"Rosh Hashanah" by Elijah Perseus Blumov

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize! 

-Regional pronunciations

-The Israel-Gaza War ("Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints....")

-Who Is A Jew?

-Judaism: Ethnic, Social, Ritualistic, Theological, Artistic

-Maimonides' 13 Articles of Faith

-The Cosmological Argument

-Life's Will-To-Order

-The meaning of "Follow Nature."

-We are both masks and mouths of God

-The Jobean vision

-Klezmer and Chazzanut

-The Miltonic sonnet

-The sour-sweetness of consciousness

-When does humanity begin?

-Living the apian way 

Text of poem:

Rosh Hashanah

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped. The cleft from innocence,

and then the toiling to redeem the dearth

of good one finds in looking on one’s soul—

this is to be human. Pluck the fruit,

the flowering of conscience, root and bole

of suffering, and, like the alchemist bee,

work the mind’s dark nectar and transmute

it into gold that sweetens, pays for Eden’s tree. 

Transcript

Versecraft 3-10: “Rosh Hashanah” by Elijah Perseus Blumov

Hey everyone, and welcome to today’s show. As you can see, this is one of those occasional episodes where I take advantage of my platform to impose my own poetry on the public, though of course if you’re opposed to this practice you should feel entirely free to skip this one. It would of course be ridiculous for me to claim that there isn’t any self-interest in my decision to offer these kinds of episodes, but the truth is that my intentions do go beyond mere self-indulgence. It’s rare enough that a poet sits down to analyze and explain their own work, and I think offering an opportunity for you to hear about a poem from the angle of the writer himself has at least the potential to be an interesting exercise. Furthermore, I recognize that Versecraft is for the most part a very impersonal podcast, and I like to use these episodes as a chance to open up a little bit about different facets of myself for those of you who are curious to get to know me a little bit better. Such are my rationalizations. 

Before I begin today, let me remind you as always that if you find yourself enjoying the show, please consider leaving a tip, becoming a paying subscriber, or purchasing some Versecraft merch, links to all of which you can find in the show notes. At the very least, please consider leaving a rating on Apple podcasts and letting your friends know about the show. Thanks so much.

For those of you listening who are poets and are shopping around manuscripts, I’d like to remind all of you that the submission period for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize is now open! The Hecht prize, awarded by The Waywiser Press, is one of the greatest formal-leaning poetry prizes in the business, offering the winner not only publication with Waywiser, but a purse of $3,000 and a book launch at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. You’ll also win the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve beaten me, as I’ll be applying as well. 

Finally, one interesting note on last week’s episode: James Matthew Wilson had some very kind words for me about the show, but he did offer one small but notable correction: he did not in fact intend to employ a broken-backed line, but rather, because he pronounces the word “childhood” as three syllables—chi-uld-hood— the line in question is actually perfectly iambic. I confess this reading would not have occurred to me, and I’m very glad he pointed it out. It goes to show how, in some rare instances, regional pronunciation can be a factor in how a line is scanned. 

In my previous two self-featuring episodes, I chose poems that allowed me to talk about important influences in my life, namely, psychedelics and heavy metal. Today, I’d like to talk about another—my Jewish inheritance. Unfortunately, I can hardly talk about my Jewishness without at least briefly mentioning the horrific war happening right now in Israel and the Gaza strip. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general is of course a perpetual moral disaster, and anyone who believes that either side is historically free of blame is woefully misinformed. That being said, what Hamas has done is unambiguously evil. The gleeful massacre and abduction of hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children, has no possible justification. 

If it was actually true, as Hamas likes to claim, that the goal of their efforts is merely Palestinian liberation, they would not strive to achieve it by indiscriminately slaughtering Israeli citizens. Palestinian liberation will never, ever happen under such conditions, barring a truly apocalyptic war across the Middle East. Such a war, in which millions upon millions would die, is exactly what Hamas wants. They are irrationally driven by revenge, religious and ethnic hatred, and a death-wish in every sense. They are a threat not only to Israel, but to all innocent and reasonable Palestinians. For the sake of the future of both Israel and Palestine, Hamas must be brought to justice. 

