My Portion

This is the Blessing

2010-09-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

Friends, I'm going to cheat a bit this week. The parasha is Ha'azinu, which takes us almost to the end of Deuteronomy. The last bit, V'Zot ha-B'rakha--"This is the Blessing"--is read on Simchat Torah. But I'm going to jump ahead, wish you a very happy new year, and close "My Portion" with this poem. Thank you for reading along with me.

In the same way Moses lived his life in the public sphere as leader of the Israelites, so he concludes it in a public way by blessing the people according to their tribes. [“This is the blessing with which Moses, the man of God, bade the Israelites farewell before he died” (Deuteronomy 33:1).] There is no mention in his farewell address of his own two sons, Gershom and Eliezer.

I ask a blessing in the name of Gershom,
about whom we know only: he did not succeed
his father; a prayer for Eliezer, who is no more
than a “begat.” If Asher dips his foot in oil
and Joseph reaps the bounteous harvest
of the moon, let the sons of Moses stand
for all of us whose names are just recorded
in the family Bible with no deed inscribed
beyond birth and dying. Say of us:
The Lord has sent them rain in its due season
and when it pocked the grapes with mildew
and set the corn to germinating in the ear.
The Lord has smote the loins of their foes
and cut their own sons down on the fields
of Degania and Lachish*. They have rested
between His shoulders and fallen beneath His feet.
He has tested them at the waters of Meribah**
and with the blood libel at Kishinev***.
They have invited their kin to the mountain
and the stranger to drink the finest wines.
They have born sons and daughters who know
but do not speak the name of God.

*Degania was a kibbutz, attacked by the Syrians in 1948. Lachish was one of the fortress towns protecting the approaches to Jerusalem, laid siege to and captured by the Assyrians in 701 BCE.
**The “place of testing,” where Moses is told to call water from the rock but instead strikes the rock with his rod.
***Site of a pogrom, or anti-Jewish riot, that took place in 1903 when the Jews were accused of killing a Christian child to use his blood in the preparation of matzos.

My Portion

2010-09-03T00:47:00.000-07:00

When people are bar or bat mitzvah, they chant a section from the Torah, which then becomes “their portion.” The chanting is done according to an ancient notation system called Torah trope. The mnemonic power of such chanting is foreseen in this week’s second parasha, "Vayelekh," where G-d tells Moses, “Therefore, write down this song and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this song may be My witness against the people of Israel…since it will never be lost from the mouth of their offspring” (Deuteronomy 31: 19-21).

No occasion, no feast or fast
marks this Sabbath or the passage
I will chant, as did my fathers.
G-d’s word advances on kadma. *
I lavish, as darga requires,
a trill on “write this song”;
as gershayim—drive out—predicts,
I chant the people's “turn to other gods.”
This is a different path to knowing:
a detour to scatter notes—zarka;
a reach, as for a bunch of grapes—
segol. So much attention heaped
on single words—“Be strong"—as if
we must add music to make sense
of the pedestrian commands,
as if the most mundane detail,
warmed by our absorption in it,
might burst out in dazzling song.

*The Hebrew words in this poem are names of tropes, which either refer to the shape of the notation or the way it sounds.

Apologia

2010-09-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Sometimes the morning crashes through the blinds,
noisy with light; today, fragmented by fog,
it must be reconstructed as the eye
pieces together the bed, the man beside me,
the dear faces in the silver frames.
This is the life I’ve chosen so easily
that even a stormy dawn like this one fails
to ready me for your call, your small request:
a reason not to end your life at the end
of our conversation, one oval analgesic
after another. You know how to do this
having learned from previous attempts,
but nothing prepares me to explain why
the same pale capsules on my shelf promise
a more benign relief. Through the curtain
of rain, persimmons glow in the leafless tree.
Every year, warblers puncture the skins
and feed. As sad as I have ever been,
such recurrence cheers me. Your brand of grief
is out of my depth. You want the ordinary:
husband, child. How can I, who have both,
swear I’d manage on the thinner broth
of friendships like the one I offer now?
Even the rainbow, flung between our houses,
is just a promise that the world goes on.
I don’t know how you make yourself go on;
the truth: I only know I want you to.

History Lesson

2010-08-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

One theory of the Torah’s authorship (if you accept that it was not written by G-d Himself) is that the five books were written by four different authors. Deuteronomy, according to this “documentary hypothesis” was based on material from pre-Exilic times but was actually written down by a single author, the Deuteronomist, in the age of Babylonian exile, the mid-sixth century BCE. So, in this parasha, when the Deuteronomist describes the blessings that will rain down on the children of Israel as they enter the promised land, he also knows that exile is in their future, and he describes this as well with a passage beginning, “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.” (28:16).

Predicting the past is easy. Telling the future
from further ahead, the Deuteronomist,
sees clearly how the wheel will turn towards woe.
The kneading bowl, once brimming with yeasty life,
lies empty; the city with its proud towers
is disassembled stone by holy stone;
and every male body, the mark of the covenant
etched into it, bursts out in scales and boils.
So, the moment of entry into the land—
promised, longed for, glad—is tinged for us
by knowing what comes later: how the people,
heads bared, trudged into captivity
behind the captured vessels from the Temple
they had yet to build. There were good years,
when all the bees made honey, and sheep,
descendents of the flock brought out of Egypt,
gave milk. Blessings, curses; blessings, curses:
what other word for this than history?

A Trick of Memory

2010-08-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

This parasha contains one of my favorite lines of Torah: "You shall wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heaven—you shall not forget" (Deuteronomy 25:19). During the Exodus, the Amalekites attacked the Israelites,"smiting the hindmost, all that were feeble behind"(1 Samuel 15:2).

Mostly, we’re supposed to remember:
the Sabbath day to keep it holy—
our tiny lights and our libations
rescuing that sundown from resemblance
to every other dusk—and all
613 commandments, we remember
when we see the periwinkle fringes
of our prayer shawls like string
around a finger, like “Every good boy
does fine.” We remember we were slaves
and how G-d freed us with a mighty hand,
with Technicolor signs and wonders:
blood red sea, green frogs, black night.
We even must remember to forget
like the magician transmogrifying
lead to gold by stirring the pot
without once thinking, “hippopotamus.”
So we blot out the memory of Amalek,
the warriors like carion crow, ravening
among the stragglers, their black caftans
flying in the wind, the points of their spears
like beaks. We work so hard forgetting,
remembering becomes the heart of who we are.

For the Berkeley Tree Sitters

2010-08-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

When Moses instructs the Israelites about besieging a city, he warns them not to cut down the city’s fruit trees. He asks, “Are the trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city?” (Deuteronomy 20:19) The sense seems to be that the trees can neither defend themselves nor be hostile, and are therefore hors de combat. When I was working on this portion, a group of tree sitters who had been encamped in a grove of oaks on the UC-Berkeley campus, were forced to come down. They had been protesting the university’s plan to clear the trees for an expansion of the football stadium.

The last of the trees’ defenders descend from the crown
like australopithecines testing the feel of the earth
on their delicate soles. Twenty-one months, they nested
in the crotches, draping the limbs with bracelets of rope,
assembling their hideaways over the knees, where the trunks
bent abruptly, searching for light. On their perch,
even the eating of energy bars, the layers
of garb became a dumb show, their every gesture
intended to sing: We are no more important than oaks.
In the end, interposing the body, frail as a bud,
between the keen blade and the heartwood seems silly,
outlandish as much as it’s brave. Still, who will defend
the trees of the field with the sitters besieged and brought down?

My Idea of Heaven

2010-08-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

When the people cross over the Jordan, G-d decrees, “You are not to do—according to all that we are doing here today—each-man whatever is right in his (own) eyes” (Deuteronomy 12:8); in other words, the people will no longer be free to pray wherever and however they like. Instead, the Israelites will be required to make their sacrifices only where G-d “chooses to have his name dwell” (12:11)—at a central sanctuary. From the first moment, the promised land is not at all about license but about the yoke of commandment.

This is what the promised land will be:
the old joke, where hell’s a conga party,
and heaven, five old men twirling their payes
while they read the Mishneh-Torah, nibbling
an occasional bite of tuna on rye.
It’s what we want to want—sacrifices
offered as prescribed, on the altar,
not the high places where strange gods,
toppled in our conquest, may yet reach out
their marble arms and grab us at our feasts.
What we really want is simpler: meat
brought down with spears and roasted on a spit;
the thwack of chests, their meeting greased with sweat,
the abandon of alien fire. What we gain,
choosing among the beasts of the field only
those that ruminate; among the men,
those that bear the scar of covenant;
among the many gods, the One—just that:
In lives bounded on one side by birth
and on the other by a sentence, we choose.

