Scoured : a poem

Ghost trees scrubbed

Scoured by swags of snow

Already I feel numb to this

Why and how

Of season’s cycles

The brown the gray the blue

Circle back to bleached

And I strive and scrape

Exhausted of bounded life

Burnished by dull cold.

Green Bus : a poem

The late bus and its light

Like a neuron dissolving into

Green and blurry haze 

Some light from alternate minds

Gathered on the late, late bus

And the woman in the blue coat

Inside this world staring at what?

The ruddy sun trying to hide

Behind nude trees

Thinking what?

Maybe a lonely thought

Just the faded impress

Of some hurt healed long ago

But still felt

Winter Wheat : a poem

Winter's tenant has arrived

Speaking the testament of frost

The rows of blades like soliders

Guarding the once burnt field

This year the corn ravenous 

Nitrogen mad, enraged

Their roots like ribcages

Leaf and stalk bedraggled innards

Laying stool in the earth's mouth

Now this winter wheat is

A blanket for dry furrows

Sleeping, cleansing, hiding

The secret of rebirth for

Winter's dark night

Of snow and ice

Frost and freeze

East Cloud

Brutalist Dream

Maimonides and the Book that Changed Judaism: Secrets of The Guide of the Perplexed

Micah Goodman’s Maimonides and the Book that Changed Judaism: Secrets of The Guide of the Perplexed was a best seller in Israel.  The English translation was published in 2015.  

I learned Rambam primarily from Leo Strauss’ writings and his students.  The ‘secrets’ of the guide for Strauss were the dramatic depictions of G-d (allegorically) engaged in reproduction in the so-called Account of the Chariot and Account of Creation.  Untangling this mystery was the prime focus of Strauss and his students.

Goodman defines secrets far more broadly.  So much so that I am not exactly sure what the secrets of The Guide are under his rubric; perhaps there are many, and his broad approach is in keeping with that.  Goodman aptly says that the Rambam complied halacha from the confusing array of rabbinical sources to create one rational, easy to approach source - the Mishnah Torah.  

When he wrote The Guide he purposely took rational, logical philosophical accounts and broke them into pieces.   The Guide is a book that conceals more than it reveals.  And according to Goodman, whereas the Rambam is certain on matters of Jewish law and practice, he allows philosophy to be a highly equivocal pursuit, open to uncertainly. And that is the Rambam we get in this book.  Both Goodman’s The Guide of the Perplexed and Maimonides are very post-modern.  They are not comfortable with meta-narratives.  The subjects under study are uncertain and equivocal, and so are our conclusions.  Maimonides comes across as non-dogmatic and within constraints even pluralistic.

Although Goodman presents a solid summary of The Guide, I can’t see how, with this conclusion, the book changed Judaism.  Oddly, Goodman does not provide a summary of this claim.  What changed after The Guide?  For the most part, Jewish philosophy is a backwater of Jewish history.  The Kabbalah and its various incarnations have changed Judaism far more than the Rambam’s intriguing work.

Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel

I do not want to condemn Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel because it all works out in the end.  An adolescent desire to have all fiction descend into a scenario of gloom, with the accompanying doom, is a trap I try to avoid in life, so why not in the fiction I read and write?

The problem is less with the tying up the loose-end ending, than with some of the predictable turns of the plot.  Even in Rebecca Winter’s sorrow and stress, Quindlen never wants to cause her readers too much pain.  That said, Winter’s despair during her long period of solitude is disquieting, and something most have experienced.  

But overall, Quindlen does not want to tax us too much.  In the end, this leaves us with a novel that does not expand our horizons as readers, or stretch the possibilities of the novel.