Find the Light, Be the Light: Perseverance, a Chanukah Folio
Sometimes I ask myself what is the ‘end game’ to being Jewish? Yes, I know about the idea of “moshiach,” but what about the rest of us, those whose notions are in the here and now? Do we imagine somewhere there is a big book, that a page will turn and suddenly Jews will live peacefully throughout the world? We have suffered with antisemitism—well—forever. In grad school I read the writings of a man who lived in Italy during the Renaissance. He had to move 7 times in 15 years because in each town where he lived it became illegal for a Jew to reside there. And so he moved and moved again—the law biting at his heels.
This Chanukah began in antisemitism: Bondi Beach and Brown University. Shocking. Vile. Sad. And that start to the chag changed the message. “Bring light” became the phrase—what our Rabbis told us; what we whispered into our children’s ears as we hugged them after lighting the candles. And Chanukah is the Festival of Lights. But what do we mean?
It seems to me, and to the poets whose work is represented within these pages, that the light is us—our best selves: our dreams and hopes, our prayers, our deepest wishes. Its there in our love. Its there as we help those we love into the next world. Its there as we relate to the natural world. As Joy Ladin points out in her poem: its the YES! Each and every one of these poems brings us a new light. May we carry these lights into a new calendar year. And may 2026 bring also some quiet and some peace.
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Be the Light Be the light over the river peach glimmer of summer. Be the ray the remedy bioluminescent, shimmer of light fastened to the day. Be someone who holds on, a light keeper. Once when I told someone my name they thought I said Light Saver —Deborah Leipziger
Where We Begin In the shadow of the candles, you whisper, we begin in darkness. Yet in Adam’s First Sabbath, the book my mother read me, the first day began in light. Adam leaned against a tree as day faded scarlet to black. He believed G-d had taken away what he had given. Yet he waited faithfully for the light to come back. And it did. And it was good. And it was then He began to separate beginnings and endings. Maybe we created Joy, how it appears in the aftermath of fear: the lung nodules that haven’t grown in 9 months— the terrible waiting. The plane that landed safely after hovering in the wind over turbulent waters— the rain that falls after a long drought. But what happens when the parched earth no longer absorbs water? What can we glean from the first garden, the first man who made the first mistake? How long will we wait and ache for the return? —Dina Elenbogen
Frames “Every man is a farmer or a sailor.” He walks the world As if under a mountain shadow Shows us it is possible To be a moment On the edge Of a deep. As in Taha Muhammad Ali's poem When we immediately fall into a valley pit Trying to hear the silence Between a shout and a howl. I’m mute Because I can’t find words That could break through this stone A window That we can all Take a look At the sea. —Lior Maayan
Gaze
Elders, we wake in liminal time
between dark and dawn, 5 am,
but who sleeps well these days?
Before our cars have time to de-ice,
we park and spill out into winter
then wander indoors to the high school pool
and shed layers. This is the time
we’re assigned before students arrive
to flex, perfect strokes, compete –
what we do no longer.
I plunge into cold waters
but whisper thanks to whatever arrives,
currents I stir with arthritic wrists.
In our lane, a man bumps me off course,
a woman bobs like a seal, a buoy.
Later in the locker room she speaks
of upcoming cat scans.
Something was detected
but it’s still not clear.
Her luxurious skin looks so smooth
against a nimbus of gray hair.
You’ll come next week? I ask,
You’ll swim…and tell me more then?
We gaze into each others’ eyes, our depths.
—Cathleen Cohen
Inside These Darkest of Days
Head out amongst the trees
early morning and you may discover
an autumnal lawn of tiny yellow fans—
as though the wind has thrown
down for your steps
its gingko gown. Here is the season's
austere pageantry:
that rancid odor turned
into a dull lustre underfoot.
Now draw it inside you—
let yourself be lit
from within as the earth
draws into itself. Last night
a supermoon illumined
whatever spare time you carry,
now spend it on a single candle
whose wick ends inside
your darkest chambers—
the yellow flicker of leaves
urging you to choir
your dreams within the world's
radiant oratory.
