Notes from Online Jewish Writing Camp . . .

It's menucha again, rest hour, and I'm taking a few minutes to share about what we read and thought about and wrote today while learning about haiku and psalms.

We read, "You Can't Be a Jew Alone," by David Ebenback
These days cables and cell towers collect our prayers
and carry them to all the places - a mourner’s
inbox, a grandmother’s ear against the phone,
a small white office where a rabbi
leads online services.
Does it make any difference to the prayers,
which are used to traveling underground
or getting caught in the arms of trees?
Still sometimes we hold our prayers
in the vault of a synagogue, together. And sometimes
we cry them out in a bedroom, all alone,
and they go under a pillow.
Does it make any difference to G-d?
who didn’t invent prayer anyway, and to whom
the whole world buzzes like that - 
like power lines or cicadas hungry on the branch?


We talked about the imagery, the ways Ebenbach uses language to create pictures we can feel. We thought about the difference between the 'branches' of trees and the 'arms' of trees. We spent a lot of time with the prayers going under our pillows and held in vaults . . . and with the cicadas.

Then before each writing our own, we wrote haiku poems together inspired by Ebenbach's poem. I'll share a few of them. If you'd like, look back at the original poem and see if you can find what inspired them.

every thirteen years
cicadas emerge to pray
in trees together

birds, rocks, books, shells, dust
collecting tchotchkes, making
kugel close by, yum

we hold our prayers
in the vault of a synagogue
praying together

our prayers travel on
the world's buzz or the wind's breath
no difference to God

When we turned to learning about psalms, we learned about parallelism (Give ear, my people, to my teaching, turn your ear to what I say. Psalm 78:1) - and chaism [kai-asm] (all for one and one for all OR you can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the girl). We gave Psalm 42 an overview read, and then watched and listened to this response to Psalm 42 on Bim Bam. It's beautiful, of course I chose it so I'm biased, but I really recommend watching the 2 1/2 minutes of it.

We talked about God.
We talked about prayer.

And then we wrote a Psalm together.


A Jewish Writing Camp Psalm
by Rabbi Amy Josefa Ariel and the 2025 Jewish Writing Camp Writers

God, we think about You.

When we think about how big and small the world is, about how many people are thinking and feeling at the same time, about the burning bush, about our Torah stories, we think about You.

We aren’t all sure if you are here or not here.
There, or not there.
We think about Him.
We think about Her.
We think about You.
And many of us don’t know what to think.

We don’t think about You when we are doing math
but
we know Albert Einstein did, and
fractals, the geometric figures in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, making the random and chaotic make some kind of sense
and beautiful
our rabbi says, “Mah rabu ma’asecha, Adonai”
so math at least in this one way makes her think of You. 

It’s hard for us to think about You,
and it’s hard for us not to think about You.

Some of us think You are the whole point,
and some of us think You can’t be the point at all.
Maybe it’s true: sad and horrible things happen because
that’s just part of being human and something we need to
figure out,
but
that answer doesn’t work for all of us.
When something is unfair, hard, or truly awful,

Where are You?

Some of Us think you are involved with Our lives,
and some of Us think you can’t be.
Maybe it’s true, that you got it all started and sat back
and now it’s up to Us,
or maybe you count each of the hairs on Our heads,
and hear every word We tuck under Our pillows,
it’s just
there isn’t an answer that works for all of Us.
How can all of Our ideas be true?

It’s hard for Us not to think about You,
and it’s hard for Us to think about You.

We don’t think about you when We are doing word problems,
mathematical exercises presented as verbal descriptions
of situations
requiring the application of operations to numerical data within the text to
solve a question.
Math may not make Us think of you, but
you make Us think of math. 

We know what to think,
We don’t know what to think,
We pray anyway.
To him.
To her.
To you.
Even when We don’t know how.

We think about you in Our Torah stories, at the burning bush, when We remember that there are so many of Us, so many people, thinking and feeling at the same time, because the world is so small, and so big.

We hope you think about Us, too.