Collections of Poetry
Poetry and Liturgy
My poetry and liturgy, taken together, form a single body of work rooted in honesty, embodiment, and refusal. Refusal to lie to myself. Refusal to smooth over pain for the sake of palatability. Refusal to pretend that faith, identity, grief, fear, love, and survival can or should be clean. Whether a text appears as poetry on Ritualwell or as part of Into Night, it comes from the same place: the lived space where language becomes both lifeline and witness.
This work exists at the intersection of prayer and utterance. Some pieces are recognizably liturgical — blessings, laments, invocations, communal cries shaped like psalms. Others are unmistakably poems — fragmented, raw, sometimes unruly, written more to survive the moment than to serve a ritual function. But I do not see a hard line between the two. In Jewish life, prayer and poetry have always braided into one another. Psalms are prayers and poems. Lamentations is liturgy born from catastrophe. My writing stands in that lineage, even when it does not resemble what we expect sacred language to look like.
The poetry collected through Ritualwell reflects moments when the outside world presses in too hard to be ignored. These are texts shaped by war, antisemitism, fear of visibility, communal grief, political erasure, and the constant act of counting — days, deaths, losses, thresholds. Ritual appears here not as something abstracted from life, but as something embedded in it: mezuzot hung on uncertain doorframes, candle-lighting alongside dread, blessings spoken through trembling. These poems insist that Jewish ritual is not only for moments of stability or joy, but for moments of raw vulnerability, when survival itself feels like a spiritual act.
Into Night, by contrast, turns inward. Where the Ritualwell poetry looks outward at collapse, violence, and communal fear, Into Night documents what happens once the world goes quiet and the internal noise grows unbearable. It is a chronicle of insomnia, mental illness, isolation, and the psychological weight of nights that stretch far past endurance. These poems do not ask to be used communally; they ask to be sat with. They speak to the private hours when faith becomes wordless, when prayer is replaced by breath-counting, and when simply staying alive until morning feels like its own form of sacred labor.
Across both bodies of work, repetition, counting, silence, and directness function as core techniques rather than stylistic quirks. Trauma returns in loops. Fear revisits the same questions. Hope flickers in brief, careful moments. I allow poems to end without closure because life often does. I allow anger to speak plainly. I allow tenderness to appear without guarantee. These choices are not aesthetic alone; they are ethical. They honor the realities being named rather than reshaping them into something more comfortable for consumption.
What unites my poetry and liturgy is a commitment to presence over resolution. I am less interested in telling people what to believe than in accompanying them in what they feel. These texts do not aim to save, explain, or redeem suffering — they aim to witness it without turning away. They make space for contradiction: for loving Judaism while being wounded by the world in its name; for longing for peace while living inside fear; for believing and doubting simultaneously.
Taken together, this work insists that modern Jewish spirituality must be capacious enough to hold grief, rage, exhaustion, joy, and hope without ranking them. It argues that prayer can look like poetry, and poetry can function like prayer. It speaks for those who need language that does not flinch — language that can survive the night and still greet the morning without pretending the darkness never existed.
Ritualwell.org
My Ritualwell poetry exists as its own body of work, separate from B’tzelem HaLo Mush’lam, because it needed the freedom to breathe without structure holding it up or pinning it down. These poems are not a project in the sense of architecture or system-building; they are moments. They are written from inside lived time — inside fear, grief, relief, rage, tenderness, exhaustion, and the strange holiness that sometimes appears without warning. Ritualwell became the home for my strongest poems not because they are the most polished, but because they are the most honest. They are where my voice is least filtered and most exposed.
This poetry is deeply Jewish, but not liturgical in the formal sense. The Judaism here shows up the way it often does in real life: sideways, incomplete, raw, embodied. Blessings appear alongside panic. Hebrew phrases interrupt English not as decoration, but because English alone is sometimes insufficient to carry what needs to be said. Ritual objects — mezuzot, kippot, counting, candles, prayers — appear not as symbols, but as lived practices, tangled up in trauma, memory, hope, and survival. These poems assume that ritual does not rescue us from reality; it meets us inside it.
Much of this body of work was written in response to war, antisemitism, fear, and the collapsing sense of safety that comes with realizing how fragile belonging really is. Again and again, the poems return to counting — counting days, counting deaths, counting time, counting losses — not because numbers are satisfying, but because they are often all we are left with when language fails. At the same time, the poems resist the flattening that numbers impose. They push back against abstraction by insisting on names, faces, relationships, and the unbearable weight of individual lives. If counting risks erasing humanity, then these poems insist on grieving it back into view.
