Author: Bogi

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A poem for Elul! Teshuvah by Rachel Barenblat

To help along your repentance and self-reflection, we share this Elul poem from Rachel Barenblat’s Open My Lips: Prayers and Poems. This is one of two Rachel Barenblat collections we published in our Jewish Poetry Project imprint; the other one is Texts to the Holy.

Open My Lips cover art, featuring a painting of a hand wrapped in t'filin pointing at a place in the Torah text.

Teshuvah
by Rachel Barenblat

God and I collaborate
on revising the poem of myself.

I decide what needs polishing,
what to preserve and what to lose;

God reads my draft with pursed lips.
If I really mean it, God

sings a new song, one strong
as stone and serene as silk.

I want this year’s poem
to be joyful. I want this year’s poem

to be measured like flour,
to burn like sweet dry maple.

I want every reader
to come away more certain

that transformation is possible.
I’d like holiness

to fill my words
and my empty spaces.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written
and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:

who will be a haiku and who
a sonnet, who needs meter

and who free verse, who an epic
and who a single syllable.

If I only get one sound
may it be yes, may I be One.

*

Thank you for reading! If you appreciated this poem, we offer free shipping on the book within the US. We also have more information to entice you:

This volume of contemporary liturgical poetry is both a poetry collection and an aid to devotional prayer. Open My Lips dips into the deep well of Jewish tradition and brings forth renewed and renewing adaptations of, and riffs on, classical Jewish liturgy. Here are poems for weekday and Shabbat, festival seasons (including the Days of Awe and Passover), and psalms of grief and praise. Open My Lips offers a clear, readable, heartfelt point of access into the Jewish tradition and into prayer in general.

Those who wish to begin a prayer practice in English but don’t know where to start will find this volume offers several starting points. These poems could be used to augment an existing prayer practice, Jewish or otherwise ­— either on a solitary basis or for congregational use. For the reader of poetry unfamiliar with liturgical text, they can serve as an introduction to prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular. And for the pray-er unfamiliar with contemporary poetry, these poems can open the door in the other direction.

We offer another way of preparing for the High Holiday season as well – have you checked out our calendars for the upcoming Jewish year? We have cats and also plants, for the cat and/or plant lover in your life. Start your new year with us!

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Torah in a Time of Plague: Introduction

Let’s talk about our latest book, Torah in a Time of Plague! It’s now available in our webstore, and we have been discussing it chapter by chapter on Twitter under the hashtag #TorahInATimeOfPlague, and now – as requested 🙂 – we will also make these discussions into blog posts.

There are many interesting, unique and/or lesser-known ideas in this book, and now we’ll be able to share them with you!

Torah in a Time of Plague, deposited on a pillow with animal print sequins.
We have print copies!

We begin with editor Erin Leib Smokler’s introduction that talks about “Theological Vertigo in Proximity to Plague”.

The term “theological vertigo” is from Avivah Zornberg, who uses it to discuss situations of being near death.

“[T]he reaction is a sense of theological vertigo, of asking what does anything mean in that case. If it’s really just a matter of a millimeter—it could go this way, it could go that way—how do we understand God’s providence?”

Zornberg points out that it’s a common Biblical interpretation that this was the cause of Sarah’s death, because of what happened to Isaac. Sarah did not think Isaac was killed, but she knew that he was almost killed, and she couldn’t live on knowing that.

Smokler points out that this is now our shared experience because of COVID-19, and now we’ll also need to deal with that.

(She also gives a Talmudic example about the destruction of the Temple related to how to go on in a situation like this, but you’ll see that in the book,)

The book has five sections:
1: Theology of Plague
2: Jewish Community and Practice Under Duress
3: History and Literature of Plague
4: Quarantine Reflections
5: Time in Unprecedented Times

and we’ll gradually make our way through these!

Hopefully by so doing, we’ll have a new understanding of what it means to have lived through something when we were near death – and also how our ancestors lived through those times, and what they thought about them.

…They thought some surprising things, as we’ll see next time in Chapter 1: “Covid-19 and the Theological Challenge of the Arbitrary” by Shaul Magid!

In the meanwhile, you can get the book:

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Relaunching our blog in the spirit of the season!

Dear beloved Ben Yehuda Press readers,

We hope you are having a great start to your Elul! In the spirit of repentance, we’d like to apologize for the lack of blog updates in the past two years. As part of our expansion – we now have a social media person! – we are also returning to our blog.

We’ve already been posting a lot of new material on Twitter, but now these will also be converted to blog posts. If you prefer Twitter, don’t worry, your experience there will stay the same! This is an additional service for those who prefer something differently formatted.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been running a series of weekly parsha readings on Twitter – offering carefully handpicked tidbits from books we published, about each weekly portion. (Check out this one on Eikev!) Going forward, these will also be made available here on our website.

We’ll also post our deep dives and author introductions: on Twitter we just started a series focusing on Rabbi Tamares, a provocative thinker of the early 20th century!

Of course you’ll also get our news updates about upcoming books, exciting sales and preorders.

We have one right now: our unorthodox anthology reflecting on the present day, STRANGE FIRE: JEWISH VOICES FROM THE PANDEMIC edited by T.S. Mendola is now available for preorder! Free shipping within the US. You can also add it to your to-read list on Goodreads.

Thank you for reading, and we wish you great High Holy Day preparations!!