Lit: Poems to Ignite Your Jewish Holidays, Chaya Lester, Shalev Press, Jerusalem © 2019, ISBN 978-1-62393-021-9, p. 242, $18.00.
WINCHESTER, California – Poems are part and parcel of Judaism, arguably beginning with Miriam at the Red Sea, continuing with the Psalms and into present-day liturgy. Chaya Lester, Jerusalem-based psychotherapist, Jewish educator, and spiritual guide, calls on the metaphor of a lit candle and the multiple meanings of the word lit – the literature of poetry, intoxication of experiences, and “being lit up” in the sense of being alive and amazed – as her muse. The motivations for writing these poems are the twin themes of Jewish apathy and assimilation, whose panacea she perceives to be celebration, “the Jewish world needs to get lit…Jewishly lit.”
Lester arranges Lit: Poems to Ignite Your Jewish Holidays according to the Jewish calendar, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the New Year and ending in Elul, the last month of the year, a month in which there are no biblical holidays. In between we find poems for Israeli holidays, special occasions, such as Rachael’s Yahrzeit (Jewish Mother’s Day) and Tu B’Av, a Jewish Valentine’s Day equivalent, and Rosh Hodesh, the semi-holiday inaugurating the start of each month.
In both rhyming schemes and free form, Lester’s poems evoke images describing her deep connections to humanity and her love of Israel and Judaism. One of her Rosh Hashanah poems opens with the image of a penitent as a punctuation mark in a long day of prayer.
Days of
Inscription
of Submission.
Before
God bent
Back curved
as a comma,
or an end
quotation/mark…
For Simchat Torah, Lester compares the Torah to a tree,
Carve your initials in her trunk
and pick the fruit from between
the good book’s leaves.
Yours are the lungs/to let it breathe.
Many poems begin with a message describing the author’s personal experiences evoking the poems’ images. In the Passover section, she describes the immense task of preparing and cleaning a house for the holiday. She begins,
Love it or hate it you can’t escape it.
Might as well make it somethin’ sacred,
Celebrated.
— It’s all about how you frame it.
A month after Passover is the little known, and perhaps little observed, at least outside the Orthodox Jewish community, holiday of Pesach Sheni, the second Passover (See Numbers 9:6-14), giving people unable to observe Passover on 15 Nisan a chance to observe it. Lester writes in the section’s introduction, “I am particularly appreciative of Pesach Sheni. The Second Passover. The Holiday of Second Chances.”
Her Pesach Sheni poem, entitled “Again,” also showcases her clever wit—an ability to pun between two languages, a technique she quite often uses.
Let’s try this again.
To connect the daats
– to know each other
Biblically, mythically, thoroughly
with all our incompletes.
Here she juxtaposes daats, the Hebrew word for knowledge with its English homophone dots.
Lit: Poems to Ignite Your Jewish Holidays is a feel-good book, moving the reader through the emotional highs and lows of the year and of life.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His works include: The Comprehensive Jewish and Civil Calendars: 2001 to 2240; The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, Second Edition; and Sepher Yetzirah: The Book That Started Kabbalah, Revised Edition. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.