The Poem Taught Me to Love Living | February 2025

Reflections, an explanation, the poem, and enough inspiration to keep going for the next 20 years and beyond.

Jan 31, 2025

Let’s Do This
Well, this is a little uncomfortable. If we met on the street, or at a party, we’d probably exchange small talk. And here I am, sharing one of the most personal moments of my life.

If you’d prefer to skip my personal reflection, please do. Since this poem I’m about to share assumes some understanding of Jewish concepts, I suggest skipping ahead to the Concepts section. Or you can stick around for my personal reflections. Either way, thanks for being here.

My Grandmother’s Joy
To appreciate how this poem changed me, I’ve got to explain a little about my life before reading this poem, sometime around my 27th birthday. (I’m 47 now).

I grew up in Seattle, part of the Jewish Sephardic community there. We weren’t particularly observant, but we were connected. Meaning, we didn’t keep all the laws, but we felt close to our faith. That closeness, for me, was largely due to the influence of my grandmother, Alegra Alhadeff.

My grandmother was the middle child of David and Buena Leah Behar. David was the Hacham, the wise man and spiritual leader of the community. My grandmother inherited all her faith and love of God from both her parents.

This love was on full display for the holiday meals at her home. I remember so many Passover Seders, or meals, where delicacy after delicacy was prepared to exacting perfection. Since I was one of the younger grand kids, I got the treat of sitting next to her. Time after time during the meal she’d lean over to me and say, “Doesn’t it look so royal?” or some other reflection on how lovely it was to see her family together, celebrating her faith and enjoying her cooking.

Finding “Observance”
Thinking back, it isn’t surprising that growing up with a grandma like her that I’d eventually want to become more observant in my Judaism.

For me, that path to observance included studying in a traditional Yeshiva, or rabbinic seminary. I spent my college years studying, mostly Talmud, but a lot of Bible as well. So, while my contemporaries were doing whatever happens in frat houses and university campuses, my friends and I were attempting to memorize pages of Talmud, recall all the events in the books of the bible, and dazzle each other with penetrating questions. It was a great time, and I loved nearly every minute of it.

There was one aspect, however, that left me empty. The rabbis gave these rousing speeches about the centrality of spirituality, achieving academic prowess, and disparaged the physical world. It was, of course, an important message, and a strong antidote to the pursuits that my contemporaries were seduced by.

Yet for a kid growing up with my memories of family holidays sitting next to my pious grandmother, these rabbinical admonitions against temporal pleasure left me confused. And empty.

Where was the faith of my grandmother? Where was the beauty and joy of living life? How was I supposed to make sense of the love and peace I felt as a child with my newfound dedication to my faith?

I would find my answer in a poem writting by Rabbi David Ebner in his book, The Library of Everything, which I share here with his permission. This poem gave me the insight to carry on the faith of my grandmother, and doing all the work, all the cooking, baking, cleaning, that’s involved in living life and giving to your family.

But first, a little background so you can understand, and perhaps find your own meaning, in his verse.

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Concepts

I won’t provide an overview of the poem, because I want you to find your own meaning. Yet here are some of the concepts you might not be familiar with and the bare bones of what you need to know to let this poem come to life for you.

Now let’s get to the poem.

The Poem

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Modeh Ani
מקים אמונתו לשני עפר

I.
Soul sits in the last (metaphorical) row
studying Torah
in the great Yeshivah of Olam Haba.
Body sleeps dreamlessly
on a Jerusalem mountain
waiting endlessly
for a moment,
a second,
perhaps myriads of millennia
are passing,
but the dead
don’t wear watches.
In heaven everyone is a no-body
in a world of non-sense.

II.
I asked Maimonides:
“If I have earned heaven,
found release from prison,
why must I return to body,
for resurrection?”
Reluctant,
to peak about resurrection
(was it a sore point for him?)
he said:
“Study the white fire text of
‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’
The rest is commentary,
go learn.”

III.
I remembered a child raking leaves
their color and crackle
their smell when I rolled in the pile
and the steam of the hot chocolate
my mother brought me
rising in the autumn air.

And winter,
skating on a day so cold
the rhythm of the blades
cutting through the ice
froze like sound icicles.

A hot summer day,
watching the Dodgers,
Jackie and Gil,
Peewee and the Duke,
play the enemy Giants
to the bass roar of the crowd,
the shout of “Play Ball”
and the sweet taste of love
in the salted peanuts.

And an April day,
when winds began to gentle,
rains to soften,
and love began to root
in shy words
between two bodies.

I understood
metaphor alone
was not enough,
white fire alone
was not enough,
Heaven alone
was not enough.

I longed
to hear a driven leaf,
and see a red sunset,
to taste salt love,
smell fresh bread,
and touch
the incarnation
of a particular flesh.

And knew I would weep
from the joy of desire
if I were with body,
and wanted body back
so I could cry.

IV.
In Heaven
the rest is commentary.
Creation’s white fire
is to knead dark earth
and breathe this poem,
black fire on white fire
resurrected together
as one.

A promise
to a dust sleeper.

by Rabbi David Ebner
from The Library of Everything pp. 49-51
Reprinted with permission from the author.

The Response
I don’t want to go too deep into how I responded to this poem. I want to leave you space to have your own response, or maybe it won’t speak to you at all. That’s the way it is with poetry.

Photo by Isa Bödi

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