Psalm 137: Reimagined

PSALM 137: REIMAGINED

Lucía Pizarro is the founding Spiritual Director at the Jewish Liberation Theology Institute in Hamilton, Ontario. She is the first Mexican woman ordained as a rabbi in the Conservative movement. She completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Essex in the UK. Since 2002, she has been involved in Palestinian solidarity, and she has been leading liberation Seders in Ontario since 2009. This year, she kick-started IJV’s online chavurah.

I had the privilege of speaking with her about her spiritual work by email in July 2020.  —Jessie Stoolman

JESSIE STOOLMAN:

How did you first encounter Psalm 137?

RABBI PIZARRO:

I’m not sure when I first encountered Psalm 137. I did study it in-depth during rabbinical school. I even wrote a paper about it. I was fascinated by it.

JS:

How has it been challenging for you?

RP:

I think this is the hardest Psalm of the Bible. I am particularly taken aback by the imagery of smashing infants against a rock. I am particularly sensitive when it comes to images of suffering children.

JS:

When did you begin rewriting the Psalm?

RP:

Last year I conducted about 23 interviews with people who identify as Jewish and care about Palestine. I found that the biggest challenge for people was finding a community of like-minded people. People felt they didn’t belong in the mainstream Jewish community, and they yearned for a sense of belonging… So I started an online chavurah (a meeting group of like-minded Jews) here in Canada for an organization called Independent Jewish Voices Canada. I learned that a lot of non-Zionist Jews do not have access to Jewish learning, because the mainstream Zionist organizations monopolize all Jewish learning, and non-Zionist Jews are either rejected by the mainstream, or they simply cannot stomach these organizations. People wanted to study Jewish text, but they didn’t know where to start.

Jewish Voice for Peace facilitated a webinar on January 21 called “Judaism Beyond Zionism: Challenges with Text, Liturgy, and Theology” (you can watch it here). This was my first live appearance online ever. So I used this as a kickoff…

Rabbi Linda Holtzman recited Elliott batTzedek’s rendition of Psalm 137, so that ended up being the content of my very first online class ever.

During the session, we read the Biblical Psalm line-by-line in order to try to make sense of it. For their homework, I asked the group to either rewrite Psalm 137 in a way that would work for them or to write a response to Psalm 137, and to be prepared to share at the next session either what they wrote or what they experienced when they were trying to write. That’s how everything started.

JS:

What have been the results so far of this practice of reinterpretation/rewriting?

RP:

At some point in the week, I realized that I had to do the homework, too. It didn’t feel right to ask people to do something I wouldn’t do myself. So I scrambled to put something together to share also during the session. What happened for me when I wrote something was that the words on the page were a bit too intimate. I ended up writing how I really feel about Jerusalem. As a result, during the session, I felt embarrassed to share my poem. But hearing everyone’s poems during the next meeting was very inspiring, and I knew I had to share mine too, so I did. The result was incredible. Opening up in that way, for a group of like-minded people, creates a level of validation that it’s hard to find these days with everyone being too busy to one, open up, and two, really listen to others. Everyone wanted a copy of all the poems. They were so moving and inspiring!

JS:

How has the practice evolved?

RP:

Now I have put together an eight-week online program around this practice. The response has been amazing, and I will have to open a second group to accommodate all the people that want to take part in it.

We will meet via Zoom once a week, every week, for eight weeks to reflect on themes related to a parashah (a weekly Torah portion) from a trans-inclusive radical feminist and (hopefully) queer perspective. We will have weekly reading assignments and bi-weekly writing assignments. Through this very special practice of opening up and vulnerable sharing, we will build a deep sense of connection, community, and belonging.

