Poetry in parables

Yehoshua November’s new book exudes existential peril

By ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD
Yehoshua November (photo credit: Courtesy)
Yehoshua November
(photo credit: Courtesy)
 IN “GOD’S Optimism,” Yehoshua November’s acclaimed 2011 debut collection, God is He who labors every moment in the boiler room of the world, amidst its intrinsic emptiness, to “recreate our lives.” A benign God, at once caring and concealed among the tableau of monstrously misguided choices humans often make.
In “Two Worlds Exist,” November’s second and newest book, the reader is immediately introduced, through the book’s title poem, to the darkening of the poet’s spiritual face, to the eclipse of its steady light.
If I wear an ice suit, I can fly beneath the sunset and not burn, my son said from the back of the van, as we drove over the bridge beneath the pink sky.
And if I wear an ice suit, I thought, perhaps I will finish my days without roasting in the oven of what one human does to another or the furnace of what God does to man.
November, a Lubavitcher Hasid, does not have in mind flood or famine. He is not thinking of the carnage in Syria or South Sudan. The wound that goads his anger is distinctly Joblike.
If I wear a band of silence around my head, I will hear nothing, what my youngest daughter hears.
I would like to rise up and lodge a complaint before God, but each morning I wake up late for prayers and rush to catch up with the other worshipers.
In his community, November acknowledges, there might be some who would reproach him for “crossing a heretical line,” by questioning God. But the practice of questioning God, he asserts, is very much part of the Jewish tradition.
“During the Holocaust,” November noted in a conversation with me, “rabbis got together to put God on trial.”
Poems of suffering and loss ripple through this volume. “Conjoined Twins,” for example, is about his parents’ stillborn twins (two bodies/and one heart.) A more typical November poem than the title poem, it fits tragedy with redemptive wheels. The dead infants are named Mordechai and Pesach, deliverer and deliverance.
Of Pesach, he writes: the holiday when all Jews, even idol worshippers, were freed, as long as they desired to go.
And they left their bondage and arrived at the mountain, where the Midrash states, they camped in the desert like one man with one heart.
November is that rare modern poet who speaks to the reader in parables. He looks at the world around him, at the world within himself, and proceeds to tell a story about human fragility, and by association, divine fragility. Though he may rail against God, he is always willing to give Him the benefit of the doubt.
In his contentious first poem, his wife, Ahuva, turns and asks him, referring to his daughter's deafness: Do you think this happened because God wanted to show us what innocence looks like? The poet then turns from the worldly to the mystical realm. The mapping of his parables tend to go in that direction. The strength of his poetry lies to a great extent in the way he navigates both realms with such quiet command.
Two worlds exist: the higher hidden one and our earthly realm.
Everything that occurs in this life flows down from the hidden world.
That which appears good descends through an infinite series of contractions until it fits within the finite vessels of this world.
That which appears tragic slides down, unmitigated, from the hidden realm— a higher, unlimited good this world cannot hold.
Whether or not one feels the poet might be hiding parts of his anger toward God in God’s hiddenness, one values his literary grappling with the glaring imperfections of worldly life as he sees it reflected in God’s limitless, engaged, elusive presence.
The poet has stated as his mission finding the divine in the secular world.
If there is one consistent thread of sorrowless light in the poet’s two books, it is November’s ravishingly tender and extravagant displays of love for his wife to whom “God’s Optimism” is dedicated.
The notion of contemporary Hasidic love poems may stun the reader accustomed to processions of men in funereal black hats and jackets, and women camped inside dowdy, don’t-touch-me dresses and skirts. But November is skilled at grafting unrestrained longing onto the restraints of desire, resulting in strong sensual tension.
These lines from “Shadows” appeared in “God’s Optimism”: I watched you the way young men watch women before they have loved them, and I sent my shadow hungrily after you, the way some send their shadows where there bodies cannot go.
And in the present volume, we find “I Made A Decision,” a companion poem to “Shadows.”
Once, before either of us was twenty, in the cafeteria, I watched your mouth enclose itself around a plum.
Because I was young and you were beautiful.
I did not say, This is not a physical body nourishing itself.
And I did not say, Perhaps this is the other half of my soul.
I made a decision with a young man’s body, And my soul continues to thank me.
Reined in by the Hasidic ethos of tzniyut, or modesty, November, when moved to write about sexual love, does so with fluid restraint: In the middle of grading a terrible essay you remember how much you admire her and you send her an email from the living room.
And if neither of you has fallen asleep, you lock the bedroom door.
And in the middle, one of your children knocks from the other side of the universe.
(From the poem “Between Lifetimes” in “Two Worlds Exist”) Born into an Orthodox, but not Hasidic family, the poet grew up listening to the music of Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon.
(His father, a gynecologist, was a man with a sixties’ sensibility.) Leonard Cohen’s poetry was one of November’s early influences.
He thus came to poetry equipped with a contemporary existential language that would not come as easily to a Hasidic poet born into Hasidism. He brings to his poetry’s Hasidic-grounding a modern sensibility that makes it accessible to people who ordinarily would go nowhere near Hasidism in any form. As a Reform rabbi once said to him, “Even I like your poetry.”
In his poem, “American Chassid,” he explores the compelling distinctions between himself who spent high school summers in his attic bedroom,/ reading Thomas Hardy… and the tough old Russian Hasidim with their ritual baths in frozen lakes, their underground cheders and firing squad executions.
American Chassid, / hot shower then heated ritual bath./ Kosher sushi and veggie burgers.
November may not face execution in America as a Hasid. But he stands before God with his own particular pain, his own cargo of existential peril. Did his vaunted Russians also take God by His invisible lapels and give them a good shake? That would make for an interesting poem of its own.