David Crumm: The Marcia Falk interview on ”˜The Days Between’

Whatever your faith and whatever the season, Marcia Falk has blessings, poems and spiritual guidance to help you through a time of reflection and renewal. Her new book is called, [The Days Between : Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season.](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1611686059/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1611686059&linkCode=as2&tag=reathespi-20&linkId=PB4JGNHNRKMOKEWK)

As the subtitle indicates, this is a series of reflections, readings, blessings and prayers appropriate to each day from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. But this book also is full of timeless spiritual wisdom, eloquently signaled in these concise lines. Consider this eight-line reading that Falk calls "Taming the Heart."

Slow spin of earth

against sky-

imperceptible yet

making the days.

One stone tossed

into the current,

and the river, ever-

so-slightly, rising.

_ ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviewed Marcia Falk. Here are ... _

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH MARCIA FALK ABOUT 'THE DAYS BETWEEN'

DAVID: Your website, MarciaFalk.com, describes you as "Poet, Painter, Judaic Scholar." We will include a photo of your book's front cover, which features your watercolor-and-pencil work, called "Gilead Apples." Your career is so varied. How do you describe your overall body of work to audiences, when you tour and talk about your new book?

Marcia Falk, photo used with author's permission.

MARCIA: I would say that I am a creative artist, a poet and a translator with a strong scholarly background in the work I do. I've brought together the literary world and the world of scholarship in my work interpreting and recreating Jewish liturgy from a non-hierarchical perspective. I don't just sit down and write liturgy. Everything I do is based in the tradition.

DAVID: Evidence of your very thoughtful process is that your books take many years to complete. Probably your most famous book-at least one that has been on my own reference shelf for many years-is your rendering of [The Song of Songs.](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584654236/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1584654236&linkCode=as2&tag=reathespi-20&linkId=7K53SRA3THLSMAG6)

MARCIA: That has been in print for more than 30 years and it has migrated through a number of publishers over the years. I began that work when I was a graduate student in English and comparative literature at Stanford and I was doing independent studies in three different areas at once: I was in a poetry translation workshop and I was doing an independent study in American poets and then-and this is the most important hing-I had decided to go back and study the original Hebrew Song of Songs, which of course I had known since childhood in my Jewish background.

I remembered The Song of Songs as very musical and lyrical and I already loved the book but I had never studied it. It is an extremely different book linguistically. I worked with a Bible scholar, sitting together and researching this book. I researched every word and phrase and never thought about translating it. I was just absorbing the book. And then one night my translation workshop had an evening when we were sharing our work. When my turn came, I said, "I don't have anything to show. I've spent all my time studying this wonderful book and it's completely taken over my life." I began to talk about The Song of Songs and how they couldn't understand this aspect of it from the King James Version or they would miss this aspect in the Revised Standard Version. I was talking to them about what's in the original Hebrew.

That's when I realized that I really should translate this book that had become such a big part of my life. And, that took me years. I went to Israel. I wanted to study at the feet of the great Bible scholars there. I wanted their approval that I was on the right track. Eventually my translation became my doctoral dissertation, the translation accompanied by a commentary. Depending on where your readers may look for a copy of that book, I should point out: Some editions of the book today now appear without the commentary. I think editions with the commentary are more helpful.

DAVID: That's a terrific story because it conveys to our readers the great care and the long years you spend on your work. Let's point out that I'm certainly not alone in praising The Song of Songs. A very long list of great literary lights have praised that book, including Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer who wrote about your book, "I thought until now that the Song of Songs could not be translated better than the King James Version. Marcia Falk really managed to do an exceptional poetic job. She has great power in her language."

So, then, leaping forward to the mid 1990s, you produced the big [Book of Blessings](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807010170/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0807010170&linkCode=as2&tag=reathespi-20&linkId=CFBRIN2TM67G2KF6).

MARCIA: I actually began writing that book in 1983. That was a 13-year project by the time Book of Blessings finally came out in 1996. That book is a recreation of prayer for Shabbat, the Sabbath, and for weekdays. My impetus for doing that book was a deep frustration with the patriarchal focus of traditional prayer that was so unsatisfying to the point of being painful for many Jewish women and, it turns out, many Jewish men as well. When it was published, that book created a pretty big stir in the Jewish world.

Then, in 1996, I thought I would dive right into the next volume, which would be for the high holiday season, because that is the time of year when more Jews enter the synagogue than at any other time of year. But this book, which just was published, took another 18 years.

DAVID: I've been a journalist covering religion and cross-cultural issues for 40 years now and I am fascinated by this thoughtful, long journey represented in your work. There is a great deal that evolves and matures in us as we go through the years. I talked about this issue, this spring, with the writer Barbara Brown Taylor and asked her why five years had passed between books.

Barbara laughed at that and said: "I envy the writers who can turn out a book every year, but I teach full time, my husband and I live on a working farm, I travel a lot to speak. And, honestly, I think it's worth taking time to actually live the kind of life that will produce something worth writing about."

MARCIA: There are many reasons it took me so many years: raising a child, needing to make a living as a professor and many other things. But the main reason was that this needed to evolve in my mind and heart. I needed to really grapple with what this very difficult liturgy was all about. The themes of the high holidays are extremely profound and they are at the core of all of human endeavor.

It took this many years to complete, really, because I needed to live long enough in the world-and needed all of the experiences that come through the years with birth and grief and growth and renewal and all the things that make up a human life through those years. I needed to grow through all of that. My living was seeping into my poetry all that time.

DAVID: I hope that readers of this interview understand that, while your book is Jewish and ideal for Jewish readers, this book also can be appreciated as an inspiring and spiritually challenging reader for non-Jews as well. As I was preparing for our interview, Marcia, I was also balancing hours of visiting my father in hospice care. He's at the very end of his long life, now, and I found many passages in your book just electrifying.

Let me read one prose passage from the opening of the book that really helped me in my own reflections right now. You write: "Positioned between dawn and dusk, dusk and dawn, we live between past and future because we cannot live _ in  _them; we cannot act in them or change their outcomes. In this sense, past and future don't exist for us: only the time between them-the present time-exists." And then you continue a few lines later: "How do we live with the knowledge not just of our own mortality but of the truth that we cannot hold on to everything? How do we keep from succumbing to despair?"

I underlined those lines and turned down the corner of that page. That summarizes, so eloquently, the spiritual challenge we all face at times of major life transitions. It certainly was very helpful to me in the midst of hospice care with my Dad. I read those lines aloud to him.

MARCIA: To me, that's the best reward as an author-to hear that kind of response from a reader. I should also mention that it's been very interesting to me that, wherever I speak about this book, hospice workers in particular come up to me and I see how engaged they are. I feel very gratified that the book is of use to those in hospice. I think that hospice workers are doing something extremely important in our world world.

DAVID: I think it speaks, even more broadly, about how these timeless truths and insights-these blessings and prayers-can touch many lives whatever one's faith might be. So, let me close our interview by asking: What do you hope general readers will take away from reading your book?

MARCIA: For my Jewish readers, I hope I'm bringing a new awareness of their Judaism, but I also hope it will reveal something for non-Jewish readers as well. I hope it touches people and enriches their paths through life. We're all human beings and we're all in this together.

In this book, I am dealing with big themes that speak to and for all of us. Of course, I'm doing this in Jewish language and metaphor-but ultimately for any religion or tradition to meaningful, it has to be dealing with the universals of human life. No religion works unless it is really talking to the whole community of humanity.

(Originally published at www.ReadTheSpirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

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