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24
JEWISH BOOK ANNUAL
visible.” An invisible
mezuzah
appears in “Dos Oysleydikin (The
Emptying)”: “the shadow of an empty name still on their doors/
shadai and shadow shattering the mother tongue.” So phonet
ically close to shadow, “shadai” stands for God’s name written
on the
mezuzah's
case. The three letters
(shin, dalet, yod)
represent
Shomer Delatot Yisrael
— God’s function of guarding over the
doors of the children of Israel. Indeed, the fourth letter of the
alphabet,
dalet,
has the appearance of a door or open mouth
of mother tongue. Hidden and visible, Jerome Rothenberg’s
paradoxical
mezuzot
offer points of entry to his tradition.
The opening paragraph of Rothenberg’s
A Big Jewish Book
introduces the architecture for a hidden
mezuzah
in the domicile
of mystery and creativity:
There was a dream that came before the book, & I might as
well tell it. I was in a house identified by someone as THE
HOUSE OF JEWS, where there were many friends gathered,
maybe everyone I knew. Whether they were Jews or not was
unimportant: I was
8c
because I was I had to lead them through
it. But we were halted at the entrance to a room, not a room
really, more like a great black hole in space. I was frightened
& exhilarated, both at once, but like the others I held back before
that darkness. The question came to be the room’s name, as if
to give the room a
name
would open it. I knew that, & I strained
my eyes
8c
body to get near the room, where I could feel, as
though a voice was whispering to me, creation going on inside
it. And I said it was called CREATION.
To name is to confer identity: God’s name on the
mezuzah
cover
marks the Jewish dwelling where the poet identifies with his
or her particular history. Halting at the two-directional thresh
old, ambivalent Jewish poets explore the darkness and recreate
their own scrolls at the entrance. They write their updated mes
sages on the gate and doorposts of their modern American
dwellings, and the resultant tensions between guardians of the
faith and the avant-garde animate their art.
KARL SHAPIRO
The distinguished American poet Karl Shapiro has written
“The Mezuzah,” a poem about two Christians who come to his
door to hand out religious literature: