8 - Secularity, Sacredness, and Jewish American Poets 1950–2000

Summary

Secularism is part of a dynamic ontology that is generally important for making an account of Jewish identity, and specifically relevant to understanding the contemporary moment in Jewish American poetics. For all their collective ferocity in matters of divinity and transcendence, those who identify proudly as Jewish secular poets make special allowance for Kabbalah as a rich poetic resource. This chapter explores how the kaddish, the Jewish prayer linked to ritual mourning, becomes the target of radical secular poetics. Through the art of translation and of poesis, Peter Cole suggests an alternative to the usual ways of thinking about the relation between the sacred and the secular. He imagines a more harmonious model, whereby poetry serves an important function in allowing us to draw closer to the sacred. The poet Rachel Tzvia Back shows how poems can help us find our way to those sacred texts that may help us live.