Tag Archives: Yom Kippur

May 29, 2023 · 6:30 am

I Wanted to Be More Jewish

by Carol Blatter (Tucson, AZ)

My dad died of lung cancer on January 16, 1965. I was twenty-two. I remember Mom and me trying to find his tallit to be used in his burial which was tucked away somewhere in the apartment. Luckily we found it. Do I ever remember him wearing his tallit? No. Why would he? He didn’t go to synagogue on the Sabbath to engage in prayer. Nor on other holidays either. 

Because he had a hard life and had to work long hours including on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, he left behind any Jewish observance. (I am assuming that he had some Jewish education in his childhood but I never had a way of verifying or refuting this. All my dad’s  family are deceased).

Jewish practice could not heal his losses. He lost his dad when Grandma locked his dad out permanently for his abusive behavior. Dad, the oldest child, lost his childhood when he became a dad for his family. He lost the love and attention from his mom, my grandmother, who was raising Dad’s three younger siblings. He lost an education when he dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family. He lost his sense of self-esteem and the ability to earn a good living in his adult life. 

I grew up in a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. I always knew that I was Jewish. Most of our neighbors were Jewish. An Italian family lived next door. I thought that we had a good relationship with them. Maybe it was a superficial relationship because we were of different faiths. Thinking back I realize they never came to our apartment. Did my parents ever invite them even for a cup of coffee and chat? Did they ever invite us to their apartment for a cup of coffee and a chat? Not that I can ever remember.

We had a dance toward the end of sixth grade before graduation. John Mortorello, a very nice Italian boy, asked me to the dance. When I told my parents, Dad was incensed. He probably said something like, I can’t believe that you are going to a dance with an Italian boy. He was visibly upset. It’s hard to remember my reaction. I wanted to go to the dance and I was content to go with John. Mom didn’t say anything. I don’t think I knew much about prejudice. But I was beginning to learn. I still went to the dance with John. Did Dad have bad memories of having been beaten up by some Italian and Irish kids when he was a kid? Does that explain his reaction? 

Did he fear that eventually I would meet and date and, perhaps, marry a non-Jewish boy? I have no idea what he thought. 

Dad had an ice cream parlor and luncheonette when I was growing up. Many Syrian Jews frequented the store. For some reason Dad kept complaining about the Syrians. Why complain about the customers who brought income into the store? And why pick on other Jews just because they originated in Syria? Not from Minsk or Pinsk or Brooklyn? Not Ashkenazi Jews? Were their skins darker than ours? Did they have accents that made it difficult for them to be understood? I wonder what dad really feared. What I do know is that he feared the goyim. But Sephardic Jews are not the goyim. 

Dad and I never talked about our religion. I don’t think that I learned anything about our Jewish traditions from Dad. Showing was a way of teaching, and Dad was not a role model for Jewish practices.

My recollection is that neither Dad nor Mom went to the neighborhood synagogue on Kol Nidre night nor on the following day. I have my doubts that they prayed at home and fasted. I never saw this happen. What was strange was Dad taking on the role of a taskmaster on Kol Nidre night. I can still hear him telling me what I wasn’t allowed do. I couldn’t turn on the radio. I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t read. There wasn’t anything I was allowed to do. What was going on with Dad? Why this strange behavior? Why was he so harsh? So dictatorial? When did Dad ever tell me what to do or not do on other Jewish holidays? Not once that I can remember. In telling me the rules of Yom Kippur as interpreted by my dad, perhaps he was assuaging his guilt for his own non-observance. He could tell himself he was a good parent keeping me in line Jewishly. It is as if he fulfilled his obligations as a Jew even when he didn’t.

I was ten and in fifth grade. I told my parents that I wanted to fast on Yom Kippur. They appeared shocked and surprised. Imagine seeing my parents standing there frozen like two statues facing a traumatic event. I wondered. Did they think I was too young to make an informed decision? Did they think that I might die if I fasted? After their brief whispered chat, they agreed I could fast but only until 3 PM. I was ok with that. But they didn’t say anything about fasting with me.

