RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #175 (3/17/2022): St. Patrick’s Day
(©2022 David Lefkowitz. Aired March 19, 2022 on Dave’s Gone By.)
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for St. Patrick’s Day, 2022.
As the saying goes, everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day! Italians, Hispanics, African-Americans are Irish. Well, Black Irish. Jews, too, identify with our Celtic brethren, because we suffered oppression, we love literature, and just as the Irish swallow their ale, Jews wallow in our ailments.
I can think of no better way to celebrate Irishness than sharing poetry by James Joyce, who is, notwithstanding Agatha Christie and George R.R. Martin, the most important writer to have two first names. Here’s a little verse from 1904 called “Silently She’s Combing.”
Silently she’s combing, combing her long hair
Silently and graciously with many a pretty air.
The sun is in the willow leaves and on the dappled grass
and still she’s combing her long hair that goes down past her ass.
No, I’m kidding — it’s “before the looking glass.”
I pray you, cease to comb out, comb out your long hair.
All you’re doing is getting lice everywhere.
No, kidding again. I’ll spare you the rest of the poem; it’s just a guy worried that his girl is a skank.
Let’s try another verse, this one with a Jewish cadence: “All Day I Hear the Noise of Waters.”
All day I hear the noise of waters
making moan.
Sad as the seabird is when, going forth alone
He hears the winds cry to the water’s monotone.
The grey winds, the cold winds —
See? This is why Jews move to Florida.
I hear the noise of many waters far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing to and fro.
Basically, the guy needs a space heater and some Prozac. But James Joyce is clearly using nature to reflect the psychology of his characters. Much as Yiddish-Irish poet Shmuel O’Malleystein did when he wrote, “Toilet’s backed up again. Ruining the floors. Guess we go back to pooping outdoors.”
Let me close my scholarly examination of James Joyce with this passage from Finnegan’s Wake, which I think is the key to his work, if not all literature:
The spoil of hesitants. The spell of hesitency. His atake — is it ashe, tittery-taw tattery-tail, Hasitense hump-on-a-dimply, heyhey-heyhey a winceywencky.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Slainte’ (slant-cha) and L’Chaim!
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