Sunday, September 21, 2025

Samuel 4: In Writing

Within the darkness

that presses its nose

against the window


a baby screams

and screams

her father humming


desperate sursuration

Not mine. Not now 

Not today. 


Lights out. Bedtime

On distant lit pathways

a stroller appears. Disappears. 



I’m scared to go to the army,” my son says.

What if I don’t like the food?

And also--I might get killed. 


Crouch in a ditch. Pray. 

So many promises I want to make.

But nothing to say. 


I tell him of the Davidka,

the canon that couldn’t aim

but saved the city with its roar


The siren shriek

haunts the night

but my children have learned

to barely flich. 

 

Today my son has an earthquake drill;

last night, a missile.

Saferoroms sprout like mushrooms

before the rains. 


Two helicopters circle 

locuslike overhead.

encircled in the angry

howl of aircraft. 


I will have mercy

on whom I have mercy

And grace 

on whom I have grace.


Yet how we long to lock

salvation in a box

to shoot at will


Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Samuel: Chapter 4

 


When words fail...

The center

does not hold.

What will the future birth? 



For full chapter, click here,

"And Samuel's word went forth throughout Israel"-- a triumphant announcement of Samuel's ascension. Yet this opening verse also contains a hint of threat. For if Samuel's "word" is trustworthy, then the destruction he prophesied must and will come.

And come it does: the decimation of Israel's army, the capture of the Ark of Covenant, the death of Hofni and Pinhas, the heartbroken death of Eli. Only in his death do we learn the extent of his greatness--he is one of the few pivotal judges, who like Otniel, Debora and Gideon led Israel for a definitive 40 years. Yet there is no hope for his family's future, as even birth turns deadly: Pinchas' wife dies in childbirth, naming her child I-Kavod, No-Honor--a fulfillment of God's initial prophecy "For I honor (kavod)  those who honor Me, but those who spurn Me shall be dishonored."   

Between Samuel's definitive "word" (davar) and the "word" (davar) brought by the soldier of Israel's defeat is a collection of wordless cries: the army "trumpets" (tru'ah) in triumph as the Ark is brought to the encampment; the city screams (tza'aka) and shrieks (zaaka) as the terrible news of defeat spreads. Language becomes a chaotic cacophony (hamon; homeh).

The breakdown of speech into primal screams creates a need for interpretation:  “Why is there such a roar in the camp of the Hebrews?” the Philistines ask; What is the meaning of the uproar?" asks Eli.  Functionally, these sounds echo Samuel's prophecy: a warning coming to fruition. There are no true surprises--everything has its "herald", if we but learn to listen.

Intertextually, these wordless cries return us to the moment Moses descends Mount Sinai after the creation of the Golden Calf, to be greeted by wordless cries demanding interpretation:

"When Joshua heard the sound of the people in its boisterousness, he said to Moses, “There is a cry of war in the camp.
But he answered,
It is not the voice of those who scream in mastery, 
neither is it the voice of those who scream for being overcome: 
the voice of screaming do I hear.” (Exodus, 32: 17-18)

The linkage to the Golden Calf is illuminating. 

The Calf was created out of Israel's inability to deal with existential uncertainty--out of a need for safety, a desire for a god they could control. “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for we do not know what has happened to that man Moses" (Exodus 32: 1). The Golden Calf is God without the terrifying Otherness; the intermediary without the originator. 

This is a role that parallels that of the Ark of Covenant here: “Why did God put us to rout (nagaf) today before the Philistines?" the Israelites ask--the word "rout" n'g'f synonymous with "plague", suggesting a defeat by divine order. Yet rather than attempting to answer this question by turning to the terrifying, unknowable God of Knowings (as Hanna named Him), they decide to "fetch the Ark of the Covenant of God  from Shiloh, to be present among us and deliver us from the hands of our enemies.”

