About this book
Repartings is a cyclical poetic response, in voice feral and exacting, to the imagery of the prophetic texts of the Hebrew bible.
Joelle Maxx Milman’s debut collection of poetry contains two parts, woven together: original poetry, written in response to the weekly portion of prophetic text read aloud in synagogues, alongside linguistically adventurous translations of the prophetic texts themselves.
The poetry and translations track the central speaker-poet-prophet as she dips in and out of various biblical landscapes in search of meaningful dialogue with a nonbinary God. Together in cycle, the poems are erotic and devoted, aligned with the Jewish prophetic tradition of care and agony while playing with a decidedly heretical edge of sexuality and political violence.
Repartings re-imparts the biblical texts of the Hebrew Bible in service of a reimagined world, one where intimacy with God is demanded as an embodied and deciduous communal inheritance.
Advance Praise
The haftarah (verses of the Prophets) chanted in synagogue is an often-ignored and even boring liturgical moment. Yet with her breathtaking book Repartings, Joelle Maxx Milman has created a lush, intimate midrash on these texts, in which a sharp yet soft contemporary mystic dialogues with the characters in the haftarah stories about divine reality, prophetic imperatives, and current events. Angels abound here—the angel that appears to Samson’s mother in the field, Zechariah’s angel with the candelabrum, angels that chronicle and angels that cry. Characters like Rahab and Jephthah’s daughter come to life in a modern context, with a prophetic call to sink into our knowing, live differently and treat one another better.
Its earthy, embodied feel — “the ground and my skin conspire/that actually, they are friends” — is inviting, yet there is also an aching yearning: “Can there be a home to this longing that you built into our bodies?” In these pages we find a deep sense of the liminality of this time we are living through: “the things once predicted have come, so/time to predict new comings.” Like its source material, the book holds a strong and still relevant tension familiar to the Hebrew ancients, saying in the voice of the prophet Micah “the way we are on earth is wrong” and in the voice of Zechariah “there is promise of God dwelling again.” Each of the poetic sections end with an ellipsis, something left out—which reflects the haftarot themselves, pulled out of an ongoing text to represent a moment in thought and time.
The biblical texts themselves appear here also, with innovative, evocative translations by Milman herself, so readers can see both sides of the dialogue taking place. Readers perhaps might even consider bringing the volume to synagogue to enliven their study and prayer—I certainly intend to. In writing these poems on texts so often ignored, the poet has achieved her own imperative to “take these words and make music.”
—Rabbi Jill Hammer, translator of Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook and The Romemu Siddur, author of Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women and The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women
The joy in reading Milman’s poems, followed by her own translations, is the realization that the shock of her poetry, whether it be concerning sexuality or violence, is simply the unfiltered leap into the actual prophetic readings. We are forced to process the raw and uncompromising power of the Hebrew, because it is translated not just to English, but to vulnerable and direct dialogues between Milman and herself, and perhaps God.
But the overwhelm of this lurid imagery is really only a part of the overall book. It would be greatly unfair to reduce its considerable sophistication to this; there are other themes that emerge: life in Israel as Milman lived it, with tourists and war; the recurrence of ruach — a force that is God’s but is still not God’s; internal conflicts over religiosity; and many others.
In a distilled sense, her poems and translations express a longing to have a relationship with God that is not constrained by the specific constellation of Jewish prophecy, while also even moreso, wishing to weave Jewish prophecy into an even higher relationship with God and self. It is a monumental project that I expect will appear as part of the Jewish canon in years to come.