I would like to think that my condemnation of Hamas has very little to do with my Jewishness, and everything to do with my basic capacity for moral judgement as a human being. In every situation, I think it is irrationally tribalistic to hold to any given opinion or practice merely because of one’s cultural or genetic inheritance. As such, while my approach to Judaism has always been respectful and often admiring, it has also always been critical, and those elements of Judaism I have embraced have only been those which I believe are insightful and justified. 

Even more than most religions, Judaism has many aspects: it is not only a faith, but a culture; not only a faith and culture, but an ethnicity. As such, there are many ways in which one can be Jewish. There are those who are ethnically Jewish but culturally and religiously Catholic, like a significant percentage of the population of Latin America; there are ethnic and cultural Jews who are religiously Buddhist, like Allen Ginsberg; there are ethnic and cultural non-Jews who are religiously Jewish, like many converts, or like the historical Khazars. On top of all of this, there is no universal agreement on what Jews actually believe, and disagreement, debate, and personal interpretation are not only permitted but encouraged. There is an old chestnut: “two Jews, three opinions.” One of the things I admire most about Judaism is this critical ethos, this love for debate which enables the complexity of truth to be sought openly at all times, allowing for a faith that is dynamic, free-thinking, uncommonly tolerant, and immune to calcification. 

Because of this critical ethos, I have always felt the license to explore and question my relationship to Judaism as I saw fit, even with a Rabbi for a father. To understand this relationship, I find it helpful to divide Jewish life into five dimensions: ethnic, social, ritualistic, theological, and artistic. 

I feel very little attachment to my status as an ethnic Jew—as I’ve said, I don’t believe in tribalism, and I am a cosmopolitan at heart. I have had the luxury not to be discriminated against based upon my ethnicity, and I recognize that it is a privilege to be able to disregard it. If I lived in Israel, or Iran, or Poland, the case would be different. I do feel that it is always an injustice to the richness of one’s personality to define oneself, or be defined by others, based on one’s physical identity, and those who cannot help but be at least partially defined by their physical identity due to unjust social circumstances face not only material but spiritual oppression. 

The social element, such as having Jewish friends, close ties with a congregation, being part of Jewish organizations or groups, etc., leaves me similarly cold. I almost never have the urge to be around large amounts of people in any circumstance, and as for close friends, I require only that they be kind, reasonable, intellectually curious, and passionate about things I find interesting. Bonus points if they’re engineers or artists. 

When it comes to Jewish ritual, I have mixed to positive reviews. I get no kicks out of keeping kosher or going to services regularly. On the other hand, having a Bar Mitzvah was one of the most exciting and stimulating experiences of my life. I find the Yom Kippur service moving and profound; Sukkot and Passover are beautiful opportunities to have lively symposia with friends and express gratitude for existence; the keeping of Shabbat, a day in the week set aside for contemplation and appreciation of the world, is a wise and wholesome practice. With the pressure and ambitions of daily life, and the suspicion that any specific ritual is more or less arbitrary, it is easy to let these things fall by the wayside— but having experienced them, I am convinced of their value. Regardless of one’s spiritual practices, having special days set aside for contemplation, mortification, gratitude, and philosophical dinner parties is always a good idea. 

Coming to theology, we are now getting into the juicier side of things. I have said that Jews do not have a unified religious dogma or consensus, but the creed that comes closest to it is the 13 articles of Faith proposed by Moses Maimonides, the great 12th century scholastic theologian who occupies a niche in Judaism similar to Aquinas in Catholicism. Maimonides claimed that all Jews in good standing believe in the following 13 propositions: 

1.     That God exists and is the creator and sustainer of all things.

2.     That God is unitary. 

3.     That God is incorporeal.

4.     That God is eternal.

5.     That only God is deserving of prayer.

6.     That all the words of God’s prophets are true.

7.     That Moses was the greatest of the prophets.

8.     That the Torah we possess was the Torah given to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai.

9.     That the Torah shall not be changed nor replaced.

10.  That God is omniscient.

11.  That God rewards those who keeps His commandments and punishes those who transgress.

12.  That the Messiah will come.

13.  That the dead will be resurrected.

There is a beautiful hymn, called Yigdal, which consists of the recitation of these thirteen propositions, and which is commonly sung in synagogue services to this day. Obviously, Judaism has evolved quite a bit since the 12th century, but for the most part, this creed is still approved of by mainstream Jews. If we take it as a metric of religiosity, I would be about 40% religiously Jewish, because I believe in the first five propositions: that God exists as creator and sustainer, that God is unitary, that God is incorporeal, that God is eternal, and that only God is deserving of prayer. These are of course the propositions which are held in common by nearly all Classical theists, whether of the Stoic, Platonic, or Aristotelian varieties, and it is within the category of Classical Theism that I would place myself, albeit, like Spinoza, with a Jewish flavor.

