July 25, 2011 · 7:56 am

Meditation and Organic Torah: The Missing Link

by Natan Margalit (Newton, MA)

“Narcissistic navel gazing” was an accusation thrown around a lot when meditation and other forms of spiritual practice started making inroads into Jewish communities a couple of decades ago. Now, a lot of us meditate, and far from taking Jews away from the traditional Jewish emphasis on community, tzedakkah, and social justice, Jewish meditation has greatly enriched our lives.

And yet, anyone who meditates knows that it often is a struggle to connect our spiritual practice with the rest of our lives. I try to meditate in the morning. Actually, I do my own combination of davenning (Jewish prayer) and meditation. It usually isn’t a transcendent experience, but it can get me to slow down, feel my body, breathe, accept myself for a few moments before I start rushing around trying to solve my problems — or the world’s. On a good day, I get a feeling of something that, on reflection, I might call presence, or even Presence. But all that quickly gets swept away once I come downstairs and face the music: The kids need to get to school on time but Nadav won’t put on his clothes and Eiden wants to play baby dinosaur. I’d love to play with them but instead I’m aggravated because I need to rush them off to school and myself off to work. Maybe it’s just the dynamic rhythm of life: a time to meditate, a time to dress the kids, a time to make a living — to everything there is a season.

But I think that’s not the whole story.

We live in a society and economy that kills Presence more than it needs to. Let me go on with more tales of my mornings: some mornings after I come downstairs I can escape the chaos in the house for a moment by doing one of my favorite chores: taking out the compost. Putting the compost on the pile and covering it up with dry grass clippings, I take note of how it’s doing. It’s like cooking — is there too much liquid, or is it too dry? How does it smell? Like rich, plant-nourishing compost or still yucky? I’m checking its progress from last week’s rotting food scraps to fertilizer for our garden, and in a couple months, more veggies for our table. It’s a mundane but also magical cycle that always amazes me. And it reminds me of what most people say when they are asked where they feel spiritually connected: “in nature.” And it’s true. There is something about the patterns of nature that inexplicably affects our consciousness. Perhaps it’s that everything is connected and nothing is wasted. Nature is a set of cycles and patterns that bring us back to Presence and the Oneness beneath all existence. So composting can feel like a continuation of my meditation.

But, most people don’t compost. The default in our society is tossing it. Out of sight and out of mind. And it does something to our spirit as well as the world when we cut off our minds from the natural cycles. Go to YouTube (or the sidebar of the Organic Torah blog) and check out the short video The Story of Stuff. It powerfully illustrates how our economy is all about a linear fantasy that we can take all the resources we want from somewhere, use them up and dump the waste into an infinite somewhere else. This is the Industrial Age worldview that gets us to rush around in work schedules more suited to machines than to people. Family and community take a back seat to production and GDP.

When I compost valuable organic matter (last night’s dinner scraps) instead of tossing “waste” I’m also keeping a bit of Presence in my life. It not only helps reduce the size of the landfill, but it also expands the breath of my soul. OK, but beyond composting, how can we connect more to Presence in our work and daily lives? Where can we start shifting the structure of our lives to include more natural patterns?

I get at least part of the answer when I do my combination davenning/meditation in the morning. When I think of patterns in daily community life, I think of a little quote from the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 127a) that comes right near the beginning of the daily morning blessings. “These are the things of which a person eats their fruit (the yield, or reward) in this world, and the principle (Hebrew: keren, horn) remains for him/her into eternity: honoring father and mother, acts of loving kindness, arriving early to the study house in the morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, supporting (a poor) bride, attending to the dead, concentration in prayer, making peace between people. And the study of torah is equal to them all.”

The daily rhythm of saying these words (and the Hebrew does have a beautiful, poetic rhythm to it) reinforces actions that we as individuals can do to strengthen the natural rhythms and patterns of community. The seemingly mundane actions mentioned in the Talmud — honoring parents, visiting the sick, helping out at a wedding, or welcoming guests — recognize the patterns of communal life. These actions, and actions like composting, strengthen those patterns at their most vulnerable and fragile points: the relationship between generations, the cycles of birth and death, and the easily frayed fabric of community. Underlying and emerging from all these actions is the torah. It is “equal to them all” because it enables us to reflect on them together as one interlocking whole. The Sages said about the torah: “turn it and turn it, for all is in it,” because the torah is but another level of the weave of life in which nothing is wasted.