—Rabbi Zach Golden, cofounder of Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center in Los Angeles, and frequent contributor to the Forward
This is a book that stands as a long answer to that most primal of pleas: “can there be a home to this longing / that you built into our bodies?” If you’ve never heard that question gnawing in the depths of your soul, this book might confound you. Or entice you. Perhaps even convert you to dare to live into a deeper and more audacious life. One in which prophecy is not “over there,” but “in here,” coming to roost uncomfortably in your heart. As a brooding collection of poems and prophecies, Repartings wants to shape-shift you, bend your certainties until they break apart in the flames of justice, lure you to enter, naked, into ancient texts, and re-mind you that you cannot remain what you thought, or hoped, or feared you were. “it’s the visions of prayer,” Milman writes, “if you open your eyes to / dream like a prophet no one remembers / except for the audience of angels.” In such fraught times as ours, what other audience should we long to find? What other way should we live than daring to open our eyes to dream and prophesy? Who could dare to turn away from the poet’s brooding claim when she cries out, “I demand audience because / I’d very well like to file a complaint / over the guns and the flags and besides / I’ve been itching to know god’s true name.” You will understand this, or you will not. If you do, you’ll want to have this book close at hand, joining the poet in her plea to “dearest ruach / I demand audience in order to —” If you don’t, this might be the book that can save you. At least a little, and that might be enough.
—Mark S. Burrows, poet, translator, and author most recently of You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke
Rabbinic tradition teaches that when prophecy ceased, kabbalah began. The ability to turn vision into words, into meandering utterances that were hurled and screamed and chanted and pleaded in public or into the void gave way to mysticism; the words turned inward and became veiled, hidden. In one of the most original and unique books of poetry I have ever read, Joelle Millman channels the power of the visionary words of the biblical prophets and playfully drags hidden mysteries into the sunlight, piecing the shards together into something that feels very old and new at the same time, familiar and ancient, tangible and elusive. Prophecy did not cease. It is very much alive in this stellar recently discovered scroll, and an amazing read – both Millman’s original poems and her own truthful translations of selected haftarot.
Rabbi Julia Knobloch, author of Liner Notes
14. Isaiah 60:1-22
— swirling and swirling the eddying gyres
rounds in her circles, opening skies-
(other gods meant to be must die)
it’s time to turn towards the empty eye:
open and open the eddying goes,
the fire and flame build boats for the moats, since
walking and angels sleep differently, here
the wandering ghost has become a bird, here:
god calls a ghost to come open the box
inside is the magic you thought that was lost
intention and magic are poured in the bowl
god pours the sea over, your body, a mole
to the map of the palace where you once saw
the whole of the ocean, and you called it
god, she calls up the spirits and
renders us home, she
fills us in splendor and licks off the bone
of the wings of my clouds, my wings and
my homes, who steers me to land,
like doves to their coates –
aligned, you are you: so, You
see her in distance so come to step close
and once you get closer, god floats
in the center of empty of center
in glowing and glowing you call the smoke:
the void is a whirlpool that conquers your name
inside it is ruach which sweeps off your whole
inside it is god who glows gold glows god whole
take hand, take promise, take premise, take heart,
it’s autumn, trust circles, swirl back to the —
20. Malachi 1:1-2:7
— inside of the vessel where I enter
something’s recurring, some story
I’ve heard a thousand times is
whispered across the panels of
the temple built for sacrifice, or magic, and
I’ve brought my tarot cards to come say hi to
ruach and hear what I hope is
another story from another messenger
of god, this time. but the whispering
whispers around my canals and I think
it’s the same thing. it’s after the first and last
destruction but it’s the same one, and
all the blessings have turned
to curses, curdled milk, but this time my ruach
is raging, raging at the circles, ruffling
the circles and I hear a back and forth of
roaring, god and man and all of us yelling ourselves
silly into circles of fights and ideas that spin
the whole anger to the shape of an eye which, when it blinks, swallows
a waterfall and gushes a puddle of
tears which has all landed, I see, on the altar
in the middle
of the temple which is now wet, so wet, when instead
it was supposed to be light.
god is mad, at
the altar that is covered in water from the eye
it was meant to be much different and easier, a
whole different sort of reading and
praying and a specific type of crying, and it seems
the recurring downfall is coming soon, and I wonder
which time is the cry a legitimate cry, so
trembling and tired, I get again
on my knees to ask god
when do I go to cry, where —
