Bassist and bandleader, David Chevan has fused Jewish and African American musicians together to create a traditional liturgical melody, intertwined in a jazz aesthetic. Seven other talented musicians add their talents to this innovative and challenging endeavor: Warren Byrd (pianist), Will Bartlett (clarinetist and saxophonist), Alvin Carter and Baba David Coleman (percussionists), Frank London (trumpeter), Mixashawn.com (saxophonist), and Stacy Phillips (guitarist and violinist).

“This is the Afro-Semitic Experience” is actually an expansion of earlier concerts of the Chevan-Byrd duo. In 1997, Chevan began giving concerts of sacred music with his friend, pianist Warren Byrd. These concerts, entitled, “Avadim Hayinu-Once We Were Slaves,” focus on the Jewish and African-American sacred traditions, and have been well received by audiences and critics alike. In June 2001 they were featured artists at the Washington, D.C. Festival of Jewish Music. Their performance was filmed by PBS, and concert highlights along with an interview were aired on the PBS show, "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly." Warren and David have traveled around the Northeast and recently went to Birmingham, Alabama where they gave a concert workshop on their music. They have given concerts in every imaginable venue: churches, synagogues, concert halls, grade schools, high schools and colleges. Their mission is to perform this musical program wherever it is needed and is relevant. Their music engages elements from Gospel, Klezmer, Nigun, Spirituals, and Swing musical traditions, attempting to unite the musical and sacred traditions of two minorities that share similar historical challenges in a single artistic endeavor and common creative purpose.

Why jazz? In the words of Columbia University music professor Christopher Washburne, jazz provides an apt framework for brotherhood and togetherness. The cultural origins of this African-American contribution to the musical repertory include a call-and-response atmosphere—a musical dialogue between instruments, between melodic themes, and between musical components. The varied rhythms evoke memories of ancient dances, and the melodic themes and rhythms do inspire spontaneous group dancing. Yet, jazz also provides opportunity for the individual musician’s interpretation and improvisation. Thus jazz is the ideal medium for conveying the relationship between individual and community. There is balance, give and take, and room for each person to express personality and uniqueness, but all individuals exist within the broader context of community.

The dialectic of individual versus community is profoundly Jewish. Each individual has a unique and personal relationship with G-d, but individuals ultimately serve the need of the Jewish community. Prayer can be private, but certain prayers can be recited only in a prayer quorum, a minyan. For example, “Days of Awe” takes Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt’s rendition of ancient liturgical and melodic themes of the High Holidays and—well—jazzes them up. In Chevan’s own words:

“For Jews everywhere the Days of Awe are a period of enormous importance and this album gives me a chance to express my own sense of awe and explore these themes with a group of intense performers and improvisers. I chose Rosenblatt's melodic approach for this album because I didn't want this program to be merely a blowing session. I don't just want to jam on old Hebrew High Holy Day melodies (though we're going to do plenty of that), I'm equally interested in creating a format to display these beautiful melodies and to retain their sacred meaning. If you're going to create a program or make an album about the High Holy Days, the music, the liturgy, and the spirit have all got to be there [and the] integrity of the original work as well as opportunities for improvisation.”

Does he succeed in retaining the integrity of the original prayers? As a Jew familiar with many of the liturgical references upon which Chevan draws, I was able to recognize the ancient and sacred melodic themes because of the tonal depiction of Rosenblatt’s melodies and other cohesive nigunnim. But Chevan’s adherence to the true spiritual intent of the liturgy goes beyond melodic replication. For example in “Here I Am,” minimalism reflects the idea of humility. Rather than a grand array of jammin’ musicians, the pared-down selection of players suggests solitude and contemplation. The key is to create this sense of awe in a performative venue, as jazz is usually performed in clubs not in the sanctuary. (At least not yet…) Another example is the use of trumpets to imitate human voices and real-life sounds of remorse and pain in “al chet,”— a confessional prayer that lists types of sins committed during the year.

Chevan is largely successful in highlighting the Jewish elements in his music. However, is he equally successful in bringing the African American heritage to his work? In the chamber-textured pieces, for example, the jazz aesthetic is less noticeable. So is this really a balanced melding of the two cultures? Could African-Americans find elements of their own musical and cultural heritage in such pieces as “v’chol ma’aminim” and “al chet”? Has he created a synergy, or merely a hybrid? The answer is irrelevant because Chevan’s greatest contribution lies in opening up the dialogue not only between instruments but also between two communities—the Jewish and the African American. “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” a gospel and Hawaiian Mingus song, is thematically linked with the next track on the CD, “Nefesh,” which deals with the Jewish concept of the soul. The very title of the album pointedly reminds Jews as well as African Americans that both share a heritage of slavery and abuse.

