This book caught my attention today and I couldn’t put it down. Plunked down my little piece of plastic and carried the irresistible treasure back to Brooklyn. It’s called: Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky. Translated from the German by Christine Lo. Beautifully…
daily kaddish: for the islands
A response to Mira’s kaddish for the islands slipping into the sea.
another kaddish for japan’s daughters and sons: on scale-slipping and tragedy
A kaddish for all the sons and daughters Japan has lost and will continue losing in the aftermath of this devastation, whose enormous universal scale I cannot comprehend, whose personal scale is also enormous in its minute detail. On how we use scale-slipping to cope with tragedy. A reply to Mira’s kaddish one daughter at a time.
daily kaddish: for a lump of clay
Mira’s beautiful post from this morning about winter struck a nerve with me.
I marvel at her ability to celebrate rebirth, welcome surprises, and plan to keep molding her lump of clay. I usually feel that way myself—I’m having a great life, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of it plays out. But today I find myself wanting to bake my lump of clay hard, in this lovely shape it has today not wanting surprises.
I know she’s right. That’s not how this lifetime works, and I need to go on molding and rolling with the surprises.
So this is a kaddish for a lump of clay.
a kaddish for winter
I’ve been thinking about rebirth a lot, lately and wondering why. All that rebirth stuff — I’ve always thought of it as merely wishful thinking, codified into religious precepts, to ease the mind regarding inescapable misery. Rebirth, opiate of the masses. Or something like that. Rebirth, the place we put our hopes and dreams. Next…
daily kaddish: fluegelhorn shabbes
The end of a long week arrives and I’m in no mood to play a long, slow, mournful Kaddish, so instead I break out the fluegelhorn and toss off a playful Kaddish to kick off Shabbes.
eulogy for my father
Quite a number of people have told me how moved they were by the words I spoke at the my father’s funeral. Some asked for copies of what I said. Still others asked to hear those words for the first time when they read reference to it in an obit somewhere. I don’t think I…
daily kaddish: n&g, 4th draft, for mira’s birthday
[powerpress] The fourth draft of a kaddish layered with Mira reading her adaptation of Dodi Li to G and N’s poem to me, with congratulations to Mira on her birthday.
daily kaddish: elizabeth taylor
[powerpress]
our “kaddish in two-part harmony” podcast is live!
We’ve finally made the necessary arrangements with ASCAP so that we can run a public, free podcast of the daily “Kaddish” recordings. As of today, all our daily Kaddish recordings are linked directly in this blog as “daily kaddish: [title]” posts that have an embedded Media Player, and you can subscribe to “beitmalkhut.org” in the iTunes Music Store at You can now subscribe to our daily “kaddish in two-part harmony” podcast in the iTunes music store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/beitmalkhut-org/id427553603.