Wendy I. Zierler, GOING OUT WITH KNOTS: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry
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[0:45]Wendy Izzerler is the author of Going Out with Knots, my two kata shears with Hebrew poetry.
[0:50]Wendy is the sigmund folk professor of modern Jewish literature and feminist studies at HUC
[0:56]JIR in New York prior to joining HUC JIR.
[0:59]She was a research fellow in the English department of the University of Hong Kong.
[1:03]She received her PhD and her MA from Princeton University, and her BA from Stern College
[1:08]of Yeshiva University, and an MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
[1:14]In June 2021, she received her binek ordination from Yeshiva Maharat.
[1:18]Her most recent book is Going Out with Knots, my two kata shears with Hebrew poetry.
[1:24]She is also the author of Movies and Midrash, Popular Film, and Jewish Religious Conversation,
[1:30]and of Rachel Stull the Idols, the emergence of Hebrew women's writing, and many articles
[1:34]in the field of Jewish literature and Jewish gender studies.
[1:37]She is married to Daniel Fite and has three adult children.
[1:41]Welcome, Rabbi.
[1:42]Thank you so much for coming on totally book to talk about your book Going Out with Knots.
[1:48]Congratulations.
[1:49]Thank you so much, Delighted to people.
[1:51]I just wanted to start by reading this little snippet from your introduction, and then
[1:54]I want you to talk about the whole project and everything else, if that's okay.
[1:58]But in the intro, you were talking about praying, you set the stage, and then you wrote,
[2:03]in writing this book, I, too, was praying.
[2:05]I, too, was giving vent to my hopes and yearnings, and seeking meaning in the aftermath
[2:10]of unremitting personal loss, first the sudden shocking death of my father, and then within
[2:15]less than a year the loss of my mother, it was a dogged, sometimes paradoxical effort
[2:19]as a professor of Hebrew literature at a reform rabbinical seminary, as a woman devoted
[2:24]to living in a modern Orthodox community, and later, as a newly ordained Orthodox rabbi,
[2:29]to find my place in the male-centered liturgy and prayer rituals that Jewish tradition
[2:33]has prescribed for such a loss.
[2:36]I had to wrestle with challenges to faith and hope arising in the wake of successive
[2:40]bereavement and the liturgy that often did not seem to speak in my voice, and I had
[2:45]to come to terms simultaneously with a worldwide pandemic isolating us all.
[2:50]And then you say, I did find healing, solace, and hope through a project I came to call
[2:54]the sheer haddash shell yum.
[2:56]So now let's hear about the whole thing.
[2:59]Thank you so much, and thanks for choosing that passage.
[3:02]So this book, going out with knots on the most basic level, is a grief memoir.
[3:07]It was the story of my experiencing these two consecutive losses within one year, the shocking
[3:13]death of my father.
[3:15]He was meeting a friend, making his way from a car, to go into a restaurant and meet
[3:21]a friend, and was struck dead by a distracted truck driver.
[3:26]And so the experience of being hurled into being a morner.
[3:30]At the time when I was busy writing a story, kind of in collaboration with my father
[3:35]father about his own experience of having to wrangle a prayer quorum, a minion, to say
[3:42]cottage for his own mother, who was hit by a car.
[3:46]So it was a crazy recapitulation of circumstances.
[3:50]And from the very beginning, I knew that I was going to be a kind of reluctant or antsy
[3:56]cottage reciter.
[3:58]I'm very acquainted with prayer, but I knew that I'd have to be there morning, afternoon
[4:04]and night reciting the same things over and over again.
[4:07]And so I knew from the beginning that I was going to need something else to keep me going.
[4:11]I knew it was a feminist, I knew as a literary type that that sort of repetition within
[4:16]that context, I was going to need something.
[4:19]I never thought that I would be doing it for as long as I did because my mother, whom we
[4:25]very heroically, had to pick up from her shock, move her from Toronto where she was living
[4:32]at the time to New York, where my siblings and I were living, get her a dialysis slot
[4:38]because she was the sick one.
[4:40]My dad was perfectly healthy when he was killed.
[4:43]Within five months of moving her, she ended up dying too.