A dialogue between cultures almost invariably involves dynamic tension and dialectic, but it will inevitably involve personal and communal growth as religious and musical figures reexamine precious and often rigid concepts and allow innovation and change. Conceptually and melodically, Chevan has taken brave and daring strides to build bridges between two cultures that have often been separated by a chasm of cultural misunderstandings and distrust. He is to be commended on his vision and his musical creativity.

A Ph.D. student at New Mexico State University, I am now completing a program in Rhetoric. Recently, I graduated from The City College of New York with an M.A. in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing. My thesis was mentored by Marilyn Hacker and contains both my own work and one translated. During 2002, I graduated from Yeshiva University with a degree in Physics, and also attended Columbia University’s Biosphere 2 Program.

While a Junior at Yeshiva College, I among other inspired students brought into being Mima’amakim in 2000. Since then I have taken the title of chief editor, performer, and board member. The reading that had the most candlelight was the basement reading at Cornelia Street Cafe. Also nicknamed as a psalmist, avant-garde style, though referred to by my legal name when appearing in the New Jersey Standard, the Forward, and The New York Times. My favorite concert was Matisyahu at the Bowery Poetry Café.

Final Revision

I
Still wearing yesterday’s clothes I wake
on the couch before the television.
The sun proofreading the geometry of nearby planets.

II
These clouds converse so that I can turn and tell her
your eyes are narrow; your eyes are the echolalic rush of leaves;
your eyes are him in a convex photograph.

III
Their clouds have less movement than the remote control.
These are unkempt, dusty, brown clouds.
They are bands of photons.

IV
The couch is made of plastic and heat
and all I want is to live by crossings
and let her be god.

V
In this story I want to play Hagar, let him be Abraham,
hold the corners of the winds and let them close.
All three of us know that on cathode-ray tubes we are blinking static.

VI
That we are murky clouds on a sphere of condensed water,
that we are in the white noise of televisions,
in the white noise of our neighbors’ televisions.

VII
In the sun is the whirlwind light,
the yellow that makes me turn over and brush her highlighted hair,
that lets me say Abraham help me take off my clothes,

VII
She helps me love the white digits on the screen.
She wakes up and helps me get off the couch and to the floor.

Dessert

She is a woman of the daughter of terror,
where god is an incorrigible act,
a fierce cow on the verge of womanly despair,

a trotting monkey about to morph
into a full fledged woman who has no shame,
no desperate men sitting around

in the dinning room rumbling like a god.
Trembling rumors is what she has in the kitchen jars,
what she has hidden on the painted plates,

her treading on the wooden planks of the kitchen,
her manner of wrestling with the door frames.
I straddle into the kitchen where she is dangerous.

She is burdened by her soups, perpetual passovers
and cleanings that wont allow the deranged to sit.

Blue Temple

At a dusk ceremony
a priest prays for peace –
drinks from a wine goblet
as another sings, “Israel.”

A male wears four corners
of a simple garment –
murmurs like sere leaves
and halts an explanation on his lips.

His scroll turns red
on the fringes –
as he sprinkles blood
with his thumb on the silver altar

yet he shies away from surprise.
A priest mulls over lamentations,
reads the calligraphy,
re-reads the female scrolls
that rest open in the temple.

“For the songs of the souls—at the time they are swaying in the high regions to drink from the well of the Almighty King—consist of tones only, dismantled of words.”
Rabbi Shneor Zalman of Ladi

A few months ago, I attended a lecture on the shared history of Jewish and African-American music, presented by Robert Cohen at Grand Army Plaza library in Brooklyn. Sitting comfortably among the arrogant elderly and the eccentrically alone, and one young sexy hip couple, I was at home, no doubt, the specific combination of lecturing and unrest was just like dinner at Grandma’s. The tastiest historical morsel of the evening was the assertion that Louis Armstrong learned to scat (a mode of Jazz singing employing only non-sense syllables as if a musical instrument) from observing Jews pray. Growing up, nodding my head to the hip hop beat, for a nanosecond of each nod I felt a deep twinge of shame—the stinging projectile of “Yo, check white boy out!” followed by sadistic laughter, always echoing just around the corner of my Jewish multi-cultural Brooklyn head. The shadow of the Beasty Boys never too far. Hearing this particular facet of Louis Armstrong’s musical development, I felt both relief and joy. Jews had come full circle within the century of my birth! A Jewish modality of singing had been musically processed by African-Americans and then replied to, the concept of a cultural dialogue brought to full enunciation and fruition. It appeared that I had allowed adolescent shame to get the best of me before checking in with the larger melting pot picture.