We can do a better job of connecting our meditation and spiritual practice to our daily lives, but we have to realize that the cards are stacked against us. The dominant culture and economy are still operating on a mechanical model that keeps us running away from Presence, away from the patterns that lead us to the One. In order to spread that sense of Presence beyond the sitting cushion and throughout our lives we need a more organic model of daily life. For that, the (organic) torah is a good place to start.

Natan Margalit was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, studied Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, made aliya, and studied for many years in Israeli yeshivot. He received rabbinic ordination at The Jerusalem Seminary in 1990 and earned a Ph.D.  in Talmud from U.C. Berkeley in 2001.  He has held teaching positions at Bard College , the Reconstuctionist Rabbinical College and the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Boston.
Natan is Director of Oraita, a program of continuing education for rabbis of Hebrew College , as well as spiritual leader of The Greater Washington Coalition for Jewish Life, in Western Connecticut .  He is President of Organic Torah, inc. a non-profit organization which fosters holistic thinking about Judaism, environment and society. He has written and taught for many years on Judaism and the environment, innovative approaches to Jewish texts, Jewish mysticism and spirituality, and gender and Judaism. He lives in Newton, MA with his wife Ilana and sons, Nadav and Eiden.
This piece first appeared on Organic Torah’s website (http://organictorah.org/) and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
 

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July 18, 2011 · 7:52 am

Reclaiming My German Citizenship

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

It was last June that my husband Brian and I completed our applications for German citizenship before moving from Bozeman, Montana to Berlin, Germany.  By reclaiming our German citizenship we hoped to come “full circle” as the descendants of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.  We are still waiting for the magical moment when we learn that our citizenship has been restored, but we both believe it will be worth the wait.

It was not a magical moment when we told my mother that we were moving to Germany.  The opportunity to connect with my past, become fluent in a language I fell in love with as a child, and to once again be Jewish in Germany meant nothing to her.  How could we bring her grandchildren to the place of horror and persecution from which she and my father had fled?  No answer would suffice.  She did not speak to us for six weeks.

I don’t know what it felt like for my parents and grandparents to be stripped of their German citizenship, to be stateless from 1938 until 1944, and to finally become American citizens.  My maternal grandmother seemed to remain stateless, eventually leaving America for Israel, then Switzerland, and finally going back to her beloved  Germany.  My paternal grandparents were more typical immigrants, creating their own oasis of German culture in the middle of New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood (complete with apfel strudel, kartoffel salat, and lots of wurstchen).

No form of Holocaust reparation is enough, but reclaimed citizenship has more significance for me than any financial restitution our family may receive.  My children and their descendants will have opportunities that my grandparents could never have imagined.  We will have access to Germany’s universal health care system and free system of higher education.  We will automatically become citizens of the European Union which means we can live, work, and study at a university in any EU country under the same conditions as nationals.  We will not have to give up our American citizenship, nor do we want to.

I will take full ownership of my identity when I regain the citizenship that was stripped from both my parents’ families.  As a German American Jew I can embrace each of these three elements of my identity to whatever degree I wish.  Just as I have always struggled with what it means to be Jewish, I will always struggle with what it means to be German.  But I am entitled to my German citizenship, and I may soon have it.

After months of fruitless attempts to track down my citizenship application, I learned in March that the all-efficient German bureaucracy had lost it.  The application contained many documents that I had painstakingly put together to establish my German Jewish identity.  These were my personal historical building blocks that had suddenly vanished.  The official who delivered this disturbing news politely apologized and suggested I file a new application and begin the process all over again.  His cold words hit me like a stamp that says “no one cares.”

Now it is June again, our first school year in Germany is coming to an end, and my oldest son is preparing for his bar mitzvah in Berlin this fall.  Avery’s bar mitzvah will take place on the anniversary of my father’s bar mitzvah in New York City in 1942.  My son and my father will have both taken this step as immigrants, and as German American Jews who belong to a vibrant and thriving Jewish community.

I also have high hopes that the stress and frustration of trying to move my  citizenship application forward are finally behind me.  My application was eventually found and is being processed in Rathaus Schoeneberg, the place where John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.  Kennedy not only said that he was a Berliner, but that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” As we embark on our second year of living in Germany, I feel optimistic that Kennedy’s vision will become a reality for me.