Bless This House

2010-07-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

With the people nearing the promised land, God predicts, “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8: 12-14). Here, I try not to forget.

O Lord, our dwelling place in every generation, bless, too, this house, its balustrades and finials, the frayed couch and curly maple table. Flood it with Your light, flowing over the gold bowl, the Imari plate. May it be Your will to visit this kitchen where the lemons pickle and the scent of yeast transforms from ferment to bread. Consecrate the beds—the trundle where our daughter tosses away her comforter, sleeping open to Your will; the mattress that our son outgrew, his feet poking beyond the blanket; our bower, where embrace outlives its evolutionary purposes. Let no fear ascend the stone steps, past the carnations in their clay boxes. Bestow abundant holiness upon the roses, upon the patio, upon the gravel paths. Allow peace—which is everything we’ve known here—to be all we ever need to know.

The Sin of Moses

2010-07-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

One of my most poignant memories is standing on the top of Mt. Nebo, in Jordan, where Moses died. Behind me was the dry, endlessly repeating “wilderness”; ahead, the first glimpse of water and the life that springs up around it--the Promised Land. What, I couldn’t help wondering, could Moses have done to deserve the cruel half-granting of his request to G-d: “Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan” (Deuteronomy 3:25).

The children of Yocheved and Amram*
are wearing out--too many years of lifting
the people’s spirits with a dance or a well,
approaching on their behalf the blinding fire
of Adoshem*, suffering their whining.
Miriam goes first, buried without fanfare,
as though she simply gave out, a spring gone dry,
leaving them without water. Then Aaron—
his vestments stripped like shorn epaulets—
is left by son and brother on Mt. Hor.
And though he lives, Moses learns his sentence:
to gaze across the Jordan, its green banks shocking
after so much sand, and breathe his last,
like in a fable, granted only the half
of his wish he meant as metaphor--to see,
but not cross over. G-d could always cite
a reason, having made them out of dust,
to find them undeserving: striking a rock,
smelting a calf, claiming a prophet’s mantle—
one was as flimsy as another. If death
is punishment, no one is innocent.

*The parents of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam
*A respectful term for G-d, which avoids saying the name used in prayer

D'varim: Words

2010-07-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

The Book of Deuteronomy is called D’varim, or Words in Hebrew, referring to the “words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan” (1:1). In the book, Moses reiterates the Israelites’ history, as well as reviewing various laws. But there are significant variations between the version presented here and the one in the earlier books.

To my daughter, going off to college

My chronicle diverges in important ways
from received wisdom, just as the words
Moses addressed to Israel don’t match
the previous account. Whatever tradition
is handed to us, we must modify,
as an actor speaks the dialogue that’s written,
but means “to be or not to be” filtered
through her encounter with a father’s death,
a mother’s shortcomings. So I begin
to catalog your journey to this point
where you and I part ways, and only you
may cross over into the promised land.
You believe you started under these palms.
But as you sculpted your own heart-shaped face,
your small frame from fragments of your father
and me, you carry the ways we have adapted
to the long journey from Sinai. Our people
wove woolen blankets for Graf Pototsky’s sleigh,
deciphered secret meaning in the quotient
of the Hebrew letters for G-d’s name,
made sacramental wine on the cold hillsides
of Geneva, Ohio, nearly flamed out
in the ovens of Birkenau. Take up this story,
which will sometimes be a burden to you;
tell it now in your own words.

Matot/Massei

2010-07-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

Double Portion this week

All My Vows

The Torah and subsequent rabbinic commentaries are very uneasy about vows. These are not the promises we make to each other or our intention to follow the law, but rather added obligations a person might take on—in the Bible, typically abstention from wine, sex, foods, bathing, or haircutting. Once such a vow is taken, it becomes a sin not to fulfill it. On the evening of Yom Kippur, Jews recite the prayer Kol Nidre, which means All My Vows. In that prayer, we ask for dispensation from unfulfilled vows of this type. In Numbers, a husband is given power over his wife’s vows: “Every vow and every sworn obligation of self-denial may be upheld by her husband or annulled by her husband” (30:15).

Open my womb, and I will give
its first fruits to the Lord,
as if my child were meat or bread.
Spare the ones I love from death;
I’ll cut my hair, abstain from wine,
from raisins, grapes, and, vinegar.
Bring winter rain in its due season,
and I will sing a song of praise
each morning though the ice be hard
upon the pavement, the wool scarf
wet with breath. Send peace to the land,
and I will sacrifice a sheaf
of paper, a record of my life.
These are my promises to G-d,
and I am free as any bird
to enter into or betray them.
Upheld or overruled, my vows,
which I have vowed, I do repent.
They are meaningless as words.

Promised Land

In the final chapter of Numbers, we get a preview of the mercilessness that the Israelites will be expected to practice toward the tribes that reside in the promised land. “When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land” (33:51-52).

It’s the unapologetic ruthlessness
that makes us queasy, believing that, for once,
they did as they were told without murmuring,
inserted themselves in the abandoned cities
of their enemies, with no more scruple
than cowbirds laying their eggs in an alien nest.
We must believe that it was right; the text says
G-d required it, and we can glean some reason
in what they are commanded to destroy:
altars and idols, the toys of trifling deities,
excuses to perform a vulgar act,
then lay it, like the sacrifice of entrails,
at the feet of gods. Or did they hear
their G-d decree what they desired? A patch
to claim where they might build sheepfolds
for their flocks, shelter for their children;
a land they might dole out with perfect fairness—
to the many, more; to the small, enough—
in perpetuity. Was it too much to ask?

What I Had Hoped

2010-07-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

A second census in the book of Numbers, taken after yet another rebellion and its punitive aftermath, finds that there is not one person remaining from the original group who left Egypt. In theory, that might have meant that the people who crossed over into the promised land would not make the mistakes of their parents. But, of course, that’s not what happened.

for my son

If I could send you into the promised land,
as you were the instant you revealed
through some complex cascade of signaling
that you were ready to come into this world,
you might be free; you might encounter G-d
uninflected by the long whine
of adult disappointment. But once you started
down the birth canal, the limits of me
began to mold you. Your head, misshapen for days
after that journey, filled with the lullabies
I remember my own mother sang on the banks
of the Nile; you ate what my body could concoct
from manna and briny water. I did what I knew;
it was not enough to enter Canaan.
My love for you is boundless as the sea,
but I am human, standing on the shore;
to G-d, the sea is water in a tub,
and upbringing, a stain spreading through it.

How Beautiful

2010-06-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

Balak, the king of Moab, is none too pleased when the wandering Israelites camp on the steppes of his kingdom. He sends the prophet Balaam to curse them. But on Balaam’s way to deliver these imprecations, his donkey keeps balking because, unlike his human rider, the donkey catches sight of “the angel of the Lord standing in the way” (Numbers 22:23). Finally, God allows the donkey to speak—the only instance of an animal talking in the Hebrew Bible. When Balaam finally listens, he, too, is able to see and hear the divine messenger. When he reaches the Israelite encampment, instead of cursing, he marvels, “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!” (24:5)

We’re old friends, my friend’s dog and I,
from years of walking, or in her case, darting
after squirrels, deciphering a message
in the stink of marked bushes, lapping at a ditch
after the morning sprinklers have done their work.
Sometimes the leash goes slack; bred to herd
and anxious that I lag, she drops back
harrying me till I rejoin the flock.
When I let her lead, the sights and scents
of the world beneath my feet reveal themselves:
Behind the hedge, a tomcat raises his hackles;
the smell of newly planted salvia
competes with the pleasing odor of roast meat.
Perhaps an angel stands in my way, ready
to show me how the world is full of blessings.

Bitter

2010-06-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

Miriam dies in this week's portion, in a single sentence sandwiched between the laws of purity and the incident at Meribah, where G-d instructs Moses to "tell the rock" to yield its water, and he strikes it instead, resulting in G-d's refusal to let him enter into the Promised Land. Not surprisingly, I've always felt a kinship with Miriam and no small resentment that she often seems to get the short end of the stick. Her very name means "bitter."

