Friday afternoon radio in Israel is nostalgia time, when old favorite presenters play old favorite oldies to ease out of the week. One Friday afternoon an older lyricist than usual came up during the afternoon program as it played in the kibbutz dairy.

When my wife was working in the dairy

On kibbutz In northern Israel

A Friday afternoon song

Came over the radio

“Take Me in Under Your Wing”

That I read aloud the first time I met her.

The dairyman said to the Israeli girls

Milking beside her, “You know who wrote that?”

They shrugged. He turned to her

More or less out of politeness.

She looked at him, “Bialik?”

He looked back in amazement.

“You see,” He waved his hand

Over the fields, tracks of cud chewer excrement,

“You see, this girl in the land just six weeks

Knows who Bialik is!”

They milked cows and took tithes

And changed pumps for the Sabbath milking

But nobody knew who she was

As she walked up the snake path to the cabin

To wash away the filth

And pray before sunset

And find the law behind a stone

In Jerusalem, not the place she left.

Image via Wikimedia

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I wrote a poem when Ariel Sharon fell into a coma: it just started dictating itself to me as I walked down the street and I had to pick up stationery at my wife’s yeshiva when I got there to write it down. We left Israel six months after Disengagement and I read one of his biographies and was moved by his mother’s life, then wound up with a sequence of poems by different witnesses, a curious history of the state. This is the view of Yitzhak Rabin— whose birthday on the Hebrew calendar falls this evening, Rosh Chodesh Adar— who promoted him on condition that he behaved himself, and later as PM employed him as a security advisor to decide what land to cede in the Oslo Accord, while Sharon loudly decried the Oslo Accord in public. As PM Sharon also ceded territory and also faced threats to his life.

You’ve got no tact

To play a part

In any joint decision;

You’ve got no heart

For staying out

Of any bit of action.

You do not listen.

When a military policeman

Tells you “no”

You do not show any discipline, chew him out

To your men, make sport

Of his private life, walk, limp, receding hairline.

These things don’t go unmentioned

When it comes to discussing promotion.

How you talk does not improve the situation.

When you go behind his back

Or over his head to the kitchen cabinet

Because you have Ben-Gurion’s private line

Or some other way to get your own back

It isn’t intelligent.

Every time you get your way

Another enemy is waiting.

The army is like playing a game of chess

You need to see where pawns

Are waiting to take your Queen.

Now Ben Gurion is gone

Who will you go to?

Who can you call when your latest plan

Is foiled because the next man up the totem pole

Remembers exactly what you mean by discipline?

You’ll never make a good officer

You do not have the patience.

I’m giving you the Northern Command.

Get out of here. Prove me wrong.

Behave like a human being.

One day you might have the chance

To be a man instead of talking to the mountains.

On that day remember me.

You do not have to always win

To be a good statesman.

Image via Wikimedia

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After my father died we had to clear the apartment he kept his office in, and my mother started collecting old menorahs from thrift stores. I still can’t go past a window display with some old Jew’s cast-offs without wondering when that was last lit, and how.

I saw the first on top

of a book case, hiding, funereal

and black as a cenotaph

tucked behind my father’s photo.

The next was on the ledge

of the window and she showed it

– opening the tiny frame

in the heart that contained ten commandments.

The last one (recently acquired)

was stone in part, and green amethyst

(or look-alikes) bejewelled the cups

where the candles, if it were used, would be put.

Why she should collect the lamps

of the dead, who don’t light their candles,

take them home instead and light

just her own one  I could not say.

But she stands running her hands

on the candle cups. Her doctor mentioned:

“You can’t just leave them. It’s a call.”

And my mother agreed, bought a new set

and when she lights it is the first

of at least ten that gleams

in the gloom of the back room.

It’s a cold room.

I notice my father’s room;

their bedroom, where he died, a sad room.

It has light now and flowers

but still you can’t help hearing him, groaning.

She says, “There really aren’t

that many lamps in junk shops,”

as more and more Jews die

and their sons clear their house for scrap.

She says, “Only this one, and that.

You can’t leave them. In shops

You have to rescue them.” She hangs

a hand on the brass candle cup.

We take candles wherever we go

something requires that we light

before full dark – it isn’t law,

it is the need for someone else to see the match.

If you find a lamp – please do not leave it –

somehow you’ll find your way back

to when you were at home, and light was with someone

and a spark fell before dark.

Atar Hadari’s “Songs from Bialik” was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award. His Pen Translates award winning “Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin” is out from Arc Publications in January 2018.

Image via Wikimedia

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The first poem here emerged from a practice I’ve adopted over the past few years of combining close study of Jewish texts with creative-writing prompts. I was introduced to this sort of work through classes offered by Amy Gottlieb at the Drisha Institute in New York; after those courses ended, a few of us decided to continue meeting on our own. “Birthright” stems from study of Parashat Toldot—which is to be read in 2017/5778 on November 18.

Birthright

Eyesight dimmed, aged Isaac

could nonetheless discern

the sound of one twin’s voice

from the other’s

and detect the scent

of each from his garments;

alas, how the story

might have shifted

could he have distinguished

Esau’s skin from a goat’s.

For this next poem: I struggle somewhat with my level of Shabbat observance. And I also struggle with my addiction to my iPhone and various social-media platforms. About a year ago, following the rush of online reactions in the aftermath of the presidential election, I began trying to disengage for one day each week: Shabbat. And that’s the impetus for “Sabbath Rest 2.0.” 

Sabbath Rest 2.0

About that Fourth Commandment:

I’ve always remembered the Sabbath day;

I just haven’t kept it holy.

But these days, I do keep it

free from Facebook and Twitter.

And when the sun sinks and sets

and the three stars appear,

I’m renewed and refreshed

and ready, once again,

to face all that awaits.

Erika Dreifus writes poetry and prose in New York. She can be found online at http://www.ErikaDreifus.com and on Twitter @ErikaDreifus, where she tweets “on matters bookish and/or Jewish.”

Photo by slgckgc, via Flickr.

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