Yehuda Amichai

I thought, thinking about concentric rings and circles, I was thinking about that prior to sitting down here to record this.

And I remembered a poem by Yehuda Amichai, Israel's kind of chief poet laureate.

It's called in Hebrew, which means the diameter of the bomb.

And I brought it in here.

welcome.

I think one of the most important things we can do on a day like today is simply give people permission to acknowledge that this has affected them, maybe differently than they expected, maybe more deeply than they realized, maybe in ways they don't even have words for yet.

So before I shared a poem from Yehuda Amichai, I know that you have written poetry as well in response to your experiences with treating trauma.

And I think you chose one to read for us now, one that you wrote For the 25th commemoration of 9-11?

Once again, Shabbat shalom, everyone.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote, "The Jewish people read in the ears of God that book, the Torah.

All year long, every week, another portion, like Scheherazade, who told stories to save her life.

And by the time we get to Simchat Torah, God forgets, and it is thus possible to begin anew." This week, we begin anew.

And we're gonna h- hear a poem translated into English.

This is by Yehuda Amichai.

Um, this was posted on October 7th on the KehillaRVA, um, social media.

This is a poem that I felt was appropriate for October 7th.

Don't stop.

Go on beating, and make musical instruments out of them.

Whoever wants to make war again will have to turn them into plowshares first." It's a good one by Yehuda Amichai, Israeli poet, uh, passed away in 2000.

So, uh, you know, I wanted to do an October 7th-related class for this podcast, and it just, it didn't, it didn't happen, um, because there was just so much going on in, in the day and, and all of that.

Think about small kindness.

I want to close with the poem by Yehuda Amichai, who in his way, as always, challenges but also rewrites for us, redefines for us what our religion can be.

Yehuda Amichai is gonna offer something different.

Instead of saying, "Don't have that image of Mashiach.

Instead, have kindness," Yehuda Amichai is gonna tell us his image of Mashiach is individual kindness.

So I'll read you his poem.

This is from the collection I Wasn't One of the Six Million, section seven.

And finally, a poem.

Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel's prominent poets and very beloved, wrote a lot about wrestling with the divine and finding way of Jewish vocabulary speaking to today.

So as we end this episode with Ayeka, where are you? Eicha, how is so much suffering possible? And when do we begin? Here are the words of Yehuda Amichai from a poem of his that I translated into English with his permission.

People spoke in excited voices, like in an airport.

I left them.

Yeah.

So this is a, a poem I always think about when I travel, and it's called "Tourists" by Yehuda Amichai, who lived in my neighborhood in Jerusalem, and the poem goes like this.

"Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower.

I placed my two heavy baskets at my side.