The Tzedakah Box

Preface

Many years ago—without knowing anything about its significance in the Jewish religious tradition—I purchased a small, elegantly carved wooden tzedakah box. I bought it simply because it was beautiful—a smooth, richly grained sphere that filled the palm of my hand, topped by a carved Star of David screw-on lid inlaid with golden Hebrew letters meaning “charity,” and a one-inch slot on top through which coins (or folded paper) could be inserted.

I later learned that “tzedakah” literally means “righteousness” and refers to “giving charity.” It is a mitzvah or commandment in Judaism— not an optional or “bonus” act of virtue, but an ethical obligation that is simply “right and just,” based on the premise that none of life’s gifts is truly “ours.” Rather, they all belong to God, who has entrusted them to us—and to whom we must return them through a sharing and redistribution to the world, in whatever way God wishes.

I began to fill this little wooden tzedakah box with tiny slips of paper, each containing a single word or phrase as a “prompt” for remembering some gifted moment or intense experience of my life. It was gradually stuffed full of over 200 slips of folded paper that became poetry prompts. Over the years I have randomly drawn out these slips of paper and written a poem for each of them, finally reaching the bottom of the small round wooden barrel on the eve of my 60th birthday.

This book holds the contents of that tzedakah box, open at last for “redistributing” the gifts of my life—its joys and sorrows, hits and misses—by offering them now in this form. As a sort of “homage of gratitude” for my sixty years, I had considered including in this collection 180 poems: three groups of sixty each. Then I happened to read that in the Jewish practice of tzedakah, charity is usually given in multiples of “18,” which is the numerical value of the word “LIFE” in Hebrew ( “chai” )—with 180 considered a generous tzedakah, for it is “Ten times chai!”

I was thrilled by this little revelation—perfectly serendipitous and confirming—just like the moment-to-moment thrill of Life itself, when our eyes and ears are open. May the merit of this tzedakah be a blessing. L’chaim!

Waiting
Mortality coils at my door
displaced in this green
Spring
Poised to strike, then unfurling
lazily, full length
to lounge across my
threshold,
biding time watchfully,
in mock unconcern
for our coming
kiss.

Prayer
Resting
in the space between
the breaths
Nesting
in the space between
my breasts
Finding You
at last in my heart-home
knowing to the bone
that I am not alone.
In the space between the breaths:
cricket chirps, phone rings
leaf falls, sparrow sings
water drops, clock chimes
dog barks, poet rhymes
cell divides, car crashes
flame ignites, lightning flashes
in the space between
the breaths
worlds are born
from my small dying
with no fixed reference point, into
You.

Favorite Shoes
How can they be my favorites
That so rarely appear
At the end of my legs?
Yet they stomp, sassy, into my memory
When you ask what I like best to wear:
Ostrich leather, pecan colored
Pointed-toe cowboy boots!
Oh my, what a far cry
These big boys are from every other voice
In my storied, studied, indoor,
Pale-skinned scholarly world.
Like Valentines
They show up only in February—
Rodeo month—and even then,
Not every year.
Only in those loverly years
When my heart is two-stepping,
Beat-skipping, sassy-stomping, romancing
Some sweet filly fatale.

Look
From the second story library window
I got a glimpse of treetops
realizing
crape myrtles’ biggest burst of blooms
are fuchsia facing the open sky glory
uninhibited fearless of pruning
widely welcoming the sun
in a mutual mirrored melody of
into-me-see
What’s going on up here with God
while we walk down-gazing on
the ground-scattered petrified
pastel-pink piled papery petals?
Before making a decision about anything
come upstairs to this window and
look.

Haiku: A Waterfall
Drenched in Love’s flood we
travel entwined to the bed’s
desert side, laughing

Aging BodyMind
(or, What in God’s Name is Happening?)
The I Am of my three and four year old
remained at ten and twelve,
endured the teens and twenties,
persisted through midlife;
The same I AM will usher in decrepitude
offer a chair to diminishment,
a lemonade to dementia, perhaps,
or a salute to senility.
Already gravity is tolling bells for falling flesh—
the ageless I AM watching wonderingly,
its awareness a steady youthful glow
beneath the rubble of this aging bodymind,
saying to moving parts as they tumble toward the tomb:
“Tell them I AM sent you,” *
and I AM walks you home from here.
* Exodus 3:14

A Wild Blue Hope
Today Great Nature stopped me to show
there is yet a wild blue hope
pushing through the concrete layers
of power-hardened hearts
There is yet a blossoming promise
of impossible beauty
and wet blooming life amid the
petrified fossils of greed
There is yet a ripening
green justice and fecund future
against all odds of the
boulders and bastions of arrogant privilege
There is yet a fertile force in the
bedrock, deeper, stronger and greater
than the concrete layers of
manufactured selves
There is yet a wild blue hope

The Trip
In this world we’re
living out of a suitcase, you know.
Not filling the drawers,
I’ve mixed and matched
my few outfits for variety
but lately simplified all
to one clean uniform.
Keeping the closets empty
and my bag light enough to carry,
I wait for my ride,
making friends with
the Ticket Agent.
Whether eighty years or longer
it’s still a short trip,
a quick, red-eye turnaround.
Then Home
for a long leisurely unpacking
of love.

By the fire . . .
sweatered with chill,
in the white Adirondacks
on the circle-pit grill
with twisted clothes hangers
we roasted marshmallows
blackened crispy burnt, red-glowing
flame-blowing the sticky hot sugar melt
overflowing our lips with the gooey inside
of one giant bite of these
such-sharply-charred soft sweets
puffing out our autumn cheeks
Had anything ever tasted this good
in the popping of smoky cedar wood?

Electronics
Now that Left and Right have
polarized to the furthest ends
of the measurable spectrum
we’re living off the grid
in the wild and woolly hinterlands
of vigilante justice:
all caravans of chaos
all wagons of wariness circled
against the “others”
all posses galloping,
both the Red and the Blue,
toward the opposite extremes
that will one day meet on the
other side of this little burning
snow globe we’ve fouled.
Fully armed in electronics
smart phones in hand, tablets booted
cable news and social media vomiting forth
their hot toxic lava
the bile of hyperbolic language
the breaking news that has broken us
all to pieces and poisoned our wells
with fear on every side
There on the meeting ground
of extremities—be it Rumi’s field
or Armageddon’s plain—
we will face our enemies, our selves,
at the lake of purple rain.
There will all our devices mingle, in
gasping bubbles, to sink as one
and Isaiah’s cry can sound the rise
of a peace-loving nation
where we shall “draw water joyfully
from the springs of salvation.”