When Marcia Falk first began publishing her translations of Jewish prayers and Scripture, she didn’t expect to encounter controversy. In fact, she never expected much at all.
“I’m a poet,” she says from her Berkeley home. “Poets in our culture are used to being ignored.”
But Falk’s translation of “The Song of Songs” and her prayer book/magnum opus “The Book of Blessings” were definitely not ignored. In fact, her “Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible” — originally her 1977 doctoral thesis — has been popular ever since its initial publication. A reprinting from University Press of New England has just been released.
However, while largely applauded throughout the Jewish world, her 1996 “Book of Blessings” in particular met with some resistance.
Many readers loved her reinterpretations of classic texts. Others saw Falk’s work as a step removed from heresy. But over time, congregations around the country have adopted some of her prayers. Locally, for the last 12 months Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah has used the “Book of Blessings” as its siddur for a once-a-month “Neshama” Shabbat service.
“I get e-mails every day from strangers thanking me,” she says. “They say [‘The Book of Blessings’] has allowed them to be Jews, to express themselves in a Jewish language and to do it with Hebrew, in a way totally connected to tradition yet in a way that speaks for them.”
Falk does have her detractors.
After atttempting his first “Neshama” service last year, Temple Isaiah congregant Harry Strout thought her work went “overboard” in some respects. “The poems she included in her book were wonderful,” he said. “However, I do not think that they belong in a prayer book. When it comes to changing original Hebrew text — text that has been in existence for centuries — my dander is aroused.”
He criticized in particular her rewording of the Barchu and Sh’ma prayers. Falk’s Sh’ma reads in part: “Hear, O Israel — The divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything; the many are One.”
“Instead of using the exact wording as is found in the Chumash,” said Strout, “she modifies them to wording that is similar to something that the Ethical Cultural Society would be proud of. For me, the concept of God, the way I understand God to be in Judaic terms, has been removed. God has been Americanized.”
Many others at Temple Isaiah, including the clergy, are fully supportive of Falk’s work, though they know it won’t please everybody.
Says Rabbi Judy Shanks, “She is astonishingly loyal to the traditional order and thematic rubrics of the prayer book, but she helps us see how much more there is to them then we might have.”
Adds Rabbi Roberto Graetz: “One doesn’t have to agree with everything she proposes, but if we are to grow and evolve, we need to be open to language and thinking that is a bit out of the mold.”
Falk is nothing if not open to language. A Stanford Ph.D. in English and comparative literature, the Bronx native grew up in a home steeped in both English and Hebrew literature, and her entire career has been guided by a love of both. That’s what drew her so strongly to “The Song of Songs.”
“Rabbi Akiva said the whole world was not worth the day the ‘Song of Songs’ was given to the people of Israel,” notes Falk. “He and the sages saw it as an allegory of love between God and the people of Israel, a view perpetuated in rabbinic tradition for centuries.”
Falk herself, like many scholars today, doesn’t buy that interpretation. “In one sense,” she says, “this could be seen as a rationalization to make the text kosher. I think they included it [in the Bible] because it was popularly embraced as oral folk poetry. The people already canonized it.”
In addition to her work with sacred Hebrew text, Falk has also translated the poetry of the late Israeli poet/mystic Zelda, whom she knew.
“She was a wild Orthodox visionary,” says Falk, “who was adored in Israel. She died in 1984, and it’s a great sadness for me that she never saw the book.”
These days, Falk says she’s taking a breather from translating and is concentrating more on her own poetry. She still conducts regular weekend workshops with Temple Isaiah, sharing her understanding of Jewish liturgy. Rounding out her resume, Falk is also an accomplished painter (her work can be seen on her Web site, marciafalk.com).
But for Falk, it all comes back to her abiding attachment to Judaism, the Jewish people and the texts that bind them. “I lay most Jewish culture and civilization before Hebrew literature,” she says. “That’s my great love.”
“The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible,” translated by Marcia Falk (University Press of New England, $12.95).