I’m thinking back to when my dad sat shiva for his dad. I was eight years old. It confirmed that  my dad had some knowledge of Jewish traditions. He followed the Jewish practice of mourning for his dad. Despite a life-long fractured relationship, he knew he had to sit shiva. He had to say goodbye to his dad in this traditional way. Maybe in his dad’s death, he forgave him.

Thinking about all the main Jewish holidays, Sukkot, Purim, Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Ha’Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Chanukah, I can’t remember any family celebrations. I don’t know if I knew so little about these holidays that I didn’t feel a sense of loss. Maybe in a subconscious way, I did. Somewhere in my childhood, I decided I wanted to be more Jewish. Where this came from I have no idea. But it has shaped my entire adult life. 

I’m proud to be an observant Jew.

—

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press, Story Circle Network Journal and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Real Women Write: Growing/ Older, Real Women Write: Seeing Through Their Eyes, Story Circle Network’s Kitchen Table Stories, The Jewish Writing Project, Jewish Literary Journal, New Millennium Writings, 101words.org, and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write, Beyond Covid: Leaning into Tomorrow, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother. 

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December 20, 2021 · 7:30 am

The Word of God

by Eric Gabriel Lehman (New York, NY)

It was another Yom Kippur day a year and a half into the pandemic, and for a second time I davened in my dining area’s pop-up shul within sight of my kitchen sink. I scrolled through the Hebrew prayers on my phone, while up on my laptop the cantor, six-sided Keppel on his head and in sneakers, raised arms to his invisible congregation. Forgive our transgressions and our sins; claim us for Your own. The cantor’s music was no easier to resist than some memorized pop song and I sang along, even if the idea of sinning evoked my cigar-smoking grandfather’s sternness rather than my understanding of atonement as reflection and reconsideration. The day plateaued at the Musaf service, after seventeen or so hours of not eating or drinking, brain soft and eyes blurry in the dreamy afternoon light. Later, the dimming sky mirrored the melancholy of a year turning toward fall as we moved toward Ne’ila, whose final shofar blast would end the day like a mighty period. The ark’s opened curtain bared its theatrical cast of Torah scrolls in their embroidered vestments, each pair of rollers adorned with silver rimonim like jewelry. The chanting of the Thirteen Attributes, a threnody enumerating God’s compassion, mercy and grace, always rose like a collective sigh when sung live in the synagogue; my solitary rendition competed with ambulance sirens and the occasional car alarm, yet each attribute pulled me deeper into Ne’ila’s twilight. By the time we approached the edifice of Avinu Malkeinu, I felt ready to slip out of my body. Our Father, Our King, we have sinned in Your presence. Our Father, Our King, we have no sovereign but You. The prayer’s repetitive drumbeat inched me closer to an abyss, just when the seven repetitions of Adonai is God caught me and the final shofar sounding gathered me in its empyrean updraft. That’s when a familiar voice sounded within, half reminder, half reprimand, all party-pooper: You know you don’t really believe. 

2020’s initial laptop Yom Kippur experience was imbued with a valiant sense of making do and struggling against the odds—so Jewish. The familiar service was invigorated with novelty. This year’s, however, felt resigned. After an optimistic spring, the emergence of the Delta variant prompted my synagogue to cancel in-person services. Online or no, I donned pants and a dress shirt, in addition to tallit and kippah, as I had the year before, and I set my laptop upon a white tablecloth. Yet the forced retreat to the screen dampened my mood and tarnished Yom Kippur’s messages of hope and regeneration. Each freeze and lag reminded me how artificial the set-up was. When those permitted in the sanctuary laughed at the rabbi’s occasional joke, it sounded canned. The day’s cycle of prayers could have been a recording of the previous year’s services and the bima’s varied offerings of music and talk, a taped rehearsal. I began second-guessing my reactions. Would Avinu Malkeinu with its objectionable image of God as a ruler, bring tears? Would chanting the mantra-like Kaddish still connect me with my father, our relationship as problematic as the Kaddish itself, with its inventory of adulation for a God I’d always found hard to acknowledge? The High Holiday’s through-line of God as king/deliverer/judge demanding appeasement before granting life and health for another year felt like something out of a bad relationship: if I do x for you, regardless of how conflicted I am about it, you will love me. Each time I sang out the name of God I felt either hypocritical, sentimental or just plain lazy, performing by rote. Why, I asked myself, Passover’s wicked son, should a non-believer even utter the name of God at all?

