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Parsha Post: VAYEIRA

This week’s Torah portion brings much controversy and family drama!

Vayeira, in which Abraham attempts to sacrifice Isaac, our authors threaten their fathers with a knife and feel crushed in the synagogue. Hagar, however, gets to see G-d.

As usual, we provide you three handpicked tidbits from books we published, to enrich your weekly Torah portion experience… …or feel like you are not the only one about to run screaming from the synagogue.

The Binding of Isaac, Church of Narga Selassie, Dek Island, Lake Tana, Ethiopia. Photo by A. Davey

Also, we are glad to showcase this week not only one, but two bilingual poets who write both in English and in Hebrew! (We are going to share the English.)

We’re going to start with the poems, because they are more tension-filled, and then the discussion of Hagar speaking to G-d will bring a bit of an emotional resolution.

(OR NOT)

(I MEAN)

(FAMILY STRIFE INCOMING)

The first poem is by Herbert J. Levine, from his English/Hebrew poetry collection An Added Soul: Poems for a New Old Religion. This book explores through poetry how one can relate to Judaism while still having a non-theist perspective. This is a longstanding enterprise of Herb Levine’s – there are two volumes so far that we published, and they can even be bought in a bundle:

From Generation to Generation by Herbert J. Levine

How can I forget
that my son threatened me with a shovel,
swore he had been falsely accused over money
his sister had stolen?

How could my father forget
that I once raised a knife
to his face when he stood behind me
showing me how to carve the Thanksgiving turkey?

After the ram was slaughtered,
how could Abraham forget
the devouring knife that Isaac seized
and held against his trembling throat?

The second poem is about Sarah – to have something to match a poem about Abraham (I feel there’s always more about Abraham, though that’s changing!). Technically it is set on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, but there is no earlier or later in the Torah 😉

It is also a poem about going to synagogue and feeling that it is DIFFICULT. Which is a legitimate feeling to have! But often underdiscussed too. I think this Torah portion especially provides material to struggle with / feel uncomfortable about.

It’s from NOKADDISH: Prayers in the Void by Hanoch Guy-Kaner. (This book is in English, but he also writes in Hebrew.)

“[A] startlingly honest exploration of what it means to be a person living with the Absence and Presence of God.”

Wings by Hanoch Guy-Kaner

Let us magnify his holiness,
lovingkindness and compassion.
How lovely his tents are.
Beloved Sarah is under the divine wings.
Let her be bound in the garland of lives.
How fortunate is Sarah,
Born on the first day of Passover
Died on the second day of Rosh Hashanah,
When the gates of heaven are wide open as on Yom Kippur.
Angels chant soft hymns,
Ascending and descending ladders of light.

Mourners bathe in compassion, memory,
winter’s soft light coming through
stained glass windows.

The more Rabbi Linda piles up thanks to god,
recites his compassion and kindness,
The harder I am smothered by wings,
Crushed by the closing gate.

I just really like this – beauty, compassion, repentance, and the poet goes I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE. (Relatable content.)

And now for Hagar – This short excerpt is going to be from Torah Journeys by Rabbi Shefa Gold, a book that explores the spiritual challenges of every weekly Torah portion (+ gives exercises to focus on them). It shows the journey to the Promised Land in the Torah as a journey you take within yourself (so you don’t have to physically go anywhere!) and how the events of the Torah illustrate personal spiritual growth.

The name Hagar means “the stranger.” She represents the stranger in our midst. When we cast Hagar out into the wilderness, her offspring becomes our enemy. When the stranger is banished, our opportunity for seeing God is squandered. The ability to see God passes instead to the stranger, to Hagar. “At the moment of deepest despair, God opened her eyes.” She is blessed with a vision of God who appears at the living waters of life.

In receiving the blessing of Vayera, we are both the one who banishes the stranger, and the stranger herself. In finding the compassion to welcome the guest, to open our heart to the one who is different, the best tool we have is our memory of being the stranger ourselves.

I skip ahead a bit, because the next part is going to be especially interesting – and it’ll also show the power of midrash as fix-it fic 😉

Much later in the story, Abraham takes another wife named Keturah, which means “spice.” The midrash says that this new wife is Hagar, returning, the-stranger-welcomed-home. She is transformed from a bitter, desperate stranger into a source of sweet fragrance.

Welcoming Hagar back into our hearts bestows on us the blessing of seeing God once more.

By the way, we have a whole book that explores midrash as fix-it fic, and we suspect it predates the term “fix-it fic”. It’s from 1977! The new & updated reprint edition of Tales of Tikkun – New Jewish Stories to Heal the Wounded World:

It retells classic Bible & Talmudic stories, and it also has a (different) story about Hagar & Sarah. (I feel this story just makes people feel “that CAN’T be it, right? RIGHT?”) That story is long, so I chose not to include it here, but you can get the book.

