Wendy I. Zierler, "Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry" (Jewish Publication Society, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network – Jewish Studies Channel
Host: Rabbi Mark Katz
Guest: Rabbi Dr. Wendy I. Zierler
Book: Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry (Jewish Publication Society, 2025)
Date: November 18, 2025

In this deeply moving episode, Rabbi Mark Katz interviews Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zierler about her new book, Going Out with Knots, which intertwines memoir, mourning, modern Hebrew poetry, and translation. The discussion centers on how profound personal losses led Zierler to draw upon her literary scholarship—and the poetry of Hebrew women—to process grief and build communal meaning during two years of reciting the Kaddish. The conversation is rich with reflections on tradition, gender, translation, the healing power of literature, and the recovery of marginalized voices in Jewish canon.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of the Book: Loss and Scholarship

• Zierler’s Personal Story: Wendy Zierler shares her experience with consecutive, devastating losses: her father, mother, father-in-law, and her mother-in-law’s decline, all culminating amid the broader trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic ([02:10]).
• Kaddish and Creativity: These losses led her to say Kaddish for 22 months. To cope, she leveraged her expertise in modern Hebrew poetry, weaving weekly poetry teaching into her congregation’s Kaddish journey. The book grew from these sessions ([02:10–03:28]).

2. The Meaning Behind “Going Out with Knots”

• Mishnaic Roots: The title draws from a Mishnah discussing sons leaving home wearing ‘knots’ from their fathers—a symbol of longing and connection. Zierler recounts her shock upon reading commentary asserting daughters do not miss fathers, prompting her to reinterpret and reclaim the ritual as a daughter desperately missing her father while wearing his tallit ([03:44–08:02]).
  • Quote: “There I was, terribly missing my father… being told that this experience that I was having was ritually emotionally invalid. And it was like a punch in the gut.” — Wendy Zierler ([07:35])

3. Healing Through Literature and Poetry

• From Speechlessness to Metaphor: Zierler describes loss as a “speechless” place, and poetry as the medium that restores agency and creates new meaning through metaphor and translation ([08:26]).
  • Quote: “Poetry … is a mark of, like, reasserting our sense of agency.” — Wendy Zierler ([08:44])
• Communal Healing: Weekly poetry readings and translations enabled communal healing and integration of grief ([10:21]).

4. Walking with the Poets

• Finding Kindred Spirits: Zierler relates to poets not just through their words but as companions on her mourning journey, especially Lea Goldberg and Yehuda Amichai ([11:36]).
  • Quote: “Each one was meeting me in a very specific way at various points in the journey.” — Wendy Zierler ([11:36])

5. Hybrid Structure: Memoir and Poetry Analysis

• Why Combine Genres?: The book alternates between personal narrative and close readings of poetry, with Zierler highlighting her own penchant for living “in two worlds” and valuing hybrid forms ([14:42–16:12]).
  • Quote: “That yoking together of things is very much my disposition… to be more than one thing at once.” — Wendy Zierler ([15:30])

6. Reclaiming Women’s Voices in Hebrew Poetry

• Historical Silence: Zierler discusses the long historical absence of Hebrew women’s poetry after the biblical period, her academic focus on this “booming silence,” and her ongoing quest to recover and foreground these voices ([17:56]).
• Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo: Special attention to Morpurgo, the first modern Hebrew woman poet, and a model for Zierler’s own rabbinic and scholarly identity ([19:22–21:21]).

7. The Art—and Responsibility—of Translation

• Balancing Form and Meaning: Zierler details the negotiation between literalness and artistic fidelity in translation. She uses footnotes to mark interpretive decisions and emphasizes that, for certain poets, the form itself was crucial to meaning ([23:08–26:20]).
  • Quote: “I felt that just translating the words and not reproducing that would not give you the musical effect of the poem.” — Wendy Zierler ([23:58])

8. Why Modern Hebrew—and Israel?

• On Language and Canon: Zierler asserts that modern Hebrew poetry uniquely bridges ancient and contemporary Jewish experience. Its proximity to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew lets poetry “midrashically” reinterpret tradition ([26:44]).
  • Quote: “We can have access to Torah and bona fide Jewish theology through this repository of modern creativity.” — Wendy Zierler ([28:06])

9. Authorial Intention vs. Reader Interpretation

• Literary Methodology: Zierler discusses the limits of authorial intention in close reading, especially for poets long deceased. She balances textual evidence, biographical context, and intrinsic properties of the Hebrew language ([29:26–32:12]).

