Poems of Jewish Faith and Culture

Open the gates—the radiant portals,
Swift to Thy sons who are lovely and pure.

I hereby call
       to the Ancient of Days
to summon His will
       to drive them away—

At altars, ye mighty, proclaim loud His praise,
And multitudes too may whisper His lays.

Holy—He sets apart one day in all the year;
Holy—He pardons them whose longing turns to Him.

You are All
and I am a particle. Who should have mercy
on a particle if not the All?

Send the dew of blessing, the dew of grace;
renew my dispensation, and grant me length of days.

New pain! said Isaiah.
New contract! said God.

the thunder
of the Old Testament
into the lightning
of the New.

How good to stop
and look out upon eternity a while

And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.
I came to the Promised Land by sea.

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
   All found their comfort in the holy place

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
      Walked with them through the world where’er they went 

Done, he pointed a greasy finger
at me, said You can't be a goy.

when we came on a Sabbath, more than twenty
men, women, a baby born at sea.

we take nothing with us, save a small stick or dowel
in the casket

What, apart from a historical and armchair sense of the intense religious experience of spiritual adepts, does Kabbalah—and specifically the poetry of Kabbalah—have to tell us as readers today?

In August 2008, I flew to Budapest, Hungary, to meet with the 96-year old widow of the poet Miklós Radnóti.

Poets of different faiths come together over the Bible’s most celebrated lyrics.

I got the question I most often get (this one is always, always asked by a women and never by a man): “are you worried about what your children or family will think about your poems?” Often, in response to this question I talk about being Jewish.

“One Whole Voice” is comprised of extracts from A God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler.