Texts to the Holy - (Jewish Poetry Project) by Rachel Barenblat (Paperback)

About the Book

"When I wake / your name is honey / on my lips." So begins this latest collection by poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat. These love songs to an unnamed other capture a God-intoxicated spirituality in plain-spoken language redolent of the Bible yet anchored in modern life.

Book Synopsis

"When I wake
your name is honey
on my lips."

So begins this latest collection by poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat. These love songs to an unnamed other capture a God-intoxicated spirituality in plain-spoken language redolent of the Bible yet anchored in modern life.

Texts to the Holy follows in the tradition of the Song of Songs, the great Biblical poem that describes love between two human beloveds and is also read as an allegory for the love between us and God. It's in the tradition of the medieval poet Judah ha-Levi, whose writings of yearning for God use human love as a metaphor. And it's in the tradition of Adrienne Rich and Pablo Neruda, whose poems of human love and passion are suffused with awareness of the sanctity of the tangible and the everyday.
These poems can be read purely as love poems from one human beloved to another, and they can be read as poems of love between a soul and her Source. Texts to the Holy expresses deep emotion in contemporary language, without sentimentality. It reminds us of the truths that the yearning heart finds reminders of the beloved everywhere and that even a text message can be a locus for holiness.

Review Quotes

Texts to the Holy is a collection of sultry, passionate love poems... to God! Rachel has marvelously blended the holy sensuality of Song of Songs with the compact verbal rhythms of social media. Quite in contrast to most devotional writing, her words croon and sizzle, delight and reverberate. You can both read them to your beloved one and pray them to the Holy One. We religious folks should break out of our comfort zones and allow Rachel's book to open up our hearts to a passionate love for God in prayer.

--Reverend Heidi Haverkamp, author of Advent in Narnia

These poems are remarkable, radiating a love of God that is full bodied, innocent, raw, pulsating, hot, drunk. I can hardly fathom their faith but am grateful for the vistas they open. I will sit with them, and invite you to do the same.

--Merle Feld, author of A Spiritual Life and Finding Words

Rachel Barenblat's Texts to the Holy bridges the human and Holy, so that we realize the bridge is really just an illusion to get us to realize that the human is itself Holy--"Bless the One Who separates / and bridges. Even at a distance / we aren't really apart." And yet, in every honest line, she also comforts us in the uncomfortable knowledge that realization does not exactly bridge the unavoidable separation from That to which we are so close, and that sometimes, "yearning is as close as you get to whole." The Ba'al Shem Tov or the Aish Kodesh couldn't have said it better.

--Netanel Miles-Yépez, translator of My Love Stands Behind a Wall: A Translation of the Song of Songs and Other Poems, and co-author (with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) of A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters.

These are simple poems, radiant with joy. There is nothing clever or snide about them, no giving-only-to-take-back: the speaker of these poems is in it for keeps.

When it comes to you, dearest one,
I am profligate with promises...

They are not -- and do not pretend to be -- artless: but they have a hard-won simplicity, poetic and spiritual. We are here to celebrate love, to celebrate wanting and being wanted, seeing and being seen. There are moments of tender humor, that might verge on blasphemy to those who do not take immanence seriously:

Suddenly though among strangers
I am not alone. You are with me.
Your emoji and your texts
--they comfort me.

But Barenblat takes immanence very seriously. The conflation of the divine and the beloved is not a device or a conceit, in these poems: it's just the truth, as seen by a veteran, disciplined contemplative.

It is you who wipe
tears from my face
with tender hands

who remind me
I deserve better
than desolation

To read these poems is to take up the challenge of being this vulnerable, and this much in love.

--Dale Favier, author of Opening the World