God Vibes

Here’s a secret: Every month, I read my boyfriend’s horoscope. Then I cross-reference it with my own, and with our calendars and travel plans, searching for a new way to be more attentive or understanding, some need I might anticipate. This is not, generally speaking, an effective relationship strategy. Every month, I remain the same imperfect person I have always been. The stars don’t improve me. Maybe they would if I believed in them more.

Belief has always been a hurdle for me. An aspiration, too. I want to trust astrology, but I forget all the aspects and retrogrades. Things go no better when I’m out in the world. I have panic attacks at protests. I’m a terrible sports fan. I go to synagogue hoping to experience God but end up taking notes for short stories on my phone instead. This is not a successful strategy for Judaism; I don’t consider myself a successful Jew. Other Jews’ spirituality provokes envy in me, or alienation. I feel most Jewish when reading Jewish writers, but the ones I like best tend to be irritable, political, and somewhat godless: Philip Roth, Deborah Eisenberg, Grace Paley, and, until her latest book, Ariana Reines.

Reines is a poet, performance artist, playwright, translator, and astrologer with a deep and serious interest in belief. Her maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, a piece of family history that recurs throughout Reines’s work, as in the long poem “0,” from Reines’s collection Mercury (2011):

After the man she loved died for her at Treblinka
After the war was over
My mother’s mother made our blasted family
In her belly
With a man who beat her children
A man with no business sense and good taste in jewelry.

Those six lines are like a Grace Paley story in miniature. They are also familiar. I know many Jews with comparable histories, and many Jews, including myself, who understand themselves in the historical context of the Holocaust. In Mercury, history seemed to be the primary way Reines thought about Jewishness, and reading it, I recognized a kindred spirit. Here was a smart, searching Jewish woman who, having found more tragedy than meaning in her religion, turns to sex, progressive politics, and astrology for answers. Sounds about right. But in Reines’s most recent collection, A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), she returns to Judaism—and this time, things are more complex.

It’s possible to read A Sand Book as the meandering story of a poet who discovers God, though God does not properly appear until the collection’s end. For most of A Sand Book’s 400 pages, the shift in how Reines handles Judaism seems more a matter of poetic approach than belief. In Mercury, she wrote about sex with a combination of roughness and flippancy that evoked the more uncomfortable sex scenes in Fleabag and Girls, or the X-rated monologues in Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? (2010); Reines handled politics with similarly scathing humor, but when it came to Jewishness, she held back.

Reines doesn’t hold back in A Sand Book. She treats her religion with the same casual, caustic tone with which she writes about every other subject she considers important. In “Something Inside Me,” she writes, “You should project your body into ancient times […] / I already do I said. And the idea of Europe devolves into a Teutonic moment in Brooklyn / In which we got to be Jews in a beer garden and got shitfaced and it was others who died.” This is history as origin story, but filtered through glib hyperbole. The pain and survivor’s guilt—it was others who died—are sincere, but the delivery? Not so much.

A Sand Book is filled with saints, prophets, and religious symbols. Reines’s speakers test and discard the “many philosophies / Celebrating equanimity / Kindness and happiness / Propagated by saints / And sages from Tibet.” They wish to “be hidden like the scroll in the ark.” They do meth with priests. Some even read the Old Testament. In “Nine Moons,” the speaker sees a rainbow and thinks, with some resignation, “now I’d really have to reread the part in the Bible about the arc / That follows the Flood, after the raven / & after the dove, but like so many books that are closed in my mind in the end / I left this one closed too.”

Reines does not leave the Bible closed. As A Sand Book progresses, she alludes repeatedly to the Old Testament and shows a marked interest in the Exodus story; pharaohs, Aaron, the Nile River, and the Red Sea make appearances. So does Joseph, the first known Jew to arrive in Egypt. In the Bible, Joseph’s prophetic dreams warned of a seven-year famine. In Reines’s poem “Joseph’s Dream,” Vice President Mike Pence stars as a yoga teacher whose “Insecurities are always / apparent.” The poem is short, funny, and a bit inscrutable. It works less as prophecy than as a demonstration of Reines’s ongoing attraction to religious imagery.

That attraction recurs throughout A Sand Book. In “To the Reader,” the speaker “found myself on my knees sobbing // Before an image of the Black Virgin / Of Czestochowa, known in Haiti // as Erzulie Dantor.” At first, she tries to defend her tears as genuine emotion. Then she backtracks, asking the reader,

Can you take
Seriously one at once so arch and so
 
Strange, so frank and yet so withholding? I’ll wager that you can.
 
And/but I am trying
To escape from the problem
 
Of being taken seriously.