The identity of the savior here is ambiguous--is it God, or the intermediary Ark? 
The slipage becomes more pronounced in the reaction of the Philistines, who declare: "God has come to the camp!" making Him plural: "These are the same God who struck down Egypt..." The plurality that Hanna identified in God--whom she named Lord of Hosts;  Lord of Minds, multi-faceted and unknowable--is here reduced to an idolatrous merging of God with the "Ark of the Covenant of GOD of Hosts Enthroned on the Cherubim." The priests, Hofni and Pinhas, play a role parallel to that of their ancestor, Aaron, creator of the Golden Calf. Their "taking" of the Ark reflects Hofni and Pinhas's initial sin of seeking to force the divine: "Give it to me or I will take," they say, grabbing the gifts meant for God; reducing God's "hosts" (tzva'ot) to the women who "congegate" (tzovot) around Shilo, or to the literal Israelite and Philistine armies (tzvaot); 

The attempt to force and manipulate God via His tangible symbol becomes here the source of destruction. If the priests thought they could "take" the Ark at will, they leave it  to be taken. The wordless jubilation at the coming of the Ark, which echoed the wordless celebration of the Calf--becomes the screams of mourning at its taking--in a separation of the symbol from the symbolized. 

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Samuel 3: In Writing

It's only a matter of time, 
he says, till they try again. 
There may be a warning-- 
there may not. So just know.
Everybody says. 

Sun ricochets off the waves

and the siren begins

ereely unconstrained.


Bathers stampede towards the changing huts.

I crouch over my baby

tell the preschooler arms over her head


It's nothing, I say. Nothing

to fear. The wail dies.

See, not even a boom, I sooth.


These days, these weeks,

in a shark mouth

propped open with a stick 

ready to snap.


An egret scries the murkey water

then plungers, silver

flailing in her beak.


Two weeks till first grade,

two weeks till kindergarten

We balance at the soupy cusp

of the turning year.

Monday, August 18, 2025

Samuel: Chapter 3


 The fraught moment

Before

it all begins

it all ends


For full chapter, click here

This chapter continues where the previous one closed, reiterating and amplifying the prophecy regarding the fall of the House of Eli.

As in the previous chapter, Samuel and the sons of Eli are repeatedly juxtaposed, in an implicit yet insistent link. Every description of the sins of Eli's sons is bookended by descriptions of Samuel's virtue; Samuel here becomes Eli's "son", after the two biological sons fail so completely. He is the beloved usurper, stepping into the place of the rejected priests. In this chapter, Samuel's linkage with the destruction of Hofni and Pinhas becomes more explicit, as he actually speaks the words of doom. With the rise of the "naar" (youth) Samuel, Eli's "nearim" fall.      

Their fate was already been inscribed with the previous chapter's prophecy. What this chapter adds is the element of time. Samuel hears God speak "on that very day," and prophesies about "that very day" that will bring destruction that lasts "forever." A key word of the chapter is terem--before, not yet. The light of God has not yet gone out; Samuel has not yet heard God voice, he does not yet know God. We stand at the cusp, in the expectant before. The silence that precedes the storm that will end Eli; before Samuel regularly communes with God. 

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Samuel 2: In Writing

And the wind. The drifting bubbles

The kites with streamers

that soar and swoop and crash.


 The world perches on stilts

and likes to flip

off the tightrope

spanning the abyss–


fall down to the taut plain

balanced on posts

only to bounce up again. 


A costumed woman with a crown of stars

Turns in an undulating banner.

Behind her all things wind-driven and fragile:


Kites, crepe, whirligigs,

sugarfloss that melts to the tongue. 

a woman with a rainbow wrapped baby.


My baby runs between the shadows--

I will never wrap him again.

My daughter's keens as her string tangles

my son crying because the tassels tear,

because it flies

because it won't fly

because it falls.  

 

Walls disappear in a sudden gust 

that sends kites spinning. 

Hold on tight for the next turn

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Samuel: Chapter 2

 


You can be raised from the depths 

or plunged in free fall

in a world that perches on stilts


For full chapter, click here

Confession: I completed this drawing a lifetime ago--before the war with Iran started. I delayed photographing it because my grand plan of using both sides of the page hit a snag, as the notebook started to fall apart. I did not solve the notebook issue, but am now am trying to pick up the threads of my thought post-apocalypse, returning to the project. Again. 