My freshman year of college found me laying tefillin and eating on the kosher meal plan. I was pious enough to balk at singing out Jesus’s birth of a virgin in the Catholic Mass the university’s choir was going to perform in a crucifix-equipped church. (I eventually made my peace by humming the offending text.) I spent many Saturday mornings at the local Chabad House, tucked into a cozy building originally a Taco Bell, where I was drawn into the Lubavitcher’s bracing Chassidism, initially unsettling as a guest who’d shown up at the restrained supper of my Conservative Jewish upbringing and got everyone dancing on the table. The English major I was looked forward to the textual analysis of pilpul—as well as the rib-sticking cholent stew—after Shabbos services. Gradually, however, without my knowing why and unable to stop it, God began fading away. The Chabad rebbe’s express-train mumble of davening came to mean less and less. I couldn’t view Torah as holy writ any more than I could Shakespeare, however fascinating. I enjoyed being in a community of Jews, but like children coming to resent a parent’s interference, I questioned whether God had to be there. Complicating all this were the increasingly louder rumblings of a sexuality I knew the Torah condemned. Was I about to go Reform, with its goyish organ music and English prayers, or worse, become that ultimate sell-out, that pale imitation and oxymoron—the secular Jew?

When the Amtrak train taking me back to school—and to Chabad—after winter break slowed to yet another interminable stop in upstate New York, I found myself before a snow-covered field spread like the blank page of a journal awaiting my pen. I didn’t really know it then, but I was on a long and winding road toward claiming a Jewish identity without God. It would mean improvising and reinventing and some stumbling, but Jews had figured out how to remain Jewish without a temple and survived the Spanish Inquisition, hadn’t they? The snow stretched toward a lonely horizon line; I would miss Chabad House’s rowdy little stetl across from campus, cholent and all. The train’s sudden jostle into motion registered surprise at my conclusion. I had been brought up to believe in the evils of intermarriage and the ultimate sin of conversion, which my eight-year-old self once envisioned as lifelong exile from our apartment into the drafty, grimy hallway of our building in the Bronx. Yet even cast out into the cold, the air would be the same, I reasoned; I would keep on breathing. Even more surprising than this conclusion was how obvious it was. I wouldn’t experience anything as exhilarating yet straightforward until I came out.

Years later, beside him during an Orthodox High Holiday service after my mother died, my father commented that he never once heard me praying, even though he knew I read Hebrew. His was scanty; he depended on me to speak to God for the both of us. But I refused, determined to remain true to my Amtrak revelation. I should have realized that hearing the prayers out of my mouth might have soothed not hearing his wife’s voice from the other side of the mechitza, where she’d always sat. So there we were, two Jews stranded on islands of stubbornness and sadness, close enough to hear each other’s silence amidst so many full-throated affirmations of a God my father and I couldn’t or wouldn’t address, respectively.

This Yom Kippur, God’s name sounded especially distant through my laptop’s speaker. An all-powerful being able to create or destroy at will, unbeholden to any principle of justice other than its own, seemed unfathomable, even cruel, in the age of COVID. Such a God, supremely untouched by day-to-day turmoil, a remote, disinterested party, the very definition of a stranger, seemed unworthy of Yom Kippur’s abundant praise. Jonah’s story, read that afternoon, came across as an object lesson in the arbitrary nature of divine intervention, by turns micromanaging or else absent when needed. Such a mercurial, prissy God dipped no more than a toe into the messy world he was credited with creating, if systemic racism, climate catastrophe and imperiled democracy worldwide—for starters—were any indications. Like those able to retreat from COVID-plagued cities, he skipped town. 

