From "What the Thunder Said" to "Hebrew Lessons" and other Jewish Poems

A saddle of duty and a bit of habitdrove me to Hebrew schoolevery Tuesday and Thursday afternoonto learn a new alphabetfor memorizing the ancient tribal ritesand horrible historical wrongs.During years of what seemed forced laborI sat sullen, clock-, cloud-, and crotch-watching.

Now when I am even older than those ancientHebrew teachers I studiously ignored,I finally know three Hebrew lessons by heart.Hineni: as a leafless twig patiently awaits spring, listenfor God's voice. Hazaq: carry our heavy sacksof pain shoulder to shoulder and tell stories on the way.Sheheheyanu: at this lavish feast raise the first cupto our shy host.

I even see why our sages call lovemakingon Shabbat a mitzvah. Then and thereI am fully present. We reach for each otherwith strong and strengthening arms, and God knowsevery vital organ singsthank you thank youthank you.

Years ago, teaching The Waste Land, I began thinking about the three instructions in "What the Thunder Said" about how to escape the wasteland. What could be more ironic than beginning my Jewish spiritual journey with a noted anti-Semite's central poem? I teach the poem because it is important, but it is a poem in which I have little personal interest. Abstruse allusions to literature in Sanskrit, French, German, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek—it arouses either self-satisfaction (if I catch any of the allusions) or self-criticism (when I don't). Neither response—"I am smart" or "I am dumb"—is what I seek in literature. So nothing could be more ironic than the truth that it was pondering those three edicts translated as give, sympathize, and control that began my own Jewish search.

I decided that give in the poem means to give yourself to God, sympathize means to have sympathy for others, and control means to control negative parts of yourself. Then I saw that the three categories themselves—relationship to self, to others, and to God or the sacred—were clarifying and useful. That is: how I relate to myself (Eliot's "control"), how I relate to others (Eliot's "sympathy"), and how I relate to God (Eliot's "give oneself ").

Beginning with these categories I began to formulate my own key words. My love of Hebrew scripture led me to think about these three areas in Jewish terms. There are, no doubt, many paths to wisdom, but Judaism is my path. Family holidays, temple music, Hebrew school three days a week as a child, my own parents' devotion to their temple—of course, Judaism is my path.

I think I first encountered the word Hineni in Saul Bellow's Herzog. When I finally got around to actually reading the Hebrew scriptures years later, the word leaped out to me. How many of our patriarchs (our scriptures are undeniably patriarchal, but that's another story) answer God's question "where are you?" in that contraction of the Hebrew words for here-I, meaning "here I am." I love those stories and read them metaphorically. To me Hineni means centeredness, presentness, and the kind of listening Yeats called hearing "in the deep heart's core." The shema, our primary Jewish sentence, is about hearing, so listening to that voiceless voice we say, Hineni. Achieving such wisdom—no, working toward such wisdom—is my goal for my relationship with myself. So let Hineni replace Eliot's self-control. Arguably this is "only" a matter of word choice, since working toward the ability to say Hineni no doubt involves controlling other impulses, including flight from self, in noise and motion. Sit still and know that I am God.

Self and others—Eliot's sympathize? Here my watchword comes from our Jewish tradition but in a roundabout way. I was introduced to it by of all things a reference to Edmund Wilson's gravestone. Wilson was not a Jew, but for his tombstone he nevertheless chose hazak, hazak v'nithazek—be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another. These are...