Crossing the Narrow Bridge 

August 2024

The first national organization devoted to supporting Jewish poets and Jewish poetry held its second Jewish Poetry Conference this July. But this year, as the board of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry prepared to welcome over 50 Jewish poets from the U.S., Canada and Israel for a week in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, our joyful anticipation carried an undercurrent of dread. 

We knew we needed to address the terrible stress and heartache that have plagued our participants since the horrifying events of October 7th and the ensuing war between Israel and Gaza — the protests, internal disagreements within the Jewish community, the literary community’s escalating responses, and the global rise in antisemitism. It felt to us tone deaf, irresponsible, and, ultimately, unproductive, to run a Jewish conference in this moment without creating a specific space to explore these issues. At the conference we wanted to do what we hope to do in our writing, which is to name what is real and challenging before us, and to go toward it with nuance and curiosity, to the best of our ability. So we added to the conference agenda a two-hour voluntary session with the deceptively simple title “Being A Jewish Poet in These Times.”

The majority of participants chose to attend. Afterward, they shared how they left feeling both relieved and hopeful, even conference fellow Rich Michelson, who had attended by mistake. “By the time I realized my error it was too late to sneak out. How lucky I was!” Rich said. “I was tired of the endless, dispiriting conversations and accusations I had been having about this subject over the past six months.…However, here everyone was truly heard, and everyone listened. Whether I agreed or disagreed with my fellow poets, I left the session enlivened and hopeful. I should make such valuable mistakes every day!”

For months after October 7, we heard almost daily from Jewish writers across the political spectrum who felt silenced and isolated. We did what we could to support and connect people, but these efforts often felt lacking in the face of such fear and sorrow. Witnessing the open, earnest exchanges between our participants awakened in us a dormant hope for what might be possible — in rooms like this one and in the larger world.  

We’re sharing the methodology and template used to facilitate the conversation in the hope that whether it’s in our homes, our schools, or our places of work, more of us will be willing and able to name the pain we are facing, even if we disagree about the causes and the ways to alleviate that pain, and engage in meaningful, heartfelt, open dialogue. 

Purpose

Right at the start we articulated clearly what we hoped to achieve, and what we knew we wouldn’t be able to. Our purpose was not to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, change policy at a university, or convince a literary magazine to change its statement. Instead, we articulated the purpose of this session as a desire to:

• Enhance our ability to have civil conversations when we disagree
• Talk openly about our views and be heard with dignity
• Seek to understand and to be understood

In the context of our conference, we hoped to create a space for people to share their experiences since October 7th, as well as share their relationships to Israel and Judaism as it affects their work as Jewish writers and people in the world today. 

Agreements

It was crucial that people felt they could engage with bravery and vulnerability. Adapting the language of executive coach and clinical psychologist Michelle Brody, we agreed to avoid speaking styles that encourage argument and debate — like political rhetoric, labels, provocative argumentation, persuading, making assumptions, and criticizing people’s motives. And we agreed to speak in ways that encourage civil conversations: 

• Speak for yourself, not others
• Share from your own experience and values
• Honor and respect the dignity, perspective, and experiences of one another
• Ask questions with respect, curiosity, and openness
• Hold conflicting sides of issues
• Maintain confidentiality

The session was not recorded, and our photographer put down his camera and participated with the rest of us. 

Worry-Clouds

After discussing the purpose and the group agreements, we gave each participant a handful of Post-It Notes, and invited them to write down their worries, one per note — not their worries about broader issues but worries about talking with one another about these broader issues. What were they worried might happen if they engaged honestly in this conversation at this point in the conference? We gave some examples: “I’m worried this might cause more suffering and anger, making things worse instead of better” and “I’m worried I may alienate new friends I’ve just made.” 

Once everyone had set down some of their concerns, we asked them to pass the worries around. The somatic experience of physically passing these small sticky notes, literally sharing their worries with one another, holding the worries of others, and letting others hold their worries, was meaningful in and of itself. Participants were then invited to read aloud an anonymous concern, with no one knowing whose worries were whose. The group as a whole nodded and acknowledged each worry as it was read, helping people feel they were not alone, dissipating much of the room’s tension. Then we stuck the worries on a far wall, aware they were still there but now slightly removed from us, no longer in our hands.

Dialogue Session

Now, at last, we were ready to talk with one another. With an arrangement of an inner circle of chairs facing an outer circle of chairs, we created rotating sets of three people, with one “speaker,” seated on the inside, talking with two “listeners” who were seated in the larger outer circle. Each speaker began with the prompt “It is summer 2024, and I am a Jewish poet and…” and then shared what emerged from their heart. After two minutes, the two “listeners” in the group had one minute each to respond with the words “I was moved by…” After that, the speaker joined another group of two people and repeated the same exercise, and then did the same with a third pair. After three rounds of speaking, they switched chairs with a listener, and that listener became a speaker. They too had a chance to share three times, and then the entire process took place once more with the final listener in the role of speaker. In this way, each person had a chance to both listen and share. 

The very specific time-keeping and choreography allowed people to speak deeply and honestly without being challenged or shut down. And because of the rotating groups, everyone spoke to two-thirds of the people in the room, maintaining an intimate and private setting. The conversations elicited tears and hugs from many. Conference contributor Lesléa Newman said she came away “feeling heard and hopeful. Though nothing in the outside world had changed, something in my inner landscape shifted. To have all my fears and worries voiced without being judged was a rare and precious gift.” 

Closing: Reflection & Shared Hope

Because sharing like this is vulnerable and emotional, we needed a closing so people could feel held and could move on. We first invited everyone to spend 10 minutes writing quietly about what came up for them during the dialogue session. This was not shared, a private chance to absorb and reflect on the experience. Then we asked everyone to write on another Post-It something they felt hopeful about after this experience. Again we had them pass the notes around — except this time we were handing people not our worries but our hopes. Everyone was given the hope of another, and we ended the session with each person standing and reading the hope they were now holding, focusing this time on what might be possible. 

Why do this? Poets seek complexity, mystery, turns and more turns. Yet if we hold complexity in our words on the page but not in our lives with one another, of what real value is our work?

Shelby Larue Sizemore, Yetzirah’s conference manager, a recent graduate from UNC-Asheville, said afterward that she’d entered the facilitated conversation “full of anger, confusion, and sorrow. These emotions had been sitting like a rock in my chest for nearly 300 days. Yet, as we moved through the open, honest, vulnerable dialogue, I found lightness. The weight I’d carried was now shared… I left that room a new person, more open, and more ready to face these tough conversations.”

In today’s fractured world, we need to spend more time slowly listening to one another. Though we’re often pressured into “making statements,” siding one way or another, we usually have complex, conflicting values and opinions. The kind of dialogue we had lays the groundwork for articulating what we share, as well as why we differ, making us more likely to create healthy and productive communities, organizations, and maybe one day even countries and worlds. Yetzirah strives to practice and model this Jewish, poetic way of being in the world, and hopes to inspire these conversations in others.

Eleanor Wilner said in her keynote address that opened the conference, “Don’t you love contradictions? Fossils make great paperweights. Continuity requires change. Don’t you love contradictions? We hear the voice we’re listening for.” She described being a Jewish poet as “Joy with the Oy in it.” Only when we sit face to face, knee to knee, sharing our Oys, our deep and complicated worries and hopes, can we see and be seen in our full complexity, and only then can we begin to again approach joy.