The concluding prayers, with their many references to the book of life closing and the gates of heaven shutting, lent the gloaming of this past Yom Kippur a particularly end-of-time, Götterdämmerung feel. The yahrzeit candles lit for my parents had already burned low, the sounds of traffic out my window sank to a hush and the cantor’s voice sounded roughened by thirst. As the time for Avinu Malkeinu and the seven repetitions of Adonai is God approached, an ecstatic yearning I recognized from sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat chanting the Gayatri mantra or some other trayf snippet of Hindu spiritual embroidery overcame me. This troubled year, however, my mood gave me pause. Once, fearful of blasphemy, I resisted evoking the name of Jesus in the Mass, whose Latin I understood, but could I utter the name of God with a full heart in another language I knew if I didn’t really believe?

There in my dining area, body and mind—and for all I knew, soul—fragile and bowed beneath the full weight of the past eighteen months, I did what I hadn’t done in that Riverdale shul beside my father: utter the name of God. The God I named was no omnipotent force or intercessionist agent but what Sufis refer to as The One, the perfection of love, the embodiment of wisdom and compassion I might also embody. Such a name was shorthand for the divine in all of us; those Thirteen Attributes were our birthright, after all. The name of God I repeated seven times in a hoarse voice acknowledged the ineffable in lives often too encumbered and limited by what we are so sure we understand, sometimes to catastrophically shortsighted effect. I let myself tear up singing the Avineu Malkeinu loud enough to drown out my neighbor’s barking dog, part catharsis, part resolve. I will do better. We must do better. Then I recited the Kaddish’s many praises of God not only for my parents and grandparents and two cousins and a friend and someone from work but for my world in mourning, in pain, and sorely in need of healing.    

Eric Gabriel Lehman has published novels, short stories, and essays. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Raritan, and elsewhere. He teaches at Queens College/CUNY in New York, where he lives. You can find him online at Twitter (@eglehman1) and can reach him via email: Eric.Lehman@qc.cuny.edu

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October 19, 2020 · 8:54 am

Every day a little death

by Karen Webber (Baltimore, MD)

I rehearse my own death each Yom Kippur.

Pearls nap in the jewelry box, shiny Mary Jane’s poke from

the rack and sackcloth stands in for silk.

I prefer not to sleep in a coffin, as I plan my funeral with

Sharon Olds reading her latest and the Emerson string

quartet playing Bartok.

Elul’s moon is weighted down by custard and should haves. 

The corner of a shroud lifted by the wind whispers, “keep what

is precious and forget the rest.”

I beg you to do the same.

Speak with me, to me, thru me of forgiveness and of regret.

All I can leave you is this perfectly fragranced afternoon,

because my father sold all the good jewelry when my mother

died. I do have her half moon Seiko whose battery hasn’t

been changed in 20 years. Time stops. 

But now, it is time to preheat the oven. To shape the

Portuguese sweet bread round as the moon and pull it fresh

from the oven steaming.  It is time to invite my mother and

my father to sit down and break bread with me.

Death is my teacher and every fall I rehearse, as mine

marches closer. But for now, life.

Karen Webber is a Reform cantor, artist, and poet, whose  poems and essays have been published in chapbooks, Lilith Magazine, and on-line at Voices of Eve. Her newest original program, “Keep on the Sunny Side,” is a musical conversation on positivity, loneliness, and relationships, which she created in partnership with the Mental Health Association of Maryland.  To read more of her work, visit:  https://issuu.com/richardholleman/docs/voiceofeve_issue11 (Pgs. 122-127)

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September 21, 2020 · 10:22 am

Yom Kippur

by Rick Black (Arlington, VA)

At this hour of prayer,

when the gates are still open

and voices are expectant,

it must be known

that I am one who stays at home

to prepare a meal for

the dovaners.

I am closest to God

in the clanking of silverware,

in the rush of the kitchen faucet,

in the slicing of bread.

So, I wait for them 

to return from their distant,

serpentine journeys. 

Forgive me, 

but I am ready

to welcome them 

back home.

Rick Black, an award-winning book artist and poet, runs Turtle Light Press, a small press dedicated to poetry, handmade books and fine art prints. His poetry collection, Star of David, won an award for contemporary Jewish writing and was named one of the best poetry books in 2013. His haiku collection, Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel, has been called “a prayer for peace.” Other poems and translations have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Midstream, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Frogpond, Cricket, RawNervz, Blithe Spirit, Still, and other journals. To learn more about Rick’s work, visit: https://www.turtlelightpress.com

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October 28, 2019 · 9:21 am

Three Prayers, One Heart

By Harold Witkov ( Downers Grove, IL)

In 2018 I suffered a heart attack and ended up having quintuple bypass open-heart surgery. When I left the hospital five days later, I had the expectancy of recovery, but rather than getting better, things got worse. 