I cannot describe God other than to say that it is the transcendent source and sustainer of reality, infinite, eternal, and omnipotent, and that all we know of the world and ourselves is but one limited expression of this unlimited, incognizable source. I believe in God as a philosophical proposition, because, as per the principle of sufficient reason, it is rational to believe that the world is caused and irrational to believe that it is uncaused. Even if one were to permit the existence of an infinite regress, it would beg the question—what brought the regress itself into being? Atheists will of course immediately retort that the theist who says that God is causeless is also being irrational. This is not quite true however, because God transcends the domain of spacetime where the principle of sufficient reason applies: God is not irrational, God is trans-rational. By contrast, to postulate that spacetime, which is bound by physical laws, does not possesses an original cause is irrational. If one were then to argue that there is a deep principle of the universe which is irrational and lies beneath the realm of the visible cosmic order, I would say that person is probably talking about something very similar to what I’m talking about when I talk about God. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think the most essential distinction between a theist and an atheist is whether one believes in fundamental order or fundamental disorder. As chaos theory suggests however, when it comes to absolute reality, this distinction, like all distinctions, must ultimately dissolve. Order and disorder bloom within one another in an eternal flower which is the dream of God. To my mind, it makes the most sense to view this blooming of order and disorder as itself a pattern, a fractal of meta-order which one might call the divine plan. 

Beyond cosmological arguments, I take the side of order as an existential act of faith: because life forms possess a will-to-order, because consciousness is itself an Apollonian phenomenon seeking to organize and understand the world of experience, I place my loyalties with Apollo, as I am called to do by the very nature of my being. It is God-as-Apollo operating within us which also serves as the basis for an objective moral code. Moral conduct is the conduct which leads to true human flourishing, and this ideal conduct can be determined by closely examining and experiencing the nature of the kind of thing we are. When the Stoics urge us to follow Nature, this is what they mean—not to follow blind instinct, but to discover the laws of our own psychology and abide by them to our benefit. I am not convinced that it makes sense to call God qua God moral, but God does express what one might call a moral streak through the creation of human nature, which psychologically rewards the exercise of moral conduct. Whether God is moral or not, God calls us to be moral, and that is the role we are best suited to fulfill in the cosmos. 

I am agnostic on the point of whether God could be said to have anything one might call a personality in and of itself. Then again, whatever consciousness is—and consciousness, ultimately, is all we know—its source is God. Certainly God does manifest personality in conscious creatures such as ourselves. Every living soul is simultaneously a mask that God wears and a revelation of divine intelligence. Hence, to the extent that it is possible, I believe that all forms of life are deserving of reverence. 

Such is a rough sketch of my own theology. If there is a Jewish spirit to my thought, it lies not only in my insistence on the transcendence and unity of God but in my insistence on the objectivity of morality and the prescribed role of the human being as a righteous custodian of God’s world. Above all, I treasure the insight which Judaism shares most explicitly with Hinduism, and which can be found movingly expressed in both in the Book of Job and the Bhagavad Gita: That God is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, and that while God calls us to be moral, God itself is under no such obligation. We can expect no mercy or justice from God except as mercy and justice are expressed in ourselves. Nevertheless, the cruel horror that is God is also the source of all the gifts of life, and is therefore deserving of awe, reverence, and gratitude. If there is an essential message which runs throughout my poetry, it is this. 

This brings us to the final dimension of my Judaism, the arts. I have already spoken of the Book of Job as a guiding text in my life and work, and I consider this grand and tragic poem not only an important theological document but the chief literary accomplishment of the Jewish people. Every Jewish writer is writing footnotes to the Book of Job. Consider the greatest modern Jewish writer, Franz Kafka— who is he if not the man who reinterpreted the agonies of Job for the modern world? 

