
Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the
Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm‐‐and your memory in my head three years after
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud‐‐wept, realizing how we suffer
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew
Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers‐‐and my own imagination of a withered leaf‐‐at dawn
Dreaming back thru life, Your time‐‐and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,
the final moment‐‐the flower burning in the Day‐‐and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled
bed that never existed‐like a poem in the dark‐‐escaped back to Oblivion
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its
disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all‐‐longing or inevitability?‐‐while it lasts, a Vision‐‐anything
more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue,
the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the
sky an instant—and the sky above‐‐an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to‐‐as I walk toward the Lower East Side‐‐where you walked 50
years ago, little girl‐‐from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on
the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark
51
toward candy store, first home‐made sodas of the century, hand‐churned ice cream in backroom
on musty brownfloor boards
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be
mad, in a dream‐‐what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window‐‐and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and
over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk‐‐in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First
toward the Yiddish Theater‐‐and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now‐‐Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the
West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes
old as you ‐‐Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me‐‐Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as
the universe‐‐and I guess that dies with us‐‐enough to cancel all that comes
What came is gone forever every time
That's good! That leaves it open for no regret‐‐no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even
toothache in the end
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul‐‐and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering
itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger‐‐hair and teeth‐‐and the roar of bonepain, skull bare,
break rib, rot‐skin, braintricked
Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy,
you're done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it‐‐Done with yourself at
last‐‐Pure‐‐Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all‐‐before the world
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened
telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands
No more of sister Elanor,‐‐she gone before you‐‐we kept it secret you killed her‐‐or she killed
herself to bear with you‐‐an arthritic heart‐‐But Death's killed you both‐‐No matter
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks‐‐forgetting,
agrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar‐‐by standing room
with Elanor & Max‐‐watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch‐hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirtspants, photograph of 4
girls holding each other round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave‐‐lucky to have husbands later
You made it‐‐I came too‐‐Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and will gream on to his
last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer‐‐or kill‐‐later perhaps‐‐soon he will think‐‐)
52
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now‐‐tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt‐‐what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first‐‐to you‐‐and
were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark‐‐that‐‐in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the
black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull in the grave, or a box
of worm dust, and a stained ribbon‐‐Deaths head with Halo? can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence, than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have‐‐what you had‐‐that so pitiful‐‐yet Triumph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower‐‐fed to the ground‐‐but made, with
its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate
hospital, clothwrapped, sore‐‐freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife‐‐lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy‐‐even in the Spring‐‐strange ghost thought some‐‐Death‐‐
Sharp icicle in his hand‐‐crowned with old roses‐‐a dog for his eyes‐‐cock of a sweatshop‐‐heart of
electricirons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out‐‐clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts‐‐
begotten sons‐‐your Communism‐‐'Paranoia' into hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a
year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over midnight
Accountings, not sure. His life passes‐‐as he sees—and what does he doubt now? Still dream of
making money, or that might have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your
Immortality, Naomi?
I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses‐‐headed to the End.
They know the way‐‐These Steeds‐‐run faster than we think‐‐it's our own life they cross‐‐and take
with them.
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal
changed‐‐Ass and face done with murder. In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia,
shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept. Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me,
beginningless, endless,
Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore Thee, Heaven, after Death,
only One blessed in Nothingness, not
53
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity‐ Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day,
some
of my Time, now given to Nothing‐‐to praise Thee‐‐But Death This is the end, the redemption
from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean
by weeping
‐‐page beyond Psalm‐‐Last change of mine and Naomi‐‐to God's perfect
Darkness‐‐Death, stay thy phantoms!

from Kaddish and Other Poems: 1958‐1960 (City Lights 1960)
A recording of Allen Ginsberg reading the entire text of Kaddish is available through www.allenginsberg.org
54

Daiyenu
by rachel kann

had you‐i been given but seconds in this unreal reality,
and the ten‐thousand things not made themselves known to me‐you,
daiyenu,
had the ten‐thousand things made themselves known to me‐you,
and your‐my blood not thudded circuitously, stubbornly,
daiyenu,
had your‐my blood thudded circuitously, stubbornly,
and these atoms not stayed gathered into matter as me‐you,
daiyenu,
had these atoms stayed gathered into matter as me‐you,
and you‐i not been born earthly entity,
daiyenu,
had you‐i been born earthly entity,
and these lungs not breathed me‐you,
daiyenu,
had these lungs breathed me‐you,
and you‐i not strengthened from struggling,
daiyenu,
had you‐i strengthened from struggling,
and the time‐space web not caught me‐you,
daiyenu,
had the time‐space web caught me‐you,
and you‐i not made manifest believed‐in possibility,
daiyenu,
had you‐i made manifest believed‐in possibility,
and never felt faith inside me‐you,
daiyenu,
had you‐i felt faith inside me‐you,
and not lost ego‐identity,
daiyenu,
had you‐i lost ego‐identity,
and not detached from a conceptually separate me‐you,
daiyenu,
had you‐i detached from a conceptually separate me‐you,
and never found inner tranquility,
daiyenu,
had you‐i found inner tranquility,
and never let angel‐death tongue‐kiss me‐you,
daiyenu,
55
had you‐i let angel‐death tongue‐kiss me‐you,
and not answered with reciprocity,
daiyenu,
had you‐i answered with reciprocity,
and not still vibrated energy for eternity,
had you‐i been given but seconds in this unreal reality,
had it all been arbitrary,
had it all been but a word,
a breath,
a blink,
a touch,
a grace,
a pulse,
a truth,
daiyenu,
daiyenu,
daiyenu.

http://rachelkann.com/
56
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