This website is a joint venture of Congregation Kol Emeth, Palo Alto, California and Hod VeHadar, Kfar Saba, Israel, to discuss the Amichai book of poems, “Open Closed Open.”

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Our two shuls have chosen a few favorite sections of some of the longer poems for exploration together. We picked these in a remarkable telephone exchange during which poems were shared across the miles. (We wonder if a cross-oceanic phone conversation was ever before as poetic as this one.) Although we are on different continents, we will be very much together in our reading of the following poems:
Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay
#1 page 39 paperback, page 39 in hardbound; page 5 in1998 hardbound Hebrew edition
#7-page 41 paperback, page 41 in hardbound; page 7 in 1998 hardbound Hebrew edition

1
In the street on a summer evening, I saw a woman writing
on a piece of paper spread out against a locked wooden door.
She folded it, tucked it between door and doorpost, and went on her way.
And I didn’t see her face, nor the face of the man
who would read what she had written
and I didn’t see the words.

On my desk lies a stone with the word “Amen” on it,
a fragment of a tombstone, a remnant from a Jewish graveyard
destroyed a thousand years ago in the town where I was born.
One word, “Amen,” carved deep into the stone,
a final hard amen for all that was and never will return,
a soft singing amen, as in prayer:
Amen and amen, may it come to pass.

Tombstones crumble, they say, words tumble, words fade away,
the tongues that spoke them turn to dust,
languages die as people do,
some languages rise again,
gods change up in heaven, gods get replaced,
prayers are here to stay.

7
“Our Father, Our King,” What does a father do
when his children are orphans and he
is still alive? What will a father do
when his children have died and he becomes
a bereaved father for all eternity? Cry
and not cry, not forget and not remember.
“Our Father, Our King,” What does a king do
in the republic of pain? Give them
bread and circuses like any king,
the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting,
bread and nostalgia. Nostalgia for God-
and-a-better-world. “Our Father, Our King.”

The Bible and You, The Bible and You, and Other Midrashim
#16 page 26 paperback; page 26 hardbound; poem #30, page 41, 1998 hardbound Hebrew edition

16
Waiting rooms. The waiting room of Job
where he waits for the bad news
and his friends sit and talk to him in whispers.
The waiting room of Moses in the desert
where he paced back and forth and doesn’t sit still for an instant.
The waiting room of Isaac bound on Mount Moriah, waiting
to go under the knife. The waiting room of Sarah
in the tent before the birth of her son,
and the waiting room of King David up on the roof.
He was waiting for Bathsheba to get out of her bath,
then he sat down and waited for Nathan the prophet
to come and curse him. And all of us
wait with them in a rustle of wings
and a flutter of newspapers
and coughs and sighs and whispered conversations –
wait for the door to be opened by the white angel
and behind him the blinding white light.


Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem
#7 page 137 paperback; page 137 in hardbound; page 143 in 1998 hardbound Hebrew edition

7
In Jerusalem, everything is a symbol. Even two lovers there
become a symbol like the lion, the golden dome, the gates of the city.
Sometimes they make love on too soft a symbolism
and sometimes the symbols are hard as a rock, sharp as nails.
That’s why they make love on a mattress of six hundred thirteen springs,
like the number of precepts, the commandments of Shalt and Shalt Not,
oh yes, do that, darling, no, not that – all for love
and its pleasures. They speak with bells in their voices
and with the wailing call of the muezzin, and at their bedside, empty shoes
as at the entrance of a mosque. And on the doorpost of their house
it says,
“Ye shall love each other with all your hearts and with all your souls.”

Poems from Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai, Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld,
Harcourt, 2000, used by permission of the translators