Crisis. Restart. Crisis. Restart. This has become the pulse underlying Bibliodraw, and is perhaps appropriate for this chapter, which focuses on mutability--on a world in which all is conditional, and can be flipped in a moment. 

The chapter opens by returning to, and emphasizing, Chana's radical redefinition of prayer.  And Chana prayed , once again using the new reflexive term va-titpalal (ותתפלל). The chapter, through subtle wordplay, draws attention to this new word for prayer in 2:25: If someone sins against another person, God may intercede ((p'l'l ×¤×œ×œ, lit. "arbitrate" "judge" ); but if someone offends against GOD, who can intercede (יתפלל) ?” Prayer is now intimate, interactive, reflexive, connecting heart and mouth,  inside to outside. "My heart exhalts...my mouth opens wide". Hanna, through prayer, links to the intimacy of the "God of knowings" (el deot), who knows multiple minds, but is also multitudinous. 

Indeed, this is the essence of her thanksigving prayer: God is the anchor around which  "all acts are measured", yet his multitudinous means that the world is inherently unsteady, in flux. Everything can transform into its opposite, God containing both sides of the binary: the satiated may become hungry, the barren full, life and death, the netherworld and exhaltation, poor and noble, the humiliated and the proud  all can morph into each other. 

The chapter then proceeds to demonstrate this thesis, as Eli is given a prophecy about the coming fall of his dynasty: "I had intended for you and your father’s house to remain in My service forever. But now—declares GOD—far be it from Me!" Even the priesthood that was granted to Aaron as a gift that could not be questioned is not immutable. The foundational structures of the nation depend on the relationship to God. The "enduring house" will be reserved for a new, "fatheful" priest.  

It is within this fraught context that the idea of kingship is introduced. In a final departure from Judge's,  era "when there was no king in Israel, each did what was right in his own eyes" Hanna concludes her exhaltant prayer with the call: "God will judge the ends of the earth— / Giving power to the king, / And triumph to the anointed one." This call forshadows a new political era. Yet it also intimates that the king will not be the stabilizing force foreseen by Moses.  Rather, he will be part of the world of flux and revsersals, where even the greatest of gifts can be taken away by a God that judges the very "ends of the earth" allowing them to transform --ourobourous like-- into each other. 

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Samuel 1: In Writing

 There is heft to sadness

a hard brittleness to grief--

it etches the edges

of the unspoken

the black maw 

no sound can breach. 


Lips, teeth, tunneling

gullet. All the sloughed-

off selves.

Masticated

crushed and swallowed.

 

See me, I pray. 

Remember who

I am, when I

myself have forgotten. 

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Samuel: Chapter 1

 


Watch for the lips--the edges

where the bitter inside

pours forth 

See me, and remember.


For full chapter, click here

"There was a man...from the hill country of Ephraim"--the opening of this book echoes the opening of the final section of Judges, a perfect replica if not for the additional detail of the hometown of Rammatayim. Indeed, the chapter is dense with intertextual links to the closing of Judges, the juxtaposition acting as an implicit commentary. 

As in the case of Michah, the story of the "man" very quickly becomes a story about his relationship to women--in Judges, Micah's mother; here, Elkana's two wives. We are given two levels of reality: the official story of the "man", and the teaming complex story of the family. The House of God in Shilo--which animates the backdrop of Judges as the  option rejected by the Dannites, and as the home of the abducted dancing girls--here moves center stage. Now, for the first time, it plays the unifying role Moses envisioned, presented as a locus of pilgrimage miyamim yemima (another direct echo of the closing of Judges).  As in Judges, we have a story of barrenness, and the promise of a Nazarite from before conception, whose hair will never be touched by a razor.  As in the closing of Judges, this is a story that places vows at the center.

Yet these very similarities highlight the essential differences. 

If the closing of the Book of Judges utterly reduces women to their reproductive function, here, relationship is placed at the center: Penina has children, yet it is Hanna who is beloved, "though God had sealed her womb." "Am I not better to you than ten sons?" Elkana pleads. 

If vows, up to this point, have been the most potent expression of patriarchal control, with a father and husband given the right to undo a woman's vows, while men's vows act to suppress female freedom, here it is a woman who makes the vow--and her husband acquiesces. "Do what is good (tov) in your eyes," Elkana says--the very expression is a subtle variation of the closing refrain of Judges "each man did what was just (yashar) in his eyes." From a "man's" search for justice, we move to a woman's search for "good".

