In the month of Elul, I often experience a kind of energetic dissonance. As work deadlines mount and the gears of a new school year begin to turn, I feel a slower, softer voice beckoning me to hang back a little longer: What has this year been to you? What needs tending or repair? What do you know now that can shape the year ahead?
That last question, what do you know now, is the one I can’t stop thinking about. I have spent much of the last year feeling that I do not know how to make sense of what is happening around me: the breakneck acceleration of generative AI, wars surging around the globe, and the growing threats to Jewish communities, immigrants, and other minorities right here at home. I read the news obsessively, a habit I have been trying to curb. I’m searching the columns for some way of knowing what is happening and a theory of where things might be headed. I admire journalists a great deal, and yet, my scrolling never seems to deliver me from a rather narrow understanding of the world.
This summer, my two sons spent a month at sleepaway camp, which gave me time for small luxuries like a slow morning in a used bookstore. I was running my hand through the poetry section in a store in Williamstown, when I noticed Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s The Volcano Sequence. I flipped through the pages, found the section “Turn and Return,” and added it to my basket for Elul reading. The last poem in the collection, aperture, is stunning and almost impossible to excerpt, but I will try:
I see myself
as an aperture, words pass through, addressing/imagining/inventing
One, of whom nothing is known that is not words. I am pressing hard.
I am pressing down. It hurts so much. It does not hurt at all, it simply
flies. It is the effort to imagine what needs to be imagined. It is the
desperation to imagine what needs to be imagined by us, in order to
exist, and it wants, it wants to come into existence.It cannot exist yet, something else exists that is not adequate, not at all
adequate, and it needs to burst forth from that place. But it hurts, it
hurts.
Alicia describes her poetry as a vessel for the spirit of God to pass into the world, for humans to address and imagine the unknowable holy One. What compels me even more is the idea that for something to come into existence, we must imagine it first. And that this imagining is a kind of knowing—understanding the limitations of what exists and envisioning what could burst forth from that narrow place.
A couple of weeks later, I was in Maine with 18 tremendous artists in the second cohort of the Mandel Cultural Leadership Program. It was an inspiring couple of days, filled with art sharing and open-hearted conversations about Jewish culture in this moment. One of the fellows, Efrat Hakimi, shared her work in progress on Five Hands, in which she assembles and activates yadayim that she has encountered in museum collections around the world (a yad is a ritual object used to read from the torah to avoid touching the scroll with the human hand). In Efrat’s work, the yad becomes an object that holds or materializes the distance between her and the untouchable, unknowable villages in Morocco where her family lived for centuries. Efrat’s work deeply moved me. It gave form and meaning to a journey I have been on to trace the vast distance between my Jewish upbringing in America and the rupture of my family’s cultural and spiritual worlds in Morocco.
In late August, one last signal arrived in my inbox from Igor Golyak, Mandel culture graduate and founder of Arlekin Players Theatre. Earlier in the summer, I had seen Igor’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Frenzy for Two, or More, which was beautiful and disturbing in the best sense. Delirium follows a couple who bicker endlessly about trivial matters in their apartment-turned-shelter, as a war rages outside their walls. Igor wrote an astonishing piece about staging a fashion runway inside a real shelter during an air raid alert in Yavoriv, a small town in western Ukraine. He described how directing Delirium had given him the instinct for what to do with a frightened child sheltering there:
I staged people surviving a bomb shelter by playing. Eight weeks later I was in a bomb shelter, and I did not think of the play once. I reached for rags and music and made a game, because a frightened child was watching and something in me already knew what that room was for…People imagine that intuition is a guess. It is not a guess. It is knowledge that arrives before the experience that would prove it.
Igor’s writing spoke directly to the question that had been unsettling me, and became the seed for this letter: What do you know now that can shape the year ahead? Perhaps what I know now is that there are many portals—like Alicia’s aperture, Efrat’s yad, and 3am in a shelter in Yavoriv—through which to perceive and understand what is happening, how we got here, and what could be different in the future. And that the work of living and leading in uncertain times is to seek out these alternate ways of knowing, allow them to instruct us, and create toward the worlds they make possible.
From all of us at the Institute, we wish you and your loved ones a Shana Tova U’Metuka — a year of sweetness, connection, possibility, and peace.
Eva Heinstein
Director, Mandel Institute