Not long after I got home from the hospital, my health began to decline and I was diagnosed to have “heart failure,” and told that I was a “candidate for sudden death.” The problem was my heart function, or “ejection fraction.” It was dangerously low. I could drop dead.

What I needed most then was a surgically implanted defibrillator to zap and kick-start my heart should it stop beating, but that could not happen until three months after my surgery. In the meantime, all I could do was continue on with cardiac rehab, take my medications, and count the days.

During those months, I prayed a lot, shed tears, and suffered a series of complications. I became very sensitive to the word heart, and the heart symbol ❤️ (wherever they might appear during the course of a day). 

Once, for instance, when I lost Internet service for a few days, my laptop mercilessly put a heart symbol with a crack in it on my computer screen with the message: “You’re not connected.” How true it seemed.

In response to my overwhelming sense of vulnerability, I created my own special little prayer:

Shaddai, Shaddai, 

Please don’t let me die.

Heart, Heart,

Have a new start.

I clearly recall my somber Yom Kippur that year. During the service, I softly read aloud, along with the other congregants, the Ashamnu — the “We Have Sinned” prayer. In correspondence with my many transgressions, I gently tapped my heart with my right fist. For someone recovering from heart surgery and living with heart failure, it was a sobering experience.

The day of my defibrillator implant finally arrived. Not yet sedated, I was on the operating table when I became aware that things were not what they should be. They brought my wife in and explained to us that they had just discovered my body had an anomaly: I had a “persistent left superior vena cava.” It was a benign condition, but a condition that nonetheless canceled the implantation procedure. There was another defibrillator company that made an alternative defibrillator for people like me, I was told, but that would be another day.

My body anomaly and last-minute canceled surgery experience gave me a lot to think about. Despite the grave risk, I decided to at least temporarily forgo a defibrillator and just try to work at raising my heart function on my own. This I would do through exercise, medication, healthy eating, and prayer.

Then, in July of 2019, I had my 4th echocardiogram. This time my heart function was significantly higher. It was still below normal, but I was no longer a candidate for a defibrillator. There was also no scar tissue to be found. My heart had physically gotten slightly smaller too and, according to my cardiologist, that was a positive. The results were “all good.”

I am inclined to say that while my heart has been getting physically smaller, it has also been growing a lot on a spiritual level. This whole experience has made me a better person, although I’m still a work-in-progress.

Recently, I celebrated another Jewish New Year. Once again, in synagogue, I recited aloud the Ashamnu. This time my right fist gently tapped upon a much healthier and happier heart. And on Yom Kippur a new prayer touched my soul.

The Rabbi announced, “Please turn to page 261 in our prayerbooks. This year we are adding a new prayer, the Birkat HaGomeil — Sharing Thankfulness.” The Rabbi continued, “For those among us who have experienced a near-death experience over the past 12 months, and are comfortable in doing so, please rise as the congregation recites the Birkat HaGomeil.” In a sea of seated congregants, a dispersed handful, myself included, stood:

Baruch atah Adonai,

Eloheinu melech haolam

HaGomeil l’chayavim tovot, 

Sheg’malani kol tov.

Blessed are You, our God Eternal; Your majesty fills the universe – through Your generosity I have experienced Your goodness.

Harold Witkov is a freelance writer in the Chicago area who previously worked in textbook publishing and sales for more than 30 years.

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September 23, 2019 · 9:30 am

Holy Ground

by Kayla Schneider-Smith (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

Bubby holds up a fist and makes a
zero with her fingers

This is how “Jewish”
Reform Jews are to me,

she shuffles me through crowded markets where
boiling men wear summer coats and study
their feet as we pass them

step to the side, step to the side,
Bubby goads, but all I hear is

make yourself smaller,
make yourself zero

Bubby buys me a white shirt
and a white skirt for Yom Kippur
the way she thumbs through the racks and lights up when
she finds something right
makes me feel like she loves me

so that each time the hot familiar anger rises
I remember how she bought me a Yom Kippur outfit and
walked me through the city with her rolling shopping bag and
poured me iced coffee slushies and
paid for taxi rides home and told me

I’m waiting for you to wake up

Wake up to what, Bubby?
to your God who
invalidates my God?
to my God who challenges yours?