Another throughline is fear — not generalized fear, but specific, embodied fear. Fear of being seen. Fear of being mistaken for something you are not. Fear of being targeted for simply existing. Fear that comes with wearing or removing a kippah, with hiding or displaying Jewishness, with loving a people whose pain is constantly politicized. These poems refuse to clean that fear up into something noble or instructive. They allow it to be what it is: destabilizing, repetitive, exhausting, and often lonely. They name the quiet calculations that happen in public spaces, the loss of innocence that comes with realizing safety can vanish overnight, and the grief of watching the world forget its promises.
At the same time, this poetry is not only about despair. There are moments of blessing, of resolve, of fragile hope. There are poems that mark transitions — leaving one home, entering another, standing at the edge of uncertainty and choosing, at least for today, to step forward anyway. There are affirmations of voice, of resistance, of memory. There is prayer here, but it is prayer that argues, questions, blesses with trembling hands, and sometimes speaks even when faith itself feels threadbare. Holiness in this collection is not found in certainty, but in persistence.
Stylistically, these poems are intentionally direct. I do not hide behind heavy metaphor when the truth needs to be spoken plainly. Repetition is used the way trauma repeats — looping, circling, returning when you think you’ve moved past it. Line breaks matter because breath matters. Silence matters. I allow poems to end unresolved, because life often does. I allow anger to stand without apology, grief without immediate consolation, hope without guarantees.
What Ritualwell made possible was the understanding that poetry can itself be ritual — not a replacement for prayer, but a companion to it. These poems do not tell the reader what to believe or how to resolve their feelings. They bear witness. They sit shiva. They stand guard. They count. They bless. They rage. They wait. They remember. They speak when silence becomes dangerous.
This collection exists for anyone who feels caught between love and fear, identity and exposure, belonging and isolation. It exists for those who do not have the luxury of neutrality, whose very existence has been made political, and who are still trying to live tenderly anyway. These poems are my record of standing in that tension and refusing to disappear.
Into Night; A Compilation of Poetry
Into Night is my record of what happens when the world goes quiet but the mind does not. It is a book written in the hours when structure dissolves — when routines fall away, distractions lose their power, and the thoughts we avoid during the day come forward and demand to be witnessed. This is not a book about sleep; it is a book about what prevents it. The night, in these pages, is not merely a time of day, but a psychological and emotional landscape where memory, fear, desire, grief, and longing move without supervision.
The poems and texts in Into Night emerge from isolation, mental illness, and the strange intimacy of living too long inside one’s own head. There is a recurring sense of being untethered — from people, from safety, from certainty, and sometimes from the self. Nights stretch, distort, and repeat, and with them come spirals of thought that feel inescapable in the moment, even when they might appear manageable in daylight. This book does not judge those spirals or rush them toward resolution. It understands them as part of a lived reality: how the mind tries to survive when it is left alone with itself.
Time behaves differently in Into Night. Minutes drag, hours collapse, and memory refuses to stay in the past. Earlier moments of pain resurface with startling clarity, and imagined futures carry just as much emotional weight as real ones. There is a constant sense of waiting — for sleep, for relief, for morning, for something to break the cycle — and an equally constant fear that nothing will. The night becomes a space where control feels lost, where self-care can feel like failure simply because existing feels like too much.
Language in Into Night is deliberately spare and exposed. The poems resist ornamentation in favor of immediacy. Line breaks mirror breath that catches or disappears altogether. Repetition mirrors anxious thought patterns that return no matter how often they are dismissed. Silence appears as much in what is left unsaid as in what is spoken outright. I allow the work to linger in discomfort, because pushing too quickly toward hope would feel dishonest to the experience being documented.
While much of the book is heavy, it is not devoid of tenderness. There are quiet moments of self-recognition, fleeting connections, and fragile acts of endurance that matter precisely because they are small. Survival is not treated as triumphant; it is treated as ongoing. Getting through the night does not guarantee the next one will be easier, but the act of reaching morning becomes its own form of meaning. In this way, the book resists both despair and false optimism. It lives in the space between.
Into Night is not written to reassure the reader or to provide answers. It is written to say: you are not alone in this kind of darkness. It offers companionship rather than solution, honesty rather than cure. For anyone who has stared at a ceiling waiting for their thoughts to slow, who has felt fear sharpen after midnight, or who has learned how loud silence can be, this book exists as witness. It is a testament to the reality that night does eventually end — not because everything is fixed, but because time, merciless and miraculous, keeps moving forward.
