Poetry and Religion
Plus, a poem by H. Leivick
The leaders of Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism in the UK recently announced that they are planning to work more closely as one movement. It doesn’t look like a merger (at least, not yet) but it is a real change - and an unusual one.1 In many ways it makes sense. The two movements - now, apparently, to be known as ‘Progressive’ Judaism - are united on important issues like mixed sex congregations, same-sex marriage and who gets to count as a Jew (my children wouldn’t, if I was Orthodox). Both use both Hebrew and English in their liturgy, though on the whole there is a greater proportion of Hebrew in Reform.
These Judaisms - which often go hand in hand with more liberal attitudes generally and on Israel/Palestine in particular - represent around 30% of Jews in the UK. Yet in public conversation it can often feel like the ‘Jewish community’ is synonymous with the Orthodox one: the Chief Rabbi, currently Ephraim Mirvis, is the orthodox Chief Rabbi. If, like me, you grew up attending a Reform Synagogue, this can be disquieting, even disorientating. Keith Kahn-Harris writes about the difficulty of capturing the full diversity of the Jewish experience here. It is always wrong (and often dangerous) to treat religions as monoliths.
I grew up attending a Reform synagogue, but I have recently been visiting a Liberal congregation near where I live in London - and where I’ve been made to feel very welcome. There are genuine differences between the traditions, most obviously in the liturgy - the scripts and rituals. A liberal service is more… liberal. Those differences are mirrored in the Siddur, our prayer book. Siddurs are often central to a congregation’s identity. Unlike the Torah itself, everyone handles them week in week out. You use them at home every Friday. I remember a lot of contention when the Reform Siddur was updated a few years ago.
As well as including texts for various services, blessings and songs, Siddurs include an anthology of readings - passages for reflection grouped around individual themes. I loved these sections, like I love all anthologies. And I was always struck by how diverse the selections in our old Reform Siddur were. There were passages from the Rabbis, of course, but also secular writers and philosophers, as well as extracts from Anne Frank’s diaries. There were poems, which were often English translations of Hebrew or Yiddish originals. Living in rural Hampshire, Synagogue was more or less our only connection to Judaism, or Jewish culture, outside of the home. Those excerpts felt like an important way into a rich culture which I was both a part of and apart from. I was much more interested in the readings than I was in the prayers.
The Liberal Siddur has readings of this kind too, but they are integrated into the service and read aloud together. And there is another difference: some of the passages and poems aren’t written by Jews. Last week, for instance, we read the reflections on the theme of loneliness, which included two poems I was already very familiar with: Robert Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night’ and John Clare’s ‘I Am’. The poems were unattributed in the Siddur, so you would have to go to the back to know who they were by. They were a kind of liturgy.
All of which felt very right to me, even revelatory. These are special poems. Frost’s, in particular, has meant a great deal to me, so I’m glad it might be finding others. A service creates a moment in which poetry, any poetry, can be heard and when we talk about the declining role that poetry plays in our everyday lives, we have to talk about the loss of those spaces in which people are in the right frame of mind to take it in. For so much of human history, those spaces have been religious spaces. It is why poetry is still read at weddings and at funerals. I say all this as someone who has very little faith in the traditional sense and who has mixed feelings about the role of religion in public life.2
At the same time, part of me feels protective of distinctively Jewish literature and liturgy. Synagogue might be the right place to hear poetry of any kind but it is also one of the few places in the UK where you will encounter Jewish writers and poets and hear Hebrew spoken. It’s difficult to know where the balance lies between the universal and particular. Poetry is best heard in the language it was written in: that’s true for English poetry as much as for Hebrew prayers. My religion isn’t just in Hebrew, in a very literal sense it is Hebrew, though I don’t understand the words and wouldn’t believe them if I could (ignorance helps).
There was another poem in this week’s reading: one I hadn’t come across before, though the author, H. Leivick, is one of the most famous Yiddish poets of the twentieth century. We heard it in the original Yiddish, which is the language to hear it in and which I do not speak it any more than I speak Hebrew.3
The night is dark and I am blind. The wind tears the stick from my hand. Bare is my sack, empty my heart, and both are useless - too heavy a weight. I hear the touch of someone’s hand. Allow me to carry your heavy load. Together we go. The world is dark. I carry the sack - you, my heart.
See variations on the following joke: “Two Jews are stranded on a desert island. They build three synagogues --- one for the orthodox Jew, one for the reform Jew, and one that neither one of them will ever set foot in.”
When people talk about Britain as being “a Christian nation or… nothing at all”, as one delegate at the recent ‘National Conservatism’ conference put it, my skin crawls.
Poem by H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern, Russia and the USA, 1866-1962) from the Siddur Lev Cadash, where it is credited to The Penguin Book of Yiddish Verse (1987). This is the version printed in the Siddur, with changes to the punctuation and the last line which are my own. The publishers will have to trust me that the usage is educational.