Local poet and author Joy Ladin recently released her tenth book of poetry entitled “Shekhinah Speaks.”
In Jewish tradition, the Shekhinah is imagined as a passive, silent presence which represents the feminine side of God. However, in this collection, Ladin samples language from the Book of Isaiah and Cosmopolitan magazine to envision a Shekhinah who never stops talking and allows readers to become aware of their existence in this world.
Zydalis Bauer spoke with Ladin to learn more.
Hear Ladin read an excerpt from Shekhinah Speaks in a digital exclusive clip.
Read the full transcript:
Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: Local poet and author Joy Ladin has released her 10th book of poetry entitled “Shekinah Speaks.”
In Jewish tradition, the Shekinah is imagined as a passive, silent presence, which represents the feminine side of God. However, in this collection, Ladin samples language from the Book of Isaiah and Cosmopolitan magazine to envision a Shekinah who never stops talking and allows readers to become aware of their existence in this world.
I spoke with Ladin to learn more.
Joy Ladin, Poet/Author: “Shekinah Speaks” refers to the Shekinah, who, in Jewish tradition, particularly in Jewish mystical tradition, refers to the female aspect of divinity.
So, Jews don’t believe that God has a body or fits into human categories. But nonetheless, I think most people who are Jewish or Christian are familiar with the way God usually gets gendered as male.
So, what they started to do is they went back to a verb in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Exodus that referred to God dwelling among the Israelites in the encampment — shekhin is the verb — and they said, “Yes, there’s an aspect of God which is the divine presence, the Shekinah. It’s a female verb.”
And first, the gender wasn’t a big deal, it was more about the imminence of God as opposed to God being out there beyond everything. We want divinity to not be subject to the whims of human fate. So, having a God who’s transcendent, this is a good, reassuring thing in a lot of ways. But a God who is only transcendent feels too far away.
So, the Shekinah is the aspect of the divine that’s close enough that really dwells with people. The basic sense of this female aspect of God who is accepted by even the most Orthodox Jews as female, even though she doesn’t have a body and she wasn’t raised female and has never been socialized that way, or you know…that was an important idea for me as a trans woman, because if you start conceiving of a disembodied aspect of God as female and you’re like, “Yes, that’s right. This makes sense to me,” basically, you are…have learned all you need to know to think about somebody like me as female, where the body is not what defines it, it is something else.
Zydalis Bauer: And I want to talk about the text that you drew inspiration from, because I think it’s fascinating. So, you drew inspiration from the book of Isaiah and the magazine Cosmopolitan, which is really interesting to bring together.
So, what led you to writing in this style?
Joy Ladin: I think it started around my PhD dissertation. I was trying to figure out Modernist American Poetics. And if you’ve ever read T.S. Eliot, for example, or Ezra Pound, I don’t know about you, but I think I understand, and then suddenly I’m lost.
And so, and I had the same response to Emily Dickinson. And I thought instead of trying to write a PhD dissertation about what I understand, why don’t I write about why I can’t understand these poems that I’ve read over and over again? But in a lot of those poems, there’s a sense that there are combining words that are drawn from radically different parts of human experience.
Like Emily Dickinson has this beautiful phrase Amethyst Remembrance. What is an Amethyst Remembrance? One is from Mineralogy, that word, and another is from human psychology. And she jams them together into something that sounds like it means a lot, but you can’t actually figure out what it means because the language bits come from different places.
So, I figured out how to describe those kinds of effects and I thought, “Well, this is interesting to me. I want to learn to do this sort of diction mixing.” So, I had worked with women’s magazine language before. Cosmo had always scared me, I think, because of the covers, you know, like, yeah!
Zydalis Bauer: They’re always intense, yeah.
Joy Ladin: They’re intense. Nothing says give up on gender transition like looking at those covers. You will never get there, Joy.
Zydalis Bauer: Yeah, good point. Right? Yeah.
Joy Ladin: But I now there’s a, there’s a website and a database and I could just search for stuff. So, I thought, well, what would happen if I tried to take a part of God’s speaking in Isaiah and see if there’s a Cosmo article that sort of relates to it?
So, there’s a — an Isaiah passage and it starts out “Sing out oh barren one who has not given birth,” which I really related to, as, you know, somebody who’s not able to give birth, but.
And so I put “barren” into the Cosmo website, and immediately the first thing that came up was “Why This Woman is Proud to be Known as the Pageant Queen Without a Uterus.” And the Shekinah, of course, is a — she’s called Queen. She does not have a uterus. She is proud.
Anyway, it just seemed like if the Cosmo website can be seen as a form of divine communication, I had just gotten the thumbs up from God on this project.
So, I took it from there and I started taking words out of each text and literally just making lists of them and mushing them together until they started to cohere to each other into phrases and sentences and sentences started to sound like they were saying something. And they weren’t — it wasn’t me saying it, it was more me trying to hear what voice was coming through the sentences.
Zydalis Bauer: I have to say, when I first read that you use Book of Isaiah and Cosmopolitan, it didn’t make any sense to me. But the way you just explained it right now, it almost makes perfect sense. And so, thank you for that explanation.
And I know that the book is also described, “allowing readers to be conscious of their space and their connection in this world.” In what ways will we experience this journey of awareness through this poetry book?
Joy Ladin: Mmm. One of the things that was surprising to me about the way the Shekinah talked, like when I asked myself, “How does the Shekinah speak?” The only thing I got was any way she wants to, right? You don’t tell Divinity how to talk.
Zydalis Bauer: Right!
Joy Ladin: Right, yeah.
Zydalis Bauer: How dare you?
Joy Ladin: Not a good idea! You know, Moses didn’t say to God on Sinai, “You know, you got a typo there in that part of the Bible.” No! But both in Isaiah and in Cosmopolitan, the way that these voices speak to us is in the second person, they’re all addressing a you.
And both God and Isaiah and the you that you hear in women’s magazines is a you that seems to know everything about you. It believes, in fact, it knows you better than you do. Have you ever noticed that? It’s like this stranger knows what make up you should wear and what mistakes you’ve made when you’ve tried to wear it?
Like that it’s a kind of omniscience that’s — but it’s not a transcendent omniscience. It’s like, “Wow, you’re in my stuff and watching the mistakes that I make as I try to put on mascara.” That is weird.
And in Isaiah, it’s a lot about, you know, you people. You’re — I know you’re heartbroken. I know you’re worried about this. So, it’s the same kind of very intimate and but totally authoritative naming of the you. So, those two things went together very beautifully.
And at a certain point, I had thought that the book would really be about the Shekinah trying to explain who she was, because, you know, from my perspective, I didn’t know and I know that people generally don’t know, but I was very surprised that the Shekinah is actually mostly trying to tell us who we are. And she’s trying to do that partly because she wants to prove that she’s really here with us, that she knows us, each of us inside out.
So, she wants to say, “I know you’re feeling this way and I know you’ve gone through this.” And she’s also doing that, though, because she wants us to realize not just that she’s there, but how we are connected.
