By Rivy Poupko Kletenik,
JTNews Columnist
Dear Rivy,
The Boston Marathon bombing is just devastating and shocking, one more tragic life-changing milestone in our country’s loss of innocence. This has been just a dreadful year of violence what with the shootings at the opening of the Batman movie and then the awful shootings at the school in Newtown, Conn. I feel like the carpet has been pulled out from underneath our entire country. I am at a loss.
There are a variety of coping mechanisms that people draw on at times like these. Some immerse themselves in news reports, and some set up a wall of self-protection, distancing themselves from all media outlets. Some people become cynical and pessimistic; others try to bring healing and restoration to the world.
Then there are the rest of us, who vacillate from one extreme to the other as we exchange nuggets of news and information, giving off the allure of some pitiful speck of control that we might pretend to have. Ultimately, in spite of everything, we reassure ourselves that this world is not a ghastly place of random horror. We do this so that we might continue to place one foot and then the other down as we propel ourselves into a daily life. We gravitate like moths toward some bit of light in the darkness. We flutter around morsels of inspiring tales of heroism that present themselves, as if to offset the high dose of cruelty. Most of all we then look for comfort. How might we get through this morass?
For this tragedy, this time, in this National Poetry Month of April, perhaps the comfort we seek might be found in the medium of poetry, a lovely locus for the lonely and a solace for the isolated. Per Harold Bloom, who writes that his antidote for “so many shadows, so many difficulties” is poetry, perchance we, too, might find a modicum of succor therein.
I offer you a selection of Jewish poetry, hopefully to speak to the troubles of the moment.
First is a short, classic poem from Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish young woman. While on a rescue mission from then-Palestine, after heroically parachuting into Hungary in 1944, Szenes was tragically captured, tortured and then executed by the Nazis. This poem suggests, more than anything else, a sense of continuity and the ongoing ebb and flow of both nature and the human reach for the beyond. This is a comfort.
A Walk to Caesarea
My God, My God
I pray that these things never end:
The sand and the sea
The rush of the water
The lightning in the sky
The prayer of man.
From the Biblical book of Kohelet, here is another poetic portrait of the constant, rhythmic patterns of this worldly life, signaling a transcendent grandeur, greater than any single one of us. Captured and put to music by Pete Seeger, and later recorded by the Byrds, it became possibly the No. 1 Billboard song with the oldest lyrics. Surely, reading it quiets the turbulent soul.
For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
As we struggle to understand the frailty of life snuffed out in a single swift act of violence, let us allow the words of this haunting poem by Israeli poet Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky to take us on a journey inward, to slowly help us redirect our internal compass toward those whose names are now ensconced forever with Boston’s Patriots Day 2013.
Everyone Has a Name
Everyone has a name
given to him by God
and given to him by his parents.
Everyone has a name
given to him by his stature
and the way he smiles
and given to him by his clothing.
Everyone has a name
given to him by the mountains
and given to him by his walls.
Everyone has a name
given to him by the stars
and given to him by his neighbors.
Everyone has a name
given to him by his sins
and given to him by his longing.
Everyone has a name
given to him by his enemies
and given to him by his love.
Everyone has a name
given to him by his feasts
and given to him by his work.
Everyone has a name
given to him by the seasons
and given to him by his blindness.
Everyone has a name
given to him by the sea and
given to him
by his death.
This last, raw poem by Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai captures for us the pain that Israel has come to know too well, of the sudden bomb that shatters everything in sight and afar, whose genesis is cold and calculated at the same time as its impact reaches the immeasurable heights of heaven, raising timeless questions with no answers.
The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
Give yourself the gift of pausing as you read these poems. Try sharing them out loud to friends and family. Every poem tells a story. Ask yourself: What story does each of these poems tell? In what way do the poems speak to the way you are feeling?
Let us hope, that, as in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry,” that the poems here might go a bit toward the relief we each crave.