Kayla Schneider-Smith is a poet, musician, and social activist from Monmouth County, New Jersey. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she recently completed the Yahel Social Change Fellowship in Rishon LeZion, Israel, where she taught English, piano and guitar to children, adults and senior citizens in a small neighborhood called Ramat Eliyahu. Kayla is currently pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at The University of San Francisco and working as the Mindful Arts Program Coordinator at the San Francisco Education Fund. She aspires to be an English professor, Rabbi, or Interfaith Minister one day.

If you’d like to read some of her work in prose, visit: https://www.yahelisrael.com/single-post/2018/11/27/To-Be-Or-Not-to-Be-Progressive-Judaism-in-Israel

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December 31, 2018 · 10:21 am

It Happened in Venice

by Janice L. Booker (Malibu, CA)

Ahh…Venice.  Canals.  Cobbled streets.  St. Marks Square.  Gondolas with gondoliers rowing and singing “O Solo Mia.”  I had dreamed of this trip and here I was, climbing out of the speedboat that had taken my husband and me from the airport to the foot of our hotel.

The only nagging regret I had was by circumstances of work and schedules we could only make the trip at the beginning of Yom Kippur, and we arrived on the day of Kol Nidrei, causing nagging spurts of guilt I tried to suppress.  I knew there was a historical old ghetto synagogue in Venice, the first ever ghetto, so famous it was almost folklore.  I decided that was where I would hear Kol Nidrei.

A friend who spoke fluent Italian made many phone calls and finally was able to contact the synagogue and arrange for tickets.  I doubted it would work out but when we registered at the hotel we were handed an envelope with two tickets for that evening’s services.  Could it really be that I would be in Venice, Italy, hearing Kol Nidrei?  I was ecstatic with anticipation.  My husband had tripped coming out of the speedboat and was in too much pain to go, but insisted I go alone.

I boarded a vaporetto at the base of our hotel, with not a clue of where to disembark.  A vaporetto stops at the equivalent of every watery corner.  With relief I spotted someone reading the same guide book we had and she helped me find the right stop.

I was the only person who got off at that stop with no idea which street to follow.  By this time dusk had descended and a light rain begun.  Few people passed and none understood me.  Suddenly, pay dirt!  Coming toward me was clearly a family: man, wife, child, older woman, all dressed in holiday clothes.  I approached them and said, already knowing the answer, “Can you direct me to the ghetto synagogue?”  The male responded, in barely accented English, “Please come with us.  That’s where we are going.”  On the short walk, he told me he was a lawyer and his family had lived in Venice for 500 years.  He had visited the States many times,

When I entered the synagogue a guard took my purse and umbrella but left me with the siddur I had brought along, assuming the Hebrew translation would be in Italian.  It was.

I was ushered up a flight of steps and to my surprise the men and women were on the same floor, separated by a mechitza with many openings so nothing of the service was hidden.  Three seats just behind the mechitza were marked “Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia” for their American guests.  Apparently my idea was not so original.  Directly in front of these seats, on the other side of the mechitza, were three marked seats for the husbands of the American women.

I looked around the synagogue.  It was very grand, yet reminded me of the old fashioned shul my grandfather had helped found when he came to America in 1913. He and his fellow emigrants started the Zhitomir Shul at 6th and Dickinson streets in South Philadelphia. Having their own place of worship gave them some sense of familiarity in this new and strange land.

The ghetto synagogue was noisy, children rushing through the aisles to greet the men in the family, going in the back to see their mothers and grandmothers,  The bimah was crowded:  men talking, gesturing, praying.  And then there was a sudden stillness.  The cantor’s voice rang out with the haunting first sounds of Kol Nidrei.  A chill ran through me as I realized, throughout the world, Jews were hearing the same strains of the somber sounds of Kil Nidrei, with me. I felt tied with a rope to Jews throughout the world, a connection that was strong and tight.

