The Jewish Divinity of Mary Oliver
<p>I found G?!d through the words of the poet Mary Oliver. She came to me in the summer of 2018 as this city kid expanded their love for nature, working at a farm camp for teens. When I first read her lines “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it,” I immediately felt that these were instructions for living a specifically Jewish life (from “Sometimes” in <em>Red Bird</em>). The practice of paying attention to everything with a blessing of astonishment, out loud, feels quintessentially Jewish. Her prolific body of work chronicling the wonders of nature and the human condition opened the door to my spirituality. I use her words as often as I can in the services and rituals that I lead, and I am certainly not alone in that. I love the familiar warmth when I come across one of her poems in the supplemental pages of a siddur. In this essay, I plan to use those life instructions as wayfinders to explore how her words can and have opened up Jewish spirituality and liturgy.</p>
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