The heart, which cannot be consoled...

Aaron Zeitlin, and thoughts for the high holidays

Today you’ll find two shorter poems by Aaron Zeitlin. I’ve shared translations of him twice before, and the first time I did I wrote: “I’ll put all my cards on the table and say that I think Zeitlin is one of the greatest Yiddish writers, and deserves a spot near the top of any Jewish literary pantheon.”

The more time I spend with him, the stronger this impression grows, and I’ve become enthralled with his idiosyncratic, anguished mysticism, which is (as you’ll see in his own words, in the poetry below) at once ecstatic and overwhelmed by grief, hopeful and hopeless. At this point I’d probably say that he’s my favorite Yiddish poet, so you’ll likely read even more of him here.

But before we get to the poetry, a quick housekeeping note. With Rosh haShanah almost here, the Jewish high holiday season is underway, and because of this I’ll be taking a holiday break from this newsletter for the next two weeks, through Yom Kippur.

I wish you a shone-toyve—a good year—and, in the words of this pre-war Yiddish new year’s card, “may God inscribe your name now in the book of long life, and may God bless our bond, and give us happiness and joy.”

(I borrowed the card from this Forverts article.)

That handshake is certainly how I greet all my loved ones when holidays roll around. But aside from the delightful quaintness and seasonal timeliness, I’m sharing this because its image and sentiment exist in fruitful tension, for me, with the anguished and passionate religious conflict of the poems below. They come from volumes 1 and 2, respectively, of Ale Lider un Poemes: Lider fun Khurbn un Lider fun Gloybn, Zeitlin’s 1967 collected poems.

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Morning

This morning in the Bronx
I watched one small blond cloud
rest like a child’s head
within a bare blue heaven over Claremont Park.
And for a minute
I forgot myself in God,
and for a moment I could think
that all is good, though all is bad.
And I could think that heaven knows 
what it is doing, though the heart, 
which cannot be consoled,
screams: heaven doesn’t have a clue.

This is My Faith

I am a believer, and I know: a Creator exists.
Around him orbit my prayer's hopes, the delights
of my ecstasy, my lonely depression. 
I am also a heretic among the heretics
who have a thousand questions and objections to Him.
He cannot hate such heretics.
He does not need another calm Mar bar Rav Ashi,
and He hates His sycophantic servants.

note: Mar bar Rav Ashi was an important Talmudic rabbi, and the son of one of the most influential figures in rabbinic history.

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These poems reject any easy distinction between faith and doubt, between piety and atheism. Because of this I wanted to send them out before the high holidays, a peak season for Jewish liturgical intensity and religious introspection.

For several years I worked full-time as the director of education at synagogues in the American south. It’s a strange and fascinating gig, in many ways: non-orthodox southern Jews are often caught between the cultural pressures of, on the one hand, evangelical Christianity, which is ubiquitous in the places I’ve worked (Tennessee, Oklahoma), and on the other hand of a broadly progressive secularism.

Working at these synagogues, I often spoke to teenagers (and adults, and sometimes younger children too) who struggled to connect to Jewish forms and traditions, because their only models for religious commitment were the fundamentalist evangelicalism they saw around them, or the secularism of much of the progressive world.

I’d argue that both of these worldviews—the evangelical and the secular leftist—tend towards reductive, immature views of religious faith and tradition, but that’s probably a polemic for another time. (Obviously you should feel free to disagree with me, from either side of this, and I’d love to hear any thoughts that come to mind.)

I think that Zeitlin here offers us a path between these two extremes, a model in which an individual’s committed faith and profound doubt can not only coexist, but can enliven each other.

Does Zeitlin believe in God? Yes, obviously: he is certain that “a creator exists”; he forgets himself in God.

And at the same time, does Zeitlin not believe in God? Yes, obviously: “all is bad”; he is “a heretic among the heretics.”

(I read that moment in the first poem, “I could think / that all is good, though all is bad,” as a sort of commentary on the creation narrative in Genesis, where God repeatedly “saw that it was good.” Here Zeitlin subverts the Biblical statement, claiming God’s language and God’s vision of the world as his own, and in the process reversing its conclusion.)

If Zeitlin were a theologian, perhaps he would need to choose between these two stances. But he is not; these poems emerge from and point not towards the reasoned concepts and ideas of theology, but towards the messy, irrational, and contradictory stuff of human life.

I’m endlessly fascinated by these poems and, to put it candidly, I find them compelling and deeply relatable, from my own perspective as an ambivalently and idiosyncratically religious person. I often find myself wanting to believe in God both more and less than I seem to be able to; I recognize these conflicts in Zeitlin’s poetry, and feel myself recognized by him in turn, however distantly.

As always, there’s so much more to say. But I want to leave with the question of why Zeitlin claims that “God hates His sycophantic servants.” What a wild, audacious thing to say!

My instinct is that this statement is based on a deep moral conviction. This world is, after all, filled with extreme suffering (and keep in mind that Zeitlin was the only one of his family not murdered by the Nazis). Given that, to praise and flatter God exclusively, without ever allowing doubt or anger or condemnation to creep in, is perhaps to prioritize one’s own comfort over the discomfiting dictates of compassion and empathy.

If I take seriously the suffering of those around me, in other words, then how could I not have doubts about God? From Zeitlin’s perspective, to address God only with unequivocal praise is to harden one’s heart against the terrible reality of suffering, and therefore to eschew compassion towards God’s creatures. In a way that reminds me of Dostoevsky, Zeitlin’s faith is so honest and morally serious that it cannot ever entirely overcome the claims of atheism.

I’m thinking of all this as I prepare for the upcoming high holidays. I’ll be spending a lot of time in synagogue, and for much of it I’ll be struggling to believe, or even refusing to believe, in the claims of the traditional Jewish liturgy. Zeitlin’s poems show me how that struggle and refusal can themselves, in some paradoxical way, be a kind of belief, and can exist both alongside and in opposition to a capacious and uneasy faithfulness.