Wendy I. Zierler, GOING OUT WITH KNOTS: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry

Summary

Totally Booked with Zibby

Guest: Rabbi Wendy I. Zierler – "Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry"

Release Date: October 6, 2025
Host: Zibby Owens

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Zibby Owens interviews Wendy I. Zierler, professor, ordained Orthodox rabbi, and author of "Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry." The conversation explores themes of grief, Jewish mourning traditions, gender in religious practice, poetry as spiritual sustenance, and personal resilience through loss and the COVID pandemic. Zierler discusses her experiences of mourning both parents within a year, how she integrated poetry into her Kaddish practice, her career path, and the creation of her memoir as a source of solace and transformation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introducing Wendy I. Zierler and Her Book

• Zibby introduces Wendy Zierler as an accomplished academic and newly ordained Orthodox rabbi.
• Zierler’s book is described as a grief memoir, documenting her process of mourning her parents and finding her place in male-centered religious rituals.
• Quote [03:24]:

  "In writing this book, I too was praying. I too was giving vent to my hopes and yearnings and seeking meaning in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss."
  – Zierler, read by Zibby

The Dual Loss and the Genesis of Her Project

• Zierler recounts the consecutive losses of her father (sudden accident) and mother (chronic illness and eventual chosen end-of-treatment), both within 11 months.
• The COVID-19 pandemic began just after these events, further complicating her mourning process and community participation.
• Quote [04:32]:

  "From the very beginning, I knew I was going to be a kind of reluctant or antsy Kaddish reciter...I knew as a feminist, I knew as a literary type that that sort of repetition within that context, I was going to need something."
  – Wendy I. Zierler

Poetry as a Coping Practice

• To make the daily repetition of Kaddish meaningful, Zierler began selecting and teaching a new modern Hebrew poem each week, connecting literary exploration with spiritual practice.
• The project ("Shir Hadash shel Yom") turned into weekly essays and teachings, which have continued beyond her formal mourning period.
• Quote [04:32]:

  "I started writing these weekly essays, which... has continued to this day. So I have like 300 plus teachings like this."
  – Zierler

Selection of Poems and Feminist Intent

• Zierler initially gravitated toward poems by women, seeking to insert female voices into Jewish liturgy, where traditionally none exist.

• She moved through various poets as each spoke to stages of her process, eventually including male poets whose work tackled doubt, denial, and theological frustration—experiences often unaddressed in official liturgy.

• Quote [09:32]:

  "No woman's voice is represented in the traditional prayer book. And so this would be a way, in a sense, of compiling an alternative siddur, a prayer book."
  – Wendy I. Zierler

• Examples discussed:

  • Leah Goldberg for initial poems
  • Avram Khalifi’s "Heretic's Prayer"
  • Yehuda Amichai, known for innovative metaphors for God and spirituality

Expanding the Notion of Holy Texts

• Zierler emphasizes the spiritual and literary value of contemporary poetry, advocating for an expanded Jewish literary “canon”:

  "Modern literature also can be a source of spiritual strength, that it can be holy in this unconventional sense."
  – Zierler [12:49]

Personal and Professional Background

• Zierler recounts her upbringing in Ontario, her family’s deep Jewish commitments, and the risks her father took for religious observance.
• Literary aspirations led her to a PhD and an MFA in creative writing, striving to bridge Jewish tradition with secular literary analysis.
• Opportunity for Orthodox rabbinic ordination came later in life with the founding of the first seminary to ordain women; her ordination was a landmark event.
• Quote [18:22]:

  "I grew up wanting to be first and foremost a writer...My idea was to try and figure out a way to bring together my worlds, the world of secular literature and Jewishness."

Integrating Pop Culture and Religious Study

• Zierler describes co-creating a course on theology and movies, leading to her book "Movies in Midrash," which will have a sequel focused on television.
• Personal anecdote: Returning to New York just before 9/11, being downtown that day, and how these experiences wove into her teaching and writing.
• Quote [21:29]:

  "We innovated this class that uses film and television as a springboard for religious conversation...for 15 years we taught together."

