90 Friday, May 9, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS BOOKS Has Maggid Touched Poet Julia Vinograd? BY JOSEPH COHEN Special to The Jewish News Remember the 11th Commandment: "And Thou Shalt be Informed" r _1 r -N r's) You've read the five books of Moses. Isn't it time to try the Fifty-Two Issues of the Detroit Jewish News? It may not be holy, but it's weekly! And such a bargain. To order your own subscription call 354-6060. Shortly before his death in 1935, the saintly Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, a kabbalist, predicted the flower- ing of a new age of Jewish mysti- cism. At the time there was not much evidence to support the claim. Today, a half-century after Rabbi Kook's death, his predic- tion is proving itself true in a variety of ways. A revival of interest in Kabbalah is at an all time high. Ever since Gersholm Scholem published his landmark study Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1951, the floodgates have been open. New manuals, translations of esoteric works, in- terpretations and commentaries issue from world presses fre- quently, addressed to the merely curious, the devoutly spiritual, the serious scholar and the popu- lar reader. appoint Universities philosophers specializing in Jewish mysticism to their Jewish studies faculties, novelists like Chaim Potok and Cynthia Ozick, to name two among many, em- ploy kabbalistic materials in their fictions. And Harold Bloom, one of our most prolific critics, has constructed an entire system of literary theory on Kabbalah. All this activity, of course, is external to the study of the ttadi- tional kabbalists in Safed, Israel and elsewhere, about whose work we hear little. Yet this activity suggests that a great deal more is going on than we suspect. Take, for exam- ple, the case of Julia Vinograd, a well known street-poet in Ber- keley, Calif., and the author of more than 20 chapbooks of poetry. She recently published a remarkabe collection of 21 fas- cinating dialogues between Jerusalem and God in a slim vol- ume entitled The Book Of Jerusalem (Bench Press, San Francisco). Where did these poems come from? They came from the mag- gid that is, an agent of celestial speech, who spontaneously com- municated the verses to her. She didn't know about maggidim, but they've been around for centuries and kabbalists, of which Ms. Vin- ograd is not one, have courted them from the start. The best known kabbalist to rely heavily on the maggid was the 16th Century rabbi, Joseph Caro who, over a period of 50 years, recorded the pronounce- ments of his celestial guide in a secret diary. It was published in Poland a century 'later with the title Maggid Mesharim and is available in translation today. Of course, the most famous oc- cultist to attract maggidim in contemporary times was the Nobel-prize winning Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. Thoroughly familiar with Kab- balah and a host of other esoteric systems, Yeats tried repeatedly for years to contact the spiritual world, mainly through seances. He was largely unsuccessful. Then, in his 52nd year, 1917, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who, like him, had been well-trained in occult lore. To please him she undertook automatic writing soon after their wedding. Through this method, contact was established with the spiritual world almost im- mediately, and a number of mag- gidim whom Yeats called "the communicators" turned up to give him "metaphors for poetry." While Yeats obviously knew a great deal about Kabbalah mag- gidim and esoteric symbols, Ms. Vinograd does not. Her spon- taneous dialogues are therefore all the more interesting, particu- larly in view of the fact that the dialouges in The Book .0f Jerusalem are consistent with the kabbalistic myths that iden- tify Jerusalem as the exter- nalized beauty and wisdom of God, that is, as The Skekinah, or The Bride of God. The dialogues are all love poems, fraught with the tensions between the Skekinah and God occasioned by the disharmonies of the universe. Though the two divine entities love one antoher and talk fre- quently, there is no union of their divine essences. This myth, too, Ms. Vinograd professes not to have known, and there is no reason to doubt her word, though skeptics may be tempted to hunt for a hoax. I don't think they will find one. My reason for accepting the legitimacy of the poems is that they are simply first-rate, the best love poetry and the best im- ages of "Jerusalem the Golden" I have come across in ages. The dialogues are fascinating, re- minding me not only of Yeats' de- lightful love poetry in the months after he was first married ("Sol- omon and the Witch" and "Sol- omon to Sheba") but also of the subtle and powerful music of Wallace Stevens in such poems as "Peter Quince at the Clavier," and "Sunday Morning." Ms. Vinograd possesses a spec- tacular ear, attuned to the sub- tleties of biblical poetry and to the rhythms, harmonies and dis- harmonies of contemporary life, and she is capable of combining the past and the present in fresh, vital, startling images. Here are some sample lines, from the open- ing poem "Jerusalem," though they hardly do justice to the dialogues which run to an aver- age of about two printed pages each. Naked Jerusalem sings in the sun: have a lover. He loves me so much, the sun is darkened when we touch . . . I have a lover and a broken heart. I cannot tell the two apart. I have a lover. I have a lover I have no other'. These passages merely hint at Ms. Vinograd's . unusual accom- plishment, for the poems have a continuity and a sparkling vital- ity that is evident only from read- ing them in succession. Copyright 1986 Joseph Cohen.