Donna Swarthout came to Berlin with her family to explore her German Jewish heritage and identity and the nature of Jewish life in Germany today.  You can read more about her experiences on her blog Full Circle: www.dswartho.wordpress.com

And you can hear her reading a version of this story on NPR’s Berlin Stories: http://berlinstories.org/2012/06/27/donna-swarthout-on-coming-full-circle/

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July 11, 2011 · 7:00 am

Wednesday the Rabbi Said Kaddish

by Pamela Jay Gottfried (Atlanta, GA)

Growing up, all I knew about the Kaddish was that it was recited by children whose parents were dead, thus I was absolutely forbidden from saying it.  An important tenet of folk religion –otherwise known as superstition– is that a child who recites Kaddish tempts the Angel of Death to take his or her parents from this earth.  Traveling the country and teaching, I have found this tradition to be universally known and observed by Jews.

During my second year in rabbinical school I studied the history of the Kaddish and its role in Jewish liturgy.  I was already aware that the words of the prayer had nothing to do with death, and that the person leading the recitation was in fact heaping praise upon God.  But I was surprised to learn that the origin of the Kaddish was not as a mourner’s prayer at all.  In its ancient formulation, as the Rabbi’s Kaddish or Kaddish d’Rabbanan, it was recited upon the conclusion of Torah study. The custom of mourners saying Kaddish arose centuries later.

It was in Rabbi Joel Roth’s classroom that I abandoned my attachment to superstitions about not saying the Kaddish and allowed the prayer to assert its primacy in my daily life. Like his colleagues in the Talmud & Rabbinics department, Rabbi Roth followed a pedagogic approach to the text that included calling upon the students to read, translate and explain passages without warning. This somewhat intimidating practice ensured that no student would attend class unprepared.  Every class period was effectively a pop quiz, at least for the students called upon to read that day.  It was also an opportunity for individual students to demonstrate their progress, which Rabbi Roth both encouraged and rewarded.

Toward the end of every 90-minute class, before we closed our volumes of Talmud, Rabbi Roth would take a laminated sheet from his desk and hand it to the student who “stood out” that day from among the group.  Then we all stood together to recite the Rabbi’s Kaddish. When this privilege, an invitation to lead the prayer, was bestowed upon me for the first time that semester, my heart rejoiced.  I felt my praises of God’s name rise up to join the chorus of angels in heaven.  I still remember how I felt that morning, nearly half a lifetime ago.

These days, I attend a weekly Torah study at my doctor’s office. It is comprised of adult learners who are professionals in other fields. As a rabbi and the assigned facilitator, I am often the only one present who has prepared the text prior to class.  Usually other members of the group volunteer to read aloud from the text, ask questions about the translations and commentaries, and readily offer their own interpretations of the material.  At a well-attended session, six to eight friends sit around a conference table, enjoying coffee and snacks with Torah study and conversation.  This past Wednesday, however, our host spent half the class moving chairs from every exam room into the break room.  At the end of the hour I realized that we had a minyan – the quorum needed to say the Rabbi’s Kaddish.  We quickly ascertained which direction was east, and I scrolled through the prayer book on my iPhone to find the words, fondly recalling Rabbi Roth’s laminated sheet.  My heart sang as the chorus of students stood with me to praise God’s name.

Pamela Jay Gottfried is a rabbi, parent, teacher, artist, and the author of Found in Translation: Common Words of Uncommon Wisdom.  A New York City native and graduate of The Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Gottfried teaches students of all ages in churches, colleges, community centers, schools, and synagogues. She strives for balance in her life by spending as much time writing at the computer as she does working at the pottery wheel.

You can read more of her work on her blog, Pamela’s Pekele (http://rabbipjg.blogspot.com/), where this piece first appeared. It’s reprinted here with the author’s kind permission.

And for more information about Gottfried, visit her website: http://www.pamelagottfried.com/

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July 4, 2011 · 9:59 am

Sweet Dreams

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Sometimes I dream I’m the one who kills Hitler.
It’s simple. I walk up to him,
shoot him in the face, and watch his head
explode into a million
glass pieces that clink on the floor
like a Saturday morning cartoon character’s.
Except he doesn’t get back up.

And sometimes I am Yael.
I invite Hitler into my tent as he flees from his enemies.
He tells me he is thirsty, and I
give him milk, and he falls fast asleep.
I pick up a tent pin and hammer. I drive the pin
through his temple until it reaches the ground.