I was able to locate the quote as having been born out of an interview between historian Laurence Bergreen and Jazz Publicist Phoebe Jacobs in December of 1995. Jacobs reported, “ One day I heard Louis talking with Cab Calloway, the bandleader, about scatting, and Louis said he got it from the Jews ‘rockin,’ he meant davening. But Louis never talked about this in public because he feared people would assume he was making fun of Jews praying which wasn’t his intention at all. So he kept it to himself.” Armstrong’s deep love for Jews and personal exposure to anti-Semitism give credence to her explanation of his non-disclosure. Not coincidentally, Armstrong taught Calloway to scat, who actually imitated cantorial singing in mock Hebrew, in combination with scatting in his recording of a Yiddish folk tune called “Or Azoy.”

The origin of scatting in itself is highly controversial, though Armstrong is usually credited as its founder. He was the first to popularly record scatting, making a 1926 debut with the song Heebie Jeebies. An industry myth claims that during the song’s recording Armstrong’s sheet music dropped from his music stand, Armstrong then replacing the missing instruction with a spontaneous improvisation of nonsensical singing, or scatting, “Eef, gaff, mmmff dee-bo, duh-deedle-la-bahm....” Armstrong validates the dropping of the paper story, but not as the originating event of scat singing. He wrestles with the technique’s birth in his Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, creating the feeling that something highly pertinent is being kept from us. After disclaiming the myth, he writes, “Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference one way or anther...It’s all Jive...No matter where it came from...And it all seem to have a friendly attitude... I, myself, just love to hear those guys swinging their chops-scatting.” Jelly Roll Morton contradicts Armstrong’s ownership altogether, claiming that Morton along with Tony Jackson was scatting as far back as 1906. Still larger controversy over the origin of jazz and blues traces different historical paths through West and other African regions, of course dragging scat singing along with it.

Birthed into the overwhelming poverty of 1901 “Back O’Town” New Orleans, Louisiana, Armstrong found hope and strength in observing Jews struggle and overcome oppression. Beyond triumph over racism and poverty, he found partial replacement for an absent father, and a mother who sometimes worked as a prostitute. In his autobiography, Armstrong lovingly writes of his relationship with the Karnofskys, a Russian Jewish immigrant family, who lived and owned a business in his neighborhood. To help his mother make ends meet, he started working for them when he was seven. He vividly recalls singing a song with the entire family, “I was real relaxed singing the song called ‘Russian Lullaby’ with the Karnofsky family when mother Karnofsky would have her little baby boy in her arms, rocking him to sleep. We all sang together until the little baby would doze off.” Armstrong’s intimate relations with Jews center around primitive nurture in both food and love. In this end of life account, he reports that had it not been for Jews he might have starved and that he still eats matzos to the day of his writing, “My wife Lucille keeps them in her bread box so I can nibble on them any time that I want to eat late at night.” Beyond sitting down for euphorically recalled Jewish dinners with the Karnofskys, he reports, “When I reached the age of eleven, I began to realize that it was the Jewish family who instilled in me singing from the heart. They encourage me to carry on.” Throughout the first section of his autobiographical writings, this emotional theme is often repeated, “The Karnofsky family kept reminding me that I had talent—perfect tonation when I would sing.”

According to the basic tenets of psychoanalysis the “outside” actual being of a parent as manifested attitudinally and emotionally toward a child is internalized by the highly impressionable child’s developing psyche. A basic feeling of the world is created in this way, with accompanying perceptual derivatives. Thus, inner emotional forms become expectations for how one will be treated by others, ultimately composing what are called transference objects. In the chronological line of this theory, these transference objects become lenses through which the child-now-adult sees everything. In most cases, the theory of transference is strictly applied to other humans in a person’s life. Freud’s transference framework can help us construct a three-prong bridge between scatting, davening, and Louis’s early childhood experiences with Jews.

