In his foreword, the poet Yeousha November begins 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium with a stunning comparison between contemporary poetry and the Midrash and Chassdic thought, two components of Judaism. As a non-Jew, I began 101 Jewish Poems with an outsider’s curiosity. I love the cinematic portrayals of Judaism in A Serious Man and I Wish I Was Here but lack much knowledge of Judaism itself. That this foray into “Jewish” poetry might reveal to me some things about myself as a post-Christian contemporary poet didn’t feel likely. But it has done just that. 

What one of my favorites in the book, Johanna Fuhrman’s, “I Have a Secret Crush on Everyone in the World,” makes evident is the inclusivity of the project. “I am seriously / crushing on your clipped gold nail polish,” says the speaker, “the way it signifies a desire to make the world / more beautiful, but also the way it displays / a fuck-you approach to beauty.” It’s a love poem to a world that feels like it could really use a love poem right now. November points to this piece in particular as an example of how contemporary poetry, “turns upside down the hierarchy of the sacred and the profane. It suggests the best place to find the Infinite is in the finite, and the best place to find the universal is in the particular.” 

This suggestion reminds me of the scene in I Wish I Was Here where the Rabbi asks Zach Braff’s character Aidan Bloom if he feels a spiritual connection to anything and the answer Bloom gives is infinity, the night sky. Such longing is broad, even common, if not universal. There is an applicability in many of the poems that is as general and a profundity that is achieved, as the editors argue, through great specificity of detail. A fine example of this is Dara Barnat’s piece, “These Are the Sidewalks of Tel Aviv.” It’s an engrossing poem about a specific place that left me with a genuine desire to jump on the next flight to Israel. Something about the details in these lines are so evocative, so exhilarating: “This is the city that holds me / as I sleep and as I lie awake. / People are out with their dogs at 3 a.m. / In this city, when I hear helicopters, I stop / what I’m doing. When you hear / more than one of them, it’s serious.”

The speaker of that poem wants to understand her infatuation with something harsh and uncompromising like the Old Testament God who asks Abraham to sacrifice his own son in Linda Blachman’s poem, “Sarah Unbound,” which tells the story from the maternal point of view. Aidan Bloom is similarly unsettled. He wants an answer. What is this spiritual connection we experience with the cosmos, something that is so totally other? The stars? Tel Aviv? A city that writes, in the poem, the speaker’s first poems, where she is not at home?  “According to Chassidic thought,” write the editors, “the metaphor of ‘home’—the place one is free to be oneself—is precise and instructive: that our world experiences no Divine light, in contrast to the Heavens, is not because G-d is absent. Rather, here—in the lower realm—G-d is simply His unknowable self.” I, who have been looking for God my whole life, find great comfort in that thought: Not absent, just impossible to wrap your head around.

February 2021