My mother, placid, lucid, already gray,
considered—between the moment of quickening
and my emergence into the harsh light
of Labor and Delivery—if pressed
to name me for my father’s long-dead aunt,
at least she’d add fillip of romance:
Miriamne, like the heroine
in Winterset. She settled for the Bible,
ignoring the root—marah—so I am bitter,
reading the story of my namesake, a prophet
who wasn't even gathered to her kin;
whose greatest gift was to repeat in dance
whatever her favored younger brother said;
whose punishment was to be rimed with scales
for the utter chutzpah of her claim
to speak with G-d, as still I try to do.

The Covenant of Salt

2010-06-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

G-d promises Aaron and the tribe of Levi that they and their children will receive all of the tithes for their own sustenance, ending with the declaration, ”It is a covenant of salt for the ages” (Leviticus 18:19). Commentators point to the permanence of salt and to its preservative qualities to explain this phrase, although it's still a homely substance for G-d to swear by.

It is no covenant of gold,
malleable, valuable
only insofar as we ascribe
value to the sparkly.
The Egyptians called all gold divine,
worshipped it as they did Ra,
the sun god, flashing
in the pitiless blue,
but we don’t swear by shiny.

It is no covenant of amethyst,
building its lavender chambers
in the heart of hollow rock.
The Greeks said Bacchus wept
drops of wine to see a maiden
metamorphose into boulder,
and so transformed the stone
to purple crystal. We do not swear
by what is changeable.

Ours is a covenant of salt—
plain, useful, dangerous—
to spice a dish of lentils
or ruin the field that grew them.
We might exchange some grains,
knowing one crystal is like the next,
and we will never cull
our neighbor’s from our own
once they are mixed in the pouch.

So the bond we make
is inextricable. We swear by salt.

Sacrifice

2010-06-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

“When you enter the land to which I am taking you and you eat of the bread of the land, you shall set some aside as a gift to the Lord” (15:18—9). The bread Jews traditionally eat on the Sabbath, challah, is named for this portion, which the ancient Israelites were required to separate from their dough and give to the priests as a “heave offering.” Separating challah is one of three commandments specifically enjoined on women; when making bread, it is traditional to remove a small piece of dough and throw it in the oven in memory of this sacrifice.

The loaf is still alive when I pinch off
the offering: a mite of yeast, egg, and flour.
This, I roll and char to a black nub
only to discard, though bones and peels
seem unseemly company for bread
that You require. Or is waste a part
of sacrifice? We say, “I forswear
the first fruits, the unblemished calf,”
commit them to the priests or to their fires.
“Sweet savor,” “satisfying aroma”—
what might these translations of the offering
mean to One who has no nose? Just this:
There is no virtue in letting go of things
we do not love. Once I thought this deed—
“challah,” the memory of immolation—
was better than what Abraham performed,
jollying his son up Mt. Moriah.
They are one gesture. Approaching the divine,
we’re lesser dogs scrunched down before the Alpha.
This must be what You want, acknowledgment
that though we bake and strew with poppy seeds,
the bread is ours only by sufferance.
So, my shiny loaves, my only son—
everything is on the table, and You
may eat them, though I pray that this black token—
the rabbis say the size of a single olive—
appeases the hunger You aren’t supposed to feel.

Murmuring

2010-05-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

When I read, as we do this week, about the unremitting complaints (sometimes translated as “murmuring”) coming from the children of Israel, I’m perplexed. G-d dwelled with them. He was a friendly cloud by day, taking the edge off the scorching sun, and a fire by night to ward off the wild animals. He fed them manna and found them water. What’s to complain? But then, even here, in comfortable California, I can find plenty to murmur about.

Start at the bottom, where the aesthetics are bad enough:
Toenails are talons beneath the pathetic polish;
bunions excresce from the joints like galls on oak.
And G-d forbid a woman should yearn for stilettos—
the toes rebel, screaming all night like babies
frantic to be fed. The knees revolt
(alas, in both senses of the word),
the thighs rise up in anger at the stairs.
Forget the traitor stomach, churning over chocolate;
the shoulders, sweltering; the elbows, shot.
Worst is the head: Dawn starts the eyes to singing,
like morning birds, their exquisite notes
of pain, until by evening, they have hummed
whole arias of parchedness and weeping.
The nose grows; the skin darkens. The brain,
which cannot find a word, a key, the face
of my mother as woman my age,
remembers all its petty grievances
and whines in front of G-d and everyone.

Standing Before the Lord

2010-05-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Sotah, sometimes translated as the Ordeal of Bitter Water, is one of the strangest (and most misogynistic) rituals in the Hebrew Bible. It was invoked when a husband was overcome by a “fit of jealousy” although he had no evidence that his wife had been unfaithful. According to this law, the wife was forced to ”stand before the Lord” (Numbers 5:30); that is to come before the high priest. He would concoct a potion of holy water, dirt from the Tabernacle floor, and written curses containing God’s name, which had been dissolved into the water. The accused would be forced to drink this brew, and if it made her ill, (according to some commentators, if it made her miscarry) she was considered guilty. If not, she was allowed to ”bear seed.”

My mother, may she rest in peace,
always muttered, “You can tell
who wrote the book.” The men accuse;
the women have to stand for it.
You’ve let your distrust grow, a plant
in a dark place, rangy and fruitless.
What time had I for treachery?
I owe my hours to the grindstone,
the child on my back, or throwing the weft
across the loom: blue, white, blue.
It’s you who trek into the hills
for nights on end, herding the sheep,
or so you say. Jealousy
may be a fit for me as well.
I see how Elisheva’s gaze
follows when you leave the camp
warbling on your fine khalil.*
I hear her purr the same refrain
when we gather by the well.
Whatever you make me do this day—
bare my head, touch the offering,
drink the water of bitterness—
if you have pledged to her, I swear,
I’ll grind your oath to bitter meal;
you’ll eat your words, and I will cry
Amen, Amen.

*a flute

Numerology

2010-05-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

The book of Numbers begins with another census. All of the men, we are told, number 603,550 (Numbers 1:46). Or at least that’s the translation if elef means one thousand, as it does in modern Hebrew. This is unlikely, given the forbidding terrain through which they traveled. The wilderness would have had to support at least four times that figure to include the Hebrew wives and children—not to mention the hostile tribes they encountered over the 40 years of wandering. More probably, scholars believe, elef was some kinship group of uncertain size.

So much has changed since the people pulled up stakes
and marched away from Sinai—Temples built
and sacked; Kohanim, who touched the Ark
and lived, reduced to neighbors, who for one instant,
cover their heads with prayer shawls and convert
on Yom Kippur to priests, claiming once more
the power to bless us*. Is there not one constant
we can carry forward, the remainder
in a complex sum? No, even numbers
must evolve. Six hundred thousand men?
The land, promised or merely slogged across,
could not support them. So we learn, their thousand
is not like ours, no more than is their G-d.

* The ritual referred to is the Birkat HaKohanim, the priestly blessing. On Yom Kippur, all those who are descendents of the priestly class, or Kohanim, cover their faces with their prayer shawls, ascend the altar, and offer the traditional blessing, “May the Lord bless you and keep you…”

The Lord is My Shepherd

2010-05-06T19:12:00.000-07:00

Another double portion this week. This one introduces the idea of the tithe; that is, the duty to give a tenth of what we have to G-d (or to the priests). When a shepherd tithes, he is not to discriminate, either by setting aside the worst or best for his offering: “Of all that passes under the shepherd's staff, every tenth one shall be holy to the Lord. He must not look out for good as against bad, or make substitution for it” (Leviticus 27:32-33).

The shepherd trails the stragglers through the scrub
where they have strayed looking for a shoot,
a nubbin of clover. These sheep have been his charge
since his father culled them from the flock,
and lonely in the nights with only a stone
for pillow, he laid his head on the warm wool
of a lamb and drew his cloak across them both.
Now he must pass the sheep beneath his crook
and, willy-nilly, sequester every tenth
for sacrifice. He must not spare the good,
but like G-d descend upon these creatures
for reasons they would never understand.

B'Har: At the Mountain

2010-05-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, at the beginning of parashat B’Har (At the Mountain), G-d begins speaking to Moses “on Mount Sinai,” not, as He had been doing since the beginning of the book, from the Tent of Meeting. Many scholars believe that this chapter is interpolated from a different version and that locating G-d on Mount Sinai is meant to emphasize the importance of what follows.

for my husband

As the mountain is purely background,
part of the story insofar
as everything important happens
against it, so you are here
in this manual for priests:
Do this. Do that. There is no love
amid the unadorned decrees.
And yet, this week as I have studied
“At the Mountain,” I’ve seen your face
behind the words, not because
they have the slightest thing to do
with you, the man whose beard, whose lips,
whose gray-green eyes are the last things
I’ve looked into for twenty years
before sleep overtakes me
but because you are the ground
against which every story unfolds.