10. Studying Poetry in Community

• Communal Discovery: Contrary to the image of poetry as solitary, Zierler emphasizes the value of collective interpretation—particularly in a Kaddish minyan. Fresh insights emerge from dialogue and group study ([32:12–35:23]).
  • Quote: “Every time I presented a poem… someone raised their hand and told me something that I hadn’t thought about.” — Wendy Zierler ([34:03])

11. Coming Full Circle: Modern Feminist Midrash

• Ruhama Weiss’s Poem: The book closes by returning to the earlier Mishnah about knots, through the feminist re-reading by poet and Talmud scholar Ruhama Weiss. This poem interrogates the erasure of daughters’ longing—and resistance in the face of tradition ([37:00–40:35]).
  • Quote: “Family is a complicated thing. Jewish connection is sometimes a tenuous thing. And yet… you hope for the final, you know, requital of love, the satisfying of the longings.” — Wendy Zierler ([40:24])

12. What’s Next?

• Current Projects: Zierler is at work on several fiction manuscripts and continuing her weekly Hebrew poetry project, which, since October 7, 2023, has focused on poetry responding to Israeli trauma and resilience ([40:44–41:48]).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Being Excluded from Ritual Longing
  “There I was, terribly missing my father… being told that this experience that I was having was ritually emotionally invalid. And it was like a punch in the gut.” — Zierler ([07:35])

• On Literature’s Healing Power
  “Poetry … is a mark of, like, reasserting our sense of agency.” — Zierler ([08:44])

• On Poets as Companions in Grief
  “Each one was meeting me in a very specific way at various points in the journey.” — Zierler ([11:36])

• On Translation Choices
  “I felt that just translating the words and not reproducing that would not give you the musical effect of the poem.” — Zierler ([23:58])

• On Hebrew Poetry as Living Torah
  “We can have access to Torah and bona fide Jewish theology through this repository of modern creativity.” — Zierler ([28:06])

• On Community Study
  “Every time I presented a poem… someone raised their hand and told me something that I hadn’t thought about.” — Zierler ([34:03])

• On Cycles of Belonging and Hope
  “Family is a complicated thing. Jewish connection is sometimes a tenuous thing. And yet… you hope for the final, you know, requital of love, the satisfying of the longings.” — Zierler ([40:24])

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Key Timestamps

• [02:10] Zierler’s grief journey and the origin of the book
• [03:44] Explanation of the book’s title and the Mishnah about “knots”
• [08:26] Role of literature and poetry in healing
• [11:36] Finding companionship with poets like Lea Goldberg and Yehuda Amichai
• [14:42] Why blend memoir and poetry analysis
• [17:56] Recovering women’s voices in Hebrew literature
• [23:08] The decisions and challenges of translation
• [26:44] The significance of writing, reading, and translating in Hebrew
• [29:26] Interpreting poetry: intention versus reader response
• [32:34] Studying poetry in a community setting
• [37:00] Full circle: Ruhama Weiss’s feminist midrash on knots
• [40:44] Zierler’s ongoing and future projects

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Overall Tone and Takeaways

The episode is sensitive yet scholarly, personal but far-reaching. Zierler’s voice is both confessional and analytical, mirroring her book’s style. The interplay of ancient and modern, personal loss and communal tradition, and the reclamation of marginalized women’s voices offers listeners both intellectual insight and emotional resonance.

Ideal For: Listeners navigating grief, those interested in modern Hebrew poetry, Jewish tradition, feminist studies, and anyone seeking to understand the creative processes behind integrating literature and lived experience.

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Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Interviewer]

Hi, and welcome to the New Books and Jewish Studies channel of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here today with Dr. Rabbi Wendy Zieler about her book, Going out with My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry, which was published by the Jewish Publication Society. Welcome.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Happy to be here with you.

[Interviewer]

So we always begin the same way. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote this book.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

So, my name is Wendy. I am a professor of Modern Jewish literature and feminist studies at Hebrew Union College, and I wrote this book because I experienced a succession of losses. First, the tragic death of my father, who was hit by a distracted truck driver. And then, within the same year, the death of my mother. And then, shortly thereafter, the outbreak of COVID which subsumed all personal losses and issues into a kind of communal story. And then within that year, the loss of my father in law and the deterioration of my mother in law's health due to Alzheimer's. So I was dealing with a lot, and I was saying Kaddish, what turned out to be for 22 months straight. And so I was looking to find a way to bring my area of expertise, my disposition as a scholar to the experience of daily, thrice daily Kaddish recitation. And I thought that my interest in modern Hebrew poetry and in reading closely could be something that I could bring to my congregation as part of the Kaddish process. And then the book grew out of this weekly experience of teaching these poems to my community, interweaving that with the grief journey.

