The Poetry Of Torah

Today’s sermon is a Shabbat Replay of our Shavuot Shabbat service. We were joined by acclaimed author Rodger Kamenetz who served as our scholar-in-residence during Shavuot. Rodger delivered a sermon on the poetry of Torah. What sacred meaning can we uncover when we appreciate the artistic flourishes in the TaNaKh?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

THE POETRY OF TORAH

We know the Torah,  which we received  today at Sinai, begins Bereishit bara Elohim et hashamayim v’et haarets.  

When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…

Rashi’s comment is often translated “This verse cries out for interpretation.” I’ve always loved that phrase because it gives me a sense of how alive the Torah must have been for him: the Torah was his life and the words were alive— he could feel a verse as if it were a living being  with a voice that cried out to him. Rashi’s Hebrew is even more emphatic than the usual translation,  and delightful

The last word DARSHEINI is in the command form so we could translate it, Drash me! 

“This verse says nothing but, “Midrash me!”

Or as another translation puts it, this verse demands to be read poetically. 

What is this Torah we just received today, this Shavuout. Is it a work of history? Of fiction? nonfiction? Or is it, as usually thought of, a book of laws?  

In his opening comment Rashi quotes an earlier rabbi to argue that if the Torah were a book of laws it would begin with Exodus 12: 2 where Israel first receives a commandment to observe the new moon. But it begins with Creation. That is --with Creativity. Which is another way of saying, the reality of creativity, of imagination, of poetry.  And 3rd Century Rabbi Oshaia teaches in Genesis Rabbah, that the word Bereishit refers to Torah, and the real meaning of Bereisht bara Elohim is “with Torah God created heaven and earth.” “The Holy One Blessed be He looked in the Torah and created the world. “ The Torah is the blueprint of creation.

So the Torah is not exclusively a book of laws, but much deeper than that, a partner and pattern of creation. It must be true then that Torah is a book of poetic creation. What might this mean. 

There is plenty of poetry in Torah. We can name  The Song of Songs which Rabbi Akiva called the “holy of holies” of all Hebrew texts. We have the song of the Sea, the song of Deborah, the prophetic poetry, the Book of Job and of course, the psalms. As my poetic mentor Robert Duncan once told me  in an interview “the Jews are one of the peoples of the poem” along with the Irish and the Greeks. and one sign of that is the invention of a specific name for the poet in the culture. The Irish have their bard, the Greek the poet or maker.  @e Jews have contributed at least two unique kinds of poet,  the navi or prophet and the maker of psalms, the psalmist. (King David is known as ‘the sweet singer.”)  Psalm and prophecy are two unique forms of Jewish poetry. And I would add a third, which is not usually thgouth of in this way, midrash.

For using midrash we find the secret poetry hidden in the images if we can learn to dwell on them and feel on them instead of being in too great a hurry to get the message or content. When we feel the poetry in the images, then the deeper mystery of the Torah emerges.

          Imagination has something to do with images, as the word tells you. So we come here to the objection that we Jews are  uncomfortable with images. 

We’ve just witnessed the giving of the ten commandments. Now If you were making a list of commandments would you have put “make no graven images” in the top ten? Top five? Top two? 

It is number two. 

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.

It’s not as bad as all that. My friend the painter Archie Rand discovered when he painted frescoes in Bnai Yosef a Syrian Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn there are many nuances and actually you can make images on a synagogue wall.

     But still. Number two—no graven images? What’s that about? 

We can explain how monotheism emerged in combat with a pagan backdrop. And that pagans gazed at images, bowed down to them. And our thing is fiercely anti-idolatrous.

But there’s a psychological truth in the commandment that testifies to a certain phobia. Images are powerful. as my teacher Colette said , “Images are sovereign in the mind.” They radiate feeling like the moon in the dark. 

Words can be precise and delimiting. Images are turbulent even oceanic, full of waves and depths. We seek to tame images with words, the tool of reason. Religion, even human thought can be seen as a struggle between the image and the word.  We can lose ourselves in images and that is the risk of idolatry.  But we can ‘t escape images through words, because of a weak spot: words themselves create images.  It is what makes poetry unique—it requires the participation of the reader to make images out of the words. 

Every word deep down has a root in an image. Even a word like “being” has its Indo European root in bha which means to breathe. An abstract word like “abstract” has the same root as tractor, and it produces a image of pulling away from something. Which abstraction does it pulls us away from seeing the image. Under our clearest thinking deep down, images emerge from words and words emerge from images. 

It's said we are an aniconic tradition. For instance, Catholicism, Tibetan, Buddhism, are full of icons used in meditation and worship.. Abraham our father, a midrash tells us  was an idol smasher, history’s greatest iconoclast. 

But it isn’t strictly true that Judaism is aniconic.  Yes, we don’t revere statues or paintings, as Catholics do, we don’t practice veneration as our Greek Orthodox neighbors do. We don’t meditate on images as Tibetans do. But we do have images. Lots of images. 

For instance in Genesis 3:8  we read, They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day…. 

This is an extraordinary image, and in imagination it is fully three-dimensional, sculpted and graven if you like. It has a Hebrew tension the way it combines the ineffable voice with the embodied walking. And the “cool of the day” insists on imaginative specificity. But it’s a verbal image which is what poetry is about. Verbal images have a different quality from the images you might see in a Hindu temple or Catholic Church. Verbal images require participation by the reader or listener they require an active imagination. Some alchemy has to happen to transform a written or spoken word into sights and sounds, smells and tastes, touch and feeling.. some inner activity on the part of the reader or listener. We call this imagination. In a sense our Torah with its elliptical terseness demands imagination. It cries out to us everywhere, drash me! Reimagine me! Redream my dream. And we do hear of a  magical crying out in Genesis 4:10 , where God confronts Cain after he murders his brother, Abel. God tells Cain, "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground." 

