Rosh Hashanah 2024

by

Zakayah bat Sarah v'Yosef

I became a member of Mishkan Shalom in June 2023. Already, I identified as a person of Jewish heritage. My father was Jewish. I spent much of my childhood visiting my Jewish relatives. I spent most Saturdays with my Jewish grandmother Bertha Kopple. It was through them that I absorbed the culture, history and aspirations of Jewish life.

Nonetheless, many years would pass before I sought to formally convert to Judaism. I was inspired to do so by my eldest daughter. In her final year of college, she embarked on her own Jewish journey. I assumed that, being young, she might be experimenting. All these years later, she has proved me wrong. My daughter is Jewish in body and soul. When I was struggling with my decision to convert after October 7th, it was my daughter who said to me, Judaism is your birthright. It is a beautiful thing.

Marc Chagall, The War

In a world devastated by war, beauty is a privilege. Recently, my youngest child came to me and asked for a list of books on the history of antisemitism in Europe. Tears welled in her eyes. I asked her if something had happened. Tragically, something had happened. Her Egyptian friend was grieving a relative who had died in an Israeli airstrike. He was sad and angry. He had very little context for Israel’s actions. The history of the Jews in Europe was not something his family talked about; nor was the scope of antisemitism taught in school. He wanted to understand. I told my youngest to tell her friend that I would keep him in my prayers.

I then drew up the list of books, though I found doing so deeply troubling. What in those books could help that boy? If the world were other, I would not tell him about the 1946 Kielce Pogrom. I would share with him everything I have learned on my journey from being a person of Jewish heritage to a Jewish person. The great joy we take in creation and renewal–and a life in which we make a conscious, many times difficult decision, to commit each and every day to gratitude and service even in the darkest of times.

Note:  Having completed a year-long conversion process, I was asked to give a brief presentation to my synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah about what it was like to enter into covenant with the Jewish people after October 7th.  

Three Poems by Emily Zacek

Mars, why have you brought this?

Mars, why have you brought this?

What does it feel like to not be at war?

My last memory of relative peace is Hoffmaster State Park

On a picture book day with cotton candy clouds

We conducted a scientific exploration of sand dunes:

Fly down steep hills and land barefoot into soft earth

Climb back up to sprint down again and again and again.


In the backdrop of conflict, I:

Fumbled until I could open a combination lock

Circulated my first petition

Signed and sealed vows to protect my purity

Bled alone in a locker room

Wore a perfect, sky-blue prom dress that shimmered like the Big Lake in June

Absorbed another’s unspeakable pain and buried it in the core of the earth

Clung to what remained of my virtue through institutional betrayal and shame

Fought with my father as I left home for college

Paid out my sanity to bosses, to landlords, to professors, to vendors

Married the first boy who asked me questions

Fit life in a truck, dyed my hair, changed my name

Adopted my soul mate, God in reverse

Cowered for two years in a small stucco block

Playacted homemaker as bone-grinding breadwinner

Resisted, somehow, the siren song of balcony ledge

Broke away from the man who stopped asking me questions

Took root in new place, through thick concrete of grief

Felt the wonder of my own creation, in aching temporality

Found home, heart, belonging (Hey!)

Opened my Self to authentic, loving community

Took my first full, unencumbered breath.


How can I be undaunted by the enormity of the world’s grief?

When I finally see my own soul as it truly is –

A Universe, self-contained but cracked ajar

To sizzle with divine spark at connection with Other

Yet, outside, destruction.


Peaceful Summit Moved Online (For Threats?)

Better? All right, we’ll start again.

Open your eyes, demilitarize

    (A ceasefire will not bring peace)

What is an effective and necessary means of defense, really?

    This violence is not abstract

    It is committed by people we love

Safety does not come from children screaming under the rubble

    (We must immediately demand a ceasefire)

“A week ago, we finished a second story addition to the house. I miss my cats. My book collection burned.”

    End genocide

    End occupation

“I don’t want to hurt your heart more than it aches but I have no hope.”

    Interfere in the mechanism

    Call for life

When apartheid ends, so too does the need for violent resistance

    We have more than one chamber in our hearts

    For the painful disagreements that cannot be overcome

To find the north star that glitters in the space between freedom and violence

We can expand and welcome our selves and our others into the presently unimaginable

    A place where truth can emanate

We will not forget each other here.

We will remember where our love was born.

