As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7, and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavannot will focus on Israeli poetry and music.

Israeli poet Dan Pagis arrived in pre-State Israel in 1946, having spent much of his adolescence in Nazi concentration camps. With that particularly Israeli blend of Biblical knowledge and modern sensibilities, he wrote perhaps his best-known poem: “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.”

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

Published in 1970, it was haunting then – and still now. So, when I saw a poem by modern Israeli poet Yochai Shalom Hadad making the rounds, it took my breath away. Entitled “Written In My Family WhatsApp Group,” it reads (translation is mine, so are any errors):

here in this burned-out safe room
i am eve, with abel my son
if you see my first-born, cain, son of man
tell him that

one
of my two eyes
avenged

I have read this poem over and over since first seeing it, circulating around amongst beloveds in Israel.

I think of our communal tradition of reciting Eicha each and every year on Tisha B’Av, reading gruesome and brutal words of destruction and loss and exile. I think about our people’s collection of Kinot, dirges and elegies largely written during the time of the Crusades and the Inquisition – also often recited on Tisha B’Av. I think of a piece written by Josie Glausiusz, a science journalist currently living in Israel. She explained that as her son was dying of brain cancer, she started – of course – a WhatsApp group, calling it “Poetry Is Medicine.” She writes: “I had found, during earlier crises, that the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot.”

This is a week, this is a time of anxiety and crisis, of destruction and loss and a sense of uprootedness. Perhaps, we can–with prayer and song and poetry and community–find strength, comfort, and glimmers of hope.

— Rabbi Sari Laufer