The Bible as a whole of course is the most influential literary text ever written, and insofar as I engage with biblical material, which I do often, I am engaging with my Judaism. In both spirit and content then, I consider myself a deeply Jewish writer. 

The last thing I’ll mention here is that the blend of joy and sorrow which I consider quintessential to Jewish art, quintessential to wisdom itself, is nowhere better expressed than in Jewish music, which I love. Klezmer is celebratory music in a minor key, and what more perfect metaphor could there be for the Jewish way of being? What better embodiment than the clarinet which seems to laugh and cry at the same time? Or consider Chazzanut, the Jewish cantorial tradition—in no other sacred music is there such an embodiment of the soul crying out in the wilderness, offering anxious supplication to a God whose ways are terrible and whose grace is never guaranteed. It is some of the most moving music in the world. 

At long last, let us come to our poem for today. I wrote this poem a couple months ago, a commission from my father for the celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. According to tradition, Rosh Hashanah celebrates the anniversary of the birth of Adam and Eve on the sixth day of creation. For the purposes of the poem, it is also important to know that it is customary to eat apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, which symbolize the hope for a sweet new year. The poem goes like this: 

Rosh Hashanah

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped. The cleft from innocence,

and then the toiling to redeem the dearth

of good one finds in looking on one’s soul—

this is to be human. Pluck the fruit,

the flowering of conscience, root and bole

of suffering, and, like the alchemist bee,

work the mind’s dark nectar and transmute

it into gold that sweetens, pays for Eden’s tree. 

            If you are a longtime listener of Versecraft, you can probably tell immediately that this is a sonnet. At this point I have discussed many kinds of sonnets on the show, but with this poem I have the opportunity to offer an example of yet another variant: The Miltonic sonnet. A Miltonic sonnet is not so much a sonnet form in itself, but a special breed of the Italian sonnet. We see that the rhyme scheme here is ABBAABBA, CDCEDE. We seemingly have an octet and a sestet just as we would have in a normal Italian sonnet. So what’s different? 

            A Miltonic sonnet is distinguished by three features: firstly, religious or political moral content, as opposed to the love poetry typical of sonnets; secondly, a significant use of enjambment which syntactically blends the octet and sestet together; and, thirdly and most importantly, a gradually developing volta which often begins after the ninth line, sometimes even in the middle of a line. A Miltonic sonnet thus looks very much like a typical Italian sonnet, but it does not function in quite the same way. Whereas an Italian sonnet usually consists of a statement in the octet followed by a volta into reflection in the sestet, a Miltonic sonnet is much more of an organic, unified utterance, which develops over time as a single piece of rhetoric from statement of a situation to a moral conclusion upon that situation. 

            If we examine the meter, we find that it is mostly regular, with a few small oddities. In line 12: “of suffering, and like the alchemist bee” we find a fifth foot anapestic substitution, which theoretically could be elided as “alch’mist bee,” but I wouldn’t expect anyone to do this.

            I’ve been told on a couple of recent occasions that I make frequent, perhaps over-frequent, use of acephalous lines, and we do find one in line 10: “This is to be human. Pluck the fruit.” I can defend this particular instance by pointing to the fifth foot of the previous line, which ends on an m-dash. The extra pause created by the m-dash serves as a kind of rest beat where, in a normal line, the first unaccented beat would go. I also think the stark quality of acephaly serves to accentuate this line in a way conducive to the rhetoric of the poem. 

            Perhaps the most interesting variation can be found in both lines 4 and 14. According to standard scansion, these are both alexandrines, lines of hexameter, and I permitted myself this variant because they serve to provide a sense of sonic conclusiveness to the statements which they end. Furthermore, you will notice that in both cases, these are not aggressive alexandrines, because the first foot of each of these lines is incredibly light. Take line 4: “it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth.” When this line is spoken, it sounds almost like pentameter, because we pronounce the first two feet almost as if they were a quartus paeon, a foot of three unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable: “it in the gold.” Another prosodist might scan this as a pyrrhic followed by an iamb. In any case, I feel that the hexameter effect is slight and unobtrusive. 

            Let’s now go back and read the first six and a half lines again: 

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped.

