People of the Book: Faculty Rabbi Wendy Zierler Weaves Hebrew Poetry About Grief with Personal Reflections on Jewish Mourning

The experience of grief in multiple layers and dimensions is the subject of the forthcoming book Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry (Jewish Publication Society October 2025) by Rabbi Wendy Zierler, Ph.D., the Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College. Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Zierler illuminates her own literary and personal Jewish mourning journey following the death of both her parents in one year, and her experience teaching a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and wrestling with God.

Zierler's previous books include Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation (SUNY Press, 2017) and of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women's Writing (Wayne State UP, 2004), as well as several edited books, and many articles in the fields of Jewish literature, and Jewish Gender Studies. We reached her at her office in New York to talk about her latest book, and how her students can benefit from the subject matter.

Going Out with Knots illuminates your personal mourning journey in the form of a memoir, but it is also an examination of the Jewish aspects of grieving, and your literary experience of it. How did this book come to be, and take on the structure that it did?

Wendy Zierler: The process did not start with me thinking that I was writing a book. In the aftermath of my father being struck and killed in a parking lot by a distracted truck driver, I was added to the regular rotation in our synagogue where every day at the end of morning services, someone gives a brief class, a little dvar Torah, so that they can add on an extra Rabbi's Kaddish to the end of services. And I said to them, okay, I'm willing to do this, but I need to do it in my own idiosyncratic way. Given the betwixt and between of my life as someone who lives in the Orthodox community, but whose career has been dedicated to the Reform community, I knew that this mourning process was going to be a little challenging. And I knew that I was going to have to add some sort of variation, and so what I proposed early on was that I would do a class where I chose a modern Hebrew poem, I translated it, and then used it to present a teaching about grieving, and about the liturgy and prayers. That's how this all started.

Not long after your initiative got underway, more waves of grief followed that would further shape the project. Tell us about that.

WZ: Five days before the end of what would have been the Kaddish for my dad - five days short of 11 months - my mom died. And then 6 weeks after my mother died, the COVID pandemic hit. And that affected the class that I had been giving every week. I knew that there were a lot of people that weren't going to be able to come to synagogue anymore. So, instead of it just being an oral thing, I started writing down everything that I taught each week and thinking about turning all of it into a book. Originally, I figured that the book was going to be comprised of a long memoiristic introduction talking about my mourning experience in the context of COVID, some of my issues as a feminist in an Orthodox congregation, and how it all happened to coincide with my training for rabbinical ordination, and then just a series of the poem readings in the order in which they were presented, covering the journey of my mourning through these poem readings. But then, with the help and prodding of Joy Weinberg, my editor at JPS, it became much more self-consciously a memoir, with the story of my mourning experience woven through each of their poem readings.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a different modern Hebrew poet. How does that structure illustrate your experience and understanding of grief?

WZ: Each chapter, featuring a different poet, is meant to capture a different stage in my Kaddish and personal experience. The idea was to lean into the modern language and themes of the poems, and model, in a way, an alternative modern liturgy. These poems were a way for me to highlight material outside the classical liturgical canon, that could add women's voices, express some of the doubts I was experiencing in the face of these losses, and show what it means at a certain point not to believe, even though you're there in the synagogue as a mourner, and you're somehow included. And that's why it became pretty organic to actually weave the whole memoir through the poetry.

How did you decide which poets were important for you to include? What was the process?

WZ: I would choose a poet and live with that poet for, say, 5-6 months, and see what I could find in the entire corpus that would be responding to things that came up. In some instances, I was responding to COVID, and the fact that we were praying outside on the deck of our synagogue, or we were on Zoom, or we were finally back in the sanctuary. In other cases, I was responding to George Floyd, or to a hurricane that happened that week. I would choose a poet where I had an inkling that the sensibility and the voice were what the congregation and I both needed.

I began with Lea Goldberg, perhaps the first really canonical Hebrew woman poet - before that there has been the poet Rachel [Rachel Bluwstein, known in Hebrew as Rahel ha-Meshoreret], but it took a long time for people to take her work seriously. Goldberg was not only a poet but also a playwright, novelist, children's book author, visual artist, university professor, and an editor at a major publishing house, so she was up there with the big guys. I began with her poem "To My Mother's Portrait," as a way to address my relationship with my mother after my father's passing and what it meant to move her to Riverdale, my neighborhood in New York, after living in different cities basically my entire adult life. Lea Goldberg lost her father at an early age, first to a terrible mental illness, and then when she and her mother immigrated to Palestine together. Her mother lived with her, and they had a very intense bond, and so I kind of saw myself in that configuration of the relationship. It was also important to me to start with a woman poet, in a synagogue where there's not a single word in the traditional prayer book written by a woman.