[4:47]I'll be it under voluntary terms.
[4:50]That is, she got to a health point where she realized that she would never, her life quality
[4:54]would never be restored.
[4:55]And so she chose to terminate her dialysis and we had these two deaths, one which was
[5:00]of sudden and alone and another which was thoughtful and accompanied and quite holy,
[5:08]but that occurred within less than 11 months of one another and I ended up having to
[5:12]say cottage there for 22 consecutive months.
[5:15]And this was all, this all happened six months, six weeks of sorry before the outbreak
[5:22]of COVID, where we were very aware that had my mother died just a few weeks later, we
[5:29]never would have been able to be there next to her.
[5:32]But what that meant, the COVID, the shutdown of for COVID was exactly a year after my
[5:37]father's death on March 12, 2020 and suddenly the synagogue that I had kind of grudgingly
[5:44]gone to twice a day and was shut down completely.
[5:48]Now I will say that one of the way that I got to coping with all of this is I took on
[5:55]this discipline that came from my own scholarly background and vocation, which is that
[6:01]every week I would choose a different modern Hebrew poem and I would choose it, translate
[6:08]it, teach it as, as something that had to do with grief or prayer or of something of relevance
[6:14]the matters of the day so that I could bring something new to this experience, the kind
[6:18]of literate, literate, surgical wrote of daily cottage recitation.
[6:24]At first, I just would pick the poem and translate it and bring a photocopy to synagogue
[6:30]and kind of make it up what I was going to say during the service.
[6:34]But when the COVID shutdown occurred, no one could come to synagogue anymore.
[6:40]And I suddenly realized that I ought to, I had already assembled something of a following
[6:45]for this weekly class that I should write it up for those who couldn't come.
[6:50]And so I started writing these weekly essays, which as you can imagine, this practice
[6:57]has continued to this day.
[6:58]So I have like 300 plus teachings like this.
[7:02]I wanted to commemorate this experience, both of the morning and the experience of COVID
[7:10]and this coping mechanism, this strategy and shape it into a memoir that could interweave
[7:17]all of these things together.
[7:18]Wow.
[7:19]Well, I am so sorry for the losses of your parents in close succession like that and the
[7:24]shock of the loss, just all of it, the stress on you and your family in just that period
[7:31]of time.
[7:32]And yet, grateful that you were able to write through it and now have something that can
[7:37]help others through their journey as well.
[7:41]As you were going through and picking each poem, how did you pick which passage to translate
[7:50]and what were you, what did you learn all in from doing this experiment or exercise?
[7:58]Not experiment.
[7:59]Let's say exercise.
[8:00]So, you know, I'm like a kind of professorial approach or an academic approach which would
[8:04]have been historical, you choose, you know, the earliest poets first and later poets later.
[8:09]What I was doing is trying to find a material that spoke to what I was experiencing.
[8:13]And then increasingly as we moved into COVID to what everybody else was experiencing.
[8:18]And part of what I was experiencing was the frustration of being a woman in an Orthodox
[8:23]prayer setting where women are not counted, where women's voices are not represented in the
[8:27]prayer book.
[8:28]And so I initially gravitated to women poets.
[8:31]I had written my first book about the first Hebrew women poets.
[8:34]And I wanted not some subtly to have their voices represented liturgically.
[8:40]None, no woman's voice is represented in the traditional prayer book.
[8:43]And so this would be a way in a sense of compiling an alternative see-doer prayer book.
[8:48]So I would choose, first I began with the poet Leah Goldberg, that canonical important
[8:53]modern Hebrew poet.
[8:55]And then I would just read through the, the whole books and put tape flags on the poems
[9:00]that seemed to speak to me.
[9:01]I began with a poem that was to my mother.
[9:05]I was at the time when I was grieving my father, but living with my mother in a new way,
[9:09]just down the block.
[9:11]And I was finding that her experiences having lost her father and having this incredibly
[9:17]close relationship with her mother were dovetailing with mine.
[9:20]And so I was looking for ways to actually read my life through these figures that I admired
[9:26]who could offer me inspiration.
[9:28]And I continued like that.