[Interviewer]

So let's begin by just talking about the title, Going out with Knots. You speak beautifully about your midrash. I'm sorry, your Mishnah study and how it informed the title. So can you tell us a little bit about where that came from, why you chose the title? You did?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Sure. So it's customary in the first 30 days after the loss of a loved one for the family and the friends to undertake a collective project of Mishnah study. Then the name Mishnah, that Mishnah is, you know, the first layer of the Talmud. And a Mishnah either refers to that corpus or to the individual units of that corpus. And so it's a practice to divide up the Mishnah. By the way, the name Mishnah shares the same letters as the word neshama for soul. And so it's thought that this Mishnah study will redound to the benefit of the departed soul. So you take all of the tract dates of the Mishnah, you divide them up among your friends, relatives, and then you hope that by the end of the 30 days, you will have completed the entire six orders of the Mishnah. And I had undertaken as part of this to study tract, date, Shabbat, since my father, whom I was mourning at the time, had given up a lot, had sacrificed a lot for the sake of Shabbat observance. And I was home visiting my mother shortly after his death. My mom gave me my father's tallit to pray with in the morning. And the very first morning that I was praying Shacharit, the morning prayer. In my father's tallit, I happened upon the Mishnah that I was studying that day began. It's part of a larger discussion about what you're allowed to carry outside of your private domain to a public domain on Shabbat. You know, you're allowed to wear clothes. That's not considered work, but hauling logs or water or extraneous things is considered work. So the rabbis are thinking about clothing and accessories, and they write, Habanim Yotzim Biksharim, that sons go out with knots. And they try to understand why it is that the Mishnah is speaking about only sons being able to wear these knots and what they are. They experiment with the thought that perhaps there's some sort of medicinal knot, something you tie to yourself like an aromatherapy. And they resolve that, of course, that can't be the case, because then that would apply to everybody, sons and daughters, old and young alike, and that to be about younger boys or men. And they alight upon this idea that these knots were taken from a strap, either from the father's right shoe, tied either to the son's left shoe or left arm, and in tying this knot, that this is meant to be a kind of talisman or a way, a memento, so that the son, if he misses his father, those feelings of longings will pass from him. But then the commentary that I read that morning as I was singing shul in the downtime, you know, during the repetition of the Amidah, it says that this doesn't pertain to daughters, because daughters never miss their fathers. And then I read further Rashi's interpretation that fathers will never. The daughters will never miss their father, because fathers will never show enough love to the daughters that the daughters would ever come to miss them. And so there I was, terribly missing my father, with whom I was extremely close, wearing his tallit, his ritual knots, and being told that this experience that I was having was ritually emotionally invalid. And it was like a punch in the gut. And I literally hollered like I was sitting in shul. And I said, what? And I realized that part of my experience in saying Kaddish, though I felt it a great privilege to be living in a generation where women in a traditional synagogue would be allowed to recite Kaddish, albeit in various forms, depending on the synagogue, that I was going to need to supplement that as much as I treasured the classical sources from the past, that I was going to need to bring something from my own discipline and my own disposition to Speak in the contemporary valence of my own experience so that I could make it be something that could tie me to my parents and tie me to my tradition, rather than affecting a fray or a tear in the tradition.

[Interviewer]

And for you, that was poetry. And so I'm curious, before we really get into the specific poets that you analyze, let's talk as a whole. How can literature heal? What's the place of literature in a journey like yours? And if someone wanted to use literature to help them, like, how do they start?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Thanks for asking that. So I think that when we experience loss, you know, we experience a form of speechlessness, like we recede into a pre verbal place, you know, sobbing and crying. And so coming back, in a sense, is coming back into language and recognizing that we have this unique tool as human beings to be able to put together words in the form of a response. And the poetry being this very deliberate approach to language, this very careful measuring out of words and arranging them, is a mark of, like, reasserting our sense of agency. And furthermore, poetry, in that it has a whole array of figures and tools. But one could argue that the central tool, the central figure of speech in poetry is metaphor, which takes two unlike things and yokes them together in a resemblance, semblance that suddenly makes you look at something familiar in a new way and as if re encountering it. And so if grief or some sort of catastrophe makes us feel unfamiliar to ourselves, so it meets us in that unfamiliarity, but helps us realize that we can use something from our experience, from another form of experience, to process what we're going through. And it helps translate, I would argue, to carry over an experience from one place to another, like, so that you can get from one place to another. And so for me, poetry, metaphor and translation came together in a very useful combination because every week I was engaging. I wasn't just looking at poetry in English. I had taken up to choose and translate and teach a different modern Hebrew poem, therefore, process of discovering something, translating it, and then transmitting that from my own personal reading to others. You know, from the personal to the communal. That too was healing. So that I wasn't alone in what I was doing and that people who also might have been experiencing grief could recognize themselves in what I was teaching.