Community, Empathy, and Contemporary Challenges

• Zierler discusses her community’s struggle with ongoing concerns about Israel, empathy for the stranger, and the dangers of hardening in times of prolonged crisis.
• She connects her personal journey with these broader communal issues:

  "Our core mission has to do with an empathetic orientation...Part of the challenge of my book was figuring out a way to stay connected, tradition to condition, even when things great or...death...makes you feel detached from the regular run of things."
  – Zierler [25:50]

The Meaning of "Going Out with Knots"

• The title refers to a ritual and a Talmudic passage that, taken literally, overlooked daughters’ grief for their fathers.

• Zierler shares a pivotal moment: donning her father’s tallit and reading commentary stating “daughters never miss their fathers”—directly countering her lived experience.

• Quote [30:03]:

  "I was so close with my dad, I was wearing his ritual knots and someone was telling me that I didn’t miss him... So this whole book became a metaphorical effort to go out with knots with my dad, with my mom, with my belongingness to the Jewish community, with my belongingness to traditional practice."

• She expands on using language and poetry to remain connected—knotted—to tradition, community, and memory, rather than defined by severance or loss.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [03:24] Zibby (reading Zierler):
  "In writing this book, I too was praying. I too was giving vent to my hopes and yearnings and seeking meaning in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss."

• [09:32] Zierler:
  "No woman's voice is represented in the traditional prayer book. And so this would be a way... of compiling an alternative siddur, a prayer book."

• [25:50] Zierler:
  "Our core mission has to do with an empathetic orientation... even when things [like] death... make you feel detached from the regular run of things."

• [30:03] Zierler, on "knots":
  "I was so close with my dad, I was wearing his ritual knots and someone was telling me that I didn’t miss him... this whole book became a metaphorical effort to go out with knots..."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:21] – Zibby welcomes Wendy Zierler and frames the interview.
• [04:32] – Zierler describes the loss of her parents, becoming a mourner, and developing her weekly poetry practice.
• [09:32] – Discussing the process of selecting poems, focus on women’s voices, and the creation of an alternative tradition.
• [18:22] – Zierler details her background: family, literary aspirations, and unexpected path to the rabbinate.
• [21:29] – Origin story of her book "Movies in Midrash" and how film inspires religious exploration.
• [24:13] – Zibby and Wendy discuss current challenges facing Jewish communities, especially related to Israel and empathy.
• [25:50] – Deep dive into the book's title and its profound personal and spiritual resonance.
• [31:45] – Zibby thanks Zierler; episode wraps up.

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Conclusion

This episode offers an intimate, intellectually rich exploration of grief, tradition, feminist spirituality, and the enduring power of literature and ritual. Wendy Zierler’s experience provides a roadmap for transforming personal and communal loss into resilient creativity, forging new knots of connection to self, tradition, and each other.

Recommended for:
Those interested in Jewish thought, feminism and religion, poetry, grief memoirs, or anyone seeking inspiration from lives fully lived and traditions reimagined for the present.

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For more insights and readings, find Wendy I. Zierler’s "Going Out with Knots" wherever books are sold.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

[A]

I just wanted to start by reading this little snippet from your introduction, and then I want you to talk about the whole project and everything else, if that's okay. But in the intro you were talking about praying. You set the stage and then you wrote. In writing this book, I too was praying. I too was giving vent to my hopes and yearnings and seeking meaning in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss, first the sudden, shocking death of my father and then, within less than a year, the loss of my mother. It was a dogged, sometimes paradoxical effort as a professor of Hebrew literature at a Reform rabbinical seminary, as a woman devoted to living in a modern Orthodox community, and later as a newly ordained Orthodox rabbi, to find my place in the male centered liturgy and prayer rituals that Jewish tradition has prescribed for such a loss. I had to wrestle with challenges to faith and hope arising in the wake of successive bereavements and a liturgy that often did not seem to speak, speak in my voice, and I had to come to terms simultaneously with a worldwide pandemic isolating us all. And then you say I did find healing, solace and hope through a project I came to call the Shir Hadash Shell Yom. So now let's hear about the whole thing.

