A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry are a gentle collection of poems centered around Sunday walks through the woods and fields, and reflections on God, nature, and the status of human beings next to these entwined entities

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Berry has a simple and style which lacks pretension and flourish.   For the most part these poems, sometimes rhymed, often not, speak in a very colloquial register.  This can mask the rather bold moves  Berry makes.  He is melding monotheistic Christianity with a kind of nature veneration or pantheism we find in very classical Romanticism.  But Berry does so with a soft voice. His romanticism should be spelled with the lower case r.  

These poems are about gentle encounters with God in nature, and not fantastic revelatory experiences.  As such, they are easy to underestimate.   

But Berry is doing something that has been done, and done radically, for centuries:  taking the veneration of the one God, and broadening it out and beyond a time or space into nature. Or perhaps even Nature. 

That he does this in a soft voice only serves to heighten, rather than detract from, the boldness of this move.

Rabbi Nachman’s Tikkun

Rabbi Nachman’s Tikkun, known as the Tikkun Haklali, is a group of ten psalms designated by Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav has having particularly effective powers to cure depression.  This book presents all ten psalms, an explanation of how they work in the over scheme of Breslov Chassidus, and the Tikkun Haklali generally. 

The cover with a single hand over the book is apt: since the primary “sin” this tikkun is supposed to heal is masturbation.  In Bratslaver thought and practice, there are few greater sins than masturbation.  Modern readers may find this disturbing or backward, but in normative, Rabbinical Judaism, the spilling of seed for anything but procreative sex is forbidden.  So, Rebbe Nachman’s cure fits well with this general orientation.

What rings a bit discordant to the more modern ear is not the spilling of seed, but the near manic fixation upon it; this stems back to many kabbalistic notions regarding semen, and its place in the human and divine scheme.  The depression brought on by masturbation is not only a personal, venal fault, but a way to put the universe off kilter, to destroy precious souls before they fully exist.  Semen also ties in with notions from Jewish folklore about Lilith and her use of sperm to create demon children.

All that said, I like to use Rebbe Nachman’s Tikkun, his cure, for any type of depression.  I see the spilling of seed not as a literal offense, but a symbolic one.  It stand for anything we waste, any effort or situation or person who we fail to fully appreciate and enjoy.  The cure is realizing this, then saying the psalms, and vowing not to take such things for granted again.

At night walking

At night walking

Asking give, give

And all the people

In daylight, unformed

Underfed by You

Not even forming

This very question

To ask or plead

The Handbook of Jewish Meditation Practices: A Guide for Enriching the Sabbath and Other Jewish Days

Rabbi David Cooper comes from a diverse background, and often brings to his Jewish meditative practices many elements of other traditions with little or no attempt to even window dress them as Jewish.

With his “The Handbook of Jewish Meditation Practices: A Guide for Enriching the Sabbath and Other Jewish Days” Cooper more or less sticks to a Jewish agenda, while conceding that most meditation practices are common to many religious communities, including Judaism.  

As such, the book uses a quote for the Gemara, or the Bible, as a staring off point for a practice (sometimes the connection is tenuous) and then gives a step-by-step account of how to perform the practice. 

Rabbi Cooper provides a very good basic introduction to meditation with a Jewish twist.  If you are just starting, this is a fine book to break ground in this demanding area of spiritual discipline.

Alison Lurie, Foriegn Affairs

Alison Lurie’s novel Foreign Affairs looks back a bit at the novels of manners written by Henry James as its inspiration, as she sets two faculty members from her fictitious  college Corinth University (a flimsy dressing thrown over the real Cornell University, where Lurie taught for years) in England in the late eighties.

As such, the reader can expect the typical inspection of each culture’s faults and strengths.  Lurie is in full command at the craft of novel writing, so this exercise never sinks into banality or cliche. She knows how to see the unusual in the usual, and set it all down in surprising and lively prose.

Lurie is very adept at following the tangles of human relationships; their interactions, interrelations and disjunctures.  This is very much the case with this novel, but with an added element.  Lurie takes a novel of social steps and missteps and creates a deep mediation on what it means to be in love and loved, alone and social.  In all, what is means to be human.