Other times I’m part of the plot to assassinate him
aboard his plane. This time I make sure
the bomb explodes. He falls faster and faster, crashing
with such force the earth swallows him up, as if he never

existed, and I’m sitting on the back porch, the sun is shining,
and all my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles
are laughing and telling stories.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007), a collection of poems about her family and the Shoah. Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals such as the Connecticut Review and Limestone, as well as on Beliefnet. She is a teaching fellow at Clal.

This poem has been reprinted with the kind permission of the author and Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

For more about Kirchheimer’s work, visit: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=janet+r+kirchheimer&page=index&prod=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Janet+R+Kirchheimer&flag=False&ugrp=2

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June 13, 2011 · 8:19 am

Wednesday Night Prayers

by Arlyn Miller (Glencoe, IL)

I.

Haftarah Blessing

In the sanctuary, the girl practices for her bat mitzvah.
Beside her, the Rabbi.  In front of them, the open scroll.
Behind them, the open ark.
After reciting her Haftarah with a steady, studied pace, she begins
chanting the blessing.   The mellow warmth of the Rabbi’s voice joins hers:
for holiness and rest, for honor and glory: we thank and bless you.

II.

Kaddish

In the library, two 6th grade girls practice reciting the Kaddish prayer.
An 8th grade boy listens, tutoring them.  They take turns repeating the lines,
punctuating them with an easy camaraderie.  The prayer holds this, too.
In the courtyard, the snow is lit white against the dark night sky.
Yit-gadal v‘-yitka-dash sh’mei raba, b’al-ma di v’ra chi-ru-tei….

 

III.

Shehecheyanu

In the classroom, the Cantor is teaching trope to the students.
In unison their voices overflow into the hallway, where two 4th grade boys
and their teen helper sit cross legged on the floor practicing
the Shehecheyanu: Blessed are You, Adoni, our God,
Sovereign of the universe, for giving us life, sustaining us,
and enabling us to reach this season.

_____

Arlyn Miller is spending a year chronicling the life of her synagogue  (Am Shalom in Glencoe, IL) as its Writer in Residence.  “Wednesday Night Prayers” appears in slightly revised form in the March 2011 KOL.  A poet, essayist and journalist, Arlyn also teaches creative writing in schools and in the community through Poetic License, Inc.  You can find out more about her work at: www.poeticlicenseinc.net.

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June 6, 2011 · 7:15 am

The First Commandment

by Madeline Black (Sarasota, FL)

“I am the Eternal God.”

This sentence is the well known first of the Ten Commandments. However, according to basic rules of grammar, this sentence can not be a command. And yet, it is not only one of the Ten Commandments; it is the First Commandment.

While the following nine–such as, “You shall keep the Sabbath,” “Honor your father and mother,” and “Thou shall not kill”–are unarguably commands, this first commandment reads as more of an opening line. It sets the stage for the commandments that follow.

I believe that the purpose of the first commandment is for the Israelites to accept God as the Eternal One, who brought us out of the land of Egypt to be our God.

One Midrash interprets the first commandment to mean: “I am the Eternal, if I am your God.” In other words, God is able to bring about divine redemption only if Israel acknowledges God as being our God.

Upon learning this, I was reminded of a piece of information that I learned in a social studies class this year. I learned that a state can only be considered a state if it is universally acknowledged by other states. Well, does this same principle not apply to religion?

So, let us consider our religion to be a state of mind. By accepting the First Commandment to be true, we enter into that state of mind. Only in this state of mind are we able to fully adhere to the following nine commandments.

In a way, the First Commandment is God’s way of making sure that everybody clearly understands the responsibilities set by the commandments, as well as the consequences that come from not following them. The First Commandment is a reminder so that we do not forget that the commandments are something more than guidelines.

Let us not forget that the covenant between us and God has two sides to it. We are God’s chosen people as long as God is our only God. If we do not choose God, we are not his people. But what would happen if we had not accepted God as the Eternal?

The Quantum Theory explores the idea that matter and reality only exist when observed. For instance, does a spider in your bathroom exist if you do not see it? (Personally, I would prefer to think not.) But the bigger question is, if we did not believe in God, would God still exist? And without the belief in God, what are the Ten Commandments, if not only a set of meaningless, obsolete guidelines?

Although accepting God as our God was something we did as a people, I have come to learn that it is also something one must do on one’s own. In Hebrew school, as children, we are taught the Ten Commandments. We are taught the fundamentals of being Jewish. What is accepted, and what is not. However, it is not until later that one begins to question: Why must we celebrate Passover? Why must we keep the Sabbath?

