To Argue With a Text

If you want to publish a book on a specific topic ask if there's a similar book available. I did and discovered a wonderful poet whose book on the weekly Torah readings resonates with me. Each poem is a riff on the text--bringing the words into our contemporary scene, wrestling with words until she distills her own personal meaning.

I want to allow the words to ignite my own world. I want to step out of the biblical past and argue, like a reader of Talmud, about the words. When I read of the flood, I intend to drag that story into the world of now, of Katrina, of the tsunami that took so many lives.

It is the wrestling, the distilling, the everyday that I need to reach.