Psalm 137

Lucia Pizarro

I sat at home back in Mexico and I wept
when I recalled Zion.
I no longer live in Jerusalem.
My eyes no longer hold her streets and her people.
My hands no longer build her houses and her future.
I do not smell her markets or her pain.
How can Jerusalem remain the central axis that gives meaning to my life
when I live so far away?
What is my relationship as a modern Jew to the main region of our story,
when physically I do not inhabit such a place?
Should I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand wither.
May my tongue cleave to my palate
if I do not recall you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my chief joy.
Zionism has run its course.
The delusion that the Land of Israel was our exclusive patrimony
has turned into a violent nightmare,
more than 70 years of systematic attempts to erase all traces of its Muslim,
Christian, Palestinian, and Bedouin character.
The more we try to “Judaize” Palestine,
the more we destroy it.
We have buried it under massive Los Angeles-scale highways,
dense blocks of fortress-like “neighborhoods,”
kibbutzim-cum-shopping malls
and national parks.
The more we try to assert our singular claims,
the more we discover that it can never “belong” to just one people.
I love you, Zion,
I want to learn everything about you,
about all your peoples,
your histories,
your different narratives and cultures.
I want to know everything about every single rock, stone, house, and village,
including the stories,
the locations,
and the ruins
left after the Nakba,
ruins of villages which
receive no recognition and are never commemorated.
I want to know about their past and their present.
I want to know about their fear,
their pain,
their memories,
who lived there,
where was the school,
where was the well,
and the songs that the children used to sing on their way home.
Should I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand wither.
May my tongue cleave to my palate
if I do not recall you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my chief joy.

Untitled

Sam Arnold

I know that there is no rage
To roll my native language
Off my tongue
And there are not enough tears
To spring the land to life
That I once knew.

Yet the grass does not sparkle emerald;
It dims thin and yellow.
The sun does not embrace my back.
It turns away, coldly.
Who am I if I am not
Where I came from?

But know this, oppressor:
The poison that strangles your children
Is brewed from your cup
By your own hands
I brew the antidote, happily.
And yet, you call my antidote ‘poison’
And slap it out of my hands.

Untitled

Anna Miransky

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat.
Oh we wept, when we recalled Zion.
On the poplars there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors had asked of us words of song, and our plunderers mockingly asked,
“Sing us songs of Zion”.

How can we sing a song of the Lord on foreign soil?
Should I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.
May my tongue cleave to my palate, if I do not recall you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Recall, O Lord, the Edomites, on the day of Jerusalem, saying:
“Raze it, raze it, to its foundation!”[i]

I watched as you defiled my wife and smashed the skull of my infant son.
My heart burns with the desire to inflict these atrocities upon your loved ones so that you will know my pain.
You occupy my land but I will not allow you to occupy my soul.
I will sing my praises to what is left of my life in the privacy of my mind.
And I will pray for the grace that will show me how to tame the brutality in my own heart and return my soul to peace.

[i] These first two stanzas are from Robert Alter’s original translation of Psalm 137.

Untitled

Jessie Stoolman

Bring Jerusalem with you
We are all guests on land,
temporary dwellers.[i]

In exile, she makes neighbors out of strangers,
Communities out of families,
New life out of old enmities –
Us, essentially.

In exile, we sing,
because our traumas
are both singular and collective,
If not mended, they will engulf us.
We sing,
not for our oppressors,
But for the oppressed.
We tear down our walls,
To liberate our souls.

We sing to remember,
We sing to bring us together,
We sing so that Jerusalem travels with us,
Jerusalem is a deed, a practice, a space – outside time.

There is no ownership –
only caretaking.

Bring Jerusalem with you
We are all guests on land.
In exile, she makes neighbors out of strangers,
Communities out of families,
New life out of old enmities –
Us, essentially.

We strive not to linger on oppressors,
Not to let their deeds dictate our futures.

Bring Jerusalem with you
We are all guests on land.
In exile – in diaspora –
she makes neighbors out of strangers,
Communities out of families,
New life out of old enmities –
Us, essentially.

[i] And the land will not be sold forever, for the land is Mine;
You are but strangers, temporary dwellers with Me. (Vayikra 25:23)

JESSIE STOOLMAN

Jessie Stoolman is an aspiring editor, with hopes of working for a publishing house that foregrounds the intimate (and inevitable) relationship between fiction-writing and academic research. Her dissertation focuses on the history of entanglements between Jewish and Black communities in North Africa, specifically through the lens of racialized enslaved.

SAM ARNOLD

Sam Arnold is a graduate from Canadian Mennonite University who believes in social justice, and spends her free time playing with her pets.

ANNA MIRANSKY

Anna Miransky is an (almost) retired psychotherapist who lives in and loves Toronto. She believes we are all different expressions of One Being.

YAZAN KHALILI

Yazan Khalili lives in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, artist, and cultural activist.

About Cracks Remind Me of Roadkills:

A set of photographs showing random cracks that resemble the triangular map of Palestine, juxtaposed with details of short stories, bringing the cracks as a break if the flow of time, as a minor history breaking the mainstream narratives.