At the center of this chapter is an act of prayer--one utterly different than what we have seen before. In the Book of Judges, the nation screams and weeps to God, at times with implicit blame. Hanna, by contrast, engages in an initiate conversation. From the "bitterness of her soul", she is mitpalel--the first use of the reflexive form that eventually became the standard Hebrew word for prayer: to intercede/ judge oneself. The reflexive act implies that this conversation acts not only on God, but on Hanna's deeper self. "Hanna was speaking to her heart", discovering her own interiority and "hard spirit." "Her lips moved, but her voice was not heard" outwardly--only within. See me, she pleads. "Remember me, do not forget." 

If in the story of the concubine, speaking to a girl's "heart" implies manipulation and coercion, here it becomes an act of intimacy and strength. If Jephtha is destructively committed to the "utterings of his mouth," here the vow remains outwardly unuttered, existing as an internal promise. 

This act of prayer is so radically new, Eli, the high priest, does not know what to make of it, mistaking it for intoxication. "No, my lord. A woman of hard spirit am I,"  Hanna responds with quiet strength. This prayer is not an act of imbibing, but rather of pouring fourth. And Eli recognizes her authority, granting her request.  

If the closing of Judges depicts widening ripples of dissolution--from family, to tribe, to nation--this chapter presents an opposing movement: a growing interiority, reflected in a supportive relationship, which ripples outward to impact the House of God.

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Hello to the Book of Samuel

 It's been a strange few weeks. War ranging, inside and out.  A sense of dissolution as dark and grotesque as the final chapters of Judges. And then, I was suddenly struck with Bell's Palsey, one side of my face freezing in place. A literal embodiment of a world out of wack.

Within a day it was clear that this was unpleasant rather than dangerous, but scary it is. I found myself in and out of doctors' offices. Luckily, there is an office supply store right below the specialist clinic,with notebooks on special sale. On my way to the neurologist, I found a small square one, which became my Omer project, a small shred of sanity. And on my way to the eye doctor, I found a ractangualar one, which will become the next chapter of Bibliodraw. Drawing by drawing, day by day, we keep going. 


 As  i came to the closing of Judges, I was struck by the intese intertextual dialogue with the Book of Numbers: from the configuartion of the tribes, to the laws of vows and inheritence, and the relationship of fathers to daughters, Judges is in some ways a translation of Numbers and its in the desert (the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bamidbar) encampment to the new in the land context.

In moving from Joshua to Judges, I focused on the continuity between Judges and Joshia by using a shared medium of markers. For this new book, I will rather emphasize the link to Numbers by returning to the use of ink, and the 2-page structure. Yet to emphasize the change, and create a continuity between Judges and Samuel, I will replace the monochrome with the Judges pallet of brown-red and blue.


Here's to new beginings.

    

Monday, March 31, 2025

Goodbye to Judges

This has been a book like no other. 

I returned, after a long hiatus, to begin again against the backdrop of war. To work through this book at a time of loss, of chaos and confusion, of dilemmas with no clear answers, every choice murky. 

The Book of Judges became a touchstone. Over the course of this long Bibliodraw project, my pace has gradually slowed. I began with learning, drawing and writing in a single day; then I split the various aspects among different days, so it took 3 days per chapter. Now, with this new start, it could take weeks. Yet throughout these weeks, my mind kept mulling the chapter, so that Judges permeated my days. The written sections changed tone: rather than dealing directly with the text, they turned personal, exploring its intersection with my life. The Book of Judges offers little comfort in this tumultuous time, but it does offer parallels through its archetypal enactment of confusion. This is a book of identity in crisis, of sporadic and broken leadership, of a nation lost, with each doing "what seems right in his own eyes." 

Now I sit between missile attacks and try to review, after book and world together descended to violent self-sparagmos. 