[Interviewer]

One of the things I really admired about your book is that you didn't just link your journey, your morning journey, to the poems themselves. You also found kindred spirits in the poets. And I, I often think about. I wrote, wrote a book on Judaism and loneliness and the whole beginning of the book was about how to read the Bible so that when you're feeling a certain kind of loneliness, whether it's the loneliness of losing a loved one or the loneliness of divorce or the loneliness of infertility, you can those people in the Bible who are kind of walking the same path as you. And it seems like as you lived with these poets for a while, teaching their poetry in your minion, it wasn't just their words, it was them as people that were able to walk beside you. And I'm curious if that resonates with you and which particular poets you felt walked the best with you that you uncovered.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah, I love that question. I think that each one was meeting me in a very specific way at various points in the journey. I began the book with the poetry of Lea Goldberg, who was somebody who I felt as though my experience was shadowing hers. She was someone who lost her father very tragically earlier on in her life, and then spent the rest of her life in very close proximity to her mother. She lived with her mother. Her mother lived with her from the time her mother immigrated to Palestine in 1936 to Leia Goldberg, to her death. And I had brought my mother from Toronto to live a block away from me. And I was suddenly re encountering the mom of my youth. We hadn't lived in the same country for decades, so I was feeling like a shadow experience with her. I also had remembered the experience of going to Israel as a young doctoral student and being assigned poems to read for a survey and Hebrew poetry class, and going to the library at On Mount Scopus, taking out one of the books that I was assigned to read and discovering that it had a book plate saying, from the library of Leah Goldberg, a book plate that she herself had designed. And I sat down on the floor by the bookcase and cried that I had had this opportunity to hold her books. And so I felt that I was holding her books with me as I was experiencing that early stage of grief from my father and then within that same time period, losing my mom. So that's just one example. I also talk in the poem in the book about how important the poet Yudamichai was to my own personal development, that I had studied his poetry with him. I had taken a course on the history of Hebrew poetry with Yudamichai when I was a college student, and that basically set the direction of my scholarly career and his homey, everyday language, the way that he brought big theological questions really down to earth, like to the basement or to the garage of everyone's house really felt very relevant for me at a time when I had been used to being at synagogue every day, twice a day, to say Kaddish. But then none of us could go to synagogue anymore because we were in Covid shut, you know, lockdown. And so this idea of domesticating theology, bringing it home, was very important to me. And it just followed the entire journey.

[Interviewer]

So before we really get into some more of the content, I want to talk about the structure of the book. The book is unique in the sense that it's both memoir and its analysis of poetry. And for the first time, some of these poems are translated, you know, the way that they were, because you did all your translations. And so I'm curious, how did you come up with the structure of the book? Why not just a memoir? Why not just a scholarly look at poetry? Why combine the two? How did that work for you?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

So it evolved. Originally, the thought was that I would have a memoir introduction to the book, and then the poetry analyses would unfold in the order in which I had taught them. Of course, I couldn't include all of them because that would have been gargantuan. And if you're talking about two and a half years every single week, you know, that's a lot. So I had to be selective. First came the principle of cutting, you know, kill your darlings, as they say. But I realized that I have a bit of a hybrid disposition. I live in two worlds. I'm an orthodox ordained rabbi teaching at a reformed rabbinical seminary. I like to teach modern sources in light of the past and vice versa. And so that yoking together of things is very much my disposition. In fact, it's a motif or a theme in one of the Yudo Amichai poems that I teach. I've yoked my outcry and my silence like, you know, like forbidden hybrids in the Bible. So I think I'm drawn to that, to more than one thing at once. I think that's our great challenge as Jews in America and as moderns, to be more than one thing at once.