—Sharon Dolin
Ginkgo Biloba She's sure the male tree drops fruit, not the female, draws a line with her finger from fruit to ground to rats, to house. She's sure, the property owner whose renters left a mess, having to throw out appliances, rip out built-in shelving. She will unearth the hundred year-old tree, its gold bright as lightening, as if it would explode and crackle. I say, Trim the ginkgo. We detour into seedbits, broken wings and gaunt birds of late, the life of trees, the unexpected amid the white crowned sparrow's high-low song, conversation with the chickadee, the towhee. She won't plant an oak, points across the street, That one is hanging over. Then we turn to face the ginkgo, shimmering in late morning, no sun needed to produce its own bliss. I don't tell her, sometimes in my sleep I trace the outline of ginkgo leaves, the fan shape notched, the forked veins. Don't tell her I've walked past the trees daily, bent my wrists to touch braiding on the trunk. Don't tell her the gold hanging from whitened crackled branches take me back to a gold relief I found years ago in Bremen, Germany, a country I never planned on visiting, which extinguished the light of my family. I couldn't look away that day, when gilded bronze shined in rain above the old town entry, where artists had congregated and created their bliss: round brick corners, cast iron signs, ceramic highlights, loamy intersections, each doorway different from the next. Then I'm thrust out of the memory when the house owner describes the acorn, bark, branches and roots of an oak, purposed by natives, about grinding stones. It's the female, not the male, I say, but she doesn't hear, as if she's fighting the devil, the tree complicit. Then I'm back in Bremen, think of the archangel Michael depicted in the gilded relief, and how some make a pact with evil for worldly pleasures, remember my breath in the cold air forming puffs and looking up, my neck bent. The socialists dedicated the sculpture—a narrow bodied nude battling a three-headed monster with an outstretched sword—in Hitler's name. Despite this kissing, the artists were labeled degenerates. The same day I found a shop selling Judaica, tucked out of sight, wide display of candles, a menorah dripping wax onto a dark cloth, candles I brought along the rest of the three months journey through Europe, for my December return home. Now I wonder if I used all the tapers. Uncut, they demanded process before fire. Today I know my neighbor will rip out the ginkgo. She may not know it's almost Chanuka. We could use a season of miracles. The tree's furrows hold decades-long knowledge, her maidenhairs fur the trunk, veins reach a fullness. Fruits lay on the ground as if they've birthed from the sea, spume erupting seams. I draw a picture with my hands of a new ginkgo for her, but feel the vibrancy of the old infusing me with its spirit until I'm lit. I'm gilded. —Laurel Benjamin
Clearing the Treeline
Eating lunch on a rock after a hard climb,
I watch the ant crawling over my hand.
Has she taken a wrong turn? Found
herself alone, cut off from her tribe
and its pheromone trail, confused
about her task? Does she seek a morsel
of cheese, fifty times her weight,
to carry to her nest? Walking my finger
as I stand up, she joins me in climbing
the summit. I look at a map. The ant listens
for vibrations of other ants. We each follow
the path of our species
as together we cross scree, rise above pine
to sun-warmed granite.
—Catherine Gonick
Wood-Wide Web
Seeking god, I hear nothing.
Nothing I perceive
in this wilderness, in this
wildness speaks
to me like the silence
among the plants and leaves,
in the microcosm of dirt
underfoot
there are systems
of speech, of fungi
binding the Earth,
relaying the concerns
of trees. How absurd
to imagine that we are
higher, holier than She,
that we alone are
disconnected.
—Betsy Mars
Crown of Thorns “ The sun’s corona, a rarefied gaseous envelope, is only visible during a total solar eclipse” When cosmic circles intersect With mathematical certainty Our moon shoves forward And shields the sun The birds fall silent Fear grips each heart tight That this unexpected night Might never end The moon’s pitted chalk face A death-mask to the old A love potion to the young Has turned coal black Is encircled by a rough pearly glow The day has turned cold A plague on all our houses And then the sun reappears —David Allard
The Burning of the Maps Was not what we had imagined when we lived in the slow time of watching the buds on the fig tree move into leaf, each day granting a record of change The speed of darkness day on the way to night when the child cries out STOP to turn away twilight Who is afraid of the dark? All it takes is a thick black marker to relabel history and a mutual willingness to believe in this dystopia Where am I? Little boat in the flood of time where the waves grow more dramatic as the sun sinks into a flash on the horizon Run fast and break things scatters shards all over the path To map indicates a familiarity with place a willingness to walk the length of a street listening to the birds How did not in my name turn into the planes flying the sacrifical goats into the darkness? Will this rain do any good? Or the band banging away in front of the dealer’s storefront? There by the station where TARDY has been grafittied on the bus stop — that’s where we gather for a moment for a stand. —Carol Dorf
The Narrow Place
Where worlds of little breadth
Shear to a vanishing point
Sing soft from your soul
A narrow song
Make of your footsteps
A margin, a bridge
Each choice, an opportunity
Each step, an exodus
We are all uncertain here
Fear, our constant shadow
But forward to the wilderness go
Singing, singing without cease
—Samantha Landau
Y E S
Lower-case and centered
on convex metal disks,
I read them out of order, understanding nothing
until you arranged them
into your answer
to the recurring question
posed by the metaphorical lips
composed of your ambivalence
and my readiness for rejection.