Janice L. Booker is a journalist, author of four books, including The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths, an instructor in creative non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia radio talk show host, and a free-lance writer for national publications.

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September 17, 2018 · 6:08 am

A Work in Progress

by Natalie Zellat Dyen (Huntington Valley, PA)

Within the bookends of your life
Between the beginning and the ending
Lies a work in progress
Blank pages to be filled every day.
When you’re young and each empty line leads to a road not taken.
And when you’re old, convinced there’s no more to be said.

On days when your cup runneth over
And words spill onto the page in joyous celebration of life
And on days when your heart is burdened
With broken promises and unrequited love
And the pen lies heavy in your hand.
Write anyway. Love anyway.

In this time of beginnings and endings
As you pray to be inscribed in the Book of Life
Don’t forget that today is yet another page to be written.
The final chapter is not the end.
Good books live on in memory after the author is gone
And you will live on in the memories of those you have loved
And who have loved you.
So write anyway. Love anyway.

Natalie Zellat Dyen is a freelance writer and photographer living in Huntingdon Valley, PA. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, The Willow Review, Global Woman Magazine, Intercom Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, Wordhaus, and other newspapers and journals. She has just completed her first novel. Links to Natalie’s published work are available at http://www.nataliewrites.com.

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September 21, 2015 · 6:00 am

Poem and Direction of the Heart for the Tenth Day of T’shuvah

By Marcia Falk (Berkeley, CA)

In her new book, The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season, renowned poet Marcia Falk re-creates key prayers and rituals in poetic forms from a contemporary perspective for those in search of a contemplative approach to the High Holidays. Here is an excerpt:

What Do You Have?

Not this earth, not even dust—
Not yours, caw invisible crows
like doors swinging shut.

Not your memories, rising
and burning in the air
like leaf-dew in sun.

Not your thoughts, poking in
and darting out
like hummingbirds in the blossoms.

Only this bit of time (like clouds unforming)—
even as you point to it,
gone.

Nothing

Nothing. You began as nothing and you will end as nothing. And in between—everything, and nothing. In between—joy and sorrow, beauty and decay. Everything yours to partake of, yours to bear. Yours to see, to know, to give birth to—and to let go. None of it yours to have.

Not even you are yours to have. You belong to a wholeness so great you cannot even conceive of it.

No, it is not a belonging; nothing owns you. You are simply part of it. You came out of it and you will return to it. You do not ever leave it, you are part of it forever.

And this is your moment to be alive.

Marcia Falk was born in New York City and raised on Long Island in a Conservative Jewish home. She received a B.A. in philosophy magna cum laude from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Stanford.  A university professor for fifteen years, she taught Hebrew and English literature, Jewish studies, Bible, and creative writing at Stanford, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the Claremont Colleges. Her classic verse translation of the biblical Song of Songs was released in 2004 in a new edition, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible (Brandeis University Press).

For more information about her work, visit: http://marciafalk.com/

The material posted here is excerpted from The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season By Marcia Falk (HBI Series on Jewish Women, Brandeis University Press) and reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.

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September 16, 2013 · 10:16 am

I Can’t Promise

by Natalie Zellat Dyen (Huntington Valley, PA)

I can’t promise that people will be kind.

But I can show you a reservoir of kindness
where anyone can dip their cup.

I can’t promise you happiness every day of your life.
But I can plant seedlings in your garden
that burst with joy in springtime.

I can’t promise you undying friendship.
But I can give you the words
to mend shattered bonds.

I can’t promise there’s a world to come.
But I can give you the tools you need
to fix the world that is.

I can’t promise that those you love will love you back.
But I can give you an open heart
to receive love when it comes.

And if you can’t promise to use all your gifts
At least you can promise to try.

Natalie Zellat Dyen is a freelance writer and photographer living in Huntingdon Valley, PA. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, The Willow Review, Global Woman Magazine, Intercom Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and other newspapers and journals. Links to Natalie’s published work are available atwww.nataliewrites.com.

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