Mixing Up the Bible:

Dahlia Ravitkovitch

"Guilt feelings, I've got them in spades, but not the way you imagine. On Yom Kippur I don't fast but I don't go looking for thrills either because hunger isn't conducive to personality enhancement, it won't purify, only irritate, and I know from experience and from study and observation how to be irritating to others as well as myself. I'm still evolving, becoming more efficient, since overcoming the simplest obstacle is an unattainable goal."

Yona Wallach

tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

"One more time I must remember my son Absalom whose hair caught in my womb and didn't come out for me to finish Absalom my son I construct the possibilities of my feeling pity floods me and the hunger that might be the wills of heredity and Absalom who wasn't allowed in another incarnation"

tr. Linda Zisquit

Esther Raab

Translation and the Politics of Religion

Poetic Theology/Anti-Theology

Mark Chagall, "The Binding of Isaac"

"I will dip sevenfold in the Mediterranean to be ready for my beloved David, the King, and I will climb to him in awesome majesty up to the mountains of Jerusalem. I will drink coffee and discuss security and war with Deborah, under the palm tree. Holy grandmothers in Jerusalem, may your virtue protect me."

"When God packed up and left the country, He left the Torah with the Jews. They have been looking for Him ever since, shouting, 'Hey, you forgot something, you forgot,' and other people think shouting is the prayer of the Jews. Since then, they've been combing the Bible for hints of His whereabouts, as it says: 'Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near.' But He is far away."

"From the Book of Esther I filtered the sediment of vulgar joy, and from the Book of Jeremiah the howl of pain in the guts. And from the Song of Songs the endless search for love, and from Genesis the dreams and Cain, and from Ecclesiastes the despair, and from the Book of Job: Job. And with what was left, I pasted myself a new Bible. Now I live censored and pasted and limited and in peace."

tr. Shirley Kaufman

Sacred Text/Scattered Text

Critical Frames

After the Shoah

"Anyone who rises early in the morning is on his own. He gets himself over to the altar, he is Abraham, he is Isaac, he's the donkey, the fire, the knife, the angel, he's the ram, he is God.

And him we call Abraham our Father. What kind of father is he to us, so ready to sacrifice his own son on the altar! Another interpretation: God knew not a love for sons, but he did know a love for mountains, and of all the mountains he loved Mount Moriah best of all, his mountain, his only mountain, which he did love, and that's why they had the Binding of Isaac and the two Temples on it."

New Ancient Narrative

• Critical Hermenuetics
• Constructive Theology
• Shifting Gender
• Scripting Otherness
• Narrative and Anti-Narrative
• Liturgy, Song, and Poem

"I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah,

I wasn’t even among the survivors. And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.

I came to the Promised Land by sea. No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke

within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope, I still have within me the lust to search for living water with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows. Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers. Jewish history and world history grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes to a powder." ~Yehuda Amichai

All excerpts that follow are unlineated poems from the work of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Robert Alter, Chana Bloch, Chana Kronfeld, and Stephen Mitchell--unless otherwise noted.

Removing line breaks allows the poems to read more continuously and philosophically, introducing a narrative and didactic familiarity.

"Abel killed Cain and Moses entered the Promised Land and the children of Israel stayed in the Wilderness. I ride in Ezekiel's chariot, and Ezekiel himself dances like Miriam the prophetess in the Valley of Dry Bones. Sodom and Gomorrah are booming and Lot's wife has turned into a pillar of sugar and honey and David king of Israel is alive and well. I so want to mix up the Bible."

Mixing Up the Bible:

New Theologies and Theodicies in Post-Shoah Israeli Poetry