[B]

Thank you so much and thanks for choosing that passage. So this book, going out with Knots on the most basic level, is a grief memoir. It was the story of my experiencing these two consecutive losses within one year. The shocking death of my f He was meeting a friend, making his way from a car to go into a restaurant and meet a friend, and was struck dead by a distracted truck driver. And so the experience of being hurled into being a mourner at the time when I was busy writing a story kind of in collaboration with my father, about his own experience of having to wrangle a prayer quorum A minion to say Kaddish for his own mother, who was hit by a car. So it was a crazy recapitulation of circumstances. And from the very beginning, I knew that I was going to be a kind of reluctant or antsy Kaddish reciter. I'm very acquainted with prayer, but I knew that I'd have to be there morning, afternoon, and night, reciting the same things over and over and again. And so I knew from the beginning that I was going to need something else to keep me going. I knew as a feminist, I knew as a literary type, that that sort of repetition within that context, I was going to need something. I never thought that I would be doing it for as long as I did because my mother, whom we very heroically had to pick up from her shock, move her from Toronto, where she was living at the time, to New York, where my siblings and I were living, get her a dialysis slot, because she was the sick one. My dad was perfectly healthy when he was killed. Within five months of moving her, she ended up dying, too, albeit under voluntary terms. That is, she got to a health point where she realized that she would never. Her life quality would never be restored. And so she chose to terminate her dialysis. And we had these two deaths, one which was so sudden and alone, and another which was thoughtful and accompanied and quite holy. But that occurred within less than 11 months of one another. And I ended up having to say Kaddish, therefore, for 22 consecutive months. And this all happened six weeks, sorry, before the outbreak of COVID where we were very aware that had my mother died just a few weeks later, we never would have been able to be there next to her. But what that meant Covid, the shutdown for Covid, was exactly a year after my father's death on March 12, 2020. And suddenly the synagogue that I had kind of grudgingly gone to twice a day was shut down completely. Now, I will say that one of the. The way that I got to coping with all of this is I took on this discipline that came from my own scholarly background and vocation, which is that every week I would choose a different modern Hebrew poem. I would choose it, translate it, teach it as something that had to do with grief or prayer or of something of relevance, the matters of the day, so that I could bring something new to this experience. The kind of literature, rote of daily Kaddish recitation. At first, I just would pick the poem and translate it and bring a photocopy to synagogue and kind of make it up What I was going to say during the service. But when the COVID shutdown occurred, no one could come to synagogue anymore. And I suddenly realized that I ought to. I had already assembled something of a following for this weekly class, that I should write it up for those who couldn't come. And so I started writing these weekly essays, which, as you can imagine, this practice has continued to this day. So I have like 300 plus teachings like this. I wanted to commemorate this experience, both of the mourning and the experience of COVID and this coping mechanism, this strategy, and shape it into a memoir that could interweave all of these things together.

[A]

Wow. Well, I am so sorry for the losses of your parents in close succession like that, and the shock of the loss, just all of it, the stress on you and your family and just that period of time, and yet grateful that you were able to write through it and now have something that can help others through their journey as well. As you were going through and picking each poem, how did you pick which passage to translate? And what did you learn, sort of all in from doing this experiment or exercise? Not experiment, let's say exercise.

[B]