[9:30]So I'd live with one poet for about five, six months and see what I could get.
[9:35]And then when it felt like I had exhausted that well, I would dig another well and move
[9:41]on to a different poet.
[9:43]So and moved on to men as well.
[9:47]Men with idiosyncratic voices that were expressing doubt and frustration and theological denial,
[9:54]sorts of things that I think are not properly addressed for, especially for.
[10:00]or a morning.
[10:00]There is no theological account or story
[10:03]that can make sense of accidental pointless death.
[10:08]It doesn't fit the theological model.
[10:11]And so you feel as if no one is there.
[10:13]I mean, no transcendent one is there.
[10:16]And so the poets, you know,
[10:18]this one poet, Avraham Falfie,
[10:20]who wrote a poem called heretics prayer,
[10:22]that seemed very apt.
[10:24]Or the poet Yudamishai who has this beautiful image
[10:29]of God as a car mechanic,
[10:32]lying underneath the world,
[10:33]and forever tinkering and trying to fix the world,
[10:36]but breaking something new each time.
[10:39]I only see his feet that felt very apt
[10:43]or the experience that I was having.
[10:45]And so I wanted, I wanted my community to experience
[10:50]the greatness of these poets, really excellent poets,
[10:54]and see how valuable their writing could be
[10:58]to expand the canon of what we considered
[11:01]to be classic Jewish texts.
[11:03]It's not just these hard-back books with gold lettering
[11:07]on the front and marble eyes around the edges,
[11:11]but that modern literature also can be a source
[11:13]of spiritual strength that it can be
[11:15]wholly in this unconventional sense.
[11:19]So can you take me back?
[11:21]And I know obviously you write about this in your book
[11:24]and all of that, but just for those who don't know you
[11:27]or your story at all.
[11:28]Can you explain like how did you even become a rabbi?
[11:31]Tell me about growing up.
[11:32]What did you want to be then?
[11:34]Like your whole background and how you got to hear.
[11:36]Oh, fantastic.
[11:38]Okay, so I actually never expected to be a rabbi
[11:41]though I come from a rabbinic family.
[11:43]My uncle was a rabbi.
[11:44]My brother is a rabbi.
[11:45]I grew up in first in a small town in Western Ontario.
[11:49]That's where all my family immigrated from,
[11:51]go to the TF from what used to be Austria-Hungary.
[11:55]There was oil there, so they moved to this refinery town
[11:58]in Canada.
[12:00]And my family was the only observant Jewish family
[12:03]aside from the rabbi in some cases,
[12:05]including the rabbi in this town.
[12:08]And I write about that whole curiosity of my family experience
[12:12]in this book that I just finished
[12:14]that I had been trying to write while my father was still alive.
[12:17]My family moved to Toronto when I was five
[12:19]and the youngest of four.
[12:20]And my father did this unthinkable thing.
[12:23]He gave up a thriving business
[12:26]so that he could stop working on the Sabbath
[12:29]and so that they could send us to Jewish schools.
[12:31]And so this idea of Jewish commitment
[12:34]is runs really deep in my family.
[12:35]Like, you put your livelihood on the line for Judaism.
[12:39]I grew up with that.
[12:41]But I grew up wanting to be first and foremost a writer.
[12:43]And I figured that the best way to become a writer
[12:46]was to study literature, to read and read and read and read.
[12:50]And so I went and did a PhD in comparative literature
[12:53]and all along I was doing creative writing as well.
[12:57]And my idea was to try and figure out a way
[13:00]to bring together my world, the world
[13:02]of secular literature and Jewishness.
[13:05]And I did that for a number of years.
[13:08]That has always been very gratifying for me.
[13:11]I was able to get a job training rabbinical students
[13:15]using this, I guess, peculiar orientation of mine,
[13:20]which is that modern, even secular literature
[13:23]can be part of the Coley canon.
[13:25]That's kind of the, you know, that these modern works
[13:28]can be an important interpretive layer to our tradition.
[13:31]And but then this opportunity presented itself,
[13:33]which never had been there before,
[13:35]while I was already an academic for a few decades,
[13:39]being able to train to be an Orthodox rabbi.
