People pray to each other. The way I say “you” to someone else,
respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says
“you” to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely …
— Huub Oosterhuis
How do we know when we’re in the presence of a poem? Usually, there are formal indicators that signal this — columns of verse, musicality, meter, etc. — but as a poem begins, there’s also a sense that one is skipping polite talk and getting down to brass tacks. There’s a feeling of concentration — spatially, temporally, topically. And oddly, at the same time there is a feeling, at least when a poem works, of expansiveness. Expansiveness in that a poem can hold multiple, seemingly conflicting truths at the same time and expansiveness in terms of an internal feeling of dilation.
Like a poem, another person is beyond characterization — strange, holy.
Poetry is difficult. We’re no longer taught well, if at all, how to read poetry. It feels like it is too precious or takes too much effort to understand. Not that reading a poem needs to be a trying, exhaustive undertaking; but because poetry can be mysterious, non-polemical, imagistic, it can take a certain kind of devotion — multiple readings, slower cadence — to really let a poem settle into us. A poem requires a different way of seeing than the type we usually employ to gather information. Rabbi Ira Stone has said a poem is not to be solved, but experienced.
It could be said that it also takes a certain kind of devotion to truly begin to see another person beyond all our projections, fears and self-absorption. Mussar could be described in many ways, but at root I think it is a devotional practice along these exact same lines. Like a poem, another person (whether we’ve known them our whole lives or just encountered them) is similarly beyond characterization — strange, holy.
The Person Is a Text, the Text Is a Person
I remember Rabbi Bonita Taylor, my clinical pastoral education supervisor in New York City years ago, teaching us to treat the person across from us as a text. At first, this felt objectifying in a weird way, but it points to what I’ve come to feel is maybe Judaism’s central contribution. What if we have all these hermeneutical rules about how to read Torah — infinite levels of interpretation, non-linearity, reading beyond the ego — in order to learn and then apply these skills to the person sitting across from us? The function of the sacred text in front of us, then, is that it acts as an excuse to sit down with an open heart next to another human being. We read the other person’s life, usually, from a peshat perspective, not receptive to the rabbinic custom of multiple reads. We often read our own life the same way. Learning how to read/hear poetry is very much like learning to read/hear Torah. Mussar is when both of these practices come off the page, and we try to behold another being with the same respect, awe and curiosity.
Leonard Fein notes that the first two questions the Torah asks are, “Where are you?” and a few chapters later, “Where is your brother?” As if one can’t answer the first question without also answering the second question. As if they are, in fact, the same question. Mussar is the tradition within Judaism that asks, how did these two questions become separated in our world? Historically, Mussar is talked about as a virtues-based literature (dating back at least to Bahya ibn Pekudah’s Duties of the Heart in 1080), as well as the corrective movement of Israel Salanter’s time in mid-1800s Lithuania, which was grounded in such literature. Mussar movements since Salanter’s time have been varied but have generally sought to bring forward practices to make sure that the tradition’s core insights around loving others were not just in the head, but were known in the heart.
The Mussar masters understood the core, even fatal, assumption made in approaching learning and knowledge — that if one knows something intellectually, it will naturally integrate and translate into their behavior. A teacher of mine is fond of pointing out: If you find yourself beginning a sentence with, “I know it intellectually … ,” you are saying in effect that you don’t really know it. This problem is not unique to Judaism but really could be called the original (and stubbornly repeating) sin of Western civilization. We can talk about “Love your fellow as yourself” and its primacy until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean that we functionally know how to do this.
Poetry helps. Jane Hirshfield names why one might invite poetry into their life:
More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstinted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished.
I’m not saying that poetry is by any means ethical. You can be a brilliant successful poet and be not only a jerk but sometimes a homicidal maniac (Ezra Pound). So, there’s that. But there’s something about the phenomenon of learning to read poetry that I think, for me, is inextricably connected to Mussar — to the work of learning to slow down, to be attuned to the other’s presence, to paying attention, to de-centering our particular sense of self and how we are used to seeing the world. We’re commanded to see beyond the limits of our own projections.
Being Unsettled
Mussar poetry (as I’m calling it) is about more than having an inspiring or moving poem that evokes Mussar themes, though to be clear, that is a wonderful thing when it happens. Take Yehuda Amichai’s, “The Place Where We Are Right,” with its verse, “From the place where we are right / Flowers will never grow / In the Spring,” which is a Mussar-proof text if ever there was one.
But there’s more. Maybe poetry is not meant solely to awaken us but also to unsettle us (perplexity, friction of interest) in the same way that Mussar practice hopes to jar us from our habitual sleepwalking. Sometimes, a good poem makes us feel like we are not on solid ground any more.
I am not a fan of most prayerbook poetry. Too often, we try to utilize poems in ritual settings that are beautiful but safe (at least in the way we employ them). I often feel that when I want a poem to serve a purpose that feels too specific, it flattens and sentimentalizes both the prayer and the poetry. At those times, I am an idolater, reducing the poem and stripping it of its inchoate multi-vocality.
