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Prayer to the Eternal One help me be aware that everything is now that time has neither beginning nor end that the forest of eternal awareness is all there is and when i am ready to die i will hold this forest in my hands outstretched to greet the light and into it will place my most essential my most essential essence of self for i do not fear in the omnipresent forest of awareness RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 1 RIVERS IN PARADISE JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE A river flowed from Eden, split into more rivers, and watered the Garden. Genesis 2:10 RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 2 RIVERS IN PARADISE JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE Henry Rasof Temescal Canyon Press Louisville, Colorado 2020 RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 3 Copyright © 2020 by Henry Rasof All rights reserved. No part of this book my be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author or his representative. To obtain such permission, please write or email him and be sure to describe your project. Henry Rasof, Temescal Canyon Press 116 Monarch Street Louisville, CO 80027 [email protected] Other books by the author, all published by Temescal Canyon Press The House (2008) Chance Music: Prose Poems 1974 to 1982 (2012) Here I Seek You: Jewish Poems for Shabbat, Holy Days, and Everydays (2016) Souls in the Garden: Poems About Jewish Spain (2019) Web sites by the author henryrasof.com and medievalhebrewpoetry.org Almost all of the poetry and prose in this book also can be found on these web sites. Works previously published in print and online publications "Cake." Jewish Currents "Inside Abraham's Tent." Numinous "The Talmud of Death." Poetica "Torah Tarot." X-Peri Acknowledgments My humble gratitude is due Gideon Weisz for translating many of the snippets of poems in the essays in the section on Medieval Hebrew Poets. The author of this book takes responsibility for modifying or paraphrasing some of his translations. Photographs Cover, Girona, Spain, at one time home to a thriving Jewish community headed by the famous medieval rabbi and kabbalist Moses ben Nachman, better known as Nachmanides or the Ramban. pp. 11, 19, 170, Patagonia, South America. pp. 44, 83, 134, & 169, Spain. p. 157, Colorado. All photographs were taken by Henry Rasof, and all photographs in the montage on page 2 are listed just above. RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 4 Dedication For my teachers: George Allen, good friend in Boulder John Ashbery, poetry mentor at Brooklyn College Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya (Acher), Talmudic sage whose "otherness" resonates with me Patti Berlau, late outdoor-activity buddy from Colorado Mary Alice Brown (née Marshall), inspiring junior-high-school music teacher Edward Cansino, late composer friend Chazal, ancient Jewish sages Harriet Clark, late close friend in junior and senior high school Aunt Sarah Cohen, beloved great-aunt; like me, never married Jonathan Dash, good friend in Brooklyn Professor Joseph Davis, mentor at Gratz College Marley Fein, late dear friend Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, mentor and stabilizer Bert Gassman, oboe teacher in college Rabbi Sarah Bracha Gershuny, supportive rabbi in Boulder Mirza Ghalib, Muslim Indian poet with whom I resonate Joseph Gold, violinist and oldest friend, from seventh grade Susan Jacobson, beautiful late friend who taught me about cooking in San Francisco in the 1960s Harris Barry Kram, late good friend from Colorado Jaime Leopold, late "big brother" in The Orkustra, the band we played in in the 1960s Bubbe Clara Leplin, my beloved maternal grandmother Ellen Levine, good friend in Brooklyn Rebbe Meir, Talmudic sage R. C. Morse, late close literary friend Naju, Japanese friend I met in Japan Beatrice Rasof, my sainted mother Bernard Rasof, my sainted father Elvin Rasof, beloved late uncle Jalaluddin Rumi, medieval Persian poet Sarmad, martyred Persian-Jewish poet Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, of blessed memory, inspiring teacher Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, mentor at Brooklyn College Rabbi Pesach Scheiner, Chabad rabbi in Boulder, CO Joseph Skufca, oboe teacher in junior and senior high school David Stoller, late close literary friend Rabbi Mordechai Twerski, first rabbi I ever knew Dina von Zweck, beloved late friend, genius Robert Wilking, inspirational high school physics teacher who encouraged me to do sports RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 5 Contents Prayer to the Eternal One page 1 Dedication page 5 Contents page 6 Introduction page 8 Invocation: Inside Abraham's Tent page 10 Torah and Midrash page 11 The Torah of Sex Dialogue in the Desert Jacob and the Angel The Metaphor