In my analysis of the opening chapter of Judges, I wrote “we move from the individual to the tribe.” In retrospect, this formulation is inaccurate. The focus is tribal, true--but the tribes have always been there, throughout the desert journey: the census was carried out by tribe, ; the Mishkan was inaugurated by the tribal chieftains, the journeys through the desert were taken in tribal formation, each of the spies represented a tribe. The tribes have always been the building blocks of the nation. 

What has changed here is the disappearance of the broader network. In the desert, the tribes were held within the tight national framework of the mahane, of the desert encampment. All were placed around the Ohel Moed--the Tent of Meeting, or Tent of Witnessing, that could refer both to the Mishkan and to Moses’ personal tent. There was one clear leader and one locus of connection to the divine. Each had a set place in a spatial enactment of national interactions. 

Moses foresaw that this tight framework would disappear once the people dispersed to the far-flung tribal allotments. Much of his final address in Deuteronomy revolves around how to create a parallel structure to the Mehane once Israel is embedded in its Land. The Mishkan will be recreated in the “place that God will choose.” Not only a center in place, it will also become a marker in time, as the people will converge there three times a year. The Levite cities, scattered throughout various tribal holdings, will create a vital network connecting the tribes to each other and to the Mishkan. Local courts will also converge, all leading to the one chosen “place".

Judges moves not from individual to tribe, but rather from national encampment to tribal diffusion. 

The transition away from the Mahane begins in the Book of Joshua, which charts the movement away from the cohesive encampment to the new existence in the Land. As we were with Moses, we will be with you…, the tribal leaders promise Joshua.  The "boy Joshua who never left [Moses'] tent" still draws on his teacher's authority, linking the people back to that unifying Meeting/Witnessing.  With the land not yet allotted to individual tribal estates, the people still live in a semi-encapment, with the “elders” and priests readily available. The battles are national battles, fought by all the tribes together, and involve the open presence of the divine. Joshua and Caleb, as sole survivors of the generation of the Exodus, provide a line of continuity, embodying the journey from slavery to the promised land.

As Joshua’s death approaches, he recognizes that he must establish the infrastructure to integrate coming generations. He apportions the Levite cities as Moses mandated. He calls the people together in a final address, narrating their national history and identity. Israel are also cognizant of the coming dissolution, terrified that the nation may fall apart.  The erection of the altar of witness is to serve as a reminder of shared destiny as the people become anchored in their land rather than in the travelling presence of God-within-their-midst.

The Book of Judges opens as all the briges to the encampment disappear: Joshua is dead. So too the elders. The generation has passed, and the people have scattered to their different estates. The tribes are now unmoored from the overarching structure that gave them meaning and placement, and begin to act as agents in their own right. Caleb, the last link to Moses and his encampment, begins the next stage of the conquest--but this time he is defined not as a representative of his generation, but rather of his tribe. Judah shall go up first.

A book about tribes unmoored is also a book about unmoored fathers and sons, and burgeoning Oedipal tensions. For the tribe is the most patrilineal of structures, defined soley "by their father's house." Those who lack a paternal affiliation--from the "son of an Isralite woman"  who blasphemed back in the desert, to the illegitimate Abimelekh and the alienated Jephthah--are left on the margins. 

The primary Oedipal struggle of this book is between the rejected parental God and his rebellious children. Again and again, the Israelites "do not remember" God, symbolically killing their shared history; again and again, God storms against his ungrateful children, abandoning them to their enemies. This primal struggle is refracted in the lives of the individual Judges, from Gideon, who kills his father's scared bull, to Abimelekh, who murders his father's children, to Jephthah, who is banished from his father's home, to the wayward Samson, who is at last "gathered to his father" and the father-seeking Micah. 

The submerged counter-current running beneath this patrilinear framework is the relationship to daughters. The opening story of Ahsa, lifted almost verbatim from Joshua, reads very differently in this new context, as it creates a frame structure with the story of the Isralite daughters that closes this book: Caleb promises his daughter's hand to the conqueror of Debir; the tribes of Israel deny their daughters' hands to Benjamin. Punctuating this overarching narrative of marriage and its denial is the story of Jephthah, who does not allow his daughter to marry at all, so that she “mourns her virginity”.

 For daughters are a destabilizing force, threatening the parilinear tribe and estate. 

