Big Jewish Books

“Shakespeare it isn’t!” my father would snort as we read, round-robin or responsively, from the paraphrased blessings and labored prose of the New Union Haggadah. The book came out in 1974, its glossy cover and watercolor illustrations by Leonard Baskin marking it as a jewel in the Reform movement’s publishing crown. The year before, the denomination had rolled out a new prayer book for the High Holy Days, Gates of Repentance (1973), followed in 1975 by Gates of Prayer, a famously overstuffed Sabbath siddur that boasted not just one new Friday night liturgy, but 10 of them, each slightly different in theology and practice, with a half-dozen more for Saturday mornings. The poet and former Freedom Rider who edited the Gates books, Rabbi Chaim Stern, made room for an equally various assortment of poems. Shakespeare there wasn’t, but the volumes incorporated Stern’s “free adaptations” from medieval Hebrew verse, stanzas from modern Anglophone Jewish authors such as Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Anthony Hecht, Robert Frost (Rubin 332–35), and work by a mixed multitude of non-Jews, including Leonard Cohen, E. E. Cummings, and Charles Reznikoff.¹ Even the spin-off services for children were leavened by poetry. “God is like the wind,” the rabbi would intone, and the plush seats at Temple Emanuel would rustle with our reply:

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through.

Another pious explication—God forbid we should puzzle through a metaphor ourselves—and we’d pipe up again:

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.²

A call and response, this, that seemed to me as unremarkably Jewish as canned macaroons, Mad magazine, and Fiddler on the Roof.

As David Stern observes, the People of the Book have mostly been the people of a particular kind of book: the anthology, of which the prayer book is one enduring instance (3). The books of Psalms and Proverbs are anthologies; the Song of Songs possibly so; Alicia Suskin Ostriker calls the Hebrew Bible (ta biblia, “the books”) a “wildly composite set of documents, an arena of mysteries, gaps, and inconsistencies,” composed across roughly the same time span as the one between Beowulf and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (3). (The theological differences between Rabbi Stern and Christina Rossetti, the author of that squib about the trees, are no greater than those between Genesis and Job.) “Almost all the canonical texts of the rabbinic period” were anthologies, Stern observes (3). Medieval and early modern editors and printers played a “creative and formative” role in Jewish culture (6); and with the haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, the anthology took on a new importance, becoming a “figurative, idealized space for imagining new communities of readers and audiences” and an agent for “transforming the past into a new entity through conscious fragmentation, literary montage, and collage” (7).

By the time I cared who’d written what in Gates of Prayer, Jerome Rothenberg’s A Big Jewish Book (1978) had been published, a collage of scripture and mystical literature, poems, and commentary dedicated to “poesis, not religion” (Rothenberg and Lenowitz 36).³ A Big Jewish Book transforms the past by highlighting “a tradition of poesis that goes from the interdicted shamans (witches, sorcerers, etc. in the English Bible) to the prophets & apocalyptists (later ‘seers’ who denied their sources in their shaman predecessors) & from there to the merkaba & kabala mystics, on the right hand, & the gnostic heretics & nihilist messiahs, on the left” (Rothenberg “Pre-Face” xxxiv). And just as the Gates volumes imagine a community where Rilke, John Masefield, and Reform congregants can sit down together at the table of ethical-monotheist brotherhood, A Big Jewish Book conjures a world where ancient rabbis host a heretical...