Fixed Times

2010-04-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

This week’s parasha includes an enumeration of holidays: “These are My fixed times, the fixed times of the Lord, which you shall proclaim as sacred occasions” (Leviticus 23:2). But because Jewish holidays are lunar, they actually move around the Roman calendar. If we adhered strictly to the lunar system, the holidays would eventually become disconnected from what they celebrate. Succoth, a harvest holiday, might end up in the winter; Passover, with its symbols of rebirth, might migrate to September. To correct this problem, once every four years, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month.

Every leap year, we lasso the wandering feasts—
Succoth, which strays too far into the rain,
the palm fronds dripping on the challah, returns
to harvest time. Shavuoth replants its roots
in June. Pesach, wrenched from Easter Sunday
at its birth, returns to nodding acquaintance
with its old twin. The Days of Awe blast us,
once more, with heat, our dresses stained with sweat,
as if to remind us that for a people wandering
in the desert, G-d required fixed times.
We do not come from temperate lands or Lords.

My Father's Kingdom

2010-04-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

At the dead center of Torah, midway between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 34, comes a group of disparate laws sometimes called the “Holiness Code.” The second of this week's portions, K’doshim, or Holiness, begins by enjoining the whole Israelite community: “You shall be holy, for I, your G-d, am holy” (Leviticus 19:1). How do we accomplish this? The first rule is to revere our parents.

My father could fix anything. The aunts came in procession,
bearing vacuums, beaters, toasters, fans, and he laid hands
upon appliances until they rose up from the dead.
He tightened sprockets, straightened spokes; the bike wheels hummed
the music of the spheres and all their orbits aligned.
He fashioned blazons out of copper salvage, reliquaries
from balsa boxes, still redolent of his cigars; we filled them
with river stones, cicada shells, white cowries he brought back
from some great service rendered to the nation in a far-off place—
each object sacred because he taught us how to notice it.
His bed was high; most weekdays, he descended in a cloud
of talc before we woke, went off to pace the girders, riveting
the I-beams that delimited the corners of our world.
But Sabbath mornings, we could visit him, plump his throne
of pillows, cluster at his feet. We cherubs, whom he lifted
in ecstatic somersaults and pirouettes, we worshipped him.

Goat in the Wilderness

2010-04-21T20:42:00.000-07:00

The origin of the "scapegoat" can be found in this week's parasha. In Levitus 16:21, Aaron confesses all of the peoples' sins "on the head of a goat." The animal is then set free in the wilderness. As I tried to picture this ritual, I realized that the Bible is very stingy with description.

There goat is in the text, but no scrub.
No creosote bush clings to the crust of the dunes.
No pale crag martin nests in the cliffs. No cliffs,
orange, gray, or parched. No darkling beetle
with the scavenged barley from their sacks
scuttles like a thief across their path.
No metaphor of any kind. Their eyes
can’t make connections in this wilderness,
which is not like Egypt. They sigh for leeks,
for fish, while a G-d they hardly know
speaks his sentences: “Do not uncover."
"Do not lie down.” It is an abstract world
they will inherit: a Land they’ll never reach,
a holy word, a G-d who turns the face
He does not have toward them and away.

Tazria-M'Tzora

2010-04-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

A two-fer today, as we read a double portion this week (and I fly off to Washington tomorrow). Both portions deal with the duties of the priests, who were responsible not only for the purity of the sacrifices but also for the purity of the camp.

In the Emergency Room

One function of the priests was to check people afflicted with various communicable diseases and sequester those who might pose a danger of infection. The passage reminded me of a trip to the emergency room, where the doctors' insistent questions can have the same incantatory quality as these priestly examinations: "If the priest sees that the eruption has covered the whole body — he shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean, for he has turned all white. But as soon as undiscolored flesh appears in it, he shall be unclean; when the priest sees the undiscolored flesh, he shall pronounce him unclean. The undiscolored flesh is unclean; it is leprosy. But if the undiscolored flesh again turns white, he shall come to the priest, and the priest shall examine him: if the affection has turned white, the priest shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean" (Leviticus 13:13-17).

Are you having any pain in your arm, in your chest, in your heart?
Is there tingling in your hand, in your shoulder if you twist toward your back?
Can you breathe when you lie down, when you rise up, and when you walk?
On a scale of one to ten, is your pain like the breaking of a rod on a rock?
On the treadmill, do you trudge like a woman climbing stairs
with their tops in the sky? Do you sense the plasma pound in your veins
as the cuff constricts your arm like the fingers of a demon? Is the pattern
on the screen of your breathing and your heart, prophetic as a screed
on the evils of your youth? If the enzymes in your blood betray damage
to your core, can you live outside the camp of the hearty and the well?

Plague House

One of the afflictions the priests checked for, sometimes translated as leprosy, was a kind of lesion that might appear on a person, a fabric, or the wall of a house. It was the duty of the householder to report potential infection with the odd locution, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house” (14:35). But according to the Talmud, "The house affected by the plague never existed and is not destined to exist. It was stated for the purpose of edification" (Sanhedren 71a).

This house, with green and reddish veins
that spread through the grout like sepsis
streaking from a lesion to the heart,
does not exist and never has,
the rabbis say. Why
of all the implausible stories—
talking asses, parting seas—
should this wall blossom
into parable? Deconstructing
the erupting house, stone
by imaginary stone,
carrying the abstract debris
to an unclean place outside the city
that will come to be inside
the Land, we learn that what is hard—
plaster, rock, timber, plague—
is a kind of language, pointing
to something realer than we know.

The Eighth Day

2010-04-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Against the background of the rules that dominate Leviticus, the death of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu, makes a harrowing contrast. The seven-day priestly ordination ceremony has just been completed. The two young men now go to make an offering, and they are consumed by the sacrificial fire. Why? The text says it is because they offered “alien” or “strange” fire. We are supposed to accept this as the divine rationale, but I am hardly the first person to find this a thin explanation. In fact, I have come to believe that Moses got this one wrong. He seems especially obtuse when he berates Aaron and his remaining nephews for not eating that day’s sin offering. Perhaps there is no room for accidents in Moses' theology, but could he not just leave these deaths as something we don’t understand?

And Nadav, whose name meant “giving,” and Abihu,
“G-d, my father,” went to offer sprigs
of incense, the first fruits of their new work.
They wore their linen breeches; they washed their feet,
for they were rightly reverent. But fire,
as fire will, broke free from their pans,
lit the sashes—woven with such care
of purple, red, and blue—like wicks, and they,
like candles, burned. There is no why to this.
Say “alien fire,” and we’re already stumbling
in the mortal realm of commentary.

Then Moses inquired about the goat of sin offering, and it had already been burned! He was angry with Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron's remaining sons, and said, "Why did you not eat the sin offering in the sacred area? For it is most holy, and He has given it to you to remove the guilt of the community and to make expiation for them before the Lord. Since its blood was not brought inside the sanctuary, you should certainly have eaten it in the sanctuary, as I commanded." And Aaron spoke to Moses, "See, this day they brought their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord, and such things have befallen me! Had I eaten sin offering today, would the Lord have approved?" And when Moses heard this, he approved. (Leviticus 10:17-19)

So many mitzvoth*—To know that G-d exists.
Not to add to the commandments of Torah.
Surely Aaron understood those now.
But what of the six hundred and eleven?
To set the showbread and the frankincense
before the Lord. To keep the fire burning
on the altar of the sacrifices.
To help the beast of burden if he stumbles
under his load. Not to defile yourself
by contact with the dead. Not to test
the word of G-d. Not to bear a grudge
or slay the innocent or take revenge.
And if the priest, having watched his sons
be dragged, by their singed tunics, outside the camp,
(and he, barred from rending his sacred vestments
or touching their dear, charred forms) should cry out,
should refuse to eat—even the sin
offering—what Lord would not approve?

* There are 613 mitzvoth or commandments in the Torah, dealing with everything from the treatment of the poor to marriage to various ritual practices. A number deal specifically with the duties of the priests.

A Tale of Haroseth

2010-03-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

For the past two nights, Jews have been celebrating Passover with the seder, a ritual meal that features a number of traditional foods. One is haroseth, which a blend of fruit and nuts whose consistency is supposed to recall the mortar that the Hebrew slaves used in building Pharaoh’s pyramids: And they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and brick” (Exodus 1:14).