So unlike a kind of professorial approach or an academic approach, which would have been historical, you choose the earliest poet and the later poets later. What I was doing is trying to find material that spoke to what I was experiencing. And then increasingly, as we moved into Covid, to what everybody else was experiencing. And part of what I was experiencing was the frustration of being a woman in an orthodox prayer setting where women are not counted, where women's voices are not represented in the prayer book. And so I initially gravitated to women poets. I had written my first book about the first Hebrew women poets, and I wanted, not so subtly, to have their voices represented, literally, liturgically, none. No woman's voice is represented in the traditional prayer book. And so this would be a way, in a sense, of compiling an alternative sidur, a prayer book. So I would choose first, I began with the poet Leah Goldberg, a canonical, important modern Hebrew poet. And then I would just read through the whole books and put tape flags on the poems that seemed to speak to me. I began with a poem that was to my mother. I was at the time when I was grieving my father, but living with my mother in a new way, just down the block. And I was finding that her experiences, having lost her father and having this incredibly close relationship with her mother were dovetailing with mine. And so I was looking for ways to actually read my life through these figures that I admired. Who could offer me inspiration. And it continued like that. So I'd live with one poet for about five, six months and see what I could get. And then when it felt like I had exhausted that well, I would dig another well and move on to a different poet. So. And moved on to men as well. Men with idiosyncratic voices that were expressing doubt and frustration and theological denial. All sorts of things that I think are not properly addressed for. Especially for a mourner. There is no theological account or story that can account, that can make sense of accidental, pointless death. It doesn't fit the theological model. And so you feel as if no one is there. I mean, no transcendent one is there. And so the poets, you know, this one poet, Avram Khalifi, who wrote a poem called Heretic's Prayer that seemed very apt. Or the poet Yuda Mihai, who has this beautiful image of God as a car mechanic lying underneath the world and forever tinkering and trying to fix the world, but breaking something new each time and only see his feet. That felt very apt for the experience that I was having. And so I wanted my community to experience the greatness of these. Of these poets, really excellent poets, and see how valuable their writing could be to expand the canon of what we consider to be classic Jewish texts. It's not just these hardback books with gold lettering on the front and marble eyes around the edges, but that modern literature also can be a source of spiritual strength, that it can be holy in this unconventional sense.

[A]

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These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. So can you take me back? And I know obviously you write about this in your book and all of that, but just for those who don't know you or your story at all, can you explain how did you even become a rabbi? Tell me about growing up. What did you want to be then? Like your whole background and how you got to here?

[B]

Oh fantastic. Okay. So I actually never expected to be a rabbi though. I come from a rabbinic family. My uncle was a rabbi. My brother is a rabbi. I grew up in first in a small town in Western Ontario. That's where all my family immigrated from Galicia, from what used to be Austria, Hungary. There was oil there so they moved to this refinery town in Canada and My family was the only observant Jewish family, aside from the rabbi, in some cases, including the rabbi in this town. And I write about that whole curiosity of my family experience in this book that I just finished that I had been trying to write while my father was still alive. My family moved to Toronto when I was five. I'm the youngest of four. And my father did this unthinkable thing. He gave up a thriving business so that he could stop working on the Sabbath and so that they could send us to Jewish schools. And so this idea of Jewish commitment runs really deep in my family. Like you put your livelihood on the line for Judaism. I grew up with that, but I grew up wanting to be first and foremost a writer. And I figured that the best way to become a writer was to study literature, to read and read and read and read. And so I went and did a PhD in Comparative Literature. And all. All along I was doing creative writing as well. And my idea was to try and figure out a way to bring together my worlds, the. The world of secular literature and Jewishness. And I did that for, you know, a number of years. That. That has always been very gratifying for me. I was able to get a job training rabbinical students using this, I guess, peculiar orientation of mine, which is that modern, even secular, literature can be part of the Coley canon. That's kind of the, you know, that these modern works can be an important interpretive layer to our tradition. And. But then this opportunity presented itself, which never had been there before. While I was already an academic for a few decades, being able to train to be an Orthodox rabbi, that was just not an opportunity that I could even imagine before I was approached by the founder of Yeshivat Maharat, which the first seminary to ordain women in the Orthodox tradition. And they offered to give me a fellowship to join a remarkable cohort of women who were meant to backfill the ranks, people who maybe 20 years ago would have become rabbis, but we just never had an opportunity and included a fantastic group, people who are heads of school. Another professor of literature, my study partner, Lindsay, lives in England. And in fact, we went through the experience together of her ordination becoming something of a scandal in the uk, where she was asked to. She was no longer invited to teach in the various places where she had previously taught because she had gotten ordained, because it was considered heretical to become a rabbi.