My wife, Vanessa, and I are both rabbis. There is a Mary Oliver poem from which my wife often reads an excerpt at weddings where she is the officiant:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Perhaps it is her slight Brazilian accent, but whenever Vanessa reads the second line, it sounds to me like, “All my life, I was a bride, married to a basement.” Like any good family joke, it has legs, and we continue not only to read that poem at weddings but to laugh privately around how we hear it. It has struck me recently that perhaps our adapted version is more appropriate; that is, what more could we wish for in a marriage than the hope that we be in service of our partner having access to their darker, subterranean levels? And further: It strikes me now that our bastardized reconstruction reads as a prayerful one in its own right. It’s odd and evocative; it ties nothing up in a bow.
Mussar is the work of learning to slow down, to be attuned to the other’s presence, to paying attention. We’re commanded to see beyond the limits of our own projections.
The poet Eduardo Corral teaches a technique whereby he has his students go to YouTube and listen to poets reading poems in languages the students don’t understand, and then “translate” them. This is one high-wire way of writing poetry. I say high-wire because just as we can meet another person and often unthinkingly subsume or appropriate them to ourselves, so the impulse here is to think we know what the other poet on the other side of the world is saying or to immediately put it into our own words. It can be fascinating to try to listen to the poem beyond that. To resist and then to experiment. Of course, the exercise is all projection in the end, but it can help remind us to let the other be other, as Jean Valentine says, “to imagine other solitudes.”
Reaching Towards an Other
Mussar poetry also seems to require reading poetry written by people or peoples that we might consider particularly other or who seem to belong to groups that we have an existing discomfort with. When I’ve taught classes on this theme, participants have self-assessed and chosen poets that might fit this category. Some have chosen to read the Haredi poet, Yehoshua November because of their resistances and complicated feelings about that community. Others have read Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish or Palestinian-American poets like Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye writes, in her poem, “Jerusalem”:
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
Where we can often be stymied trying to find our way into multi-narrative spaces, or we can squirm hearing a history that feels like to some degree it challenges or even erases our own history; it’s harder to argue with a poem. A poem asks us simply to be in its presence. A poem confronts us like the presence of another person should.
There is an obligation inherent in our reading. We are invited in, but we are also implicated. There’s no turning back.
The C. D. Wright poem, “Breathtaken,” arranges in fragmented form accounts of multiple homicides in New Orleans that occurred over a short period of time. Wright finds a way in that poem of being true to the particular stories, even as she bumps them up against one another so that they reveal more than the sum of their parts. She brings a sense of honest bewilderment, which keeps her from falling into something resembling righteousness. An excerpt:
bringing back stuff to make gumbo
lying on his back on Willow watching the dark torso of clouds
shots sprayed from a green van
working on a house he loved his mother’s pies
by his idling car
faceup watching the clouds bulk up and blow over
in a passenger seat on Sister Street
walking home, 5:25 p.m. carrying a bottle of whole milk
in a room at the Travelodge pending identification
And on like this for 20 pages. Wright’s is a particular kind of voice, fiercely attuned to morality but not needing to name it. She just keeps bringing her glowing witness. Tells us not to look away. As she writes elsewhere, “place yourself inside the damage.” Surely, this is a Mussar poem.
If Mussar poetry involves hearing poetry by another, it also can become poetry that reaches towards another — that fundamentally is in dialogue. Much Jewish poetry, beginning with the Psalms, models the Western language of unmediated encounter with the You. Norman Fischer’s hiddush (innovation) in his lovely version of the Psalms, Opening to You, is to translate Gd as You (“Passionately addressed to a you who is forever unknown.”) Even if the Psalms are full of deprecations of the other and don’t seem very Mussardik at first, they still have this I-Thou orientation at their center, and to our earlier point, they still have this wild, contradictory and unsettling nature.
Muriel Ruckeyser wrote about the task of poetry as the reorientation of the individual, so that they are seen
not only as an individual but as a person moving toward other persons, or a person moving away from other persons, or a person moving against other persons. … Poetry is written from these depths; in great poetry you feel a source speaking to another source.
This echoes Psalm 42 — “Deep calls to deep” and beyond that, echoes the insistence on relationality as our Jewish north star. We may not know who we are or what this life rests upon, but we know we are in relationship, and we sense that within those relationships, past, present and future, we are called to wakefulness, to responsibility.
The True Subject
Li Young Lee wrote the true subject of poetry is silence, which echoes the silence at Sinai. We learned to read into the silence, yes, but maybe initially we just allowed it. A silence of direct experience. Our whole tradition could be understood as the (necessary) turning away from that silence, articulating our tasks, blinking in the new light. But the silence is still there underneath it all. All the possibilities in our lives come from the mystery of this silence. Again, Hirshfield:
There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.
Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
There’s also a very literal dimension to this silence; sometimes, we are able to hear the other’s needs as they articulate them, not just as we imagine them. Poetry and Mussar as devotional practices remind us to listen within this silence.