Haroseth is not of biblical origin, but it is mentioned in the Talmud in a passage that indicates it was already part of the festival celebration in “the days of the Temple.” The proper method for making haroseth can be a source of strain—or more accurately pitched battle—among women from different traditions making Passover together.

In Temple times, the street peddlers sang,
"Come and get your spices for the mitzvah*
of haroseth,” already a commandment
though about it, Moses speaks not a word.
##
“Take dates or figs or raisins. Add vinegar,
cardamom and fresh ginger. Mash.”
Here is the mortar of the Sephardim,
recorded by Maimonides* himself.
##
Beneath the mezzaluna, hard-boiled eggs
merge with oranges, almonds, matzah, prunes,
holding together the Italian Jews
as sand and lime cemented the bricks of Egypt.
##
On the battlefield of Gettysburg,
no “necessaries” for haroseth. “We found
a brick,” a soldier reported. “Rather hard
to digest, but looking at it made us remember.”

##
The B’nei Yisroel of Calcutta boil the dates
into a syrup. “This has never changed,”
the matriarch insists, ruling the kitchen
of her daughter in Great Neck, New York.
##
Apples, walnuts, cinnamon, wine—ganoog.*
This is my mother-in-law’s haroseth, sacred
as the formula for holy incense
given to Moses by his exacting G-d.

*Commandment in Hebrew
*Preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and author of the Mishneh Torah, a code of Jewish Law
*Enough in Yiddish

A Prayer

2010-03-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

This week we learn the rituals associated with sacrifices of all kinds: the burnt offering, the sin offering, the thanksgiving offering, and so forth. When G-d describes the guilt offering, He adds, "It is most holy" (Leviticus 7:1). With the destruction of the Temple, the system of ritual sacrifice was replaced in Jewish practice by prayer.

Every night I volunteer my sins.
The mean, crabbed thoughts crouch
in my heart, and my tiny soul,
sitting on the cage door,
minds the latch. This is the ritual
of the guilt offering. It is most holy.

Guilt

2010-03-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

Leviticus, as its English name implies, is the book of the Bible concerned with the Levites or priests and the many duties they had to perform in order to ensure the purity of the camp. The regulations regarding ritual purity were so exacting that they were sometimes transgressed accidentally. For example, a priest wandering through the desert might come into contact with an unclean animal and not even realize or remember it. This week’s portion provides a complicated sacrificial ritual to expiate this “unwitting” guilt.

The early light slants into the cul-de-sac,
picking out the frond of the neighbor’s palm
so it appears to be a hand, raised
in blessing. The lemons are without blemish.
A white birch cants crazily over the road,
but does not fall down. And yet despite the sky,
limpid as an easy problem in sums,
this morning you’ve brushed up against the dead—
the boy on the TV news, fallen in battle,
whose formal photo in the white uniform cap
is propped up before the flag-draped coffin.
You should know how to expiate this sin:
The formula—the dipped and sprinkled blood—
is in the book. But you are not a priest;
the golden altar has been melted down,
struck as coins that bear a Hebrew girl
mourning beneath a palm: Judea Capta*.
Are these wrongs with which you have to live?

*A series of coins issued by the emperor Vespasian in honor of the capture of Judea and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE by his son Titus.

Calling

2010-03-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

This week, we read two portions, Vayakhel and Pekudei, both about the building of the Tabernacle. This is a communal affair, with all the people asked to give what they can, whether gold or talent. As a poet, I love that the names of artists are preserved in the text: “Now Bezalel, son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, had made all that the Lord had commanded Moses; at his side was Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, carver and designer and embroiderer” (Exodus 38: 22-23). Indeed, Moses “calls” every skilled person to take part in the task. I was reading this section around the time my daughter turned 18, and it prompted me to think about her calling.

I watch you listening for this call, wondering
which of the divine skills will fashion your life.
I think to warn you, “Years aren’t adamant;
they don’t stay still while you incise some meaning
into them; a life’s not gold, to pour
into a mould or solder to another’s.
Even the loom, that mythic equivalence
for what we make with the riches we’re given—
weaving a strand of honor, a thread of love—
won’t stand for the accounting we must present
of how we let our gifts be used. “As clay
in the hand of the potter, who thins or thickens it
at will,” so the hymnist proclaims are we
“in the hand of a gracious G-d.” My dearest girl,
gifted with music, what does the Lord require?
That when the task presents itself, you must,
a tuning fork struck, take up your skillful song.

G-d's Children

2010-03-08T18:45:00.000-08:00

While the Ten Commandments tell us to honor the Sabbath day, they do not specify what that would look like. As Moses begins to give the Hebrew people instructions about how to build the Tabernacle, he tells them that they may work for six days, but on the Sabbath, they must rest. I was surprised by the vehemence of the proscription against work, which is attributed directly to G-d: “Whoever does any work on it [the Sabbath] shall be put to death” (Exodus 35:3).

This G-d, wrathful, sounds like me
on a bad day, when the children won’t listen:
“Stop doing that, or I will kill you.”
Not that He didn’t have cause; signs
and wonders amused them for a moment,
and then it was on to the next demand—
meat, leeks, water, golden calves.
He wanted it to stop—the clamor,
the bickering—for their sakes,
so they might experience the world
as it had been before they came:
the order, the peace. It was good.
But children change everything.
That’s the cliché; that’s why we bear them.

Counting Jews

2010-03-03T18:50:00.000-08:00

Jews do not count people directly. When G-d asks Moses to take a census of the people, He stipulates that each shall pay a “ransom” of a half-shekel upon being enrolled in the army “so that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled” (30:12). The Ramban, an important 13th century scholar, argued that the census was actually taken by counting the money instead of the people. Since then, various other stratagems have been devised to avoid counting people, which is considered to be asking for trouble.

Not one, not two, not three. The Jew counts,
trying to avoid the evil eye,
the same way we might name a sick child Alter,
“old one,” to mislead the angel of death
assigned to yank the infant back to heaven.
So we number the stars or the half-shekels
each must forfeit rather than our lives,
which, being counted, some might judge
too numerous. True, G-d is minding
in the genial way of uncles babysitting
while they kibitz with their cronies on a bench.
In the meantime, what other spirits overhear
our census, to what purpose might they count?
A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a million, six.

High Fasion

2010-02-23T19:19:00.000-08:00

If, like mine, your religious instruction (or Cecil B. DeMille’s “Ten Commandments”) led you to imagine that the dialogue between G-d and Moses focused entirely on law-giving, then, like me, you might be surprised to realize how much of their interchange in this week’s portion is about the details of the Tabernacle’s construction and the fine points of the vestments for the high priest.

Dear G-d, who specified the pomegranates
alternating on the high priest’s hem
with bells of gold; who listed chrysolite
and jasper for the breastplate of decision;
lapis lazuli incised with names
of all twelve tribes; who ordered that the headdress
be gold, and the ephod* gold, crimson, and blue—
forgive Your daughter, who interrupts her prayer
to notice the red felt hat two pews away.

*An elaborate tunic, part of the priest’s vestments

Tabernacle in the Desert

2010-02-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to forget, as we start to read this week about the building of the elaborate Tabernacle, where the children of Israel were building it. Somehow, in the middle of the wilderness, they managed to find gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, fine linen, goats' hair, acacia wood, oil, spices, incense, and dolphin skins! There’s actually a fair amount of debate about what those “dolphins” (takhash in Hebrew) might be. Translations have included ermine, badger, antelope, okapi, giraffe, and dugong. According to the Babylonian Talmud and Rashi’s commentary, the takhash was a kosher, multicolored beast with a single horn, which came into being for the sole purpose of building the Tabernacle.

Gold we know they asked of the Egyptians—
and received—and silver for the clasps.
Cassia they gathered from the wadis,
though myrrh and frankincense were likely spoil,
a queen of Egypt having sent to Punt
for thirty-one small tubs of incense trees,
borne to Thebes aboard her royal barge.
Linen, too, they may have learned to heckle
for their one-time masters, enormous spools
for winding the dead, loaded when they left,
on hapless donkeys, or pounded from wild flax
they found along the way. Acacia bloomed
in the desert, brought by camel caravans
who grazed it on the African savanna
and dropped the seeds at Sinai where the plant
discovered how to hoard the brief rain.
Ram was plentiful, leaping the crags,
and served for sacrifice, horn, and hide.
So far, they might have built their Tabernacle
in perfect solitude, a tribe of nomads
in a waste of granite, sand, and sky.
And yet, those dolphins breach the text like fish
out of water. Takhash. The name itself
darts across the scroll just long enough
for G-d, whose every word created something,
to fashion the perfect covering for the Tent.
Then word and being vanish all at once,
a miracle spent in thirty cubits of curtain.

