נשלח: דינסטאג יאנואר 23, 2024 12:13 pm
פּראפעסאר פּיִטער קויל פארציילט:
ער זאגט שפעטער אז ער מיינט דערמיט די עליטע בעלי עלייה ומחשבה בהעם.I was invited to a Syrian synagogue in Brooklyn and I was a little nervous, I was thinking, “What do I, an Ashkenazi Jew from New Jersey, have to tell these Syrian Jews about piyut?” My host told me, “Don't worry. They don't know anything about this poetry. They know a lot of other things, but this they don't know. It will be new to them. You just do whatever you want to do.” So I read the poems I wanted to read. Some of them were from the whole range of human experience that these poets wrote about, including really sensual erotic poems, and even some homoerotic poems - which always gets people's attention, especially in a Jewish context. All in all it went pretty well. Afterwards a group of young women came up to me, they were sort of modest and were keeping their distance from me. They said, “Mr. Cole, we would like to ask you a question. Do you mind?” To which I answered, “No. Ask me anything you want.” They responded, “Well, we were talking amongst ourselves”, and they looked kind of uncomfortable asking this question, “Well, we were just having a hard time understanding what did the rabbis say about this poetry?” I answered, “This is going to be a little hard for you to absorb I suspect, but the rabbis are the ones who wrote it.” They leapt back in fear. One of them said, “Not our rabbis!” And they're probably correct - their rabbis could not have written something like this