I have learned this year from Rabbi Glickman that although we are given texts to read and passages to study, it is up to us to interpret them in a way that fits with our idea of being Jewish. This year, I have begun to understand that each person must also accept God as his or her God, and embrace the state of mind in order to be able to fully appreciate the mitzvah that is the Ten Commandments.

So, in reality, though the First Commandment is not a direct command, it is the most important commandment. The words “I am your God” are the words that direct these commandments to us, God’s chosen people. This commandment includes us all in a category of people who will follow the rest of the Ten Commandments.

God is our God, so we follow God’s commandments.

Madeline Black shared these thoughts about God and the Ten Commandments as part of her Confirmation this past Shabbat at Temple Emanu-el in Sarasota, FL. 

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May 31, 2011 · 7:50 am

Crumbs

by Janet Ruth Falon (Elkins Park, PA)

It was all orchestrated by Mother.
Moments before dark on the night before the first seder
she scattered breadcrumbs around her linoleum kitchen
but not leading anywhere, like Hansel and Gretl’s way home.

It was black inside like a fairytale woods, so
each person lit a candle, searching in its orange glow
for those deliberate crumbs
of day-old doughnuts or the last shtickel of challah
from Friday night.

Illuminated, you’d search the kitchen’s corners,
deep in the nooks and the slits of the crannies,
searching for the crumbs your mother planted.
You’d have a feather, or an old toothbrush –
its bristles splayed like a newborn giraffe’s legs –
and when you found something, you’d brush it
onto yesterday’s news, or in a little paper bag.

The next morning, you’d burn it,
letting the crumbs devour themselves to nothing —
like the marshmallow that falls off your stick
and into the fire,
leaving behind only a smell that reminds you
of something that used to be there, but is no more.

If you want to be thorough, to give it your all,
you hunt in your car for crumbs,
your desk, your locker if you’re a kid,
anywhere you might have left a trace of yourself, but
not quite enough to add up to a whole.

I like this ritual,
this Jewish spring cleaning,
getting rid of the crumbs in my life,
the pieces that don’t add up to much
and have gone stale.
Once upon a time, I loved someone
who wouldn’t let me eat a doughnut in his car
and, several decades later,
offered me crumbs of friendship.
At first I accepted them gratefully
— hungrily – but after a time
I realized that even an endless supply of crumbs
didn’t add up, and
didn’t satisfy me as much as one intact cookie,
(even a boring little ginger snap,
or some other intrinsically unattractive sweet.)

So I’m telling you
when I open the door for Elijah this year
I’m not going to let just any one in,
even if it’s Elijah’s guest, if he comes empty-handed.

And even when Passover has passed,
if I’m going to let you in,
you have to bring me a pound of those buttery bakery cookies
that look like pastel-painted leaves,
or better yet, an entire cake,
one you know I like.
You see, I don’t accept crumbs any more.

Janet Ruth Falon, the author of The Jewish Journaling Book (Jewish Lights, 2004), teaches a variety of writing classes — including journaling and creative expression — at many places, including the University of Pennsylvania. She leads a non-fiction writing group and works with individual students, and is continuing to write Jewish-themed readings for what she hopes will become a book, In the Spirit of the Holidays.

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May 23, 2011 · 7:33 am

Hawking Sees No Heaven

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Hawking sees no heaven,
a fantasy, he calls it,
“for people afraid of the dark.”
What, no Shangri-La for the children,
no safe haven for the doubtful?
His pronouncement manifests the force
of a prison door closing on a life sentence.
Mr. Hawking, I surely respect your intelligence,
but how can you be so sure?
We are more than machine
with triple AAA batteries gone dead.
In the small, sheltered space
before you fall asleep
do you not think your soul migrates
to a higher, more peaceful place?
Sleep may be death’s counterfeit,
but we dream, do we not?
Why not then for eternity?

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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May 16, 2011 · 7:28 am

Writing Wharton’s Wrong

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

Singing about marriage, two of Steven Sondheim’s characters in A Little Night Music condemn it for inflicting so much pain: “Every day a little death….every day a little sting.”

I felt a bit like like that in college, not because I was married, but because I was an English major.  Time after time, I’d find a book I was reading and enjoying stung me because of an anti-Semitic portrait.  There was Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, a Jewish antiques dealer in The Golden Bowl, and many more, too many to remember, but I met them at every turn in English and American books.