Rules

2010-02-11T21:08:00.000-08:00

“You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk” (Exodus 23:19). Over the centuries, this very specific rule about goats is elaborated into the Jewish dietary law that forbids the mixing of all kinds of meat and any dairy product, largely through the Talmudic procedure of building a “fence around the law”—essentially, adding some extra rules for padding so that the treasured command from the Torah will not be inadvertently transgressed. Some commentators have argued that the laws of Kashrut are based on health considerations—for example that pork was taboo because in the days before refrigeration, it was so often the source of food-borne illness. More traditionally, these laws are regarded as chukim; that is, laws that cannot be explained rationally.

This verse comes to teach us
that the kid may be a calf;
and the liquid, mixed by the dairy
contains the milk of many mothers
so cannot be combined
with the kid or the calf;
that boiling is beside the point;
and that the rule is broken
before we ever eat, by the act
of boiling; that the prohibition
is key to staying our hand,
to knowing the creatures as kin;
and that the law is given
without a reason, practice
for living in the unruly world.

The Ten Sayings

2010-02-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

What is usually translated in English as the Ten Commandments, in the Torah text is Aseret ha-D'varim, the Ten Things, the Ten Statements, the Ten Declarations, the Ten Words, or the Ten Sayings.

As He created the world with only His voice,
so He tried to say us into goodness.
But we are not the waters, whose only duty
is to swarm, or the sparrow hawk
who flies across the dome of heaven, G-d's thought
incorporated. And if the raptor swoops,
snatching a finch in its talons, tearing the flesh
until the bones and wings, plucked clean, fall
to the ground below, no one calls it murder.
We, alone, lie and steal because the terms
create a failing from the standard stuff
of camouflage and plunder. Our G-d calls us
not to survive like those spiderlings,
feeding of the bodies of their mothers,
not, like the jackal, to eye the cheetah's kill,
but to be human, obedient or sinning,
the only creatures who believe in Him.

Time's Arrow

2010-01-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

When Pharaoh finally lets the Israelites go, G-d does not lead them in a beeline for the Promised Land. He’s afraid they’ll have a change of heart and want to return to the evil they know—or, more properly, assuming His omniscience, He knows they will. Indeed, they spend the next forty years whining about how good they had it in Egypt. So, instead of taking them to Canaan by way of the land of the Philistines, which was nearer, “G-d led the people round about, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds” (13:18).

Had there been a choice, I might have turned back,
to the path where we found buttercups to hold
beneath our chins, and yellow only meant
that you liked butter; to the creek with the crayfish
hunkered under the rocks, the trolls of our childhood,
tamed by a quick grab behind the pincers;
to the spot beside my father’s workbench
where everything was sorted, and I learned to tell
toggle bolts from nails, pitching them into the proper tins;
to the cold porch where the last apples met us
with the tang of ferment, and we knew
crisp would bubble in my mother’s oven,
she would feed us, and there would be enough.
And so G-d made the journey roundabout
and time a scrollwork we can’t unwind.

My Exodus

2010-01-21T19:53:00.000-08:00

In comparison to the exodus, which is finally realized in this week's portion, my life is tame. But then, my life is tame in comparison to the great journeys of my grandparents, as well. Jews often seem to be at the center of historic upheavals. As Bernard Malamud puts it in The Fixer, “We’re all in history, that’s sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some.”

I’ve lived my life in the aftermath of flight—
the boats from Hamburg ballasted by Jews
who’d had enough of axes and broom handles,
of smashed glass and press gangs on the prowl
for Jewish boys with peyes* to pull. My zaide**
escaped the Cossack brigades, taking only his beard
and the trick of mounting a mare bareback at a canter.
Later his wife bundled her candlesticks,
her eiderdown and fled the once-kind neighbors
who had beat their ploughshares into swords.
Her belongings I fit into the van
with the cinder blocks, the boards, the scavenged settee,
and like the Sooners before me skedaddled West
toward a happy life of minor incident,
the luxury of burying my parents.
Was this her wish when she braved the parting sea:
that I cross over out of history?

*Sidelocks: Orthodox Jewish boys and men wear the hair at the sides of their heads long in obedience to the biblical commandment “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.”
**Grandfather in Yiddish

My Son's Bar Mitzvah

2010-01-13T21:48:00.000-08:00

As part of the ceremony celebrating their entry into Jewish adulthood at age thirteen, children study one Torah portion and often read a section from it. For my son, the portion was this week’s Va-eira, which deals with the first plagues visited on the Egyptians and Pharaoh’s stubborn refusal to let the Israelites go. Before I had children, I laughed at the idea that a thirteen-year-old was anywhere near adulthood—in fact, I was laughing about that idea until Eli was about twelve and a half. Then something happened, and I began to glimpse the man he would later become. One signpost was his reaction to this portion, where G-d tells Moses, “I will harden Pharaoh's heart, that I may multiply My signs and marvels in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 7:3). Like many readers before him, Eli was troubled at the notion that G-d had a role in Pharaoh’s stubbornness and therefore in all the suffering of the Egyptians.

Thirteen and not inclined to heed advice
or threats, Eli is assigned the portion
where Moses warns of blood, boils, lice,
and Pharaoh will not let the people go.
Why, my firstborn asks, would the Almighty
harden Pharaoh’s heart, like a master
razzing some wretched freshman until he flares
in spectacular, if futile, cheek?
With that question, my son becomes a son
of the commandments, shouldering the yoke,
acknowledging the lopsided struggle
to be a man in the world G-d made.

For Pharoah's Daughter

2010-01-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

Exodus picks up the story of the Israelites more than 400 years after they first went down to Egypt for food and finally settled in Goshen. By this time, the reigning pharaoh has become concerned about the numbers of Israelites in his midst and decrees that all newborn sons be thrown into the Nile. That his daughter was aware of this order is evident when she goes down to the Nile to bathe and discovers a basket containing the infant Moses. She says immediately, ”This must be a Hebrew child” (Exodus 2:6).

Of course she knew the boy she rescued
was not her blood. Under the red
from his furious crying, his skin glowed olive,
and his eyes, unaccented by kohl,
were the Hebrews’ hooded circles
brimming with a meniscus of tears.

Save a life, the rabbis say,
and it’s as if you saved the world.
So here I sit, three thousand years
after she drew him from the water,
reading the words G-d spoke to him,
living in the world she saved.

Blessing the Children

2009-12-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

After he is reunited with his long-lost son Joseph, Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Though you might think Jacob would have learned from experience that favoritism can be poisonous, he insists upon reversing the traditional order of the boys, favoring the younger, Ephraim, by putting his right hand on the boy’s head and naming him first. As part of the blessing, he foretells, “By you shall Israel invoke blessings, saying: God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh” (Genesis 48:20). True to that prediction, Jews do bless their sons on Friday evenings with exactly those words. Although I have a son and a daughter, I like this blessing and the rabbinic understanding of why being like Ephraim and Manasseh is a good thing: They are the only sibling pair in Genesis about whom there is no record of discord.

To what you fought over—the front seat,
pushing the elevator button, the blue block—
you brought the same intensity
as brothers vying for the last hunk of bread.
Even in the world of enough you grew up in,
the impulse to do battle hangs on,
like a troublesome appendix, unnecessary
but easy to inflame. G-d made you,
as He did each of his creations, with the will
to live, to push like impossibly fragile cotyledons
through asphalt or loam. So we bless you
with the wish to be like Joseph’s children,
predisposed, like any boys, to tussle,
but born into a land where the granaries
are full. Although the father of their father,
who never saw the pitfalls of preferring,
crossed his hands to steal, one more time,
the blessing of the eldest, the sons of Joseph
trusted in the plenty of their world,
confining their rivalries to the small change
of toys and caresses, leaving behind no stories.

Theodicy

2009-12-24T07:25:00.000-08:00

“Now do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that G-d sent me ahead of you (Genesis 45:5).” This is part of Joseph’s speech when he reveals himself to his brothers and forgives them. I am moved by his openheartedness but wary of the theodicy implicit in it, the way it integrates evil into G-d’s overarching plan. It’s like the phrase that has become so popular: “Everything happens for a reason.” Maybe.

