My four friends -- Rabbis Ellenson, Greenberg, Hartman and Kushner -- who
gathered together to celebrate my 80th birthday are all philosophers. Philosophy is the
love of wisdom. But far more. The wisdom my friends seek and share is rooted in the
earth of a living people and in the heaven of its aspirations. I admire them and add to
them my newest friend, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, who initiated and edited this project.
The philosopher noted that “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” At dusk, I realize
that in later years, nudged by the surgeon’s scalpel, my hand turned to poetry. That
turn signaled a change in me.
I imbibed from my studies, secular or religious, a winking condescension towards
poetry. At the yeshiva, seminary and university, poetry lacked the status of analytic
prose. Scholarly faculties steeped in the legal Talmudic tradition, in Wissenschaft des
Judentums or analytic philosophy paid scant attention to the world of poetry. Poetry
lacked the rigor of syllogistic argument, the precision of linear thinking and the grammar
of intellectual debate. The life of the emotions had no place in the academy, but were
better left at the door of the private self, where spontaneity and subjectivity could reign.
The poet Robert Frost once explained why he eschewed writing in blank verse,
without meter or rhyme. To write in blank verse, he said, was like “playing tennis with
the net down.” But that was precisely what drew me to blank verse poetry. The
lowering of the net that did not call fantasy foul, or sentiment out of the chalked line.
The net of analytic prose was too restrictive, set too high, blocking free swinging
association.
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FROM PROSE TO POETRY
Some Meditations
Socrates and Maimonides were tough-minded. I needed to balance that with
tender-mindedness.
I reread Abraham Isaac Kook, Abraham Joshua Heschel and
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Martin Buber with new eyes. Their poetic prose opened unsuspected dreams and
passions of my own. Reading with poetic sensibility, I was less interested in finding
flaws in the argument or faults in the syntax. I sought more than precision, decisiveness
and certainty, more than the constraining rhymes and lines drawn around the four cubits
of the syllogism. With poetry came also a greater softness, a more empathic
intelligence, a new respect for metaphor and allusion.
The philosopher George Santayana once defined prayer as, “poetry believed in.”
The phrase struck the right balance. Poetry without belief is empty; belief without poetry
is torpid. The prayer I sought had to be creative and credible.
I present here a number of poetic prose prayerful meditations occasioned by the
rites of passage: On the birth of a grandchild, the Bar Mitzvah of a grandchild who lives
in Israel with his parents, the marriage of a child, the sickness and dying of a friend, and
the yearning for immortality.
Other events in the life of the synagogue, my extended family called forth the
song of poetry: the joyful acceptance of Jews-by-choice; the appreciation of goodness,
specifically the behavior of Righteous Christians who risked life, limb and treasure to
rescue Jews during the Holocaust pursued by killers of the dream; meditation brought
on by the terrible revelations of the first genocide in the 21st century. Some of the
poems have been revised, but the original content and intent remain the same.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis
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