To which Jews in particular Louis was referring? Had he chance to overhear Chasidim wailing a niggun (Chasidic spiritual melody-often wordless), or was he alluding to more conventional Jewish prayer? Being that the immediate events surrounding scatting are at least temporarily unverifiable, we can organize a semblance of an explanation around certain emotionally reductive questions: What is the essential shared element in the repetition of meaningless syllables in both scatting and Jewish prayer? What is happening emotionally in the expressions of these syllables? Can this blissful delivery of pure sound bring one closer to G-d, in the same way that it draws a singer into a particular soulful groove? I am immediately reminded of what of we call baby talk. How a parent will soothe and convey other loving feelings to their preverbal being through “non-sense syllables” such as “goo goo” and “gah gah.” In his book, Niggun: Stories behind the Chasidic Songs that Inspire Jews, Mordechai Staiman writes,

In a sense, a niggun is a combination of parent-child sounds that no one else can understand. ‘Ya-na-na-ya-na-pa-pa-yaya-ya’—a stammering infant language God created for us when our feelings are too delicate or too intimate for others to hear. ‘Ya-na-na-ya-na-pa-pa-yaya-ya.’ A Child speaks this perfect language, but forgets it when he learns his parent’s language. Yet, nothing is lost to a Jew. One day, when he is at his wit’s end, the parent rediscovers suddenly, in singing a niggun, the language of the child in him. Then he speaks to his Father, and all becomes right. This is what a niggin is for.

As death is looming, and Louis is on the verge of returning to his first and last home, these intense images of early family like relations with the Karnofsky family figure perfectly into the absence of a real father. This is the longing felt in the repetition of syllables of niggun, or what sounds like the repetition of non-sense syllables to someone who does not understand Hebrew. The closeness that Armstrong felt with the Karnofsky family would allow for him to identify with a Jewish mode for crying out when longing for a spiritual father as Jews do as they pray. The oncoming reunion with death, highlights who was close to Louis in his inner most heart, and offers an emotional explanation to Louis adapting a Jewish style of singing to a primitive (or wordless) intimate singing form of his own earlier in life.

We can wonder about Armstrong’s mother, especially with his very vivid emotional recollection of mama Karnofsky rocking her infant to sleep. Did this experience serve a reparative function for Armstrong, and become blended into the emotional representation of his own inadequate mother, also ameliorating the absence of his father? Perhaps scatting was another way Armstrong could experience the closeness he felt with the Karnofsky family. The logic following, that he was like a Jew communicating with God as a non-flesh parent, as the Karnofsky family was no longer in his real physical life. Without doubt, the Jews took an intimate familial seat in his ailing fatherless unconscious, also realized by his idealization of Jews, as a young boy might idealize his father, wanting to grow up and be just like him. We can not overlook Armstrong terming davening, rockin, though the term is obviously based on the physical rocking motions of Jew praying, a sub-meaning might be the rocking of baby Karnofsky, and the surrounding lullaby, thus a quiet fantasy of Armstrong being rocked to sleep by mama Karnofsky.

Was Armstrong in part a Jew, because he culturally imbibed, through family singing, a central spiritual unit of the Jewish musical soul? Just like Louis, most of us seek to be in the rocking arms of a great soothing mother. As a Jew, as an orphan of Eastern European Jewry, as an infant always in exile, I can experience unification through soulful melodies sung not just by other Jews, but by the great cultures of exile who sing out for home and blissful return. Whatever their fusions may or may not be, I should not be surprised. Stumbling into this soulful multi-cultural dialogue, having what is already in me awoken in different form, be it scat or a Chazzan’s wail, certain shapes of yearning are always exactly the same. Ultimately, we have a very provocative and titillating quote, which is at least in part, fact. Whether or not Armstrong directly modeled scat singing on davening, we will never know, but we can know that his heart dwelt closely to the Jewish singing soul, and was at least touched and shaped in that way.