The Poet with the Birds, Marc Chagall

De/conversion, October 7

I fear for One who covers her hair. I fear for One who gets taken advantage of by mechanics. I fear for One who went further out of her way to save a pair of hermit crabs than most people would go for most people. I fear for One who was moved to poetry by his friend’s infant grandson. I fear for One, even though I know I shouldn’t - if anyone will be ok, I have a feeling it’s her. I fear for One - that the natural posture of his smile could fade to vanishing before any of us notices. I fear for One, whose tenderness for his child almost made me want a second date. I fear for One, and whether she and her friends are ready to grapple with the realities of their politics (which I hold, too). I fear for One, whose unconditional love for his daughters shows up for the rest of us as refreshing, authentic feminism. I fear for One, a rare person well-known for having an all-around kind and genuine nature. I fear for One, who didn’t think twice about offering one of the most generous gestures I’ve ever received.

I don’t fear for me. I dread. Dread for the day my humanity cracks and my cowardice surfaces, for the day I tell anyone who asks that I love Big Brother and I’m sorry, I was in a haze of grief and disappointment and shame, I’m not a Christ-killer, I’ll sing along at midnight Mass, I’ll get down on my knees and present my tongue to the priest, I’ll swirl lamb’s blood across my molars, I’ll nail the nailed man to my doorway and lie prostrate to his flagellation and tortuous crown. Please let me stay. I promise I’ll be quiet.

Bless me, Father, for I am Jewish.

About the poet:  Emily Zacek is a poet, children's writer, and copywriter based in Philadelphia. She aims to marry the joy of creative work with making a real, positive difference in the world. Zacek earned a BA with honors in organizational studies and a BMA in flute performance from the University of Michigan in 2014, and her undergraduate thesis focused on labor activity in American arts nonprofits. She spent ten years in a variety of fundraising and development roles with nonprofits in Michigan and Colorado before switching to marketing and content creation for individuals, nonprofits, and ethically aligned for-profit companies.

Zacek seeks to create pieces that serve as a mirror for herself and her readers, both to show them their own light from a new angle, and to encourage introspection for anything that could use a bit more love, care, and tending.

Line Boil: The Sad and Beautiful World of Don Hertzfeldt

 

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

 

 

With latex-covered fingers tugging hard at my tired mouth, the dentist informed me I had chipped a front tooth. Strange. I hadn’t noticed. So much had happened. COVID happened. We went into lockdown. My mother passed away. My marriage was frayed—and there were my children. My eldest child was a teacher and risked infection every day on the job. I watched my youngest struggle through year one and two of college masking, blood testing and isolating in her cellblock dorm room. A slightly chipped tooth was a blip in comparison, though it did provoke my dentist to say, “I can fix that for you.” I declined. I forgot.

Until, after many years, I went to see It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) by Don Hertzfeldt. I left a sold-out screening at the Bourse in Philadelphia in a semi-hallucinatory state to wake the next morning with an overwhelming urge to write Don about my tooth. Only Don, one of our pre-eminent independent animators, could do my tooth justice. He had the vision, the uncanny ability to take a chipped incisor and mine it for all it was aesthetically worth: health, age, appearance, neglect, pain, loss, money… the list ballooning, my tooth floating off into space where Don would turn it into a star, a planet, a flash of radiance. Perhaps the rest of my body would follow. Or as often happens in Hertzfeldt’s films, I remain earthbound, where I grow less round, more ragged—a boiling outline of myself. The line boil is one of Hertzfeldt’s signatures. Creatives across the internet go off in search of tutorials to give their animations that “Hertzfeldt look.” A line boil, to get technical, appears when animation frames are imperfectly aligned causing the image to quiver, wobble, stray. Hertzfeldt uses the line boil to give his hand-drawn stick figures a certain aura, an impression of existing in an energy field that could decimate or dissolve at any moment. Mortality is the uncomfortable truth where Hertzfeldt dwells, though never resigned to fate. Operatic comes to mind. His other mode consists of absurd shorts such as Wisdom Teeth, a film best described as male bonding of a tortuous, oral nature.

