"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.