Strange Air Above the Ladder

Yehoshua November’s latest poetry collection has a delightfully deceptive title. The Concealment of Endless Light sounds like the name of a kabbalistic treatise, esoteric and abstract, and yet the book itself is disarmingly personal. Its poems are warm, accessible, and filled with irony. The “endless light” is not a distant, luminous ideal, receding from us in the kabbalistic drama of divine contraction. Rather, this light is just around the corner, any corner, behind the everyday phrases and routines, inside the most fleeting and simple memories. If, as Louis Zukofsky once said, poetry is “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music,” in November’s case, the upper music is divine providence itself.

In addition to being a poet and scholar, November is a practicing Lubavitcher Hasid, and his poem “Faith,” like many others in the collection, is inspired by Hasidic thought—in this case, the Hasidic understanding of the metaphor of Jacob’s ladder as an inward pathway to deeper faith and closeness to the divine:

To climb each rung
of the mind,

teeter
at the top,

and then surrender
like a librarian who reaches for a book

on the highest shelf
and then breathes in

the strange and foreign air
above the ladder.

Denise Levertov’s well-known poem “The Jacob’s Ladder” draws on a similar Hasidic teaching. In it, Levertov imagines the heavenward ladder that is far from ethereal: “The stairway is not / a thing of gleaming strands / a radiant evanescence / for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not / touch the stone. // It is of stone.” Ultimately, in Levertov’s poem, “a man climbing / must scrape his knees, and bring / the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone / consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him. / The poem ascends.” The seeker bruises herself but, in the end, witnesses a poem of her own making that ascends beyond her. Levertov was drawn to the work of Martin Buber in part, perhaps, because her father had grown up in a Lubavitcher community, and so it is not entirely surprising that both she and November bring the metaphor of Jacob’s ladder down from the realm of dreams to a faith of the everyday.

Unlike Levertov’s poet seeker, however, November’s librarian could not be deeper in his comfort zone. Moving up the rungs of the ladder, he does not crave a tantalizing mystery; he’s reaching for a book, not questing for the unknown. The final stanza, though, is where November’s metaphor goes rogue: The librarian’s mind is transported by the sudden awareness of a higher world just inches above the visible. Faith is not a wild journey, or even a meticulous one, toward a revelation, November seems to imply. Within the daily practice of life, if you are lucky, the divine presence will catch you by surprise and let you inhale the “foreign air” that has been there all along.

Like “Faith,” many of November’s poems use casual, everyday language. Their rhythm is conversational: It is as if we’re hearing, or overhearing, the poet speak, muse, ponder. This feeling is often heightened by November’s tendency to use second-person direct address. “You” in his poems can mean himself or the reader but most often refers to his muse—his wife. Her presence is central to this collection and the author’s life, literally: “Forty years bisected evenly: / Twenty with you, twenty before you. / And five souls pulled down into bodies.”

November recounts their days of courting, living together, and raising their children. These love poems find the sacred within difficult circumstances and the smallest details, as in “Poem on Our Eighteenth Anniversary”:

                              When I returned home,
late at night, four years into our marriage,
on an adjunct’s salary, no health insurance,
to find you sitting on the floor,
cleaning the drawer of the open fridge
in preparation for Passover,
your recently divorced brother asleep
on the apartment couch—
and you lifted your face,
excited to see me.

Few things in the world are more prosaic than the Passover refrigerator cleanup—or the adjunct salary, for that matter.

Difficult as it may be to write about the divine, writing about class and money in a way that is both authentic and dignified is nearly impossible. November does not skirt the challenging circumstances, neither his own nor those of his parents or grandparents. He addresses them without the shame that can cast a shadow over such meditations, while also avoiding the poetics of trauma that are sometimes found in contemporary poetry.

Instead, the poet leans toward irony as in his poem “The Deed,” in which he confesses: “I grade expository essays on the overlap / between Buddhism and psychology / to pay for my children’s cheder tuition.” Even as this phrase teeters on the edge of cynicism, it ultimately tumbles into irony and absurdity. It is absurd that while Buddhism and psychology focus on the life of the mind, writing about them in a college paper is likely to be taken as the height of clueless privilege. It is absurd that a Hasidic professor is teaching students to write such essays. It is absurd that he toils at this work, only to spend it on an educational system that, let’s face it, has plenty of its own absurd intersections. Is he a Hasid complaining about the dreariness of the secular world or a poet professor cognizant of the irony of teaching Buddhism to pay for one’s Judaism? We may never know, but to undercut the project of the study of the mind with meditations on yeshiva tuition costs, while turning those meditations into an introspective poem, is no small feat.