Rebecca Schweiger lives and works as a professional artist in New York City. She has participated in museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Israel, and her work is internationally recognized and collected by art institutions, museums, and collectors. Her award-winning works have been collected and shown in galleries such as Arta Gallery in Tel Aviv, Coda Gallery in SoHo, New York, Appel Gallery in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Givatayim Theater Gallery in Tel Aviv, Arad Art Museum in Arad, Israel, The Copley Gallery in Boston, MA, Perkins Gallery in Stoughton, MA, Clockwork Inc. Gallery in Manhattan, and many others. Schweiger also designs custom-made ketubot and teaches private and group workshops and seminars in her art school, "Rebecca's Art School", located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on artistic expression, arts and spirituality, and healing through art. Rebecca Schweiger can be reached at 917-334-1801 or rebeccarts@hotmail.com / www.rebeccarts.com for further information.

	Yizkor
	Light Bursting
	Bag of souls
	Tootsie Ketubah
	Sbarro's
	Angels and Butterflies

Seth Nadel: I grew up listening to a lot of great American rock music, folk, jazz and blues. I’m a big Bob Dylan fan, he's definitely one of my Rebbes. Eventually I got into the music of Reb Shlomo [Carlebach] and others.

Mimaamakim: You use a lot of Jewish quotes in your music, what do you feel about the integration of Jewish music with a style that is not completely influenced by Judaism?

Seth Nadel: All Jewish music is a product of the larger society around it. Mizrachi music has Arabic influences. In the music of the Jews of Africa you can hear African rhythms. Klezmer was heavily influenced by Ukranian and Gypsy music. Throughout our history, Jewish music has taken elements from the indigenous peoples that surround.

Mimaamakim: There has been some resistance, it seems, to doing the same with American music, but you are among a number of artists that have embraced it. Do you think modern culture has had a harder struggle to be brought into Jewish music?

Seth Nadel: The music I'm writing is what feels so natural for me. It's just a product of all the music I love and grew up listening to. We're not trying to be irreverent. We're just playing what comes naturally. I think the 'resistance' you are referring to comes about when the feeling is that musicians are trying to be irreverent or disrespectful with their music. Jewish music has always been used to inspire. I think you have to approach it with the right intention and be sincere.

Mimaamakim: You mentioned Bob Dylan as one of your bigger influences, how do you feel influenced by him?

Seth Nadel: As a songwriter. He is one of the greatest songwriters. You know he was one of the first to write personal songs. He's known for his protest songs and political songs, but he was really the first singer/songwriter - a modern day troubadour. In the beginning of his career all he wanted to be was Woody Guthrie, and throughout his career he kept re-inventing himself and his music...still does today. But I identify most with him as a songwriter. I have this picture of him with a tallis and tefillin by the kotel. One day I'm going to put it next to the pictures of Rebbeim on my wall.

Mimaamakim: Many of your songs use lyrics from Torah sources, are they words that have inspired you?

Seth Nadel: Sure. I find pesukim that call out to me. I don't just arbitrarily put this pasuk with that melody. There has to be a connection. It’s kind of like making a shidduch. Sometimes I'll have the melody and chords first, and then I'll find the pasuk – sometimes the pesukim and then the melody builds around it. Other times the two just happen together. The songwriting process is difficult to describe. It's really beyond words. I also write my own lyrics- that too is difficult to describe. Reb Shlomo, z'l, said, "Hundreds of songs come into the world every day, and I am lucky enough to pick up a few of the good ones." The songwriting process is mystifying.

Mimaamakim: And where do you see your music being in ten years? Or Jewish music in general?

Seth Nadel: I hope to continue doing this in ten years, with G-d's help. I love it so much. As far as Jewish music- I hope it continues to grow and flourish. It would be nice to see more diversity. I think its coming. People are more open to new and interesting things in Jewish music. The irony is that the secular music world has come to appreciate a lot of the really new sounds in Jewish music. There is a huge scene in downtown NYC surrounding these avant-garde klezmer jazz bands. Who would have thought that klezmer would be hip in 2004? But it's a new klezmer, with elements of free jazz and experimental music. People are fascinated with our music. Mimaamakim: And non-music aspects as well. Madonna is studying Kabbalah. Seth Nadel: Sure. But I'd like to see that openness to new sounds enter the mainstream Jewish music market. There is Jewish music in every genre: hip hop, reggae, dub, ambient, punk, folk. Again it's the story of the Jew in the Diaspora being influenced by the surrounding larger culture. You see this in all the art forms, but I think Jewish music is going in exciting directions.

Mimaamakim: Do you have a relationship with some of the other people doing innovative things in Jewish music?