That escape from seriousness allows Reines to depart, in both tone and content, from Mercury’s solemn, historical approach to Jewishness. In A Sand Book, she takes risks both theological—Mike Pence as Joseph; Jewish speakers praying to non-Jewish deities—and cultural. The speaker in “Dream House” recalls a day when, tired from a long semester teaching, she sat on a park bench and

pictured myself shampooing my luxury
Hair in some artsy shithole, mildew streaking the torn shower curtain
Lurching across the second expanse of poverty
My ruined imagination could manage: Well I guess I could join the Israeli
Army. Why the fuck would you want to do that said
Somebody else in my dream head.

Why would she want to do that? Not many left-leaning Jews would admit to even a cursory thought about joining the Israeli Army. Such an admission could easily be taken as an endorsement of what many Jews, myself included, regard as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bigotry and expansionism. It could also make Reines a target of anti-Semitic harassment. There’s a strong argument for her to keep that thought—I guess I could join the Israeli Army—in her dream head.

Except the thought demonstrates the ways in which certain forms of anti-Semitism can ruin a Jew’s imagination. Jews have to think about Israel because we have to talk about Israel. Depending on our social circles and political affiliations, we are expected to condemn, defend, or explain the policy—and sometimes the existence—of a country that is not our own. I have often tried to avoid that expectation, but avoidance is not always possible. How could I avoid the dinner guest who asked, “Why did you bomb Gaza?” as if I’d ordered the bombing myself? Or the once-trusted friend who accused me of faking my criticism of Israeli settlements to impress him? “Dream House” beautifully internalizes the anger I have felt at Zionism being imposed on me.

Later, in “Pilgrims’ Progress,” Reines takes perhaps a bigger risk by describing the impossibility of adequately mourning Holocaust victims. She juxtaposes this with efforts to mourn those who died of AIDS, writing of both tragedies, “I wasn’t there when it happened and nobody exactly / Told me about it.” By the poem’s end, she understands that her desire to write about AIDS and the Holocaust reflects a certain self-absorption: “Can everything / Be made to resolve into my originary pain?”

This conclusion could be troubling for a secular Jew. If I can’t understand the most important event in modern Jewish history, then where can I find Jewish meaning? For me, the answer has proven to be Jewish literature. But Reines is better at belief than I am, as befits a professional astrologer. In “Like Two Empty Wallets My Boobs,” her speaker declares herself “in readiness / For you, LORD, you,” then adds, “For you who no / Longer / Enrapture us.” Enraptured or not, in A Sand Book, Reines’s new source of Jewish meaning is God.

Reines’s preferred approach to God is through Moses. This begins in the long poem “Thursday,” whose speaker seems to be a hybrid of Moses and Reines herself. The speaker is at times male like Moses, at times female like Reines; the poem recounts anecdotes from the writing of Mercury, as well as parts of the Exodus story. In the Bible, Moses has a stutter. God also transforms Moses’s staff into a snake as a demonstration of his new, divine-messenger powers. Reines swiftly retells these stories in “Thursday”:

Bring me my gold
My serpent my rod
Pour hot gold into my teeth
Bind my silver tongue
Soak it in soft white gold
Jupiter
And unbind my tongue Jupiter
And loose it on the world

Much like the Biblical Moses, Reines’s speaker in “Thursday” is not happy to be a prophet, protesting, “I don’t know how to do it / Worship the god of persons” and, later, “I have no idea how to do it / Holy holy holy / Nevertheless I have no choice but to do it / Holy holy holy man.” By the poem’s end, the speaker has descended to full contradiction: “Of course it can be secular to be alive on a Thursday / And as a matter of fact / It cannot.”

For most assimilated American Jews, every day can be secular. We can usually blend into majority-Christian society. Not many of us aspire to be “Holy holy holy” (a repetition, incidentally, that Reines takes from a prayer called the Kedushah). Many Jews treat God and God’s orders—no shellfish or cheeseburgers, no dating goyim—as embarrassing family relics to be name-checked but not obeyed.

Plenty of religions operate this way, or have adherents who do. Jews are unusual in that for us, not believing in God counts as an overlookable transgression. In part, this is because Jewishness has historically been considered an ethnic or racial category as well as a religious one, which means that even the most atheist Jew remains a Jew. (I learned this when, as an 8-year-old, I told my mother I wanted to convert; she told me that no matter what I converted to, I’d be “Jewish enough for the ovens.”) On a theological level, Judaism is based equally in Scripture and in study, commentary, interpretation, and rules. Jews are expected to live according to Jewish values. We are not expected—or necessarily encouraged—to believe, as church signs often exhort, that God is still speaking to us.

So what would I do if God spoke to me? It could happen, at least according to A Sand Book, which ends with God speaking to Reines. The conversation takes place in a two-part poem called “MOSAIC” (as in Moses, not the art made of broken glass). The first part is an essay in which Reines explains that the text to follow is “the transcript of the verbal portion of an encounter … The words aren’t ‘mine.’” They’re God’s.