[13:41]That was just not an opportunity
[13:42]that I could even imagine before.
[13:45]I was approached by the founder of Yishivat Maharat,
[13:48]which is the first seminary to ordain women
[13:52]in the Orthodox tradition.
[13:54]And they offered to give me a fellowship
[13:57]to join a remarkable cohort of women
[14:00]who were meant to backfill the ranks,
[14:03]people who maybe 20 years ago would have become rabbis,
[14:06]but we just never had an opportunity.
[14:08]And it included a fantastic group,
[14:10]people who are school, heads of school,
[14:13]another professor of literature,
[14:15]my study partner, Lindsey lives in England.
[14:19]And in fact, we went through the experience together
[14:22]of her ordination becoming something of a scandal
[14:26]in the UK where she was asked to,
[14:28]she was no longer invited to teach in the various places
[14:31]where she previously taught,
[14:33]because she had gotten ordained,
[14:35]because it was considered a radical to become a rabbi.
[14:39]But then how did you end up writing the book about movies?
[14:43]Oh, okay, wonderful.
[14:44]Thank you for asking me that.
[14:46]So the first, almost the first few weeks
[14:50]of my getting hired, I had lived in Hong Kong,
[14:53]and I got this job, my husband,
[14:56]I moved back from Hong Kong to New York.
[14:59]I, on 9-11, in fact,
[15:01]I know that you have your own traumatic experience
[15:04]with 9-11, we moved back to New York
[15:06]just weeks before 9-11.
[15:08]And I was downtown that day,
[15:11]I have, I write about that actually
[15:12]in the introduction to my movies book.
[15:14]On that day, I was supposed to teach on Tuesday of 9-11.
[15:19]And I was stuck, I, that some way spilled me out,
[15:23]like kicked me off, and I didn't know what to do.
[15:26]None of us had, I didn't have a cell phone at the time,
[15:28]no one's phone worked.
[15:30]So I walked down to my office,
[15:32]and I was stuck there for several hours
[15:34]with an older colleague, a man named Eugene Boorwitz,
[15:37]who was the leading theologian of liberal Judaism.
[15:40]And during that day, we got to talking,
[15:42]and he proposed, he pitched to me the idea
[15:45]of teaching a class on theology and movies.
[15:48]I had done some film teaching at the University of Hong Kong.
[15:51]And so we, and innovated this class that uses film
[15:55]and television as a springboard
[15:56]for religious conversation.
[15:58]And that, for 15 years, we talked together.
[16:01]And then I wrote this book,
[16:02]a movie's in me, Josh, which employs this method,
[16:05]where you do a close reading of a film or a TV show.
[16:10]And then you talk about the central religious idea
[16:12]that has and how it can, and what Judaism has to say
[16:16]about that same thing.
[16:18]And that actually is going to be one of my next books.
[16:20]The TV sequel, I have movies in me, Josh,
[16:24]and now I'm going to have TV in Torah.
[16:25]Oh, that's awesome.
[16:28]Is that almost done or how far into it are you?
[16:30]What I'm going to include is sketched out,
[16:34]but no, it's very much at the beginning.
[16:36]I've been working on that.
[16:38]Well, there's certainly a lot of different,
[16:40]and I can't wait to hear, you know,
[16:41]a lot of these new shows and old shows.
[16:44]Actually, when my husband converted,
[16:46]the rabbi had him just go home and watch
[16:49]a whole bunch of movies.
[16:50]That was like part of his conversion exercise.
[16:53]It makes sense.
[16:54]Yes, which was great.
[16:55]I was like, oh, how fun.
[16:56]I'll do it with you.
[16:57]I can rewatch these movies, my goodness.
[17:01]So I'm actually, I'm speaking in a couple of weeks.
[17:05]I mean, by the time this comes out,
[17:06]it will be around the high holidays and all of that.
[17:08]But I'm talking to some reform rabbis
[17:10]about what people want to hear.
[17:12]What do we think congregants want to hear this year
[17:15]from rabbis?
[17:16]Like what are your thoughts on what you're going to share
[17:18]with your congregation with peers and all of that?
[17:23]Where do we even go from here?
