Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Shechinah at the Art Institute
by Irwin Keller
Blue Light Press
Aug 2024, $20.00, 156 pages, ISBN: 978-1421835594
It’s hard to pigeonhole Rabbi Irwin Keller’s collection into a genre, but I’ll call these poems and meditations Creative Non-Fiction, the convenient label of “CNF.” He takes an incident and expands it, rabbinic-style, into a parable, a moral lesson, a life lesson. They are mini-essays. They are sermons. Throughout, he explicitly invites comparisons with the funny and wise Chelm stories from European Chassidic Jewish shtetl life: there’s an element of the fanciful, myth and enchantment. There is wisdom.
Toward the end of this delightful collection comes “The Parable of the Toyota in the Gully,” the perfect illustration of Keller’s style. Set in Israel at the start of 2024, in the context of the Gaza War, Keller has gone to Israel to tend to his elderly parents-in-law and to retrieve a hand-written megillah that his congregation in Sonoma County, California, had purchased from a scribe. He’s staying in Haifa with his elderly in-laws and borrows their Toyota to drive to Jerusalem to get the megillah. GPS has been scrambled so as to hide targets from incoming missile attacks, but he uses GoogleMaps to get directions. It’s a nightmare.
He’s led down gullies and obscure paths and finally, before all goes wrong, he stops for a coffee. Turns out he’d accidentally touched the bicycle icon when asking directions on GoogleMaps and was led down these rough paths and gullies so as to avoid traffic. “I was too exhausted to laugh. The grief and exhaustion in my body wouldn’t let go of the experience. Instead, they demanded that this turn of events not be relegated to the anecdote heap but instead be read immediately as parable.” He goes on to draws out the lesson:
This is the moment we inhabit, for Israelis certainly and for Jews
in general. For years we have had a voice of rightwing nationalism
whispering in our ear, passing itself off as a voice of benign Jewish
fulfillment. It has been whispering to us, guiding us on paths that
are ever more treacherous, more damaging, and more difficult to
pull back from. We have abandoned our compass and yielded to the
reassurances of a voice that experience should tell us not to trust.
The Parable of the Toyota in the Gully reminds us that we each have
a moral compass and we cannot afford to abandon it.
Right on! Keller is gay, and for much of his life, as young man in the 1970s, he felt excluded from participating fully in his religion. “As a child I heard a call to be a rabbi, or something like that,” he confides in the title essay, but he also felt discouraged from pursuing that ambition. In the wonderfully whimsical essay, as a kid, he meets the feminine manifestation of God in the Impressionist rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. They have lunch, and in a kind of Socratic dialogue she explains tiferet to him, “beauty.” When they part company, she advises, “Don’t give up hope. You are the Divine.”
But for almost a quarter of a century, Keller pursued other things instead, including law school and being in a drag queen revue called the Kinsey Sicks, in which he performed as a character called Winnie. In “With Scott in the Crosswalk” he considers the scourge of AIDS. He’d started coming out as gay in 1981. Finally, he began training as a rabbi and today leads Congregation Ner Shalom in Sonoma County, California.
Keller’s rabbinic teachings, commentary on the Torah and other sacred texts, include “Queer Medicine for Dark Times,” in which he discusses the relationship of David and Jonathan (Books of Samuel). “Dare to love even when love is a transgression; especially when love is a transgression,” he advises. In “Minnie’s Meringues,” which takes place in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, he channels Elijah, the Book of Malachi. The essay ends with recipe for meringues! In “Angels and Airports” he expands on his hineini moment (“Here I am!”), which refers back to both Abraham and Moses. “Unlikely, Inevitable You” involves Joseph and his brothers. “River of Light,” which takes place during the summer of COVID, 2020, on a tour of the southwestern United States with his husband Oren, alludes to the Book of Daniel. In “The Theology of the Cubs,” which takes place during the Cubs’ World Series victory of 2016 (Keller is a native Chicagoan), he writes, “I forgot my work. I forgot the fatigue from the recent High Holy Days. I forgot the awful election.” “City of Flowers and Stone,” which takes place in Jerusalem, brings back the Shechinah; it ends: “A calm pervades, and the Shechinah, earlier kicked off a crowded bus, now robed in purple night, settles at last on this city of flowers and stone.”
Shechinah at the Art Institute also includes several poems: “Evening Prayer,” “How to Find God,” “The Scent of Shechinah, ” “Reverse 23,” “Oath of Disloyalty,” which is a response to Donald Trump’s assertion that Jews who vote for Democrats are either ignorant or disloyal (“I am a disloyal Jew. / I am not loyal to a political party, / nor will I be loyal to dictators and mad kings.”). The collection concludes with “Taking Sides,” which begins:
Today I am taking sides.
I am taking the side of Peace.
Peace, which I will not abandon
even when its voice is drowned out
by hurt and hatred,
bitterness or loss,
cries of right and wrong.
“Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of” takes place in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a month after his mother’s death, while performing with the Kinsey Sicks (“Bedside Pearls” deals with her stroke). He dreams about his mother. She tells her son she’s okay. He’s confused and friends weigh in. What is real, what is imagined? With reference to Rabbi Nachman of Bratzkav he speculates on the significance of the dream, and of the Divine talking with Creation. When a friend likewise dreams about Keller’s mother, he skeptically asks why she didn’t come to him directly.
“Funny,” the friend says, “I asked her that. She said that you were so busy, she didn’t want to bother you.”
Words my mother had, of course, said to me a million times. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe, like in the Chasidic stories, the skeptical Litvak –
the doubter in me – gets won over.
“This body and this life are God’s drag,” Irwin Keller writes in that opening essay, “Shechinah at the Art Institute,” “the Infinite trying on a new way of being finite.” This indeed sums up his refreshing, liberating attitude which, with rabbinic flair, he expounds and develops throughout these writings.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.