Dear T’chiyah members, family, and friends,

In keeping with your splendid tradition of studying texts in preparation for High Holiday discussions, I offer the following five poems to you, and an invitation to bring an additional one of your own choosing with you to our discussion on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.

Two of the poems you will find on the next four pages were written by the beloved Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; another one is by the Jewish American poet Adrienne Rich, and two are by Michigander Theodore Roethke. All speak in contemporary language about age-old questions.

Poetry, of course, can no more provide us with definitive answers to these questions than any other kinds of text we might study together.  But with its compression of much feeling and experience into relatively few words, it can train our attention toward some of life’s largest and most vexing questions, and quickly give us a common vocabulary with which to talk about them.

With the help of these five poems and others which you may feel moved to contribute to this project, I look forward to exploring important High Holiday themes with you (listed beside each selection below) and teasing out their big questions. For my part, I have tried to choose poems that move us successively from some of our most global concerns to our most intimate ones. For example, the month of Ramadan begins on the same evening as Erev Rosh Hashanah this year. The first Amichai poem is intended to lift that fact out of the realm of banal coincidence and into the realm of useful reflection about both traditions. On the other hand, the final poem of the set is intended to help take us deep within, to our own private hopes and aspirations for the next year.

To save on copying costs and paper itself, I hope you will consider printing these poems beforehand and bringing a (stapled) copy of them with you to services.

with best wishes for a healthy, peaceful and productive new year,
student Rabbi Donna Kirshbaum

Erev Rosh Hashanah  (this year, also 1st  of Ramadan)
THEME: t’chiyah / renewal)

Temporary Poem of My Time by Yehuda Amichai (1924 – 2000)
On the Instiitute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature site
On plagiarist.com
Alternative source if going to a library or bookstore: A Life of Poetry: 1948 - 1994, translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, HarperCollins, New York, 1994 

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 
THEME: malhuyot – power
The Waking by Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)
On   gamow.com site
On findarticles.com 
Commentary/Criticism can be found here 
Alternative source if going to a library or bookstore:: The Complete Collected Poetry of Theodore Roethke. Doubleday, 1953.

Kol Nidre
THEME: tshuvah – turning back

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke 
On   eliteskills.com
On the University of Washington Showcase site
On plagiarist.com

Yom Kippur morning
THEME: slichot – forgiveness

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich (1929-)
On poemhunter.com
On americanpoems.com
Alternative source if going to a library or bookstore: Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-72, W.W. Norton and Company, 1973

Ne’ilah  (final service of Yom Kippur)
THEME: yearning for perfection

Jerusalem is a Port City  by Yehuda Amichai, Jerusalem, 1967 (1924 – 2000) 
Cf. the back cover of the Summer 1996 edition of Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought available online
Alternative source if going to a library or bookstore: Excerpted from the long poem "Jerusalem 1967", translated by Stephen Mitchell, in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, University of California Press 1996