In the haftorah of Rosh Hashanah we read of Chana, an apparently barren woman who would come miraculously to conceive and give birth to Samuel the prophet. The reading concerns Chana’s plea before God in the temple that she might come to be blessed with a child—a prayer so strange…

“Woman makes a hole in language … we fail to say her.” (Pierre Naveau) There’s something telling in the discursive centrality of women and the feminine among contemporary academic scholars of Kabbalah. As in other Jewish studies subdisciplines, researchers in Jewish mysticism have been attempting with various degrees of success…

There are questions concerning the meaning of the opening of Psalm 126, particularly pertaining to its tense. The verse reads בשוב יהוה את־שיבת ציון היינו כחלמים, which we can render either as “when the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion, we see it as in a dream” (liberally, from JPS)…

There’s a difficulty in cataloging discreet instances in the Song of Song where the imagery of flowers in invoked. The Song, crucially, is a song set in spring, and the scent of what we might call a “floral logic” (budding—ripening—blossoming) is favored by the Song in a diffuse manner. The…

Preface—This is the inaugural installment of an intended series of essays wherein I get to think in depth about certain images and poetic motifs which I consider essential to the symbolic vocabulary of the Song of Songs. …

Metaphor and metaphysics in spring — I walk the familiar walk to my rabbi’s home on a certain Sunday and notice for the first time the blooming of wildflowers. I arrive; sweaty, delirious holiday morning prayers. By lunch he tells us about spring: by way of a familiar hermeneutic pun, we should not read the word…

Here is love’s tension, love’s politics. Here is form. The reader loves without knowing. (Lisa Robertson, “Time in the Codex”) I. In the early Nabokov story “Signs and Symbols” we learn of an old Russian couple’s trip to see their suicidal son in a sanatorium. It is a rainy day…

When I was born, my parent held me in their arms and remembered me. “I know him,” they said out loud. For a moment they even remembered by name — not the name I have now, neither in Hebrew or English, but a different name connected with their memory of…

There is a divine intimacy between women and death in our understanding of Greek antiquity. I am not the first to make this claim and it’s unlikely I’ll be the last. Women are as intimately associated with the gestures of death and mourning in the eyes of classicists as they…