Going Out with Knots by Zierler, Wendy I.;

Long description:

Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots illuminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss.

She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet-Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa-in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too.

Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part 1. So Much Has Been Severed
1. Learning to Mourn: Going Out with Knots
Things Fall Apart
The End of Stories
Loose Thread
Going Out with Knots
Settling In
Mourning and Metaphor
Sewing a Seam
A Kaddish/COVID Journal with Poems

Part 2. Transitions and Translations
2. Picturing God in Grief and Prayer: Beginning to Mourn with Lea Goldberg
“To Mother’s Portrait”
“By Three Things”
“In My Prayer Book”
“Let Winter Be Blessed”
“Blessing”
From “One Spring”
From “My Silences”
“Night Psalm”
“He Passed Over Our Door and There Was Light”
From “Ending”

3. Facing an Absent God: Grief and God Struggle in the Poetry of Avraham Ḥalfi
“Dream of Your Footsteps”
“I Know Not the Words”
“Crowned Is Your Forehead with Black Gold”
“Here a Person Believed”
“And Songs Are the Dust of Antiquities”
From “Heretic’s Prayers”
“At Night Birds Fell”
“Jewish Fall”

4. Living with a Lesser, Closer God: Yehuda Amichai’s Secular Theology of Everyday Life
“And That Is Your Glory”
“In the Morning I Stand by Your Bed”
“Half the People in the World”
“God’s Hand in the World”
“A Sort of End of Days”
“My Mother Baked Me the Whole World”
“Whoever Wrapped in a Tallit”
“Men, Women, and Children”
“God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children”
“I Filtered from the Book of Esther”
“My Father on Passover Eve”

5. Searching for Female Liturgical Voices: Mourning and Studying with Rachel Morpurgo
“Behold the Letter”
“And Thus Sang Rachel about Her Wedding”
“See, This Is New”
“On Those Fleeing the Cholera Epidemic”
“A Voice Is Heard in the Heights”
“This One Shall Be Called ‘My Delight Is with Her’”
“I, Leah, Was So Very Tired”
“Fount of Wisdom from a Flowing Stream”
“Buried Here Is the Lady”
“The Monument Is a Witness”
“This Is the Burial Monument that Rachel Morpurgo Prepared for Herself in Her Youth”

6. Retying the Knots: Learning and Relearning with Ruhama Weiss
“I Throw Down My Supplication”
“Lament for Rashi’s Daughters”
“I Am Still Praying”
“And Once Again, I’ll Sin and Return”
“Chapters of the Mothers”

7. Penning Pandemic Torah: Rachel Bluwstein’s Feminist/Illness Poetry
“Soul Walking”
“Barren Woman”
From “In the Hospital”
“Or Maybe”
“Ḥoni the Circle Maker”
“Day of Tidings”
“Sorrow Song”

8. Final Thoughts: Still in Knots
“Behold I’ll Craft a Ball from the Pain”

Source Acknowledgments
Appendix: Four Poems by the Author
Notes
Bibliography
Index