Poems/Readings on Bereishit Through Shemot
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The beginning of Torah is the story of how God made a cosmos and humanity and a family and a people.
This is a book about that story, and all the directions it can take us.
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Sample Poems from the Book
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What God Told Noah Before the Rain Fell
Where there are no men, strive to be a man.*
– Mishnah Avot 2:5.
Where there is no great one to hold the earth,
you must fill the emptiness;
sometimes all that stands against devastation
is you on a ship in the ocean
waiting for birds to fly back.
Now: take the Creation in two by twos
and hover above the rivers
over the mountains,
like revelation.
I will look away.
The birds are circling and circling
their feet aloft
and the world needs you:
you, the one
who must tend the drowned
and saved;
you, the living
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Genesis 6-7
*Translation based on Sefaria.
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In Noah’s Ark
The animals come male and female
Noah’s whole family comes
it is not enough to save all the creatures
to save the world
you must save togetherness
you must save love
or at least the possibility of love.
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Genesis 6:19
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Mother of Salt
all its soil devastated by sulfur and salt1
His wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt2
seeing what she saw,
what else could she do
but what a mother does—
give her whole self
so something might rise?
salt was on that ground
but when she looked
salt grew tall
as a grown woman.
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1 Deuteronomy 29:22
2 Genesis 19:26
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Love
There are too many shepherds here
for Jacob to speak to Rachel alone.
They are waiting for more shepherds to come,
and then more shepherds.
Together they will move the enormous stone
that covers the well’s mouth.
Then they will take the well’s water and go.
But Jacob does not want to wait for more shepherds.
He wants to speak to Rachel right now,
when his heart needs her.
That is why he moves the enormous stone
himself,
with his own hands.
Now the shepherds can come and draw water
before they had ever hoped.
Sometimes love is so strong
it reaches past you
and provides for a world.
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Genesis 29:1-11
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Quarantine Seder
None of you shall go outside the door of his house until morning.
–Exodus 12:22
It went like this: All of them in their own homes,
at their own tables.
Outside was the danger in the darkness.
And then the next home, the next family inside.
They knew about the danger all around them.
They knew about the darkness.
They knew, also, about each other between the darkness.
All that time before they had toiled together,
but it did not make them a nation yet.
Now they were one.
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▶ Purchase at Ben Yehuda Press
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Abe Mezrich 