Everything does not happen for a reason
if by that you mean “Let there be light”
is an algorithm and everything—
Haman, Hitler, the death of little children—
flows from that sentence like decisions
down an if-then tree. The reason is what you—
stranded somewhere like Egypt or middle age—
discover, a pattern that seems to be about you
as vineyard rows appear to radiate
from the hub of your car as you go speeding by.

Backdrop

2009-12-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

While Genesis is largely a story about a single family, their nomadic lives put them in contact with many other peoples, who play a role in what unfolds. Having sought his brothers where they were pasturing in Shechem and then Dothan, Joseph finds them none to happy to see him or hear about his dreams in which they all bow down to him. Instead of welcoming Joseph, they sell him to a caravan of Midianite traders who take him to Egypt as a slave. In this week's portion, Joseph has risen to a position of great power in Egypt and has helped the Egyptians to prepare for the famine that grips the entire region for seven years. Joseph’s brothers, also suffering from hunger in Canaan, must go down into Egypt to secure food. Their father sends them with “an offering—a bit of balm, a bit of honey, some labdanum, mastic, pistachios, and almonds” (Genesis 43:11). The brothers do not recognize Joseph.

In the distance, there is always a caravan
cutting like a periodic sentence
through the declarations of our tale.
The traders who bought Joseph—another item
to load across their long-suffering donkeys—
were on to Egypt and the return prizes:
Pelusian linen, papyrus, and barley beer.
Now to entice the man they do not know
is still their father’s favorite, finely robed
in the embroidered coat of the vizier,
the brothers, who sold him into slavery,
sojourn into Egypt bearing balm.
For the barley, they barter labdanum,
bled from the fragile stems of rock roses,
and precious mastic, the resin of embalming.
So the story we’d imagined—its reasons
belonging only to us—comes embedded
in the desires of other peoples’ hearts.

Hanukkah at the Crater of Ramon

2009-12-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

This Friday night, we light the first Hanukkah candle. Last year at this time, I was in Israel, and I celebrated Hanukkah primarily in the forbidding landscape of the Negev. One of the highlights was a visit to the immense Crater of Ramon, which gave rise to this poem. A few--hopefully helpful--notes: Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the Macabees over the Greek Syrians in the 2nd century BCE, including the retaking of the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been defiled. The holiday's rituals of light (the menorah) and oil (potato pancakes) commemorate the miracle that a small vial of pure oil, only enough for a day, burned for eight days until new oil could be prepared to kindle Temple menorah. At Hanukkah, Jewish children play a game with a top called a dreidel, whose four sides are inscribed with Hebrew letters. In the Diaspora, these letters stand for “A great miracle happened there.” In Israel, the last letter is different, and the phrase becomes “A great miracle happened here.”

I try to believe a great miracle
happened here. This is the landscape
of awe, the open wound
from some cataclysmic walloping
by messenger? rowdy river?
who can say? The land is full
of outcroppings that cry out
for explanation—plops of sand
dribbled from the cosmic fist.
This one looks like a woman torqued
to gaze back at the mounds of salt;
that one might have been an altar.
The earth opens. The sun won’t set.
Algal blooms bloody the sea.
Maybe the miracle was not
the cities of the plain reduced
to this gray ash, the burning bush,
the oil lasting eight days,
but any mind sensing wonder
in this G-d forsaken place.

Jacob Wrestles with the Image of G-d

2009-12-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

After more than fourteen years, two wives, two concubines, and eleven children, Jacob is ready to return home, but he is afraid that Esau, understandably, will not meet him with open arms. To protect his family, Jacob sends them to the far side of the river Jabbok. Left alone, he is attacked by an ish, While ish is commonly translated as man, most commentators understand this ish as a divine being, partly because the ish is so anxious to leave before the sun comes up, and partly because the ish gives Jacob a new name, Israel, which can be translated as “he struggles with G-d.” Some scholars, however, identify the ish as either Esau himself or his guardian spirit. When Jacob finally does encounter his brother the next morning, he greets him with the words, “To see your face, is like seeing the face of God” (Genesis 33:10).

When the being fell upon him
in the dark, each hold froze his body
in the attitude of prayer:
bent, kneeling, prostrate, prone.
Toward morning, they were locked like lovers,
front to back, and Jacob felt
G-d’s arms squeezing out the life
He'd once breathed into him. Wrenched
around at last, Jacob presumed
he’d won by his own human might
the chance to see G-d and to live.
Only when he made obeisance
seven times, approaching Esau
across the wilderness of wrong
did Jacob understand that glimpse
of the divine was granted to him
so that he might recognize
G-d’s image in his brother’s face.

For Joseph

2009-11-25T19:36:00.000-08:00

Names are always significant in Torah. In the case of Jacob’s wives, the sisters Leah and Rachel, names become a weapon in their rivalry. Although Jacob clearly prefers Rachel, it is Leah who becomes pregnant—multiple times—while Rachel is barren. To rub it in, Leah names her children Reuben (look, a son), Simeon (heard—as in, “G-d heard that I am despised and has given me this one too” Genesis 29:33), Levi (joined or attached, expressing her hope that the three boys will make her husband attached to her), Judah (thanks), Issachar (reward), Zebulun (exalt), and Dinah (justified). I can just imagine what it must have been like for Rachel to hear these children called home for dinner! Finally, G-d heeds Rachel’s prayers and sends her the first of her two sons, Joseph, whose name means “G-d will add.” I have been fiddling with this poem, for my nephew Joseph, since he was born, right around Thanksgiving day nineteen years ago.

When your uncle held me to his chest,
I thought I’d felt the final permutation
of love, that this same encompassing gesture
would extend to those we bore. Instead,
like the different postures they preferred
at the breast, each of my children made the mother
he or she required. Now, lifting you
from the crib, I think the name you bear—
“the Lord will add”—must be a prophecy.
Ask something of me, Joseph; make me new.

Jacob's Ladder

2009-11-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

Having helped Jacob steal his brother’s birthright, Rivka worries that Esau will take revenge, and she schemes to have Jacob sent away from home to look for a wife. On this journey, Jacob lays down to sleep on a stone and has the famous vision of a ladder with its top reaching to heaven. When he wakens from this dream, he cries, “Truly, G-d is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Any stone where you have rested your head
might be the boulder rolled across the gate
to heaven. Any morning you might feel
G-d’s healing finger in a ray of sun
reaching beneath your shirt to touch your heart.
Today might be the day you hear a summons
in the whistle of the thrush. Look,
this plant becomes Jacob’s Ladder;
its even rows of variegated leaves,
the stairs; and the blue, bell-shaped flowers,
the skirts of angels ascending and descending.

Generations

2009-11-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

The Bible is famous for its “begats,” and this parasha begins with the “begettings” of Isaac (Genesis 25:19). While these long lists are always phrased in terms of a father begetting sons, mothers sometimes intervene in these orderly genealogies, helping to upend the tradition of primogeniture by favoring the younger son. Here, Isaac’s wife, Rebecca (Rivka in Hebrew), has determined that Abraham’s line, traditionally intended to go through the eldest son, Esau, will go through Jacob. She and Jacob connive together to steal Esau’s blessing, not one of the more morally edifying chapters in the Bible.

This is the line of Rivka, gotten
by entreaty, when her womb
was empty as a beggar’s bowl
and the crowded firmament
she prayed to mocked her husband’s promise:

their offspring would outnumber the stars.
Inside her, the boys were the punch line
of the proverb: Be careful what you ask for.
The taut skin of her belly buckled
as they strove, like cats in a bag.

From the moment she saw the younger
clinging to his brother’s heel,
she knew her heir, the yiddishe kop*—
smaller, milder, smart enough
to hitch a ride into the world.

That shrewdness, she cultivated:
He was ready with a mess
of pottage when the burly brother
returned home from the hunt, hungrier
for lentils than for rights of birth;

ready to wear his brother’s skin,
a costume to deceive a father
beyond seeing which son he loved.
This is the line of Jacob,
the twin always too clever by half.

*Literally, a “Jewish head,” but idiomatically, someone quick-witted.

And He Loved Her

2009-11-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

The first mention in Torah of love between a man and woman occurs in this week’s portion. After Sarah dies, Abraham sends his servant Eliezar to find a wife for his son, and Eliezar returns to Canaan with Rebecca. She and Isaac see each other across “a field at eventide” and seem to make an immediate connection. The text says, “And Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebecca as wife. And he loved her, and Isaac was consoled after his mother’s death” (Genesis 24:67).