I understood that the authors were products of their society and a western culture that was ingrained with Jew-hatred, but it still pushed me out of the book the way a plot implausibility can make you lose faith in a movie.  I don’t remember ever not finishing a book that had a Jewish stereotype or slur, but I’d continue reading under a cloud.

Perhaps most disturbing of all for me was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.  I had first read her Pulitzer-prize winner The Age of Innocence and fallen in love, so I worked my way devotedly through her oeuvre in paperback.  The House of Mirth was my favorite then and still is now.  It’s a stunning book about the vanity of human wishes and the damage a superficial culture can inflict on those who won’t play by its rules. Reading it for the first time in my senior year at Fordham, I was in awe: Wharton displayed an uncanny understanding of the power of shame to control behavior and crush hope.  The novel was so beautifully written, so witty and sharp-edged, such an indictment of Gilded Age New York.

And very unpleasant to read–as a Jew.  Every time the Jewish financier Simon Rosedale appeared in the book, I winced.  He was showy, loud, vulgar, spoke bad English, and came off as a buffoon when he wasn’t insidious.  Gentiles loved his money but rightly despised him, and his eye was always on the main chance.

Wharton actually pays special attention to his eyes the first time he appears, telling us he had “small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.”  How ironic that Wharton’s contempt for Jews is projected onto him, turning him into someone for whom others are merely items to assess and purchase.

Simon Rosedale does show a less mercenary side, but it’s always connected to his fierce drive to get ahead by any means necessary.  In the same way that assertive women today are seen by some people as bitches, Rosedale wanting success the way any other American might is condemned as vulgar and almost disgusting.

I hadn’t written much fiction of my own at the time, but in the following years, Jewish themes would predominate.  I often found myself returning to writers who inspired me in college, writers like Henry James and Lawrence Durrell who were hardly philo-Semitic, and yes, Edith Wharton.  The sting became duller each time, but it never went away.

And then a few years ago, perhaps because I’d been reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern again, an idea hit me.  What if I did a Stoppard?  What if I told Edith Wharton’s story in The House of Mirth from Rosedale’s perspective, entered his mind, his past, his dreams, his fears? What if I made him a person, in other words, and not a stereotype?

Rosedale in Love was born, and it bore me along with it on massive amounts of reading about The Gilded Age and turn-of-the-century New York, all of it deepening my appreciation of what Wharton had accomplished in the rest of her novel.  And helping me let go of my regrets for the ways in which Wharton had lost the chance to make Simon Rosedale a real human being.

Because she left me a whole book to write.

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of twenty books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities, and his work has been the subject of numerous academic articles, papers, and books. A former public radio book show host and newspaper columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.  He blogs on books for The Huffington Post and reviews for the on-line literary magazine Bibliobuffet.com.

You can check out his latest book, the Jewish historical novel Rosedale in Love, at http://www.levraphael.com/rosedale.html

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May 9, 2011 · 8:01 am

Evidence of Light

by Arlyn Miller (Glencoe, IL)

Am Shalom sanctuary, early weekday morning

I.

From the east,
the autumn morning light
sets the stained glass aglow,
aqua and amber bejeweled.
Outside, a sparrow casts
its flitting shadow against
the arched panes of colored glass.
Everywhere, there is evidence of light.

II.

On the western wall, three windows
awash in a soft, even tone;
their encircled triptych assures:
you will voyage    home    to thrive and grow.
Pathways of penumbral hope issue
in all directions, it matters not in which you set forth –
Adonai Echod: God is one.
And even though the sun has not yet arced
across the sky, there is evidence of light.

III.

From the bema, to the south,
the eternal light suggests ascent,
spiraling and spare as wings.
In the foreground, rows of rounded
wooden seatbacks, like crested waves,
hint at movement and a journey.
Evidence of light, eternal.

IV.

The north door is open, guarded on each side
by the names of those we love and have lost –
clouds of memory, weighted by stones.
From the long corridor of the synagogue,
the light beckons: enter the day
and its evidence of light.

Arlyn Miller is spending a year chronicling the life of her synagogue  (Am Shalom in Glencoe, IL) as its Writer in Residence.  “Evidence of Light” appears in the December 2010 issue of Am Shalom’s KOL newsletter and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
A poet, essayist and journalist, Arlyn teaches creative writing in schools and in the community through Poetic License, Inc.  You can find out more about her teaching work at www.poeticlicenseinc.net.

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