Ahsa’s demand of her father places the issue of inheritance front and center. Immediately when Moses introduces the laws of inheritance, he hits this snag, as the daughters of Tzolfhad come to demand their father’s share in the absence of sons. In counter argument, their tribe protests that female inheritance will destroy the boundaries of the tribal allotment, as the land will eventually be transferred to the husband's family,  The solution: to limit women’s marriage. The daughters of Tzolfhad must marry only within their tribe. For the unification of tribe and land to work, daughters' marriages must be controlled and curtailed.

And just as daughters are the wildcard in tribal structure, breaking the boundaries of the allotment, so too are they a wildcard in language: women break the ridgid--and viselike--validity of vows. The laws of vows--like the laws of inheritence--are introduced with a built-in contradiction: a father--and later a husband--may undo a woman's vow, and "God will forgive her." 

"When a man vow a vow to God... he shall not hollow his words; he shall do according to all that proceeds from his mouth" God declares, an act if imitato dei and faithfulness that on the surface seems commendable. Yet in practice, as this book repeatedly demonstrates, giving such weight to the "proceeds" of a fallible mouth is dangerous and destructive. Jephthah cuts off his future; Israel wipes out a city, and almost eradicates an entire tribe. Without an ability to change the mind (nahem) there can be no comfort (nehama). 

Women, in the few instances their voices break through, offer a more fluid and dynamic language model. Achsa speaks the first line of direct dialogue; Deborah sings; Yael cajoles and seduces; Jephthah's daughter and her friends lament; Micah's mother curses, then switches it to blessing.

There are times when the rigid boundaries of oaths and promises are not enough--as God Himself discovers.  For Israel to survive, it must discover a different language. The repeated covenants between God and Israel all clearly demarcate the curses that come with faithlessness. “If you forsake God and serve alien gods, He will turn and deal harshly with you and make an end of you” Joshua warns. And indeed, after Israel breaks their vows and serve every other god but God, the end seems nigh. "No, I will not rescue you again," says God. The promise will be upheld, regardless of cost.

Yet at the very moment, there comes a wildcard, as unpredictable as a woman's fluid vow and inheritance. God, as it were, discovers, almost despite Himself,that the relationship runs deeper than vows-- a life-breath connecting Him and Israel, breaking all boundaries. His nefesh (soul, breath) "cannot stand Israel's miseries." Like a mother with a tantruming child,  God relents. 

To survive, the remnants of the tribe of Benjamin must also break the rigid boundaries of tribal identity. By stealing wives from Shilo, locus of the "house of God," they become a kind of hybrid-tribe. They have ingested the women's wildcard, and begin to rebuild what was destroyed. 

The final section of the Book of Judges brings together the destabilizing forces running through this turbulent transitional era. Here, there is no external enemy to blame. The breakdowns are all internal and emphasize the failure to move the mahane structure into the Land. Rather than a centralized "place that God will choose", there are multiple houses of God: Micah's small temple is later transplanted to the Dannite holding, which remains in force until God's Temple is destroyed, and the "land is exiled." The Levites, far from acting like a connective tissue, are opportunistic and alianted, The city of Geva's Sodom-like attack on strangers demonstrates how far the national structure has unraveled: the Levite's contention that he is going to the "House of God" does not awaken any sense of shared destiny among the Benjimanites. There is no King in Israel--missing also is the final unifying component named by Moses in his description of the future Isralite society: you shall appoint a king over you. 

Yet when the tribes attempts to act as a mahane, and recreate the national structure, they are crude and one -dimensional. If the Mahane held the entire nation together in a carefully balanced structure, the new national structure is based on exclusion and punishment.  The people call themselves "God's assembly," but He is not at the center. 

It is no accident that the protagonists in these final dark stories are all outliers to the tribal structure: the fatherless Micah; the landless Dannites who remain "encamped"; the volatile Levites, who are scattered throughout the other tribes; the voiceless concubine. The implication is that these outsiders must somehow be integrated into the national structure--or they will lead to its dissolution. The answer to the problems of inheritance are not to limit women's marriage and language, but rather to find a way to integrate its freedom, a countervoice of covenant.