Which classic Bible stories would you fix? This Torah portion has more than one tempting stories, I feel. But we can always go beyond that… (C’mon, Avraham! C’mon, Sarah!!! C’mon, THE ENTIRE CITY OF SODOM!!)

Thank you for following along, and make sure to check out our entire series of Torah portions!

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Parsha post: Lech Lecha

Our discussion of this week’s Torah portion will include ….

  • How to space a Torah scroll
  • How to listen to your kid
  • How to fight demons with a sword?!

As usual, we pick three interesting and informative tidbits from books we published, to explore the Torah portion this way. Yes, demon-fighting really will be included… But first, spacing a Torah scroll. While we do publish science fiction, this is not in the sense of “ejecting into space”. But rather, how to space the lines of text in the scroll…

We learn about this from TORAH & COMPANY by Judith Z. Abrams. This book matches some Mishna & Gemara to each Torah portion, so that the Mishna and the Gemara will provide some company and the Torah portion won’t be so sad all by itself.

For this week’s Torah portion, one of the Gemara bits picked by Abrams is from the BT Bava Batra 163a. This explains how you should space Hebrew text (not just in the Torah, but also in contracts and the like).

How much space should be between two lines of writing? Rav Yitzhak ben Elazar said: As much, for example, as is required for the writing of lech l’cha (Genesis 12:1 and Genesis 22:2) one above the other.

BT Bava Batra 163a

(There are also further opinions in the Gemara, but the alternate solutions don’t have to do with the weekly portion.)

Abrams explains:

The Gemara here is discussing how much space must be left between lines of text in a document. Note the illustration:

Of all the Hebrew letters, lamed extends the furthest upward and the letter chaf sofit extends the furthest downward. Therefore, scribes are directed to leave enough room to accommodate the possibility of lech l’cha appearing on two lines, one directly above the other.

What do you make of the symbolism that lech l’cha extends in the furthest directions up and down? Can you find any significance in the fact that the words appear identical in the Torah?

Next up, we have a tiny but thought-provoking poem for you, from the upcoming THIRD volume of poetic midrash by Abe Mezrich! You can find the first two books here.

Listening
by Abe Mezrich

God names Yishmael, Abraham’s son,
for the act of hearing a cry.

Then God names Abraham Father to All.

To father a world, first you must father listening.
______
Genesis 16:1 – 17:5

I just really like this – and also it makes one think, how did that work out for Abraham and Yishmael? (Not so well?) What this implies about our own childrearing is an exercise that’s left to the reader.

Now we get to the demon-fighting part (yes, I know you were waiting) (We are here to provide you high-quality demon-fighting content)

This next section is from Rabbi Jill Hammer’s THE JEWISH BOOK OF DAYS. Which has something for each day of the Jewish calendar that relates to that day. It was also a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, and you might see why…

This time around, I picked something from the upcoming week. Cheshvan 11 (check it out in your calendar!) is the anniversary of two famous Biblical figures passing.

(I could call it a yahrtzeit, but that might be SLIGHTLY anachronistic, given that this was before Yiddish was invented…)

Some of you probably know about Rachel’s anniversary, but do you know that this is also Methuselah’s anniversary? Yes, the guy who lived for 969 years. Rabbi Hammer found you a lesser-known midrash about his prowess with a sword.

This is from the Midrash Avkir, which only survives in fragments. (Seeing some of the fragments, the universe probably couldn’t withstand it existing as a whole, I would say.)

Let’s see how Rabbi Hammer summarizes it:

One Jewish legend about Methuselah is that he was the first to learn how to fight demons. By fasting for three days while standing in a river, Methuselah obtains the power to write God’s name on his sword. He then uses the sword to smite the demons who afflict humankind. The eldest demon, Agrimus, comes to Methuselah and asks him to desist killing the demons; in return, Agrimus gives Methuselah the name of every demon. Using the names, Methuselah banishes the demons to the far recesses of the ocean (Midrash Avkir).

The darkening autumn is a time of reflection and, for some, of depression or regret. Yet when we learn the names of our demons, they no longer have power over us. It is interesting that Methuselah uses a body of water as a place to send the demons. Water, a symbol of the unconscious, represents the place we must go at this time of year to discover ourselves.

We wish all of our readers a good occasion to go and discover ourselves, like Avraham went (lech lecha – go to yourself). Hopefully not in the company of demons!

If you liked this, you can check out our other parashah posts too.

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Into My Garden by David Caplan

On Chof Av, the Yahrzeit of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of Chabad, we introduced you to a related poetry collection on Twitter. Now you get to read it in handy blog post format!

Allow us to present INTO MY GARDEN by David Caplan.

Into My Garden cover. A man walking in a fall forest of decidous trees that have dropped their leaves.