In 2014, between the publications of Mercury and A Sand Book, Reines—the Reines of “MOSAIC,” anyway—experienced divine rapture. She was walking down Allen Street in New York City, appreciating the sun’s warmth, she writes, when “something in me gave itself over to the pleasure of that warmth.” Soon, the warmth became “love, of such ravishing totality that I don’t know what to compare it to, and of such magnitude I could scarcely speak of it for two and a half years.” Then the love-warmth started “speaking, but not strictly to speak. Thoughtforms were being communicated to me whole.” Reines wrote them down (italics hers):

After I had been at it for a while I realized I had my notebook upside down, that I was effectively writing right-to-left, like some parody of a Hebrew prophet. And there was something else. As I was fumbling for my notebook and pencil, I realized with some hilarity and considerable embarrassment that I was meeting my maker or some joke version of my maker while wearing a beard. To be precise, I was wearing a zit beard. A beard made of acne. I had not put it on by choice.

The zit beard becomes the centerpiece of the essay. Reines’s acne was the result of stress brought on by an abusive boss whose harassment made Reines “doubt my capacities in language in general … Had the ‘freedom’ and the sexuality in my work made my boss feel he had the right to belittle me so casually, to bring sexual talk into spaces where it really did not need to be? I had begun to go silent.” This silence becomes shame, which, in turn, becomes “painful sores, like the sores King David or someone complains of.” The silence also creates space for God to speak to, or through, Reines.

I have to confess that I was unimpressed with what God had to say. Many of the lines in the second half of “MOSAIC” sound like Matthew McConaughey’s stoner aphorisms in True Detective: “SITUATIONS ARE CELLS,” or “ANALOGY IS THE STRUCTURING PRINCIPLE OF THE UNIVERSE.” Others are sermon-style warnings: “EACH PEOPLE HAS THE GIFT OF ITS CATASTROPHE” and “NAZISM WAS AN INVITATION TO THE WORLD TO RECKON WITH THE NATURE OF EVIL // EACH THING TEACHES.” I found the warnings especially disappointing. I wanted to suggest that Reines’s God read Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which Hannah Arendt asks the reader to consider Nazism not as a lesson in morality, but as proof that the “average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical”—which is to say, no more evil than you or I—“could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”

But Eichmann in Jerusalem is reportage, and “MOSAIC” is a divine message and/or poem. I admire the courage inherent in that and/or. I admire Reines’s ability to put God’s words on the page, where grouchy, faithless readers like me can pick at them. This represents a major progression from “Thursday,” whose speaker was “Scared stiff / Scared to use words the way the lord uses them.” That speaker believed in divine messages, but was frightened. The “MOSAIC” essay, in contrast, conveys no fear. Instead, belief becomes a source of liberation, wonder, and delight.

In Fear and Trembling (1843), Søren Kierkegaard argues that belief is absurd. It is a paradox and a risk. Abraham took the risk of sacrificing his son, because God told him to, and Abraham was obedient and fearful. God saved Abraham. If Abraham could do that, shouldn’t Reines be able to sacrifice a bit of her dignity? Consider, too, that Kierkegaard considers faith “not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher.” I’ve always loved that idea, which Reines illustrates perfectly. Why should she conceal a zit beard or a corny divine message if she’s ascended to Kierkegaard’s “far higher” plane?

As a reader, I am grateful that Reines does not spend all of A Sand Book disregarding aesthetic emotion. With the seeming exception of “MOSAIC,” Reines puts poetry first.

In “Open Fifths,” the last poem before “MOSAIC,” she even writes about the longing for poetic beauty. She weaves her way through

first the despair at ever incarnating it in oneself
Second despairing of possessing it thru the Other, & finally
The sick & unassailable triumph of The Writer, the rare
Very rare one great enough to make a Beauty that won’t die
Which if you think about it is something even God doesn’t do.

Life with faith offers Reines a new incentive to create. In “No Child Left Behind,” she writes, “There was no manual for holy women / & had there been one we would have torn / It up.” To be a poet, A Sand Book suggests, is to write your own manual, to be used in both holy and secular life. Further, poetry blurs the lines between the two. It transforms zit beards into prophetic signals and projects the modern body into ancient times.

In A Sand Book, Reines wobbles constantly between prophecy and poetry, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the everyday. She courts condemnation and laughter, and invites the reader to write her off as crazy, or self-aggrandizing, or a half-baked Zionist with a God complex. The result is an intimacy that’s rarer than the sexual intimacy in Mercury, which, though important, can be found in many contemporary female artists’ work. Reines’s willingness to display her messy, flawed spiritual self is both unusual and moving. It gives me hope. If God spoke to Reines, maybe someday God will speak to me.