[A]

But then how did you end up writing the book about movies?

[B]

Oh, okay, wonderful. Thank you for asking me that. So the first, almost the first few weeks of my getting hired. I had lived in Hong Kong, and I got this job. My husband and I moved back from Hong Kong to New York on 9 11. In fact, I know that you have your own traumatic experience with 9 11. We moved back to New York just weeks before 9 11. And I was downtown that day. I write about that, actually, in the introduction to my movies book on that day. I was supposed to teach on Tuesday of 9 11. And I was stuck. The subway spilled me out, like, kicked me off. And I didn't know what to do. None of us had. I didn't have a cell phone at the time. No one's phone worked. So I walked down to my office and I was stuck there for several hours with an older colleague, a man named Eugene Borowitz, who was the leading theologian of liberal Judaism. And during that day we got to talking and he proposed. He pitched to me the idea of teaching a class on theology and movies. I had done some film teaching at the University of Hong Kong. And so we innovated this class that uses film and television as a springboard for religious conversation and that for 15 years we taught together. And then I wrote this book, Movies in Midrash, which employs this method where you do a close reading of. Of a film or a TV show, and then you talk about the central religious idea it has and how it can and what Judaism has to say about that same thing. And that actually is going to be one of my next books, the TV sequel. I have movies in Midrash, and now I'm going to have TV and Torah.

[A]

Oh, that's awesome. Is that almost done or how far into it are you?

[B]

What I'm going to include is sketched out. But no, it's very much at the beginning. I've been working on it.

[A]

Well, there's certainly a lot of different. And I can't wait to hear all these new shows and old shows. Actually, when my husband converted, the rabbi had him just go home and watch a whole bunch of movies. That was part of his conversion exercise.

[B]

That makes good sense.

[A]

Yes. Which was great. I was like, oh, have fun. I'll do it with you. I can rewatch these movies. My goodness. So I'm actually. I'm speaking in a couple weeks. I mean, by the time this comes out, it will be around the high holidays and all of that. But I'm talking to some Reform rabbis about what people want to hear. What do we think congregants want to hear this year from rabbis? Like, what are your thoughts on what you're Going to share with your congregation, like, with congregation, with peers and all of that. Like, where do we even go from here? This is such a crazy time.

[B]

It's very, very difficult. I actually was asked by my synagogue to give a sermon Prehistoric. And there are many things I want to talk about. And since I'm teaching every single week, they hear a lot from me and at least during weekdays. But I've chosen to speak about the centrality in Judaism of concern for the stranger in my. Which abounds with people with very firm commitments to Israel, stalwart Zionists. Against this backdrop of two years of, like, relentless war and the hostages still being stuck there, and the most recent, you know, the most recent bad news that we've been hearing on, on both sides, it feels important for the community to double down on its. On its core mission. So love of God, God's love of us, and by extension, God's love of the stranger, which is a crazy, weird, unexpected thing that one sees in Deuteronomy 10, where amidst all of this, as part of the covenant, God says, I love you, you love me, and by the way, I love a stranger. And so we have. That's our trinity. I'm going to be arguing.

[A]

I just interviewed, actually, Sarah Hurwitz, who wrote a book called As a Jew, which is coming out soon, and she was also just talking about this love of a stranger, but that it is paired always with how. And I'm going to get this wrong, but you always have to watch your back as well, because there was a story about, you know, a tribe attacking the weakest people in the back. And so we have to have both, Both of the. Hold both of those truths at once.