[Interviewer]

And it allows us to understand your morning in a way we wouldn't without the poems. And it understands the poems in a different way without the context. You're very much in this book.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah. I also think it's useful. I mean, as a scholar, I am taught on some level to be wary of the self indulgent eye. But as a feminist postmodern, I'm told that I have to embrace my subject position, you see. And so I also thought that you Know, staring at the grief straight on and just talking about it is a bit much and self indulgent, but refracting the experience through the prism of something else. I think that you can relate to that through your own writing about grief through the Bible or writing about problem solving through the Talmud. That we need. We need a way of focalizing what we're interested in, and that itself brings a new perspective that we might not have thought of.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's very easy for mourning books about mourning to be melodramatic. Your book was not melodramatic, I think, because not only are you a great writer, but I think having that extra layer of the poetry allowed you to get deeper without cliches or some of the other things that people fall into traps with.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

That certainly was my hope. And letting great writers speak for me on occasion is also very helpful indeed.

[Interviewer]

So I wanna pick up on something that you just brought up, which is the idea that you've spent your career reclaiming women's poetic voices. Can you tell us a little bit about that passion? I mean, one of the amazing things about your book is that often when you pick up a book of Hebrew poetry, people are trying to fit in their quota of women into that book. Your book really celebrates the women poets that have come before, highlights them, and introduces your readers to a lot of poets that I imagine they haven't encountered before.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah, so my career began with a book called In Rachel Stole the the Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing. And it was about the first generations of Hebrew women prose writers and poets. And I was obsessed from the time I was in graduate school with this whole question of the absence of Hebrew women's writing. And for millennia, you know, after the closing of the canon of the Hebrew biblical canon, where we have some notion of women originating oral genre or writing poetry, you know, celebratory poems. We have Miriam and the Song of the Sea. We have Deborah's Victory Song. We've got Esther being the subject of the verb Lichtov to write in writing these. These letters or these books that go out, you know, to the Persian Empire after that. We have barely a handful of poems written by women until the end of the 19th century. And I was a student of the American and the British female literary tradition. And I would sit in class and listen to lectures about the dearth of female precursors. And I'm thinking, you think you have it bad? You know, Virginia Woolf had to imagine Judith Shakespeare because she felt that she lacked, you know, she imagined that Shakespeare had a Sister. What would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister? Because she felt she had to conjure up a predecessor tradition. And yet there were all of these 18th and 19th century incredibly successful women novelists in the English and the American traditions. So, like, what was she complaining about? Whereas we had nothing. And that booming silence for me was something that I just obsessed over. It had to make a difference. If women were finally gonna enter into the tradition and speak about women's experiences or speak about any of the canonical themes in our tradition, it was going to have to make a difference what they had to say. And so I wrote that first book examining, asking the question of what happens when women finally claim a voice. And I use the image of Rachel stealing the trofim that belonged to her father as a controlling metaphor for women taking over the sfat of the language, the father tongue of Hebrew. So it was a natural sequence. You know, when you find something important, you keep on going back to it and deepening it. There are poems in this book that I had previously translated, but I had an opportunity to revisit as I got into this rhythm of weekly translation. And for me, one of the heroines of my whole career. Gotta give her credit, but it was a very important figure to me then and now was Rachel Lutzata Morpurgo, who was the first modern Hebrew women poetry, living in Trieste, Italy, from the famed rabbinic Luzzatto family. Because she wasn't just a model of a Hebrew woman poet, she was a scholar, a great erudite scholar of Talmud, mysticism, Tanakh. Her poems are exquisitely elusive and metered and carefully constructed. And she did this all before Hebrew was revived, so to speak, and became a vernacular in Israel. So it was a real feat. And she was standing alone. And so in the up to my rabbinical ordination, which also occurred during the period of the writing of this book, she became a model for me of a proto woman rabbi, not just an early woman Hebrew writer.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, Your ability to kind of uncover these people is so important. I mean, I remember in rabbinical school, like, you get Gluckle of Hamill as, like, the example of, like, the one woman who actually writes. And that's in the early modern period. So you're still missing over a thousand years more than that.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

