The Yeshiva Fades From Recollection
The yeshiva fades from recollection
and in the spaces of memory where voices are stored,
the rabbis of my youth chant questions and answers,
as they swim through the Talmud.
And when I have fallen —
there is the image of the head rabbi,
his disciples assimilated in a circle of dance,
until he, too, slowly and deliberately
asserts his inheritance,
closes his eyes, gives his arms to the air,
and movement by movement
departs and returns to this world.
And what is it that I have ignored,
that has brought me here,
only to watch the others dance?
Yehoshua November’s work was recently selected as the winner of Prairie Schooner’s Bernice Slote Award for emerging writers. His poems are forthcoming in New Works Review, Provincetown Arts, Zeek, Poetica and European Judaism.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
