Who Says
We hope to see you Monday night at 7 p.m. at our ALTE Simchat Torah Zoom get together. Please. Please. Please. The date happened to fall on Simchat Torah, and we, kind of, worked backwards from there. For the link, email altetogether@gmail.com. (You don’t have to be Jewish or to speak to come.)
Larry, in his recent Substack post, inviting you to attend, offered the following description:
We’d like participants to speak briefly about Words that, to you, constitute Torah. (The word, “torah,” means “teaching,” or “guidance.”)
I, for example, am a follower of the Lennonzen:
“Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear! Why in the world are you there, when you’re everywhere! Come and get your share!” —Instant Karma
For me, I’m someplace else. As someone who writes, both the adequacy and inadequacy of words astonishes me. The existence of memory astonishes me. It’s not surprising then that I am drawn to poetry. At the same time, I resist being anyone’s “follower.” I prefer to be an omnivore, to embrace whatever may be called for in the moment.
That’s not to say I don’t have favorites, I do, but I am also willing to spend time with those poets whose work may not resonate for me, in whom I don’t believe, in the hope that it is I who am missing something. Same thing with Torah with a capital “T.” Sometimes things click, sometimes not.
For the many years she led them, I attended a midrash writing workshop with Alicia Ostriker. How to make the text my own is a question I come back to. Ostriker, by positing women’s poetry as a unique genre in Stealing the Language and by her extensive body of Jewish-feminist-American poetry created a workshop that enabled me to comfortably enter the text.
Then, of course, there is the matter of translation. Not merely that the original text is in Hebrew, but a Hebrew, or Aramaic, of approximately the 7th century B.C.E. while I speak the English of 2022.
Plus every exchange of words, in even the simplest conversation in the same language, involves translation. It’s complicated.
I find I’m always juggling a lot of thoughts at the same time. So, today, not the Torah, but Stanley Kunitz–one of the poets I come back to often, in part because his work is so grounded and so big at the same time. I will call his poem, “The Layers” my torah for today. The poem offers an opportunity to look back fifty years and consider who were we, who are we, who will we be?
Hope to see you tomorrow.