Rosh Hashanah, as I have mentioned, is the “commemoration of our species’ birth” in the form of Adam and Eve. The apple is a “sign of sapience,” due to its association with the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Interestingly, I have never seen this connection actually made in Rosh Hashanah services. One reason perhaps is that the botanical identity of the forbidden fruit is never actually specified in the Torah. Its identification with the apple is a Christian inheritance, derived from a pun on the Latin word “malum,” which can mean both apple and evil. “Sapience,” which means wisdom, also of course carries the suggestion of homo sapiens, and foreshadows the connection made between the acquisition of wisdom and the true birth of the human being. 

The apple, the symbol of advanced self-consciousness, is “sour as much as sweet,” a reference both to the fact that wild apples, such as might have grown in Eden, are extremely tart, and to the existential angst which accompanies the delights of advanced intelligence. The “gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth” is of course honey, that beautiful, delicious, and wondrously immortal substance produced by the toil and industry of bees. If the apple represents the pleasures, fears, and responsibilities of advanced consciousness, the dipping in honey represents the way by which conscious experience is made thoroughly sweet: through immersion in nourishing and loving labor. 

As I mentioned, the sixth day of the earth was supposedly the day on which Adam and Eve were created. I argue however that the physical creation of human beings was not actually when humanity as we understand it was born. What we understand as our human condition is inextricably bound up in our advanced self-consciousness and moral sensibility, and this faculty only arose after Eve “grasped”— both the physical apple, and the understanding of good and evil. 

Let’s now go back and read the poem again, this time, all the way through:

Rosh Hashanah

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped. The cleft from innocence,

and then the toiling to redeem the dearth

of good one finds in looking on one’s soul—

this is to be human. Pluck the fruit,

the flowering of conscience, root and bole

of suffering, and, like the alchemist bee,

work the mind’s dark nectar and transmute

it into gold that sweetens, pays for Eden’s tree. 

            Eve’s decision to eat of the forbidden fruit marked a sea change in the course of human destiny, a permanent loss of blissful innocence—in exchange, arguably, for something more substantial, a point I discuss more in my Donald Justice and A.D. Hope episodes. In the phrase “cleft from innocence,” I hope to suggest a couple things. Firstly, the medial cleft between the nose and the lips, sometimes called the philtrum. According to Jewish legend, the souls of infants, before they are born, possess knowledge of all the secrets of the universe. When they become incarnated in physical bodies, an angel presses a finger to their lips, causing them to forget everything they knew, and the press of the angel’s finger creates the medial cleft that we all have. Much like Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit, the cleft is a sign of lost connection to God, yet in the reverse manner— a loss of knowledge rather than a gain in knowledge. I also hope to suggest the Jewish concept of deveykut, a mystical cleaving to God that can occur in deep study or prayer. One purpose of prayer and Torah study may be to establish a re-connection, a re-cleaving to God in the wake of our first disobedience. 

            We then revisit the idea of toil, toiling motivated by our newfound recognition of our own limitations, and our desire to surmount them. To be human is to be perpetually dissatisfied, to always desire to become better, either as an individual or as a society. The poem ends with a reiteration of the injunction from the first quatrain, rephrased in more developed symbolic terms.

            I urge the reader to take ownership of their forbidden fruit, their elevated human self-consciousness, which is figured in arboreal terms: it is both a beautiful flowering of cognition, and also the root and foundation of our existential suffering. We might recall that the neurons which give rise to our consciousness resemble nothing so much as the ramifying branches of trees. These are our trees of knowledge. 

            Having taken up the responsibility of conscience, it then becomes our duty to work the mind’s dark nectar— that is, the unprocessed emotions and cerebrations of our flowering consciousness— into accomplishments that, like honey, are sweet and nourishing. Just as the alchemist strives to turn lead into gold, so the bee strives to turn nectar into golden honey, so do we strive to turn our mind’s potential into valuable contributions to life and civilization. To work toward the goal of improving life and the world makes the bitterness of consciousness sweet, and helps to pay for the responsibility we have taken on as the creatures of God able to distinguish good from evil. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Rosh Hashanah

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped. The cleft from innocence,

and then the toiling to redeem the dearth

of good one finds in looking on one’s soul—

this is to be human. Pluck the fruit,

the flowering of conscience, root and bole

of suffering, and, like the alchemist bee,

work the mind’s dark nectar and transmute

it into gold that sweetens, pays for Eden’s tree.