The voice in the verses of Torah, like the voice Rashi heard in the text, is significant in the story of the giving of the Torah we celebrate on Shavuot. 

. In Exodus 19:19 we read  vayehi kol hashofar holakh vhazak m’od MOSHE y’dabair v’ha-elohim ya’aneno b’kol

. וַֽיְהִי֙ ק֣וֹל הַשֹּׁפָ֔ר הוֹלֵ֖ךְ וְחָזֵ֣ק מְאֹ֑ד מֹשֶׁ֣ה יְדַבֵּ֔ר וְהָאֱלֹהִ֖ים יַעֲנֶ֥נּוּ בְקֽוֹל׃ 

One translation gives the last part, As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder. 

God answer him in thunder. Wow. 

 Another more plain vanilla  translation says that Moses spoke to God and God answered in a voice..  The word kol allows this ambiguity. Both interpretations are valid for reasons I don’t want to get into  here but clearly the thunder is more poetic more beautiful and more mysterious. And I prefer it.

In Exodus 20: 15 we read the people saw thunder – a very mysterious and poetic phrase—full of wonder-- The Hebrew for thunder in this passage KOLOT  the plural of kol so we could read it as the people “saw Voices.”  Either reading is full of poetry.  How mysterious to see thunder. How mysterious to see voices.

The book of Job picks up on this idea of God, speaking in thunder. Job 37:2-5

Just listen to the noise of the rumbling, 

To the sound that comes out of God's mouth.

It is let loose beneath the entire heavens—

God's lightning, to the ends of the earth.

After it, a roar is released-

Thundered in God's majestic voice.

No one can find a trace of it by the time God's voice is heard.

Thundering marvelously with that voice,

God works wonders that we cannot understand.

The Torah is full of verbal images, but sometimes we have to dig for them so we can hear the majestic thunder in the voice.  Sometimes we have to see the thunder in the voices of Torah and that is a power of dreaming and imagination.

Our method for doing this is a poetic operation we call midrash, and kabbalah as we have it emerges as a form of midrash, and also a contemplation of what Rashi experienced of the living Voice within the  printed words. 

        The 14th century kabbalistic text the Tikkunei Zohar offers 70 interpretations of the opening word of Torah, bereishit. It is said that the Torah has 70 faces, but here they go further, the word of Torah has 70 faces. And every word might have an infinite depth. Indeed the late 13th century kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla in his Gates of Light  shows that the whole Torah is simply one long name of God and that every word in Torah has its root in a name of God. Every word, the word be’er (well )for instance has the same root as the Hebrew words for river and sea—all are rooted in Malkhut or the Shekhinah. When we hold up the Torah and point and say. THIS is the Torah—Zot ha torah, even the word THIS has its root in a name of God. I wrote a poem about this about how God is lurking in every word.

This

I consider this the eye of the eye of the eye 

The eye that looks out and feels my listening

A finger to the lips and the silence of day after day

Sleeping in rocks is the syllable of peace

While the missiles fly overhead

The death of even one child is larger than the sun

Kabbalah itself is a poetic form of.midrash while midrash might be seen  as  a poetic operation in which anomalies in the text are occasions for new poetic creation. This creative quality of the text-- its living quality, its soul is what Rashi clearly felt. The thunder in its voice is what we also can hear if we listen at the text (as we say in New Orleans) and feel into it.  Feeling into is exactly whata we do when we feel the beauty in the words or in another person=- the German aesthetic term Einfühlung was translated into English in 1908 and that is where our word “empathy” was born.

If the Torah is a poem then perhaps it has been crying out all along to be read poetically. And maybe Torah is a bit frustrated.  This verse cries out to be read poetically. Cries out. It demands “Drash me!” How do we find the poetry in Torah? We have to learn to feel into the images.  For me poetry is rooted in images. And it seems as a people we are a bit  fearful about images much as Rabbi Joel Covitz said the Jewish people are monumentally ambivalent about dreams. 

We can make the torah our own dream and our own poem. And we can redream the Torah. But first we have to search for the poetry in its images. We have to feel into them and feel them. We have to hear the thunder in its voices. We can bring all our senses to bear, for images may be of every sense sound, sight, touch, smell, taste. So let me end by reading my midrash on Torah itself. “The Illustrated Book of God” is my own response to receiving the gift of Torah. (For we were all there at Sinai, weren’t we?)_ 

The Illustrated Book Of God

I opened the illustrated book of God. It was written all of gold letters. There was a fire on page one. The flames licked the page. I stopped reading with my eyes and read with my tongue. I tasted vermillion. I put my ear to the page and heard the lions roar. I heard the clouds. I touched the bleak thorns of the acacia. I marched on oceans my feet grew weary. I sank into the delicious black mud with bare feet and bare bottom. I opened the door to the stranger who lit candles in the sun. I walked on the moon. I knew strange love of every kind nothing was forbidden. "I knew what other men thought they knew." The father came to me and blessed my broken mind. He comforted the mother who had lost her child. He sang of the shepherd and the shape. My body disappeared and I walked into pages. The gold letters left imprint on my subtle body. I knew and knew the end and the beginning. I tasted the water of loving-kindness and drank a fill. The peacocks led me to the horizon. The elephants recited their bible. The lions returned and ate my heart. I died in the dark of my last page. The book went on still unopened still unknown its hand beyond knowing.

[from Seeing into the Life of Things and also in The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022 (Ben Yehudah Press)]

HAG SAMEAKH!

--Rodger Kamenetz. Welles Park, Chicago, Friday May 22, 2026 for Mishkan Chicago.