Seth Nadel: Sure. I run a yahoo group email list, "nycjewishmusic" which publicizes all the Jewish music events in the NY Metro area to over 4,000 subscribers. It has been a great way to meet many artists in the industry that are doing new and exciting things. I'm also always on the lookout for new Jewish music CD's. I have a large collection of everything from cantoral to Carlebach to Jewish punk, to reggae and SKA. I need examples when I teach about Jewish music. I just got this great CD of the music of the Abuyada Jews of Uganda

Mimaamakim: Where do you teach about Jewish music?

Seth Nadel: All over. Synagogues, communities, Hebrew schools, camps, anywhere!

Mimaamakim: What do you teach?

Seth Nadel: Well- one of the things I'm doing right now is teaching about the "holiness of music." Later this month I'm presenting at the CAJE Conference, an annual conference for Jewish educators from across the globe and across the religious spectrum. I’m giving a session on "the holiness of music," showing how in Judaism music has always been used to inspire. Based on sources from Tanach, the Talmud, Kabbalistic and Chassidic texts. The Talmud discusses how prophets would use music to prepare for prophecy. Of course music was used in the holy service in the Temple. And the Chassidic Masters wrote extensively of how song can bring one to deveykus, closeness, to G-d. There is a lot about music in our tradition. I’m currently gathering together sources for a book on the subject.

Mimaamakim: Like a Jewish School of Rock?

Seth Nadel: Exactly (laughs). What did you think of the CD?

Mimaamakim: I have to say, the first thing I thought was, The Boss [Bruce Springsteen].

Seth Nadel: Sure. Sure. Also an influence. Growing up in NJ, it’s like my birthright. I am familiar with the highways and towns he sings about, but he somehow manages to make them much more poetic.

Mimaamakim: Thanks Seth, is there anything else you wanted to discuss?

Seth Nadel: I think we covered a lot of ground. Thanks so much, have a great night.

In A Library of Everything, Rabbi David Ebner sets the religious life of a Torah teacher to verse. Ebner shares his experiences as a religious personality forged from the diverse influences of being called a Kwyste killer by kindergarten classmate Timmy Morgan, hearing Rav Aryeh Levin daven, and seeing Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik think. The book is a product of ATID, Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directives, as part of its initiative to make the arts a more central component of Orthodox Jewish education.

In his polemical introduction, Ebner decries “that day after day Jews recite prayers, which have their full impact only as poetry and cannot be appreciated without some sense of the poetic, as if the prayers were simply an exercise in mechanical, magical abracadabra.” For a solution, he seeks the faculty of poetry, with which “all is transformed in one’s experience of ecstasy and transcendence in becoming a fount of prayer and Torah.”

He calls for two initiatives in addressing the lack of poetic reasoning within the Orthodox world. He looks to ATID to develop materials “which would aid teachers in presenting great poetry of the English language in such a way that it would speak to the soul of the religiously developing student.” He also hopes that his work will spur others to write poetry devoted to exploring a Judaism, which exceeds the rote recitation that stigmatizes the religious life as often lived. Ebner specifically limits this volume, which contains only 21 poems, to works that he feels comfortable reading and teaching in a yeshiva high school and adult education context. As a result, the book has a pedagogic feel in which Ebner appears to underscore only the positive moments of the religious life. The more difficult moments of a spiritual journey and the unanswered questions have been sanitized, and the reader is left with a less than complete picture – for which Ebner’s mission, to educate a religious community to the utility and necessity of poetry, suffers.

His first poem “The Poet Introduces Himself” attempts to justify the very institution of poetry in its ability to resonate with the lives of those who hear it. For Ebner, the Torah is also a poem in which God seeks to connect his story to man’s life just as a poet attempts to connect with his audience. The crucial role of poetry is to share common experience through the medium of words – and for Ebner the quintessential example of this is Torah. Both the poet and God seek to make their message relevant – and poetry is the medium they choose.

He reads His poem at Sinai
And like all poets
Asks us not to snore
And not to clack.

This metaphor qualifies much of Ebner’s work – as his poetry takes on the cadence of Torah – specifically Talmudic argumentation. He interweaves verses from the Torah as proof texts within his poems giving the works a Talmudic feel and creating a question-answer beat.

He wants to tell us
Who he is
Anokni Hashem Elokekha.