And she's writing in Yiddish. Yeah, writing not for publication for her family. Not that that's not important. I mean, it was a great find, Glickle's memoir. But it's just one little piece of the puzzle.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. And it's not enough I wonder if you could talk a little bit about translation, because there's a lot of reasons to read this book. One is for the heart, one is for the analysis, but one is also, because now we've got these poems that are translated that can be used in classrooms and in synagogues and other places like that. And you took a tremendous amount of care with your translation. And at the same time, I noticed you had to make sacrifices as you did. I remember Edgar Carrot, who you quote in your book and actually blurbs your book, talking to our rabbinical school class in Israel, and he said something like, you know, I was tell. Telling my translator about this story, and it dealt with a really simple man. And all I cared about was that the sentences were short, even if they didn't say what I actually had said in Hebrew. I wanted the sentence to be simple English, and short, because form was more important than content. And there are times where you privileged rhyme, you privileged cadence over saying exactly what the poet said. And there were times where you chose accuracy over the rhyme and the cadence in the Hebrew. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about that dance that you did.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah, I tried in the process of translation, whenever I was fudging it or whenever I was taking license, because I wanted to produce a rhyme or a rhythm, to drop a footnote, so that people could recognize, like, I know literally it means this, but I'm doing this. Especially with the poets who had taken such care to write in recognizable form. I felt that just translating the words and not reproducing that would not give you the musical effect of the poem. I was especially observant of that and caring about that in the case of Raquel Moorpurgo number one, because nobody knows who she is, aside from a few interested scholars. I mentioned over and over again the scholar Tova Cohen from Bar Ilan University, who is the preeminent scholar of Morpurgo. I wanted people to understand that Rahel Morpurgo, in writing this poetry, was obsessed with form. She was obsessed with dividing up the lines in a particular way, like the medieval Hebrew poets that she had studied together with her first cousin, Shmuel Davi Bluzato, who collected medieval manuscripts of those poems. And so it was trying to recognize the. The professional care and the expertise, like the craftsmanship, that these poets had exercised. So, for example, in one of the poems by Morpurgo, which she writes for her first cousin, whose name is Rachel, like hers, she uses a rhyme that is a, a a a a a It rhymes exactly the Same throughout the entire poem. It also happens to be a sonnet. And so the task that she set out for herself, the assignment she gave herself, was extremely hard, you know, high level of technical difficulty. And so I wanted to pay homage to that. And not just because I wanted people to experience the sound, but I also. That in many cases form creates meaning. So in that particular poem, her cousin is moving from Trieste to Padua at a time when, you know, if you're not living in the same city, you're really not seeing each other. And they were super close. And the fact that they shared the same name suggested that intimacy. And so when she uses this rhyme, niksheret gargeret, tif eret, koteret eret, eret, eret over and over Again, number one, it makes us think of Geveret, a woman, a Mrs. But it also creates a feeling of constancy in the face of a disruption. If they're no longer gonna see each other, it creates a tie. Sonically, it creates a tie. My whole book is obsessed with trying to tie knots, trying to maintain connections in the face of disruptions, because death is the ultimate disruption. And so I felt that in doing that I would also be servicing the meaning that I was pursuing in the translation.

[Interviewer]

Can you say a little bit about what you think it adds to your study that the poems that you were reading were in Hebrew and also that the majority of the poets were Israeli. There's a world where you could have written this book with American English writing poets. So what did it add that those two elements were there for you?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Well, my scholarship deals in large measure with this literary material in Jewish languages, in Ashkenazic Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. So yeah, that's what I have to give. But beyond that, I am keenly aware that there's something very unique about modern Hebrew poetry in being written in the language of our classical sources. That it has this capacity to give us an entree, a new layer of interpretation of our classical sources from our present day vantage point that is singular. I believe perhaps you could argue that, you know, a Greek poem like someone like Cavafy, who's writing in Greek about the experience of Odysseus, let's say, of a Greek hero, that that might share something of that double valence. But I don't think so, because modern Greek and ancient Greek are, I think, more distant than modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew, or modern Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew. And so I have been, it's been part of my scholarly errand and also my mission at Huc. In all of my teaching to argue that Torah can be delivered to us, not in various forms, and it doesn't have to come in that hard back burgundy or navy or dark green colored book with the gold letters on the spine and the marble leaf on the ed, but that we can have access to Torah and bona fide Jewish theology through this repository of modern creativity. And I'm also really amazed and in love with the wonderful miracle of the creation of modern Hebrew culture. It's such an achievement. And when we find ourselves getting down sometimes about the gap between our hopes for Medina Yisra', El, the State of Israel, and, you know, what's been going on over the past 70 some odd years or more recently, the past two, three years, we need to be reminded of the positive cultural attainments.