[17:24]This is such a crazy time.
[17:27]That's very, very difficult.
[17:28]I've actually was asked by my synagogue
[17:30]to give sermon, re-high holidays.
[17:34]And there are many things I want to talk about,
[17:36]and since I'm teaching every single week
[17:37]I hear a lot for me, at least during weekdays.
[17:41]But I have chosen to speak about the centrality
[17:45]in Judaism of concern for the stranger,
[17:47]in my dog, which abounds with people
[17:51]with very firm commitments to Israel,
[17:53]stalwart Zionists, against this backdrop
[17:56]of two years of relentless war and the hostages
[17:59]still being stuck there.
[18:01]And the most recent bad news that we've been hearing
[18:04]on both sides, it feels important.
[18:07]For the community to double down on its core mission.
[18:11]So love of God, God's love of us,
[18:14]and by extension, God's love of the stranger,
[18:17]which is a crazy, weird, unexpected thing
[18:21]that one sees in Deuteronomy 10,
[18:26]where amidst all of this, as part of the covenant,
[18:28]God says, I love you, you love me.
[18:31]And by the way, I love the stranger.
[18:33]And so we have, that's our Trinity,
[18:35]I'm gonna be arguing.
[18:37]It just interviewed, actually, Sarah Horowitz,
[18:39]who wrote a book called As a Jew, which is coming out soon.
[18:42]And she was also just talking about this love of a stranger,
[18:45]but that it is paired always with how,
[18:48]and I'm gonna get this wrong,
[18:49]but you always have to watch your back as well,
[18:53]because it was a story about, you know,
[18:55]a tribe attacking the weakest people in the back.
[18:59]And so we have to have both of the,
[19:02]hold both of those truths at once.
[19:04]Absolutely.
[19:05]And I, and the context is everything.
[19:07]So this is a context of people who are praying daily,
[19:13]songs for Israel,
[19:16]reciting prayers every single day for the ICF
[19:19]and for the hostages.
[19:22]Aaron, you know, my dog tag, like you've all been,
[19:26]I just can't wait to throw it out,
[19:27]but there's a sense of hardening
[19:30]that happens in a protracted war.
[19:32]So reminding that our core mission has to do
[19:36]with an empathetic orientation
[19:38]is something that I think that's important.
[19:40]And it's important, you know, for us,
[19:42]if I bring it back to my book,
[19:44]I mean, part of the challenge of my book
[19:45]was figuring out a way to stay connected to tradition,
[19:49]even when things great or, you know,
[19:52]death is the most radical sense of disconnection
[19:57]that a person can ever experience.
[19:59]And if,
[20:00]makes you feel detached from the regular run of things.
[20:04]And then if you're experience of ritualizing that grieving
[20:08]cast you aside in some way as women might often feel,
[20:12]it can be a point of disconnection.
[20:14]And is it okay if I explain the title?
[20:17]It might, yes, of course.
[20:19]Because it's a weird odd title.
[20:20]And I actually had to fight with my publisher
[20:22]to get them to stick with it,
[20:25]because they said no one's been understand what this means.
[20:28]So just without knowing the background,
[20:30]it's about trying to figure out how you can stay
[20:32]not at end tied and connected to a tradition
[20:34]under such circumstances or stay connected with a community
[20:39]when we're all atomized because of COVID.
[20:42]But it came specifically from an experience that I had
[20:45]in the aftermath of my dad's death.
[20:47]There's this ritual after in the first 30 days of mourning.
[20:52]There's a custom of studying Mishna.
[20:55]So that's the first layer of the Tom mode.
[20:57]You take the entire Mishna, which is six track dates,
[21:01]and you divide it up among friends and family.
[21:03]So that by the 30 days,
[21:05]when the 30 days are over,
[21:06]the whole thing will have been studied.
[21:08]And that comes from this idea that the word Mishna
[21:10]has the same Hebrew letters as the word Mishma,
[21:14]which means soul.
[21:15]And so through this you're gonna elevate the soul.
[21:17]And I had chosen to study track tape Shabbat
[21:20]because I told you my father had given up a business
[21:23]so that he could stop working on the Sabbath.
