Rich Reflects on Yom Kippur & Conflict

Maurycy Gottlieb, “Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur”

Spiritual Sunday – Yom Kippur

Here’s an Adrienne Rich poem to commemorate Yom Kippur, observed this past weekend. As the day where Jews seek atonement for their sins against God and their fellow human beings, the holy day provides the Jewish-lesbian-feminist-leftist poet an occasion to reflect upon her longing for love to unite all humankind, upon the tribal and survivalist impulse that sets us against each other, and upon her personal desire for solitude. Quoting a passage from Leviticus— “For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people”—she sets herself the challenge to sort through these seemingly contradictory positions. She will not let herself off easy but will be as truthful as she can be.

I’m not going to explicate the entire poem but I try to provide enough guidance that you can understand the issues that are tearing at her mind. Although raised on the east coast, Rich appears to be writing her poem in a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her poem is in part a dialogue with a Robinson Jeffers poem, also set on the west coast, where the poet speaks of his own longing for solitude.

In the passage from “Prelude” from which Rich quotes, Jeffers describes how he went to the shore to find solitude and then found himself interrupted, in his imagination, by all the “hateful-eyed and human-bodied” about him. Unlike Christ, who is “rumored” to have died for humankind, he is ready to dispense with them: “you that love multitude may have them.” Here’s Jeffers:

I drew solitude over me, on the lone shore,
By the hawk-perch stones; the hawks and the gulls are never breakers of solitude.
When the animals Christ is rumored to have died for drew in,
The land thickening, drew in about me, I planted trees eastward, and the ocean
Secured the west with the quietness of thunder. I was quiet.
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
No peace but many companions; the hateful-eyed
And human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them.

Rich understands his longing for solitude but then wonders, “what is a Jew in solitude?” I’ll discuss in a moment this apparent contradiction, a collective Jewish identity vs. a solitary Jewish woman reflecting and writing her poetry in “the poet’s tower facing the western ocean.” As attractive as the latter solitude can be, she acknowledges that it is also problematic. As the Jeffers poem demonstrates, it can set one off against humanity. Included in Jeffers’ “multitude,” Rich points out, are

separate persons, stooped
over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest
who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams
Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other

Rich associates the poet’s solitude with two not so positive examples: the wealthy in their gated mansions and the nativists with their guns, whether in Utah or the Golan Heights. One sees how conflicted she is when she argues,

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend
a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?

Both solitude and love of multitude begin to get complicated as Rich pushes her exploration. On the one hand, she moves from the solitude of individuals to the solitude experienced by those who have been marginalized and oppressed. In her own case, these include both her identity as a Jew and as a queer woman. There are multiple references in the poem to Walt Whitman, and Rich would like to believe that America can move past such differences and contain multitudes.

It’s very interesting to think of Whitman’s vision in light of Yom Kippur. But opening oneself to strangers can be a way to get oneself killed, which is one reason why people cluster with others like themselves. But what if one’s own kind—Jews in this case—aren’t willing to forgive Rich for denying her Jewishness for the longest time (her father was Jewish, her mother not, and she was raised Christian). And how is she as a feminist supposed to feel about certain orthodox Jews believing it to be impure to touch a woman’s hand? As she notes, describing her cloud-like confusion,

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?
If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

Who knows, perhaps Rich is writing this poem in solitude rather than attending the Yom Kippur atonement service.

Along the same lines, she wonders whether her desire to reach out and “love the Stranger” is a “privilege we can’t afford in the world that is.” She mentions at one point a woman killed with a swastika carved into her back and wonders whether she was killed because she was queer or because she was Jewish.

The poem ends in a vision of cataclysm, partly environmental, where everyone is thrown together whether they want to be or not. In that mixture, however, might we move beyond our tribal identities? Perhaps Arab and Jew, heterosexual and homosexual, will look back at a time when once we were solitary in the multitude but no longer are. Maybe the refugee child (the Jew?) and the exile’s child (the Palestinian?) will “re-open the blasted and forbidden city,” which could either be the literal Jerusalem or the  new Jerusalem that represents a utopian future where we all mingle. Solitude may mean something different in that newborn world.

Here’s the poem:

Yom Kippur 1984

By Adrienne Rich

         I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
—Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be 
          cut off from his people. 
—Leviticus 23:29

What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?
 
The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs
with its electric gate, its perfected privacy
is not what I mean
the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights
is not what I mean
the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin,
her attack dog suddenly risen
is not what I mean
Three thousand miles from what I once called home
I open a book searching for some lines I remember
about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once
bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,
something that bloomed and faded and was written down
in the poet’s book, forever:
Opening the poet’s book
I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed
and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them

Robinson Jeffers, multitude
is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys
and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines
are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf,
and the separate persons, stooped
over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest
who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams
Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other
Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend
a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?
 
To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own
to hear strangeness calling you from far away
and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk
to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind
(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew
the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:   Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she
could believe in a woman’s god)
 
Find someone like yourself.   Find others.
Agree you will never desert each other.
Understand that any rift among you
means power to those who want to do you in.
Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.
But I have a nightmare to tell:   I am trying to say
that to be with my people is my dearest wish
but that I also love strangers
that I crave separateness
I hear myself stuttering these words
to my worst friends and my best enemies
who watch for my mistakes in grammar
my mistakes in love.
This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?
If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.
 
To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege
about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,
a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,
who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car
into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death
young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing
availing his Blackness
Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand;   Jew
who has turned her back
on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone
found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?)
 
Solitude, O taboo, endangered species
on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you
In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:
your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread
her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true 
 
And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?
have I traded off something I don’t name?
To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?
What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision
far from the protection of those she has called her own?
Will I find O solitude
your plumes, your breasts, your hair
against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s
singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?
in the old places, anywhere?
 
What is a Jew in solitude?
What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?
When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms
slide into the sea
when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger
when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was
founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent
in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?