This collection was titled after the classic Chasidic discourses named Basi L’Gani, “I have come into my garden”. This is a quote from Song of Songs:

“I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride” (5:1)

The sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, expounded at length upon this quote. These discourses are called ma’amarim (singular = ma’amar) in Chabad-Lubavitch. The rebbe discusses Chasidic mysticism at length, in front of a (usually large!) audience. Here is a video where you can get an impression of what it is like to be in said audience.

Now! What does this have to do with poetry?

The Song of Songs is obviously poetry 🙂 But David Caplan also writes poetry about his experience in Lubavitch – including studying this maamar, watching other people study it, watching other people watch videos… This sounds very meta. It is in fact very meta. But it’s like this in Chasidism itself: there are maamarim about this maamar by the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. (He’s the one who people think of these days as “the Rebbe” of Chabad.)

I’ll share a poem because I feel like I’m giving all this abstract exposition, when Caplan’s poems are actually very immediate & sensory…

Into My Garden (II)

All week they studied what he is about to say.
Born after his death, they want more than stories,
want to feel how it felt to be in that room,
stand with the old men he blessed for long life and listen.

Under the white tablecloth, a handkerchief
wrapped around his hand bound his soul.
I have come into My garden, My sister, My bride…
Projected across the study hall, downloaded
and captioned, he closes his eyes and explains.

This is a moment that’s going to be familiar to people who are associated with Chabad in some way. I spent a decade attending the synagogue of a Chabad yeshiva, so it was both immediately recognizable AND a revelation: This moment can be something that appears in poetry?

Caplan has moment after moment after moment of Lubavitch life, Orthodox life. Poems about prayer. About studying in the study hall. About watching young yeshiva bachurim horse around. Not exoticized, but presented through the gaze of someone who did not grow up there, but ended up belonging there (Caplan talks about growing up Conservative elsewhere).

And with the best tools that American post-modernist poetry has to offer. Let me show more…

Even the Thief

A night of snow no one expected.
This late the study hall sounds different,
the same words said again, dark and glowing,
a window scratched with its mistakes.
Everyone knows God controls the universe,
my study-partner translates without a pause.

Even the thief prays for success. To know
what you feel, not what you ought to feel,
is there anything harder? At the airport,

a man with The Book of Genesis
tattooed down his leg boarded in front of me,
and I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel
to have those words that close.

Caplan has a contemplative gaze that he turns upon himself too:

To get religious—what does that mean?

Sometimes it all feels like an improvisation:
the snow lifting from the tracks,
a hardboiled egg wrapped in foil, an extra
sandwich in case he meets someone who needs it.

He’s very aware that a good chunk of his readership is secular. But he goes on to write poems about prayer, and not just that; Jewish prayer. Mindfully, carefully, but also unapologetically.

Last year’s words sour in our mouths, useless:
last year’s failures.

Rain claws the roof.
Embarrassed to be heard, we need

to be answered. Too late for good manners,
each prayer jostles to break free.

– “Neilah”

And that makes you face yourself. (At least it made me face myself.) Why cannot this be done? Here, it can absolutely be done. Not only that, but it feels like it needed to be done; these poems needed to come into the world. (Like Chasidim would say about a maamar…!)

This is what covenant means: each night
he carries home
a briefcase no more than a brown paper sack

stuffed with names to pray for.

– from “Bris Milah”

The night’s symbols have performed their obligations:
the eggs smooth with salt water, the unleavened bread,
the pillows we lean into like a question. 

– from “Second Seder, Atlanta”

And Caplan has the same quiet thoughtfulness about the world around him as a whole. Not just when you are packed in with a bunch of people and doing Something Religious, but in the everyday –

Memory halves whatever it touches:
the harbor cleared of pleasure boats,
the pier ending before the dock.

A man too small for his clothes
leans into the story he tells,
the boy beside him, listening.

– from “Memory halves whatever it touches…”

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps lifting into themselves,
bowing and lifting,

until each blurs into something else:
rocks pink with crab shells,

a workday of gulls circling trawlers,
indecipherable buoys.

–  from “Fisherman’s Beach”

Boys dressed like men race the stairwell as if to the singing,
as if to hear what My garden means:

seven generations caused God to withdraw,
seven generations drew him back.
All those years of talking—what did I learn?

And one more, “Old Recording” –

I know how to pray but not like this –

in the old recording, he repeats the blessings
we repeat three times a day,

his familiar accent and cadence, urgent and assured,
naming what is missing when I say

the same words, the certain knowledge
that each word needs to be said.

If you enjoyed this, the book can be all yours for under $10! (with free shipping too…)

“Other poets have made American poems from Jewish interpretive traditions; Caplan stands out in that he makes poems about the present-day people who try to live by those traditions.” – Stephanie Burt