The technique slows the rhythm of Ebner’s own words – and interrupts the trust between poet and reader. The reader can wait for the footnotes to check the sources. Ebner does not allow the poems to explain themselves – or the reader to take the initiative of interpretation. The poems are tethered to long excursus, which interrupt between poems. These explanations site sources and tell the story behind the poem. Often Ebner tells a more compelling story when elucidating a poem then in the poem itself. As with the story of Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin after “I Am Prayer”

Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin was once discussing the issue of proper intent in prayer. He taught: “One must enter the very words and letters of prayer and become one with them.” One of his disciples was puzzled by this and asked: “Rebbe, how is it possible for a person who is so big to enter a letter which is so small?” Rabbi Moshe’s response: “I am not speaking to those people.”

Ebner’s words “I am folding myself/ into/ a paper accordion/ of prayer” while vividly evoking the metaphor of Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin do not illustrate the tension and difficulty of leaving our bigness for the smallness of letters. For Ebner, it is too easy to become “a kvittel.” The difficulty of prayer is summed up in “squeezing myself/ into/ a crack/ in the wall.”

In explaining every work in prose, Ebner binds his verse to its explanation preventing the poetry from “soaring beyond the universe of prose in which stars do not merely give light – they twinkle,” as he defines it in his introduction. We are unfortunately told too many times about the twinkling – and not allowed to read poem to poem to see the twinkling itself.

Ebner does offer many fine works. In his “Water Prophet,” Ebner renders a poetic commentary of II Kings 3 in which discipleship, symbolized in the water poured by Elisha upon the hands of his master, is the very solution to the drought that the Kings of Judah and Israel seek.

In the art
of water pouring
(taught only
by true prophets)
I learned to become
a pitcher
and water,
hands
and music.

This metaphor equally qualifies Ebner’s effort. He pours the teaching found in the excurses – in the traditional prose of Torah teaching and brings it to the poetry as the prophet sits and serves the master. Ebner evokes this transition in “Biz Hundret und Tzvontzig” – as he evokes his own master – Rabbi Soloveitchik speaking

There,
In Brisk
(before, before…)
a young boy
stands next to his grandfather
during Yom Kippur prayer.
He hears the angels crowd about him.
Forty years later he tells you this tale.

And forty years further
in Jerusalem
I ask myself
To what grace-note
of Reb Chaim’s prayer
do angels dance
on Yom Kippur
in Brisk
on the head of a pin?

Ebner is first and foremost a teacher, and “The Library of Everything” is an educational tool. His book reflects ATID’s larger effort in the arts – to utilize art as a tool to enhance educational methodology. In this book, poetry is reduced to the vessel that might hold the cool pedagogical waters that Elisha receives, but Elijah’s passion, the fire of Mount Carmel, is absent. We can only hope that Rabbi Ebner will find a venue to share the work that could not be included in this volume.

Today my friend Rakhel came running… She is a daughter of the settlers who came during the season of snow. They came with the families in a train of wagons that rolled from the direction of the sun rising.

Rakhel’s mother was with child and the baby wanted to come into this world when the wagon train rolled past. There was much screaming from her wagon that day. The chief of all the wagons would not stop to let the screaming woman bring her baby into the light. Instead, he told them they could travel or die by the hand of the savages.

Rakhel told me that her family came from across the great sea for freedom and to build a new life here in the new world. She told me that her people are from the tribe of Judah and that they had to leave their home in Poland, because people not of her tribe came to destroy and kill, because her people do not share the same practices and believe in the Creator in a different way.

Rakhel and I share many things the same… My people too are not like the white man that has come to our lands. From many tribes we learn that the white man has been stealing our lands and our old ones’ stories of yesterday and our people. Our brothers are fighting and the white men are too many. They come, they take and they spoil.

When Rakhel her parents and the other two families came they did not take. They stood by their wagons. Their hands raised to the heavens and they sang. The woman was screaming and Rakhel ran to us crying… She pointed to the wagon and in her strange tongue let us understand that she wanted help for her mother. My grandmother went into the wagon. When the sun returned to rest and the sky filled with the color of smoke we who waited heard the first screams of new life. I was in wonder at what I saw. Rakhel’s father ran into the wagon… he came out holding his beautiful baby son raised him to the heavens and began singing again. He brought the baby back to its mother, came out grabbed Rakhel and me and everyone began singing a song of such joy. My grandmother and the other woman took Rakhel’s mother to our tent for warmth. This song that these people sang was different form the first, for this one held dance. The men and children danced in a circle and called everyone to dance a simkah dance. Every one was happy. Rakhel’s people, like ours, love to dance and sing and rejoice. Their sound is different and strange to me, but ours is strange to her.

