Wesleyan University Press, 2024
As If You Yourself Fled Egypt Forty Years
At temple Friday I wrestled with the feather
I’m meant to search the Torah
with—there can’t be anything extra
in the Torah—so I asked a stranger
why I’m a perfectionist in everything
but belief. All Sabbath, I made excuses—
I had dishes in the sink, essays to grade—
as if it’s a matter of finding time
for G-d, as if a stranger
was living my life, wasting my Sabbath.
There can’t be anything extra in the world,
yet every generation of Jews lives inside us.
On one hand, what I profess to love;
on the other, every distraction: poker, TV movies,
games of hoops I’m cursed to claim
as aesthetic events.
This morning I take my son
to Sunday school, the children’s service,
in the same room where I promised
I’d comb my soul just two nights ago.
Now the cantor asks us to sing along,
I sing along to a song for children,
and the youth leaders do a silly dance,
I dance along, next to my son.
During call and response,
I call and I respond.
The rabbi teaches the children a story
I heard when I was a child,
about an old man who has no room in his heart
for anyone but himself, who is forced
to live like a beggar for a week,
while an angel sleeps in his fancy house.
The moral is obvious
even to me with my forty years
of facts, history, and commentary;
I might as well be a child again.
We each take what we can
from the angels that visit us.
We are as worthy Sunday morning
as we were Friday night,
when we believed we could change,
we could be better, praise
spilling from our lips,
we could worship hard enough
to make us worthy.
Conquistadors
Two Torahs
exist in any one
Torah, equal
and simultaneous,
written and
spoken. Two
Torahs exist in
any Jew.
His auto-da-fe,
whipping,
burning at the
stake.
They’d fled the Inquisition
all the way to Texas,
which didn’t yet exist…
New Christians, they’d advanced far
within the New World.
Their patriarch—Luis de Carvajal—
governor of a province;
it’s possible he might have been Christian
after all, if only New.
One telling blames rivals
who lusted after his riches.
In another, he’s given up
by his own nephew, a boy
caught performing the daily ritual life
of a false convert,
tortured into a confession.
The boy names his whole family.
Still other Jews were hired on
by illiterate conquistadors
as records-keepers, skilled bricklayers
and bakers, multilingual,
clerically formalizing
land deals in Latin. Not
easily identifiable Jews.
In Spanish Texas they closed the blinds,
hummed a melody each Friday night,
recited words long-severed from meaning,
or kept a kind of kosher,
I too hum along.
Prayers, inheritances
I open up inside me,
blank.
In his place I like to imagine Columbus
as Converso, Marrano, Crypto-Jew.
America, whose death
didn’t you come from?
1492,
(Jews expelled
from Spain)
sailed the ocean
blue.
Lineages
traced across
five centuries sing
five millennia
of kinship with
our forebears.
It was
rumored then
that some
survived.
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Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of The Art of Bagging (2023), which won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. His poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Laurel Review‘s Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among other venues. He previously served as digital nonfiction editor and poetry editor at Gulf Coast. He has been awarded support from the University of Houston, Yiddish Book Center, MacDowell Colony, Yetzirah, and elsewhere. These poems are forthcoming from Dybbuk Americana, from Wesleyan University Press.
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