[Interviewer]

As you were analyzing these poems, I was curious, especially because they were in Hebrew, you were able to draw these stunning parallels between verses in the Talmud and verses in the Bible to what they were coming up with. I also know that you can't call up many of these poets to ask them if they meant the illusions that you're claiming that they had. How do you make the decision whether or not to credit them with an illusion, knowing that, you know, they might not have meant it and they might have accidentally just kind of stumbled on something that you found incredibly meaningful?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

So you're hitting on, you know, a kind of centerpiece question in literary studies to what? How does one. Does one need to tap into some original authorial intention in order to promote a reading of a published work? So I am of the sort that the second the work goes out into the world, you know, for better or for worse, it's in the hands of the readers. But that doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of being somewhat careful and being able to mount an argument. So in some cases, the illusions that I was finding were signaled directly through verbatim quotations. In some cases, I was able to lean my argument on my knowledge of the poet's background and the sort of study that they did. So I do a reading of an Avraham Khalifi poem through a dream of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, knowing that he grew up partially in Oman, where Rabbi Nachman died and he had exposure to Hasidut and to that literature. I am aware, for example, in reading of a poem by the poet Rachel, of the long shadow that was cast by Chaim Nachman Bialik, and how in many cases, the early women poets were compared unfavorably to the male canonical male figures by Bialik himself, who could have been a little bit condescending and so knowing, for example, that the poet Rachel Blaustein, one of the first modern Hebrew poets, wrote very, very economically and chose every single word and was told by her mentor, Aleph Dalid Gordon read the Bible, two chapters of the Bible every day. There was enough that I could bring to bear that could make me feel confident that I wasn't just conjuring up gold threads from straw, if a person could do that. And I'm also aware, outside of intentionality, of the way in which Hebrew activates that. That because the Hebrew language is perforce always speaking in the words that these sources were written in. And so especially if you have a phrase that isn't utterly pedestrian, you know, or prosaic, and that appears every other sentence in every other writing, every other piece of writing, I could argue, I could make a safe argument that this was an illusion and it could forward my agenda, which is to say each time we read one of these poems becomes an occasion for us to learn something about ourselves now, about the modern period now, but also to enter into the past in a way that feels more accessible and relevant to us.

[Interviewer]

And I would add a fourth element. You just named three, which is that you studied these poems in community, which most people who read poetry do not study them in community the way that you did. And I'm curious what was unique about that? How did it help you write the book, but also, like, what is it like to study poetry the way that you have over those two and a half years?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

So I would argue a bit with your assertion that most people don't study poetry and community, because I think that if we're calling study recitation, or if we're calling study singing, if we're taking into account all the ways in which poetry comes into our lives, if we think about what everyday prayer is and the poetic elements in liturgy, or if we think about Shira Betzibur, the public, communal sing alongs that are such an important part of early Zionist culture or camp culture. So we do experience poetry in groups. Now, what I think you are referring to is the reading, that personal, intimate reading and the analysis that I was undertaking. What I think that. That poetry allows us to do is first of all deliver a very compact, nuanced, layered personal experience and to slow down the reading. So it's not like just running through the lines to get the surface understanding, but to slow the reading down in a kind of meditation, I suppose, in the Way that we would consider to be ideal for intentional prayer there. So when I taught these poems, it would be the end of the morning service on a Tuesday. My father, unfortunately, was killed on a Tuesday. And there are many family tragedies that occurred on a Tuesday. And yet Tuesday is supposed to be this doubly blessed day according to the creation story in the Bible. So I was trying to bring back the blessing. Right. I was also recognizing that there's something so magical about uncovering hidden bits together with a group. And I am so grateful for this opportunity that I had, because every time I presented a poem in this group that had become such a close community to me, someone raised their hand and told me something that I hadn't thought about. And the most interesting teaching and learning, you know, happens when you come prepared, but someone tells you something that you hadn't thought of before. Otherwise you could be talking to yourself. And so studying this together opens up the awareness and the realization of what is worth actually reading, as opposed beach reads are great. Something that you read to just totally vacate your mind is wonderful. But you read that book, you close it, and you never come back to it again. What enables something to live beyond that initial surface read? It's the sense, the conviction that you can get something out of it. I mean, why do we do the weekly Torah reading, which often has poetic elements? Because we assume that each time around, as a group and as an individual, we're going to find something that we hadn't seen before.