In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” William Blake famously pointed out that “without contraries is no progression.” For November, the contraries are at the root of both his poetics and his theology. Indeed, contraries are fundamental to kabbalistic thought and to the Lubavitcher framing of it in particular. The holiest light is to be found in the deepest darkness; the truest expression of the divine is not within the inconceivable, distant light but is here, in our daily goings-on.

Perhaps November sees himself as a walking contrary, as in “Poetry Readings”:

          Seven men and women                              
                                                  listening to a Chassidic Jew
recite lines about the Ein Sof                              
                       and life’s great disappointments.

Ein Sof, “The Endless One,” is a kabbalistic name for divine in its least accessible manifestation. There is irony here, in the way that the primordial infinity is being juxtaposed with one life’s tzuris. But in addition to the humor, there is a peculiar kind of amused self-relishing that dodges expectations and raises eyebrows. Like the modern Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, who deftly used his knowledge of the Jewish tradition to shake up the sacred with the tantalizingly profane, November attempts a similar effect by watching the profane closely for the signs of the sacred within.

The poem “Ein Sof Radio” describes a 1934 photograph of a rabbi in Jerusalem. In the penultimate stanza, November writes:

The rabbi rests his head on his hand
to listen to the news in an 8×10 sitting room
that exists only in God’s imagination.
The prayer shawl and the radio dials—
the finite parts
that pick up infinity’s signal.

Wearing a tallis while listening to the radio can seem almost self-contradictory—but not to the one who hears the divine cutting through the static. The poet recognizes this and raises the stakes further by pointing out that all of it, anyway, “exists only in God’s imagination.” One can read that statement as nihilistic or pious or, perhaps, a compelling tangle of both. Most compelling of all, however, is the gentle insinuation that God’s imagination and the imagination of a poet who brings an old photograph to life, as well as the imagination of the readers who read the poet’s imaginings, are perhaps one and the same.

There are certain passages in “Ein Sof Radio,” as well as in the book as a whole, that seem to me to lean too far into rhetoric or perhaps even doctrine, undermining the power of the collection. Many of those passages are introduced with the phrase “mystics say,” a perhaps too-easy shortcut that signals that a Jewish teaching is
coming:

       the mystics say,                            
              the transcendent part of the soul

was created for the fraction of the soul
enclothed in the body.

I am reminded of Proust’s famous quip: “A work [of art] in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.” Then again, while I recognize that as a reader I crave ambiguity to express my own spiritual stirrings, rereading these lines, I suspect that there may be poetry in them that evades me.

Besides, November’s faith is not all easy, doctrinaire, or unselfconscious. Here is the final stanza of “Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mikvah in Salem, MA,” a poem that is a meditation on prayer, suffering, and divine judgment—or the lack thereof:

Moses, whose name means
“one drawn from the water,”
was the only prophet
to speak with God face to face,
that is, in a waking state.
But he heard only staticky silence—
oceanic, wavelike,
the crackling of a turntable
following a song’s final note.

Here, it isn’t an anonymous rabbi tuning in for the Ein Sof special but the poet himself. And he is in a nondescript hotel pool in New England, not Jerusalem.

If the first few lines echo the biblical verse,
the ending is very much the poet’s own. The string of final images is inspired by his own ritual immersion in the hotel pool (“oceanic, wavelike”) and hearing Orbison on the radio (“crackling,” “turntable,”). The latter adds a layer of irony, already inherent in the act of using the hotel pool as a mikvah—and pontificating about it. There is neither God nor the voice of God here, but the poem isn’t skeptical either; it leaves plenty of room for faith in the oceanic, powerful silence that is also the silence of music that has stopped. This is a mic-drop image, and the quiet that ensues after the poem ends is that same powerful, pregnant silence, the kind that makes both faith and poetry possible.