Mostly in these stories they “know”
each other, and we read the knowing
in quotations, like winking lashes,
for we ourselves are knowing since Adam
knew himself as naked. No matter
how we come together, chest
to slick chest, knowing conjures
something wholly of the head
like antennae tapping, desire
firing the dendritic tree.
But Isaac looked and loved Rebecca,
and she, so overcome she tumbled
from her camel, covered her head
and let her heart go out to him.

Sarah Laughed

2009-11-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

One of the joys of reading Torah every year is discovering how the story changes for me as I enter new phases of my life. Before I had children, I never noticed how much of Genesis was about sibling rivalry. Now that I have gray hair and wrinkles, I have a new understanding of Sarah, who, the Bible tells us, laughed when she was told that she would bear a child despite the fact that “the way of women had ceased for her” (Genesis 18:11). Sarah, at least, laughed inwardly. The text says that Abraham fell on his face laughing at the idea. While Abraham is clearly incredulous that Sarah will become pregnant, Sarah’s laughter seems more complex. She asks, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” (18:13) Reading the passage this year, I thought about what it might be like for a woman my age to have to compete with younger wives or concubines for a husband’s attention.

What surprised her most was not the son
the angels promised but that Abraham
might still be hungry for her shrunken charms
after that disastrous dalliance
with the Egyptian girl,* and now Keturah
insinuating herself like the incense
she was named for under the flap of his tent.
Not that Sarah envied her the work;
these days his tastes ran more to breeding sheep,
telling tales of Ur—an old man’s pleasures.
And what had Sarah left to rouse him with?
Her face was furrowed like a dune; her hair
silver as the cuffs she’d borne each day
since her father gave them as her bride price.
Would her husband suck at her slack breast
let alone a child? Eons ago
their marriage had devolved into a laugh
like one they’d share tonight remembering
this prediction while the desert cooled
like cakes on a brick, and he squinted at her
across the darkness and the cooking fire,
trying to make out the lineaments
of someone he had once desired. Still,
she’d go and wash her hair with henna now,
splash her bosom with Egyptian musk.

*Hagar, Sarah’s handmaiden, whom she “gives” to Abraham in order that he may have a son, Ishmael
*Abraham’s second wife, whom he married after Sarah’s death

The Covenant of the Pieces

2009-10-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

There are two covenants in this week’s portion. The first is the mysterious b’rit bein habetarim, the covenant between the parts, or the covenant of the pieces. In Genesis 15:9-10, G-d instructs Avram, "'Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird.' He brought Him all these and cut them in two, placing each half opposite the other…" Then, in a dream, Avram sees a fiery furnace with a torch pass between the pieces and thus seal the promise of the land. In the second covenant, the b’rit milah, circumcision seals G-d’s promise that Avram—now to be called Abraham—will be “the father of a multitude of nations” (17:4).

G-d is the great separator—stars

birthed from murky columns of gas,

continents from seas, man

and woman from the same bone,

cells dividing and dividing

yet intact like Zeno’s paradox

of pieces infinitely fractioning,

ever whole. We are the stars

He promised in the powerful dark,

and we are the pieces, our bodies

spared from fire and flood

only to be cut or cast,

as prophesied, into the Nile.

This is the nature of the covenant:

Only the Lord our G-d, the Lord is One.

Rain Hike

2009-10-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, we had one of those storms that summon the verse from this week’s parasha, “Noah,” “All the fountains of the great deep burst apart, and the floodgates of the sky broke open” (Genesis 7:11). This poem recalls a week of such rain, and a hike I took with my then-young children.

Drops had gone from backdrop to the front
of our minds. So many rainy sallies

from porch to car ended with us drenched,

the water blown in defiance of physics

under our umbrellas, through the seams

of our galoshes where all the sunless days

had left the children’s tender shins white.

Beyond bored, I was stupid with cooped desire

to sing in our outside voices, to whack at balls

and watch them hurtle toward the gurgling drains,

to whirl like kamikaze maple pods.

Cabin—or condo—fever, it seemed inspired,

zipping the children in their slickers, to just yield,

lift our faces in the rain and drink.

And so it was at first: the world, soppy

but retaining its contours; the puddle rivers

navigable, with brown leaves careening

toward the stopped up sewers. If the park

seemed as far away as another planet—

one with no sun—the children gripped

my hands and headed there without complaint.

Was the air washed? I think it smelled of rot,

like deep woods. Whatever ions floated

in the stormy air, I felt their charge.

When the dirt heaved in front of us, I believed

something biblical was happening,

as though the Lord G-d chucked a lightning bolt,

and the Earth opened a yawning maw to swallow us.

Only as the tree listed our way

did I see the root—huge as it was—

no longer held its sodden ground.

And then the oak fell, like someone gone,

suddenly, unconscious. The canopy landed

not ten feet from where we stood. No one cried,

but Eli said he thought we should go home.

Two days later, when the downpour eased,

I saw a rainbow through the kitchen panes.

It wasn’t like the children’s crayonings

with each hue in its track, but rather blurred,

ambiguously soothing as a promise

never to destroy the world again.

I did not call the children to witness it.

Casting Stones

2009-10-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

Usually, I have one or maybe two poems to offer on any given portion, but, of course, B’reishit covers a lot of ground, including the first act of creation and the first murder—Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel. I find myself drawn to the rejected sons in the Bible (of which there are many). Like Cain, the exemplar of this type, they often seem more dim than evil, boys whose natural complement makes them easy prey for sin; as G-d tells Cain, sin “is a demon at the door; you are the one it craves” (Genesis 4:7). In this poem for my brother, I think about the jealousy that is part of every sibling relationship, and how, sometimes, the demon wins.

The way our mother tells it, I absolved you
for the pebble that caught me in the thin skin
of the forehead. Even as I sobbed, I told:
We both were throwing stones, and I had bent down
for ammo, standing the moment you let loose
with a wicked slider. I must have been four—
we were farmers on the hill where the peas and roses
climbed the terraces below the house. So spring,
and we two, cooped up with measles that long March,
had at last been set free to retake the yard
from squirrel and crow. It’s not that I remember
but imagine the harsh scarf that Bubbe* knit
chafing at my neck, and the raw wound
of being, always, second. How true to me
your aim appeared, while my poor missiles thudded
near my feet. I think I would have struck you down
could I have trained my stone as I know you did.

*Grandmother in Yiddish

The Expulsion of the Ants

2009-10-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

I had no idea of the depth of my own protective instincts until I moved to California and confronted an invading force of ants bent on carrying off a newly baked apple crisp. Somehow it reminded me of these verses, Genesis 3:22-24, that come after Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of knowledge: “And the Lord God said, ‘Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!’ So the Lord God banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and stationed east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

I am not proud of the pleasure I take, blocking
the chink in the grout where the scouts, those master sappers,
tunneled through; perusing the workers’ confusion,
I even pity the dull plodders following
the formic trail, diddling each others’ feelers.
I don’t defend my wrath as I wait for them
to scent the trap, prefer it to the food
left cut and tempting on the kitchen sink.
I do not judge but only begrudge them the fruit.
It’s not hate moving me to bar
their path with boric acid. No, but neither
is it something I want G-d to see.
Maybe this is how the angel felt,
wielding the fiery, ever-turning sword
across the path to Eden, finally glad
to stop those creatures swarming over His apples
so perilously near that other tree
whose fruit would make the mortals one of Us.

The First Word

2009-10-11T20:06:00.001-07:00

When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water — God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. Genesis 1:1-3

As English speakers, most of us know the King James version of the first word in the Bible, or really the first two words, B’reishit barah: “In the beginning, G-d created.” But there are various translations, like the one above from the Jewish Publication Society. I’m interested in how these different translations affect the meaning, especially comparing the King James version to “When G-d was about the create heaven and earth,” as the phrase is given in The Torah, A Woman’s Commentary.

The first translation means this world contains

everything: the sun hoisted up

each morning like a koi out of a dark pool;

the palm tree holding its bolus of new fronds;

the squirrel scuttering across a branch

and the coyote skulking after him;

the pack of men, who merge into the landscape

as your plane ascends a thousand feet.

In the other, much is lost—what G-d had done

before He turned His mind to this green orb

and all the other planets rolling like the bearings

in a pinball game. Had He been drinking tea

with angels? Coiling some other helix to form

an earlier set of disappointing creatures?

Fashioning the immovable object

with irresistible force? We cannot say,

having just one world to plunder for words.