Happy Islamic New Year - 1437

A New Year blessing courtesy of John Rutter and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Happy New Year to all the friends of the Ballarat Interfaith Network - "Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God"

This post was originally published on The Trad Pad on  2 January 2011.  

Happy New Year everyone ... 

particularly to those who did it tough this year.  

Please take on board the thoughts of Minnie Louise Haskins

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Happy New Year! May the year be kind to you and bring you blessings, wisdom, peace, and prosperity!  The last day or two has exhibited some coincidence. Firstly, Hay Quaker published, in toto, the poem The Gate of the Year by Minnie Louise Haskins.

 Minnie Louise Haskins

Picture from here

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."
And he replied, "Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!"
So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night.
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.
So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention.

Perhaps readers have heard this poem, or part of it, before.  It was made famous by the Christmas Speech of King George VI delivered in 1939.  You can hear the actual speech – it is quite moving given it is made at the time of the first Christmas of World War II – here.

Picture from here

Secondly, I decided to get out of the house for the first time since  Christmas Midnight Carols and Eucharist at All Saints, Mitcham and go to see the much lauded movie, The King’s Speech. It is the story of the relationship between the Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, and King George VI.

The movie is being tipped as a frontline contender for an Oscar. In spite of competition from The Social Network in the bookies’ odds as set out here, it is hard to see how this movie could lose with its high proportion of former Academy Award winning actors.  The UK still produces the best actors – particularly in ensemble work as demonstrated in The King’s Speech – in the English speaking world.  However, it does an Australian heart good – particularly one coming from Queensland – to see and hear Geoffrey Rush mixing it admirably with such a talented cast. To think, this great man of Australian movies was growing up across Brisbane from me in the 1950s!

Those sitting around me in the packed movie theatre were clearly as impressed as I. 

I was however surprised at the ending. I don’t think, in such an historical movie, it is giving away much to describe the ending of this movie.  I thought the movie somehow would finish with the 1939 Christmas Speech. This is arguably the most famous, most remembered, and most quoted of all the King George VI’s speeches.  This doesn’t happen.  The movie concludes with the King’s Speech at the beginning of World War II.

Listen to the original speech here.

An interesting thought - welcoming the New Year at the Nan Tien Temple

Have you ever visited the Nan Tien temple near Wollongong? 

 It is a beautiful and astounding place.

The material below has come with permission 

from 

InterfaithnetW

Situated at Berkeley, a suburb of Wollongong in the state of New South Wales, it is one of the branch temples of Fo Guang Shan, founded in 1965 by Venerable Master Hsing Yun, which has over 200 branches worldwide. “Nan Tien” in Chinese, literally means “Paradise of the South”. This is the biggest Buddhist temple in the southern hemisphere.

 Since the opening of the temple in October 1995, it has become a new venue for local and international tourists and also acts as an important cultural centre bridging different cultures.

Fo Guang Buddhism is rooted in the Mahayana tradition which emphasises that Buddhahood is within everyone’s potential reach. Fo Guang followers strive to bring Buddhism into daily life and aptly term their faith “Humanistic Buddhism”.

http://www.nantien.org.au:88/en/about-us/nan-tien-temple

Poem by Nurit Zarchi - How to count to 5774

It can be difficult to step outside our very own selves and our very own culture, traditions, and faith and into the world of the other - other cultures, traditions, faiths.  To catch the flavour of Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, here is a poem just published in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

Poem of the Week / How to count to 5774

This Rosh Hashanah, 

Israeli poet Nurit Zarchi suggests a different way of looking at the passage of time.

By Vivian Eden | Sep. 3, 2013 | 4:56 PM 

Piling up its seconds, moments, months,

life hides our losses from us.

The miniature palm in the courtyard,

without my help, reached the window,

victorious green flag.

But at the same time that a sick person folds

back into his fate, also the injured are sorry.

These have their own time, not made of moments or days

but of one clear stretch like a night in a town at the pole.

The method for counting changes, not measured by a clock or a calendar,

but the number of telephone conversations, invitations to coffee,

words from across the sea or that you forgot for a moment.

How did I arrive on this smooth and constant track

like that bearing luggage at the airport.

Simply by not being careful

I gave my life to the moments, to the days, to the years.

 

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz. 

Published in Hebrew in "The Soul is Africa," 

page 34 (Hanefesh heAfrika, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005).

These are the days of posting up new calendars for the Hebrew New Year. Here Nurit Zarchi, an Israeli poet born in Jerusalem in 1941, suggests another way of looking at the passage of time, rather than by days, weeks and months.

The protagonist of this poem is “life,” which not only “hides our losses from us” but also accomplishes things without our intervention. In the second stanza, the speaker contemplates the “sick” and the “injured” (not only in the physical sense), for whom time seems like a long continuum not broken up into discrete units. This notion is expanded in the third stanza: Here we do not have constant units like hours, days or months, but rather a growing number of non-identical events – “the number of telephone conversations, invitations to coffee, / words from across the sea or that you forgot for a moment.” It is a counting rather than a measuring.

