1/21: (Thursday) Today is the first day of the three weeks where the crack in everything begins a process that beckons self-refinement. For the next 21 days, each day we will reconsider how the cracks in everything ultimately lead to the cultivation and revelation of more inner light. While many of us immediately feel that in a song or poem by Leonard Cohen, but too few know of Jerusalem equivalent of the Montreal bard, Benjamin Shevili.
The 21 day journey of spiritual self-reflection we are now embarking upon will draw from Shevili’s recent collection, Poems to Yova (2022). Each day, as you read each poem, take some time to contemplate those places you feel but do not always tend to that show cracks in the edifice of your personhood. Places of vulnerability, uncertainty even doubt. Sitting with these cracks will allow you to examine more deeply inside the walls of your spiritual self—this truth is something mystics and poets know well. The crack within everything begins on the 17th of Tammuz leading up to the 9th of Av—the time when the first tablets crack as they are smashed by Moses in his descent from Mount Sinai. These first cracks in the covenant lead to national catastrophe that simultaneously holds the power of luminal darkness.
As a Jerusalemite poet, Benjamin Shevili remains elusive and mysterious. The poet’s grandmother on his mother’s side can be traced to a Sephardic family that lived in Greece for generations and is associated with kabbalistic movements. Shvili was born in Jerusalem in 1954 and lived as a child in a neighborhood on the border with Jordan near the Old City, a physically and spiritually marked location which made a deep impression on him, and about which he writes in in all genres: poetry, fiction, memoir and travel writing. In addition to five books of poetry, for which he has been awarded the Bernstein, Agnon and Prime Minister’s Prize, he is the author of three (at times autobiographical) novels, a book of personal essays tellingly named Library of the Heart, and another about his travels to Poland. He teaches at Alma College, a secular, non-degree granting institution of Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv.
If a phyiscal fissure is a long, narrow opening or line of breakage made by cracking or splitting, especially in rock or earth, here you are invited to contemplate the first signs of the breakage made by cracking your surface self, your persona that you present to the outer world, inside of Shevili’s recent collection, Poems to Yova (2022), opening the second section called, “Without You”:
Dear friend
kill the
“I”
within me only
shall I live
my brother
destroy
my memory
pierce
my being
help me
to reach
the zenith
of my life
Questions for self-reflection:
1. There is always an inner voice inside me, sometimes guiding me here, sometimes pointing me there. How much credence do I give to that inner voice of the other withinme, and how do I see myself in relation to the other within me?
2. How might I live more truly and more simply if I could begin to step aside from myself, through a process of the nullification of my ego {the “I”) that could enable me “to reach/the zenith/of my life” and where are those inner obstructions that need to crack open to facilitate this process?