Madison — “The things we have in the siddur are the ‘greatest hits,’” said Rabbi Kenneth Katz of Beth Israel Center (Conservative) here.
In fact, not only is there a huge corpus of Jewish liturgical poetry that didn’t get included in the siddur, but from the Middle Ages to today, Jewish writers and poets in different communities have “inserted local expansions” into Jewish liturgy, often relating to the weekly Torah portions, Katz said.
Therefore, Katz was receptive when congregants Esther Cameron — poet, literary scholar and part-time legal secretary — and Trudy Barash, proprietor of Canterbury Booksellers Café, met with him in 1999.
“Trudy and Esther are always looking for ways to promote the writing and reading of poetry,” Katz said. So they discussed ways to incorporate new poetry into synagogue services — and hit upon the idea for Cameron to compose a cycle of sonnets, one for each of the weekly Torah portions.
Last month, the result of that conversation appeared on the web site of the Madison Jewish Community Council, www.jewishmadison.org. The cycle is called “Rim of Gold” from a verse in Exodus (25:11), directing that such a rim be put on the Ark of the Covenant.
Cameron said it took her about a year to create the sonnets. Beth Israel Center incorporated them into its Torah services for the secular year 2000, printing them on the back of announcements and having either Cameron herself or a congregant read each one aloud before the Torah reading. The poems “were received eagerly and with rapt attention” by the congregation, said Katz.
Among those who were attentive was MJCC executive director Steven H. Morrison. Though not a regular at that synagogue, he happened to attend a Sabbath service in which one of Cameron’s sonnets was read.
“I was just very moved by it and impressed with the creativity of whoever thought of it … the creativity of another way to teach Torah,” Morrison told The Chronicle. He suggested putting the cycle online via the MJCC. “Using our web site to teach Torah, that’s a good thing,” he said.
Cameron came to this project not just out of concern for poetry in the abstract, but out of a feeling that contemporary poetry has “lost touch with human life” and needs “a sacred context” and to ‘be connected again to a community….. It’s not enough to write for academics and literati.”
Her interest in this also brought her to Judaism. A New York native, Cameron grew up in Madison, was writing poetry from childhood and had no religious training to speak of.
She eventually wrote her doctoral thesis on German Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), whose works “gave me a sense of urgency, of the importance of writing poetry. I date my own seriousness as a writer from that encounter.”
In addition, Cameron had to study Judaism to understand Celan’s work. She found that the books on this subject “spoke to me in their own right” and ended up converting to Judaism.
Cameron moved to Israel in 1979, studied at two Orthodox women’s yeshivot, and published a book of poems and a memoir there before reluctantly returning to Madison in 1990.
Currently, Cameron is seeing a book-length poem, “The Consciousness of Earth,” through serial publication in a Seattle poetry magazine. She also has added two new sonnets to “Rim of Gold” that “reflect my feelings about this year after Sept. 11.”
And while Beth Israel Center is again using Cameron’s works in its services, Katz said he regards this as “an open-ended project. Who knows what [Cameron will] do next or when some other congregant will say, ‘You’re not the only poet laureate in town’?”
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