YES.
They stayed on my windowsill for years,
sometimes falling, sometimes scrambled,
browning slowly at the edges
when summer rain snuck in,
following me
from apartment to apartment,
health to sickness,
comfort to grief
to the first windowsill we’ve shared,
repeating the word
my body murmurs
whenever you brush
my hand.
—Joy Ladin
Never Said In the event of my death, words you never said. I didn’t blame you. Crack open that door, and you risk the air being sucked from the room. So, you never said— after I’m gone…when I die… And I took my cue from you, never said— what if you…when you’re gone…what will I… In truth, it never occurred to me. I was all in, fighting for our life. your wordless goodbye to our young son? —Charlotte Friedman
Invitation There is a field. I'll meet you there. —Rumi Meet me in those moments between light and dark when the air holds the last of the disappeared sun, and the sky becomes the welcoming soft purple back of God’s eye, where all judgments dissolve. Meet me on the wet sand between wake and dream where our light bodies land when they leave our beds and we fly without wings or second thoughts, living and dead, on the swells of love’s gravity waves. Meet me where once again we’re all singing in Eve’s tongue, where we can weave our wounds and cruelties together in blues, requiems, hymns that’ll shimmer like tidal streams rippling to the sea. Meet me where your blood and mine are the same water, the one sea with its countless red rafts floating the sky’s breath ashore to consciousness, where the gulls laugh with the full joy of witness. Meet me on that cusp of the one immense retina for that instant the masked raiders are unmasked, when the gang empires’ gates are blown open and their stacks of cash scattered like great flocks. Meet me on that beach where faith meets disbelief, where the gun makers can’t write off the abyss, when the light’s final glint shines through the bandit tyrant’s eyes into the caverns of his pride. Meet me in that instant of the dusk’s luminance when the missile assault’s sudden orphan is our child and the starved entrapped ones are our grandparents, and all our religions strip themselves nameless. Meet me there as your night comes, let it be ours, as the darkness cannot be divided. We’ve stood and applauded the annihilations our beliefs labelled some greater good, to march tunes of separateness. —Jed Myers
Praying
A narrow wish
on the tip of my tongue
divides
each time my heart rocks.
Hope surrounds me, like a stole
under the hammock heavens,
sadness hardens to stone.
I want the clouds
to remember the past,
heal scars
in the sweep of space.
I want to believe
in institutions,
feel safe
amidst broken stars.
I want to believe
in light and crowns,
in filaments of Mitzvahs.
Praying,
I remain close to my faith,
mouth memorized ancient passages
mirrored in English.
—I.B. Iskov
Ner Tamid
The last Jew
lights the last candle
with the last Shamash
on the last night of Chanukah
for the very last time.
The last Jew
grates the last potato,
pours the last of the oil
into the cast iron pan
and listens to its last sizzle.
The last Jew
eats the last latke
with the last drop of applesauce
and the last dollop of sour cream
just for the sake of argument.
The last Jew
spins the last dreidel
opens the last gift
chants the last prayer
sings the last song.
The last Jew
unwraps the last piece
of chocolate gelt
to melt on her tongue
and watches
the last flame last.
—Lesléa Newman
Anthony McCall is widely recognized for his ‘solid-light’ installations, hybrid works between sculpture, drawing, and cinema in which beams of light that inscribe three-dimensional forms into haze-filled interiors are projected into space.
Active in the avant-garde cinema communities of London and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, McCall began working in film and performance before developing his ‘solid-light’ installations, beginning with Line Describing A Cone, 1973. In this iconic work, audiences moved freely within the space as a three-dimensional cone of light slowly emerged from a projector. P. Adams Sitney, in his landmark history of avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, described McCall’s installations of the 1970s as, “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” Since the 1990s, technological advancements have allowed McCall to continue to develop these installations, to involve multiple projectors inscribing increasingly complex and interwoven forms. Recent solid-light works such as Split Second consist of multiple, interpenetrating solid-light forms creating a dynamic, activated space. McCall’s work makes visible the immaterial qualities of cinema, including light, space, and duration. His installations liberate the viewer to engage with their materials through both the body and the eye.
Thank you for this wonderful anthology. So happy to see friends and colleagues included.
The artwork is fantastic!
This is a gorgeous collection! Thank you, Rachel.