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A poem is presented.

A poem is presented.

The title of the work, \"The Days Between,\" is a springboard to discuss the whole period from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur. These are the \"days of turning and returning,\" a time of intensely experiencing this \"wholeness,\" feeling a part of what [Marcia Falk] calls, \"the flow.\" She asks, \"What does it mean to be 'in between' as in twilight, between day and night. And aren't human beings always 'in between,' poised between dawn and dusk, past and future, living in the present, and yet unable to capture the present, we live in the 'flow between.'\" Yet, \"The Days Between\" has much in common with the traditional mahzor, in that it captures a sense of the divinity. The intensity of the \"flow\" is experienced, whether it is called \"God\" \"or \"the \"wellspring of life.\" An atmosphere of sanctity is created for those seeking Jewish prayer, albeit from an inclusive, non-hierarchic, approach. \"There is no 'God' in these pages,\" she writes. \"But every page, I hope, evokes the sacred.\" And it does. Falk herself might resist calling this \"perpetuity\" and \"wholeness\" \"God,\" but it is not unfair to say this is what many people experience as God. A very moving aspect of \"The Days Between\" is the Yizkor service, \"Remembering the Lives,\" introduced by the poem \"I Recall\" and followed by the poems of \"Grief and Consolation,\" which trace the process of mourning until the acknowledgement, \"that we are, all of us, always dying. From the moment of birth, dying back into the world, out of which we were born.\"

Her version of the Sh'ma, the best-known piece of Jewish liturgy, represents the poet at her most subversive. She replaces the classic declaration of monotheism, \"Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One\", with a prayer about the unity of creation: \"Hear, O Israel, The Divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything; the many are One.\" Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher, enraged Jewish traditionalists when he equated nature with God. And four centuries later, the contemporary Jewish Reconstructionist movement denied the existence of a personal or supernatural deity. If such thinking has been the stuff of commentary, it has rarely been reflected in prayer. Although there have been numerous exceptions, Jewish law banned new blessings after the 6th or 7th century. And even liberal Jewish communities that have changed \"God-language\" in English translations, have been loathe to alter the original Hebrew.

We cast Into the depths of the sea our sins, and failures, and regrets. Reflections of our imperfect selves

The poem famously offers a kind of antidote to the sentence of death. It says that teshuvah (\"turning\" or \"repentance\"), tefillah (\"prayer\") and tzedakah (\"righteousness\" or \"charity\") will \"avert the evil of the decree.\" For [Marcia Falk], this is a process that begins by \"turning inward to face oneself \" and ends with turning outward to face \"our responsibility to, and relationship with, others.\" Yom Kippur begins with Kol Nidrei (\"All Vows\"), a declaration annulling all oaths and vows from this Yom Kippur to the next. Falk points out problematic aspects of the legal formula (\"One might ask what it actually means to vacate a future vow now\") and writes that it is Kol Nidrei's \"hauntingly beautiful\" melody that makes it indispensable to the Yom Kippur service. She recasts Kol Nidrei as \"a different kind of preparation for prayer\": the opportunity for the worshiper to let go of \"unfulfilled or unfulfilling expectations we have of ourselves.\"

Similarly, hand-wringing over the Christian right or the Christian anything presents no effective basis for Jewish renewal. Besides, perceived threats from this quarter are not always grounded in reality. In \"Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America,\" Elliott Abrams details the efforts of many Christian groups to eliminate anti-Semitic themes from their writings and educational programs. Yet, writes Abrams, \"a deep-seated fear of Christianity and an expectation of anti-Semitism remain central to the `Jewishness' of many American Jews. For them, Jewishness does not consist of belief in traditional Judaism; instead, at the core it means not being Christian. That negative identity is strengthened by fearful presumptions about Christian attitudes toward Jews and their place in American society.\" Abrams notes astutely that American Jews are more anxious about their children becoming more observant than about their assimilating out of the faith.

She has been called a pantheist and an atheist, but poet and Judaic scholar Marcia Falk, giving her first talk in Canada, said she is not afraid of labels. I've been called so many things lately,\" she said. \"My answer is: 'Where do we find peace? And I go toward it.'\" The feminist author of a new gender-inclusive prayer book, Book of Blessings, a 13-year-project, spoke to 225 people recently at Holy Blossom Temple. As a poet, I'm drawn to the lyrical intensity of the Hebrew blessings, but I'm uncomfortable with the heavily patriarchal picture of God in traditional liturgy and a lot of creativity begins with discomfort.\" Her book has a new version of the Sh'ma, one of the best known pieces of Jewish liturgy.

From all quarters, the response to \"Pnai\" was nothing short of rapturous. The six books that followed consolidated [Zelda Schneerson]'s reputation and won her the prestigious Bialik and Brenner prizes, among others. In 1985, a year after her death, her work - some 170 poems in all - was bound into a single volume, \"Shirei Zelda\" (Poems of Zelda), which is now in its 15th printing. About half of these are presented in \"The Spectacular Difference,\" in the original Hebrew and in English translation. Several poems written in her younger years convey a fascinated intimacy with death. \"'Why were you afraid of me / yesterday in the rain?' / Death spoke to me. / 'Am I not your quiet / older brother?'\" (\"I Stood in Jerusalem\"). Against the grain of Orthodox attitudes, Zelda had a particular tenderness for people driven to suicide. One of her most moving poems (not found in this English selection) is \"Beheik Ha'asavim Bakhah,\" (\"Amid the Grasses He Wept\"), dedicated to Levy Neufeld, a medical student and refugee from Europe. Following a series of unsolved murders in the early 60s, his disappearance had aroused suspicion and made him the object of an unprecedented nationwide manhunt. Moved by what she saw as further persecution of a Holocaust survivor, Zelda alone - her diffidence overcome - publicly championed his innocence in a letter to the Ha'aretz newspaper. (His suicide, it was later discovered, had preceded the murders.) The selection here does not include some half-dozen key poems, such as \"Baleilah Hahu\" (\"On That Night\") and \"Ketzitz Ha'amakim\" (\"As a Flower of the Valleys\"). But the translations on offer are, for the most part, elegant renditions that can be appreciated in their own right. Helpful notes explain references to the Bible, the kabbalah, rabbinical texts and Jewish prayer. However, a bilingual edition invites close comparison with the original text, and the results are not always reassuring. Take, for example, Zelda's best- known poem, \"Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem,\" which means \"Every man has a name\" (the words recur as a haunting refrain). Set to music, it has become a traditional feature of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day. [Marcia Falk], who specializes in \"a gender-inclusive perspective,\" turns this into the gender-free \"Each of us has a name.\" Repeated in all nine stanzas, \"us\" and \"our\" takes on a cozy inclusiveness; the Hebrew original, however, with ish (man) and lo (his), stresses the stark singularity of each life.

In defence of [Delilah], author Fay Weldon portrays her as a woman pursued by Samson and pressured by the civil authorities to trap him. When she tricks him into having his hair cut, Samson becomes impotent, in Weldon's story. [Cynthia Ozick] says it is [Hannah]'s husband, Elkanah, who is the feminist hero in the account. When he tries to console Hannah with the words, \"Am I not better to thee than 10 sons?\" he asserts that he and his wife have value with or without sons. In another essay, Marcia Falk takes a different view. She chides Elkanah for not understanding Hannah's pain at being childless.