Enid Dame’s Stone Shekhina
(Three Mile Harbor, 2002; 69 pp., $9.95)

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Big City Lit | May 2003

It is not easy to place words in the mouth of a Biblical figure and refashion her story, creating new dimensions. Enid Dame attempts this feat in Stone Shekhina, her seventh book, sometimes more successfully than others.

A longtime teacher of creative writing and bible as literature, Dame clearly knows her Tenach–the Hebrew Old Testament. She gleans heavily from biblical stories and Midrashim, commentaries on Biblical tales, retold to teach new lessons in the telling. At the dawn of the Christian era, as the Jewish people were forced into exile in Babylonia and beyond, almost always at the point of a sword, Jewish sages began constructing Midrashim to render their faith’s greatest lessons real and as accessible as Jerusalem and the Holy Temple had once been.

Like most modern Jews, Dame tends to neglect the elegant, native Israeli Midrashic traditions of Jerusalem’s early 8th century revenant Karaites, who became the ancient Jewish capital’s majority before its Muslim conquest and considered life outside Israel a violation of Torah. [1] Great Karaite sages like Ya’aqov al-Qirqisani, Yefet Ben-‘Eli HaLewi and Sahl Ben Masli’ah created a large body of work, including Qirqisani’s masterful code of law, Kitabu ‘l-Anwar wa-‘l-Maraqib (Book of Lights and Watchtowers) and commentary on Torah’s non-legal portions, Kitabu ‘r Riyad wa-‘l-Hada’iq (Book of Gardens and Parks). [2]

This oversight has apparently contributed to the mistaken presumptions that surface in several poems–that Israel’s Jewish presence is not rooted and the Jewish people are still at sea. Continue reading “Beyond Noah, Beyond Laughter” →

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