Where mortality looms large, say adios to innocence. Hertzfeldt’s characters stumble from frame-to-frame straining to keep their wide-eyed childhood selves from being crushed underfoot like a bug. The small-child-vast-universe trope has earned him comparisons to Franz Kafka, most notably by Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle in the article “Beautiful Bitter.” “Hertzfeldt's films have always been weirdly affecting creations, Kafka-esque odes to our fragile human condition… Watch enough of Hertzfeldt's animated existential angst grenades, and you're likely to need a good, stiff drink and a hug from your mom.” True enough. As we drove home after seeing It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the mood in the car was solemn. I distracted my daughter by talking about the audience. Hipsters across the spectrum. Three friends in the row behind us passed the time before the movie discussing cereal. Favorite flavor? Dried strawberries and yogurt clusters. What about chocolate? Yeah, absolutely. Granola? Only when in the mood. Their taste struck me as fussy, sugary, refined. One of the friends remembered being rushed to the hospital because he had choked on Cheerios while watching either Fantasia or Moulin Rouge at age four. The banter was silly, but oh so serious. Ironic. My youngest shrugged. “They are cerealists. Nothing wrong with that.” A generous appraisal given she finds cereal disgusting.

Hertzfeldt’s humor leans hard into anti-comedy. His student film Billy’s Balloon (1998) is a send up of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 Le ballon rouge. Lamorisse’s film centers on a boy named Pascal and a magical red balloon; together they transcend the terrors of the Parisian playground. Boiled down to its basic components, the film is a love story. In Billy’s Balloon… well, let us just say the balloon takes no prisoners: it is a punching bag bent on revenge. Of course, that is just my take. Viewers have seen in the film a story about everything from child abuse to an “anti-pollution campaign.” Other audiences have found serious humor in the film’s resistance to grand interpretations. Dreadful things happen “just because.” It is the “just because,” a version of Kurt Vonnegut’s catchphrase “so it goes,” that kicks the film into the chasms of the absurd.

For all his merrily, dark pranksterism, Hertzfeldt isn’t solely after laughs. Trauma begets trauma begets trauma. Or, in Hertzfeldt, black and white footage of waves crashing against the rocks. The relentless trauma cycle can make Hertzfeldt tough going even for someone such as myself—a viewer steeped in the dark, twisted arts of surrealists, absurdists, futurists (you name it). I keep a copy of The Theatre of Cruelty by Antonin Artaud on my bedside just in case I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. I have written long, tedious essays on Isidore Ducasse, the infamous Lautremont, whose Maldoror belongs on the shelf marked “depraved” if ever a book did. Still, it becomes too easy to push Hertzfeldt in Lautreamont’s direction. He is cast as the epitome of “outsider” art, which is a euphemism for mad as a Hatter on multiple anti-psychotics. Hertzfeldt’s storytelling, though, is equal to his vision—and the same world in which we suffer and die is also the world in which we live, love, and love more. As one of his most quoted lines from the acclaimed World of Tomorrow (2015) goes: “Now is the envy of all the dead.” If you have ever felt helpless during a pandemic with a chipped incisor and brain fog from dowsing everything in chlorine, being the envy of the dead is as good as it gets.

The Grand

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Jacek Yerka

I am still a child without a piano.
My sister is a piano without ever being a child.

Without a piano, I would be exactly what I am,
not my sister, who does whatever a piano does.

My father actuates as a piano,
otherwise, he would be only a father.

My mother wants that piano to go out
and not come back till it finds a higher paying job.

To think, thousands of tusks once stream this way
from the coast to the factories of Connecticut.

One tusk for every hundred keyboards
bleached and lathed to create dazzling bridges.

Pianos look a lot like elephants, all heft
and grace and great round tops.

The one in our house rubs its back against the wall,
and out of its maw the glazed sounds

I hear every day my sister must conjure
her destiny, though she must stare far

into my father’s past to find it, as he imagines
Beethoven flogging the piano till it weeps

for joy, becomes Ode, exploding Glorias!
till the house can’t take anymore.

There’s no living with him when he’s like this,
my mother says and looks at me.

Hovered at my sister’s shoulder, my father says,
This is how you become immortal, beloved.

Credits:  "The Grand" first appeared in issue 47 of Sands Hill in 2003. 

In a Dark Time

by

Theodore Roethke

Franz Marc

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Credits:  This poem may be found online at Poetry Foundation.

Wildpeace by Yehuda Amichai

 Not the peace of a cease-fire,

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,

but rather

as in the heart when the excitement is over

and you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill,

that makes me an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be

light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds—

who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation

to the next, as in a relay race:

the baton never falls.)

Let it come

like wildflowers,

suddenly, because the field

must have it: wildpeace.

You Reading This, Be Ready

 by

William Stafford

Mark Belo

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Credits:  This poem can be found online at thedewdrop.org.