[B]

Absolutely. And I. And. And context is everything. So this is a context of people who are praying daily psalms for. For Israel, reciting prayers every single day for the IDF and for the. The hostages. Aaron, you know, my dog tag, like we've all been. I just can't wait to throw it out. But there's. There's a sense of, of hardening that happens in a protracted war. So reminding that our core mission has to do with an empathetic orientation is something that I think that's important. And it's important, you know, for us. If I bring it back to my book. I mean, part of the challenge of my book was figuring out a way to stay connected, tradition to condition, even when things great or, you know, death is the. The most radical sense of disconnection that a person can ever experience. And it makes you feel detached from the regular run of things. And then if your experience of ritualizing that grieving casts you aside in some way, as women might often feel, it can be a point of disconnection. And is it okay if I explain the title? Yes, of course, because it's a weird, odd title. And I actually had to fight with my publisher to get them to stick with it because they said no one's going to understand what this means. So, just without knowing the background, it's about trying to figure out how you can stay knotted and tied and connected to a tradition under such circumstances, or stay connected with a community when we're all atomized because of COVID But it came specifically from an experience that I had in the aftermath of my dad's death. There's this ritual after. In the first 30 days of mourning. There's a custom of studying Mishnah. So that's the first layer of the Talmud. You take the entire Mishnah, which is six tractates, and you divide it up among friends and family so that by the 30 days, when the 30 days are over, the whole thing will have been studied. And that comes from this idea that the word Mishnah has the same Hebrew letters as the word neshama, which means soul. And so through this, you're going to elevate the soul. And I had chosen to study Tractate Shabbat because I told you my father had given up a business so that he could stop working on the Sabbath. And the day that I was home in Toronto, staying with my mom, it was the. Just a few weeks after his death, and she had just given my father me, my father's talit, his prayer shawl, to pray with. She knew that even though that's not typical of orthodox women, that I did. And the very first day that I was wearing his prayer shawl, I'm at synagogue in the morning. And the Mishnah that I opened up because there was like a downtime in the service when I could grab in a, you know, add in a little learning. It talked about this. This rule there. There's a concern on. On the Sabbath that you're not allowed to carry things from your private property outside, because hauling things around is a kind of work. And so you have to figure out what is clothing and what is something extra, you know, what are acceptable accessories and what would be considered a load. And so the question is, or the rule is stated, that a son can go out with knots. And the question is, what are these knots? What are they talking about? And they resolve that the knots that they're speaking of are if a boy or a son is going out and is going to miss his dad, the father takes a strap from his right shoe and ties it either to the son's left shoe or left arm. And there that not being there will be a reminder of the father and he. And it will quell his longings. He won't miss his dad. So then the question is asked, well, why sons and not daughters? And that morning that I was wearing my father's prayer shawl with its knots, for the very first time, I read a commentary that said, well, it doesn't mention daughters because daughters never miss their fathers. And I know about your very close relationship with you.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And I was just shocked. I literally screamed out, like, what? How could it be? I was so close with my dad, I was wearing his ritual knots and someone was telling me that I didn't miss him. And so this whole book became a metaphorical effort to go out with knots with my dad, with my mom, with my belongingness to the Jewish community, with my belongingness to traditional practice. Not in knots, that is, not in all the things that you aren't allowed to do or the activity. How to make it, make this crushing experience of death not be a. It is a rending. I mean, we ritually there, but that it not be like a forever detachment. And so some of these poets who, like Yudamichai, grew up observant, religious, and then became secular in his youth, and yet he writes so beautifully about how his experiences from youth linger with him just in different ways, like they transform, become something different. And he recalls what it was like, you know, he says, anyone who wore a tallit as a child will remember. And he compares the experience of wrapping in a prayer shawl to going to the beach and getting out of the cold water and wrapping up in a towel and having a feeling of being warm and shivering and laughing and blessing. And so that there are these tools, imaginative tools, especially if you look at something indirectly through the prism of something else, you know, just staring at grief. It's a tough. But if you can look at it through a different prism, then you can get a different insight.

[A]

Amazing. Well, Rabbi, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your story, for sharing your life and your analysis and all of it. So I appreciate the time. Thank you so much.

[B]

Appreciate being with you. Okay.

[A]

All right, take care. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. If you loved the show, tell a friend. Leave a review. Follow me on Instagram ibyohans and Spread the Word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books. Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold butter. Yep. Chocolate ice cream? Sure thing. Barbecue sauce. Tide's got you covered. You don't need to use warm water. Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology. Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide. If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus, you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One Travel. And with Venture X, you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?

[B]

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