We are friends sisters for three years and I learn from her and she learns from me. Her people do not look like the white man. They have darkness in the skin and their hair is black or the color of tree bark or red like fire in the sky. Rakhel has black hair that looks like wool from a lamb. It is very long and when I pull it jumps like a ball up and down, and we braid our hair after the swim.

But this day Rakhel came running. She was shouting very strong, “The soldiers are coming! The horses are coming. The white men are coming.” Our men were out on the hunt and will return in three moons. Only our older braves, the woman and young are here.

The earth trembles the sound of hooves, the war cry of the white man is carried in the wind, and before we could gather ourselves, they were here. A man on a horse points his gun at running grandmother holding a baby, “We will come to kill.” He screamed to his soldiers. Rakhel grabbed my hand and we are running like everyone. I hear the man say, “We will kill all the savages who stand in the way of Christianity and country. It is our obligation to take any measures in God’s kingdom to kill these uncivilized heathens.”

We run to Rakhel’s farm. I am running running with Rakhel. I begin to scream. The man on the horse is pulling me up by my hair. I am screaming and see Rakhel running to me. She throws her knife the man falls. I fall. I cannot move my leg. Rakhel pulls me to a hole in a fallen tree we climb in and hear the screams and howlings of my village and the war cries of the white-men. The air is stinking with burning, and we hold together shaking. The black night comes there is quiet the air holds the foul-smell of our biggest fear.

We crawl from the hole, Rakhel makes for me a splint for my broken ankle, she stands, she screams in a new voice like a mother mountain lion when she sees the cloud of gray smoke from her farm. I follow her running forgetting the pain in my ankle to her farm. What we saw was sickening. Rakhel sat in silence. For a long time. She took my knife from me and began to cut her hair till it looked the way of the men of her tribe. She went forward. And pulled the pants and shirt from the body of her father then tore her white under-dress and wrapped his body and parts in it. She took off all her girl clothes and dressed in the pants and shirt. Then she went to the body of her mother to cover it... her mother was torn like an animal. Her hair was cut from her scalp and her breasts were not there. Rakhel tore the rest of her dress and wrapped her mother then dragged the body next to her father she looked for her little brother. She ran and looked and looked, but we could not find him. She went to what was left of the house and looked into the smoldering ash. There was nothing. She ran to the barn, and I ran after her. There was he. His little body hanging upside down like the meat we smoke in the smoke tent.

Rakhel did not make a sound. She cut him from the hanging. Took his little body and laid him next to her parents. She went to the hay and began weaving together the pieces to make a covering. I did the same watching her. When we finished, she wrapped him in the blanket. Then she began digging three graves. I helped her. She made no sound. We worked in silence until the moon met the sun two times and when the sun filled the sky with the paint of morning rising, Rakhel covered the graves. She raised her hands to the sky like her father and spoke words in her tongue. Then I watched carefully. This was not Rakhel any longer. She sat next to the graves, very quietly, for seven days she did not move only to relieve herself. I gave her water and the berries that grew in the field. When the seventh day was at moon Rakhel stood, she raised her hands to the sky and now roared like the thunder before the falling rain. Her eyes filled and her rain came from her eyes. She took my hand and we went to the house. She found a hatchet and knife and tied it to the belt of her father.

Then she said, “We go to the village.”

When we arrived at the village I saw the braves that returned from the hunt, the village was no more.

The whole village looked like a burial ground and the braves were still taking the remains of bodies for burial. We walked quietly through the village. It looked like Rakhel’s farm, my father and brother saw us. All the men came running to us. I cried into my fathers arms, from what I saw, all were butchered slaughtered. The bodies of my people were torn as the vultures find a dead animal on the range. I looked over at Rakhel my friend. She stood firm.

When the tears stopped, I told my father my brother and the rest of the men how Rakhel came to save me and how she buried her parents and brother like a strongbrave and how she roared after seven days in her tongue. The men of my village gave her a new name and gave her a feather of first warrior and a pony. “From this day until she is more grown she would be called Little Brave Shadow.”

Rakhel said: “My name will be Levi Little Shadow.”