[21:26]And the day that I was home in Toronto,
[21:29]staying with my mom, it was just a few weeks after his death.
[21:33]And she had just given my father,
[21:35]me, my father's to lead his prayer shawl to pray with.
[21:39]She knew that even though that's not typical
[21:41]of Orthodox women that I did.
[21:44]And at the very first day that I was wearing his prayer shawl,
[21:47]I'm at synagogue in the morning.
[21:48]And the Mishna that I opened up
[21:50]because it was like a downtime in the service
[21:52]when I could grab, you know, add in a little learning.
[21:56]It talked about this rule.
[21:59]There's a concern on the Sabbath
[22:01]that you're not allowed to carry things
[22:03]from your private property outside
[22:05]because hauling things around is a kind of work.
[22:07]And so you have to figure out what is clothing
[22:09]and what is something extra.
[22:11]You know, what are acceptable accessories
[22:13]and what would be considered a load?
[22:16]And so the question is,
[22:18]or the rule is stated that a son can go out with knots.
[22:23]And the question is, what are these knots?
[22:25]What are they talking about?
[22:27]And they resolve that the knots that they're speaking of
[22:30]are if a boy or a son is going out
[22:33]and is gonna miss his dad.
[22:36]The father takes a strap from his right shoe
[22:40]and ties it either to the son's left shoe or left arm.
[22:44]And there that not being there will be a reminder
[22:47]of the father and he will quell his longings.
[22:50]He won't miss his dad.
[22:52]So then the question is asked,
[22:55]well, why sons and not daughters?
[22:58]And then warning that I was wearing my father's prayer shop
[23:00]with its knots for the very first time,
[23:03]I read a commentary that said,
[23:06]well, it doesn't mention daughters
[23:08]because daughters never miss their fathers.
[23:12]And I know about your very close relationship with her.
[23:16]Yes.
[23:17]And I was just shocked.
[23:19]I literally screamed out like, what?
[23:22]How could it be?
[23:23]I was so close with my dad.
[23:24]I was wearing his ritual knots
[23:27]and someone was telling me that I didn't miss him.
[23:29]And so this whole book became a metaphorical effort
[23:34]to go out with knots, with my dad, with my mom,
[23:39]with my belongingness to the Jewish community,
[23:43]with my belongingness to traditional practice.
[23:46]Not in knots, that is NOTS.
[23:49]Not in all the things that you aren't allowed to do
[23:51]or the activity, how to make it,
[23:53]make this crushing experience of death, not be out.
[23:56]It is a rending.
[23:57]I mean, we literally air,
[24:00]but that it not be like a forever detachment.
[24:03]And so some of these poets who, like you'd on me fight,
[24:07]would grow up observant, religious,
[24:10]and then became secular in his youth.
[24:13]And yet he writes so beautifully about how his experiences
[24:16]from youth linger with him.
[24:18]It just in different ways.
[24:19]Like they transformed, becomes something different.
[24:22]And he recalls what it was like.
[24:25]He says, anyone who were a elite as a child will remember.
[24:29]And he compares the experience of wrapping in a prayer
[24:32]shawl to go into the beach and getting out of the cold water
[24:37]and wrapping up in a towel and having
[24:40]being warm and shivering and laughing and blessing.
[24:43]And so there are these tools, imaginative tools,
[24:46]especially if you look at something
[24:49]indirectly through the prism of something else,
[24:51]just staring at grief, it's a tough.
[24:55]But if you can look at it through a different prism,
[24:57]then you can get a different insight.
[24:59]Amazing.
[25:00]Well, Rob, I thank you so much.
[25:01]Thank you for sharing your story, for sharing your life
[25:06]and your analysis and all of it.
[25:08]So I appreciate the time.
[25:11]Thank you so much.
[25:12]Appreciate being with you.
[25:13]OK.
[25:14]All right, take care.
[25:15]Bye-bye.
[25:16]Thank you for listening.
[25:17]It's a totally booked with Zibi.
[25:19]Formerly, mom's don't have time to read books.
[25:21]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[25:25]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word.
[25:29]Thanks so much.
[25:30]Oh, and bye the books.