From there, I went to Yehuda Amichai, who is the reason why I started studying Hebrew literature to begin with. His work has these moments of domesticity that are elevated to spiritual experiences. And that seemed to fit very well with the COVID period, where all of our houses basically became synagogues because all the synagogues were closed. And then I moved to the next poet, Avram Halfi, a poet I love, who is lesser known to American audiences. I wanted people to know about him and his iconoclastic spirituality for people to know about him. He was this poet who claimed to be an atheist, and yet he was always praying to God. He had poems called "Heretic's Prayer," and he wrote about the footsteps of God that you can never find, and I was keen to give expression to the kind of doubt and protest and skepticism that arise when one experiences loss. Death presents a theological crisis, insofar as we pattern God after our parents, and we call God a parent. If you lose a parent, it is a kind of very visceral experience of losing a god concept. Other poets in the book include Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo, the first modern Hebrew women poet, the previously mentioned Rachel Bluwstein, and my former HUC colleague Ruhama Weiss.

The October 7 attacks that took place as you were working on this book brought about a process of grief that was not only familial, but communal and global for the Jewish people. How did that affect your project?

WZ: It became impossible to write anything about Israeli poetry without addressing October 7 in some way. The Introduction of my book now begins with an analysis of a short story that Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in the aftermath of the attacks, called "Kavanah" ("Intention"). When I interviewed the author at HUC in the Berkshires in 2024, he talked about the experience that led him to write the story - a post October 7 conversation he had with his sister, who is ultra-Orthodox, who told him that the main thing she was doing in the wake of the attack was praying, a lot. Etgar responded to that conversation by setting out to write a story from the point of view of someone like his sister, who was doing nothing but "praying and praying and praying." Upon writing it, he realized that writing the story was his way of praying, at a time when he was grappling with that huge tragedy. Hearing that story, I realized that my teaching this class and my writing this book was my way of trying to pray my way back to some sense of wholeness after my own experiences of multiple losses and disruptions that came one after another - death, more death, COVID, and October 7.

My book also ends with a discussion of a poem that deals with trying to turn pain into something else: Kadur Min ha-Tzaʿar ("Ball out of the Pain") by Amir Gilboa, a secular Hebrew poet versed in classical Jewish sources and well-versed in the traumas of war. Tza'ar means pain, and the word kadur in Hebrew can translate either as a ball or as a bullet, or as a pill. So the work is about a writer using his poetry to take pain and turn it into either a weapon, a remedy, or a form of play. Arming ourselves, but also healing ourselves. That poem, in a way, became an emblem for everything I was trying to do in this book: reading and explication of poems as a kind of kadur.

In addition to the weekly class at your synagogue that you have been giving on this material that led to this book, how have you brought the material to your students at Hebrew Union College?

WZ: My students get added to my email distribution list, so they all receive the weekly essay that I write, and thus have been part of the process. And it's not just the students, it's some of the faculty, too. After working on this project for six years, I applied for a grant to an organization known as the Israel Institute that encourages university professors in the U.S. and around the diaspora to teach about Israel. I got a grant from them to do a class on Israeli poetry that I'll be offering in the spring at Hebrew Union College.

What do your teaching and research, in general and about the subjects in this book in particular, demonstrate about what Hebrew Union College makes possible for Jewish scholars?

WZ: This book directly demonstrates the unique thing we're trying to do here, where we work to take scholarship and modern creativity, and marry it with religious life. I don't think that this book could have come into being if not for the fact that I had been exposed to the creativity of Reform Judaism and its liturgy. It's just a regular, everyday thing in tefilah at Hebrew Union College for people to bring in secular poetry or different kinds of music. Now, there's a part of me that likes the traditional liturgy and its connectedness to the past. As somebody who lives between worlds, I am keenly aware of the strengths of both of my communities, and by implication, that also means I'm aware of the limitations or the gaps. And so, I'm trying in both of the communities I live in to thread a needle where I'm connecting tradition, feminism, and creativity to Torah and prayer.

My students are hungry for this kind of thing, and I get a chance to model for them how modern literature can be used in their rabbinate. I get to demonstrate to them how important it is to be able to interact with this material in the original - most of what I wrote about was not available in translation; I translated it. So, translation is a theme in this book. So I'm able to show this to my students, to push and prod them to develop the ability to do this themselves. As rabbis, they are going to be called upon to translate Judaism for their students, and they ought not have to rely on other people's translations. Our students have to build those skills to make Jewish text and scholarship meaningful in people's lives.