In the final stanza, the speaker places herself firmly on this unbroken continuum, comparing it to a baggage conveyor belt, and wonders how she got there. Her answer: “Simply by not being careful / I gave my life to the moments, to the days, to the years.” In other words, by living in the present.

Zarchi has written novels, short stories, books of poetry, an essay collection, an autobiography and over 100 books for children. She is the recipient of many literary awards.

The translator of this poem, Lisa Katz, is an American-Israeli poet and translator who has lived in Jerusalem for 30 years. Her translations of Hannan Hever's "Suddenly the Sight of War: Hebrew Poetry and Nationalism in the 1940s" and "Late Beauty: Poems of Tuvia Ruebner" are forthcoming in the U.S. in 2014.

“It's always a bit of a gamble to translate Nurit Zarchi," Katz tells Haaretz. "She is incredibly prolific, an indefatigable re-writer and also a person who often tosses what's left into a trashcan."

See more of Zarchi’s poetry translated by Katz here.

Musings

*The “miniature palm in the courtyard” in “Calendar” seems to suggest that Zarchi’s poem is in conversation with “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens. How so?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

About Lisa Katz - from Poetry International Rotterdam:
Lisa Katz was born in New York and studied at the University of Michigan and the City College of New York, receiving a PhD (on the poetry of Sylvia Plath) from the English Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she has lived since 1983. Reconstruction, a volume of her poetry in Hebrew translation, was published in 2008 by Am Oved Press in Israel; also in 2008, she was awarded the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and a Ledig House International Writers Residency. Her poems appeared most recently in the Jewish Quarterly of London. Look There: The Selected Poems of Agi Mishol, in her translation from the Hebrew, was published in the US in January 2006 as a Lannan Foundation selection of Graywolf Press. Her translations of Admiel Kosman were published in 2011 in a bilingual edition entitled Approaching You in English from Zephyr Press. Late Beauty, a bilingual edition of the work of Tuvia Ruebner, translated with Shahar Bram, is forthcoming. Katz taught literary translation at Hebrew University for a decade and is teaching at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Spring 2013.

Links:
Article by Lisa Katz about Israeli poetry in www.tabletmag.com
Poems in The Drunken Boat
Poems in Blue Fifth Review

Poet and translator Rami Saari, founding Israeli national editor, 2002–2006, was born in Petah Tikva (Israel) in 1963. He studied at the universities of Helsinki, Budapest and Jerusalem and received his PhD degree in Semitic languages. Saari has published six books of poetry: Behold, I Found my Home (1988), Men at the Crossroads (1991), The Route of Bold Pain (1997), The Book of Life (2001),So Much, So Much War (2002), and The Fifth Shogun (2005). In addition, he has translated more than thirty books into Hebrew, both prose and poetry, mainly from Albanian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian and Spanish. Saari has twice won the Israel Prime Minister's literary award for poetry (1996 and 2003), and the Olschwung Foundation Award in 1998.

Links:
OSU Hebrew Writers Listing
Biography and poems in Hebrew
Biography in English
Poem: 'The Only Democracy in the Middle East'
Poems:'In a Remote Village', 'Documentation'
Biography in Catalan

Shana Tova to all our Jewish Friends - Rosh Hashana begins to-day. May it herald in a Year of Peace for all.

Brigid's friend Avraham - who is a member of COMMON - has sent a greeting for Rosh Hashana

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Dear family and friends,

As I prepare for Jewish New Year at sunset today (Wednesday) and enter 3 sacred days and nights (where I would hardly even know if there was an election in Australia!), I take this opportunity to be wishing you a year full of wonderful health, happiness, personal growth and peace throughout the world unconditional love - for Rosh Hashana and the entire year ahead, and the well-being to be well on Saturday week, the fast of Yom Kippur. 

In the spirit of the introspection and renewal of this sacred season, I ask you for forgiveness for any wrong that I have committed to you - whether knowingly, or unknowingly...

And to lighten your hearts, I have included below 4 entertaining Shana Tova greetings, recorded through the wonders of our technology - I hope at least one makes you smile!

Shana Tova u'Metuka
Avraham


GREETINGS 1 and 2 - These 2 links are old and new Shana Tova greetings - from where I once-upon-a-time studied to be a Rabbi - yes! The name of the place is Yeshiva Aish haTorah - 

Dance along - if you can keep up...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCYRM7KYJY4#t=90

and...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_M5-qthA8w

GREETING 3 -

This is a wonderful Shana Tova greeting - in song!... from regular Israeli's - not in the Yeshiva world!

Enjoy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlcxEDy-lr0

GREETING 4 - And finally for a most profound demonstration of the traditional Jewish practise of dipping an apple into honey to represent our desire for a sweet new year, I have found no better than the following...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29-4KKWcU_U

(in case you are wondering, the true practise is to use the fruit and NOT the featured items!)