[Interviewer]

And I know there's something also special about teaching. Right. So it's not just you present the information and someone gives you an insight that you say, oh, this is interesting. Sometimes, especially if you're extroverted and you speak to think as opposed to think to speak, the act of teaching can sometimes bring insights because you're now spending an hour with the material thinking about it out loud in front of people that you wouldn't if you were quiet interrogating yourself as well. I imagine that's probably happened to you with these poems.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah, I mean, I'm always thrilled when something happens when you're there on the spot. Either something occurs to you at the moment, or someone from their own idiosyncratic place is noticing something. I was actually shocked and dismayed when I taught one of these poems this week. And I discovered actually the poem that I referred to before, the Rahel Mutata Mupurgo poem to her cousin, that it was a sonnet, and I hadn't put that in the book. I kind of hate publishing books because it closes down that open, ever developing sense of things. And so I keep on hoping, okay, I should live to the next edition, and then I can add in the things that I left out.

[Interviewer]

Indeed. Indeed. We have a standard last question, but I've got one final question before that, which is one of the poems that I found the most moving was the poem that returned to Rashi and the knots. And I'm wondering if you can say a word about both the poet and the poem that allowed your book to come full circle.

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

Yeah. So the poem that you're referring to is Kina Livnot Rashi, by the contemporary poet Ruhama Vyse, a former colleague of mine at huc, a remarkable individual who's not just a poet, but a Talmud scholar and a bibliotherapist and a regular columnist and a leading feminist in Israel, and in fact, one of my teachers. When I was doing my rabbinical studies, I was given a grant to be able to do additional coaching. And Ruhama, who had innovated this fantastic course at HUC and elsewhere, called Sub Yot Chaim, which is a play on the Talmudic sugiyah, which is a unit of Talmud study and a story or a unit of personal experience. So Sugyat Qayim means chapters of life. Unbeknownst to me, after having studied with her, done this deep Talmud study for the purpose of uncovering the latent psychological content of the Talmud, I discovered that she had written a poem about this very Mishnah that had initiated my entire journey. And it was an incredible. And I had been teaching her her poetry. So it was an incredible returning, you know, a tying of another knot or a closing of a circle for me to realize that I wasn't the only woman with a particular kind of literary disposition and an intellectual disposition who had alighted upon this. In this poem. What Ruhammeweis is fretting about and lamenting is the notion that at least what we know of Rashi's daughters is that they helped Rashi transcribe his various commentaries. They were his assistants, his secretaries, his like, amanuenses. And so if that's the case, when Rashi wrote this commentary on Shabbat 66B, I believe, when he wrote this commentary saying that fathers never show enough love to their daughters, such that the daughters would ever yearn for their father, such that they would ever need those knots to go out with, is it possible that they actually had to transcribe that? It's like opening up someone's diary and finding out that they're saying, I don't love you. Did they have to go through that? And if they did, how is it that they kept with him, that they stuck with him all those years wanting, hoping, holding out that he would finally show them love and recognition, if nothing else, for the fact that they gave birth to Rabbeinu Tam Yaakov Tam, and to Rabbi Shlomo Ben Meir, the Rashbam who became the leading Tosephists, that group of commentators and interlocutors with Rashi in his commentary. So it felt to me, first of all, she was making an important point, raising a voice of protest, but she was modeling how, you know, sometimes we stick with people who disappoint us. Family is a complicated thing. Jewish connection is sometimes a tenuous thing. And yet you love someone, you love something, you love the Jewish people, and you stick with it and you hope for the final, you know, requital of love, the satisfying of the longings.

[Interviewer]

That's amazing way to end. So we always end with a standard last question, which is, what is your next project? What are you working on now?

[Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler]

So I am always working on a lot of things at once. I'm a fiction writer, so I have several works of fiction that are being shopped around at the moment. But what I am working on right now, very much in real time, is the sequel to this first, the project of teaching Hebrew poems every week. I've called it Shir Chadash Shalyom, the New Poem of the Day. And so the Shir Chadash project continues. I've been teaching a poem every week since 2019. So it's more than 300 poems. And after October 7, it became devoted to poetry and song that either had been written or reanimated after October 7th. And for the past year plus, I've been writing a Torah commentary through Hebrew poetry that follows the weekly parasha. So that is unfolding. And I'll be teaching a class in the spring that follows that. And so I'm looking forward to that book moving on to production sometime soon.

[Interviewer]

Well, thank you very much. So again, the book is going out with my Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry, which can be found through the Jewish Publication Society. I've been talking to Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zieler. Hope you have a great.