Breathing Structure Poem by gershon hepner

Breathing structure to a span
of Bible or of Talmud, man
becomes the partner of those who
created all the texts we view
as sacred as the God who made
First Man from soil without a spade,
appointing him his attaché
by breathing structure into clay,
so he could be the kind of man
mankind has structured without plan,
bothered little by context
demanded by the Bible text.

Inspired by a chapter, “Talmud as Literature and Poetic Construction, ” in Aryeh Cohen’s book Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot (Providence: Brown,1988) , in which Cohen underlines the importance the importance of structure and context in the interpretation of talmudic pericopes.

12/10/08