Poems for Shavuot (and the rest of the year)

EVERY day the mail is placed on my desk. Sometimes it is quite a stack, for it includes books.

The other day it included two books, one quite large and one quite small. I just glanced at both. The large one — such a heavy topic, the afterlife. The small one — something about the calendar. I flipped a couple of pages and half-noticed delightful, colored, artistic renderings.

It was instinctive.

I was not going to like the big book, I was going to like the small one.

I took it home and discovered a book of poems. Normally, not my meter. But there was something so simple, touching, beautiful and accessible about the poems and the drawings that I said to myself: Read this.

I opened at random.

If the poems are about the Jewish calendar — “a poetical journey through the Jewish year,” the subtitle reads — I can start anywhere.

I started with Shavuot.

Accessible? Yes, if you know some Hebrew. If not, consult the glossary at the end of the book. In the following poem about Shavuot, the glossary tells you that makor = source, pasuk = scriptural verse, Kootzoh Shel Yud = the lower protrusion of the smallest Hebrew letter, the letter Yud; Pintele Yid = the smallest vestige of Jewish essence in an otherwise unaffiliated Jew; and batei medrash = houses of Torah study.

Here is the poem:

Holaich VeChazaik [Growing Ever Greater]

AS Shavuot is the holiday of the giving of the Torah, beginning with the Ten Commandments (the “Decalogue”), and as Torah study lavishes careful attention on every word in the Torah, the appropriateness of this poem for the Hebrew month of Sivan — of Shavuot — is clear.

This little book, by Yossi Huttler, is titled, “Lakol Z’man: A Time for Everything,” taken from Ecclesiastes 3:1.

“Everything” here means every Jewish holiday or special time throughout the year. Chapter titles are the 12 months of the Hebrew year.

Are you remembering last month — Iyar? Here is one of Huttler’s poems in that chapter:

Lag b’Omer

Or, are you thinking of next month — Tammuz? Here is one of Huttler’s poems in that chapter:

Tears

AS you might imagine, the chapter of Tishrei — Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot — has more poems than other chapters. Here are two of my favorites in the whole book (glossary, kapparos = “atonements,” referring to a custom of waving a chicken, later to be slaughtered, or money, to be given to charity, around one’s head while reciting a ritual formula, intended to inspire repentance; and na’anuim = the Sukkos prayers during which the four species of flora are waved):

Kapparos

Na’anuim

THE author mentions in his forward: “The fact that during much of this period [when he wrote the poems] I was dealing with cancer no doubt had an impact on this work, though how and to what extent is one of those mysteries of life.”

Huttler captures the mysteries of the Jewish calendar and lets the reader unravel them in his own way, for himself.

The book is available at by emailing the author at yhuttler@aol.com, or contacting 340 N. Edinburgh Ave., Los Angeles, Calif., 90048; (323) 665-0973. No price is listed.

Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News