Originally published May 30, 2024
I was reminded this week of one of Israeli poet’s Yehuda Amichai’s most well-known poems, “The Place Where We Are Right.” Catching up on podcasts from the past few weeks, I listened to Poetry Unbound’s beautiful discussion and analysis of these words.
From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.
But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.
Does “the place where we are right” allow space for others to be right, for others’ stories and pain? In the podcast, the host, Pádraig Ó Tuama, offers this interpretation of Amichai’s words:
In the place where you have privilege, or in the place where you’re frightened about acknowledging that you might be wrong, there, allow both doubt and love to dig that up because something else might be there. It isn’t to be groundless, it is to say that there might be another experience of land underneath your feet. It isn’t to say you don’t belong anywhere, leave, be gone. It is to say doubt and love are two things that can hold you. Love, alone, I don’t think is enough because it’s easy to love something and nonetheless be violent in its name. This is about saying “doubt and love.” The doubt that says, What if I need to pay attention to another point of view? How willing am I to ask myself a question that might mean that I have to stand on new ground, that I have to go a bit deeper, that I have to employ doubt and love and maybe even bring some of my loyalties into question in order to ask something that has a deeper integrity.
It has been a heartbreaking week, beginning with continued antisemitic violence in Toronto, to the horrifying loss of life in Gaza, and the ongoing hole in our hearts as the entire Jewish people awaits the return of the hostages. My hope and prayer for all of us is that we can hold our own truths, our own stories, our own pain – the places where we are right – while also using the well worn tools of our doubt and love to dig up the world, to build a new world of kindness and redemption.
Rabbi Miriam Farber Wajnberg