of the High Priest Torah Tarot Talmud page 19 Coiling the Serpent The Talmud of Deat Chagigah h Talmud Tractate 14b, "The Orchard" The Zohar on Talmud Tractate Chagigah 14b, "The Orchard" The Myth of Rabbi Akiva Wheel of Fortune Acher: Are You the Other or Just Other? Zohar page 43 The Forlorn Young Woman: A Recently Discovered Fragment of the Zohar The Forlorn Young Woman: Analysis and Interpretation Everything Is Music: The Zohar on Body, Soul, and Immortality Tikkunei Zohar RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 6 Imaginessays on Five Medieval Spanish–Jewish Poets page 83 Samuel Hanagid and the "Law of Man" Gabirol at the Beach Moses ibn Ezra: The Wandering Jew From Zion to Prophecy: A Conversation with Yehudah Halevi Yehudah Halevi: My Heart Abraham ibn Ezra and the Metaphors of Imagination Further Reading A Poetic Miscellany page 110 Protective Healing Prayer The Kabbalistic Unification of Harry and James Cake Ancient Jewish Love Potions and Charms Going Up in Smoke I Can Translate Amichai but Cannot Talk at All Waterlily Fires Into the Mojave I Drove: A Qasida Bulerias for the Second Emanation Jewish Dictionaries and Games Counting the Omer The Extra Sabbath Soul Ahavah A Prosaic Miscellany page 134 The Wonderful Cholent: A Story of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Volozhin Are Diamonds Really a Girl's Best Friend? The Story of Diamante de León, A Medieval Jewish Wise Woman The Kamah Sukkah:The Definitive, Ultimate, Only Five-Worlds Guide to Sex in the Sukkah A True Legend of Father Jean and Rav Henri: From the Book of True Legends In the Beginning, God Created Adam, Lilith, La Petenera, and . Angels in Love: An Ancient Story About the Author/Editor page 170 RIVERS IN PARADISE: JEWISH POETRY AND PROSE © 2019 BY HENRY RASOF 7 Introduction Here are poems and prose I never thought I would write, connected with a religion I was born into and never thought I would become not only interested in but sometimes fanatical about—although I hope I am now more passionate than fanatical. Along those lines my Jewish interests continue to develop in unexpected directions, from learning about and reading German and Austrian Jewish writers like Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, to planning trips to Brazil to try to find the grave of a great-uncle and to Portugal to learn about Portuguese Jews. Almost all of the poems and prose also appear on my web site henryrasof.com, and the Imaginessays also appear on my web site www.medievalhebrewpoetry.org. Some of the work has been published in print or online literary magazines. About the title of this book. Out of almost a page of possible titles and subtitles I chose Rivers in Paradise, although frankly I don't remember why. Curiously, just today, November 21, 2019, I was on YouTube listening to and watching the great guitarist Julian Bream play "Granada," one movement of Isaac Albéniz' Suite Española. After seeing a photo in the video of the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra—the spectacular Muslim palace in Granada, Spain, which I visited a number of years ago—I did some research and learned that each of the four parts of the Court contains a water channel that supposedly represents one of the four rivers described in Genesis 2:10: A river flows from Eden, waters the Garden, and then separates into four rivers. So maybe, I thought, the title didn't come to me out of thin air. The title page has a photograph "depicting" the river flowing from Eden, the first page of each of the six sections of the book has a photograph of another river, and the page preceding the author/editor bio shows the primordial river again, illustrating that everything returns to its origins. The six section photographs are of a series of rivers, the first one emerging from the mountains, several others flowing through the countryside and two cities, and the final one emerging onto a plain. Although the biblical rivers supposedly correspond to four real rivers—the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates —no consensus seems to exist on which four rivers. The montage on page 2 shows the seven rivers. In this book "rivers in paradise" is simply meant to be understood metaphorically and to represent different strains or categories of Jewish religious and secular literature. If you wish, you could think of all of the rivers as Torah and all of the literary genres as Torah, since water in Jewish religious texts often stands for Torah. Since there are many ways to spin this, don't be too literal with your counting or spin your wheels trying to find correspondences among the different rivers, the scenery, the divisions of the book, and so on. When I have tried this myself I only get mired in a plethora of possibilities, which can be interesting and illuminatory, of course, but sometimes the simplest reading is the most fruitful.