Ungodly Psalms: Ten Insubordinations

In the last few years, I’ve started reading the Tanakh. It’s lovely. And it pisses me off. It feels like it’s been written by a team of angels and asses. Which, according to experts in source criticism, it basically was. And considering the things that angels and asses do in the book, I’m not sure which designation is worse.

But contradiction is part of the Hebrew Bible’s beauty. We can see the social struggle unfolding among its authorial voices, and among the people who surrounded those anonymous authors. We see denunciation of oppressors interrupted by praise for scoundrels. Outpourings of diasporic anguish tell us to welcome strangers, and then we’re thrown into frenzies of glee at the prospect of exterminating everyone who wants to live on our land. Warnings against the rule of kings are interpolated into propagandistic histories of monarchy. Solemn ruminations on the rites of wanderers, who worship on lonely hilltops, are followed by proud declarations that everyone must report to the single Temple, and destroy all that is sacred without. The Tanakh is a patchwork of many texts. Why not add another?

I decided to write my own redaction—a subterranean text, let’s say, one that might have been unearthed in the caves of a lost Bundist sect that fled far from Zion when the first king took power, after which it lived off stores of smoked salmon and pickled herring for a few thousand years, until supplies ran out and forced it into daylight again. Or the text might have been recorded by anthropologists from the oral tradition of the progeny of Esau, who roamed the land, barely noticed, barely counted, ever since their patriarch signed his birthright away. (Patriarchy should have abolished itself already then.)

Or maybe it’s only a forgery, slipped by a sneaky agitator into the rubble of the half-destroyed library we call Tradition.

What follows is a selection from that unpublished book, which I call Ungodly Psalms.

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of five poems by Joe Grim Feinberg to be published by Der Spekter. Stay tuned for future newsletter issues to continue reading Feinberg's work.

Ten Insubordinations*

1.

Of course,
I really appreciate
the concern you showed for me.
The time we spent together in the desert 
was special. 
I will never forget it.
But why this jealousy and wrath?
Yes, it’s true,
when you were away
on business,
I did see other gods.
But do you want me to believe 
that you never led another people 
to liberation?

2.

I hung on your every word 
when you rebelled against the pantheon.
I marched
with your army of misfits 
when it smashed the maw of Moloch 
and the stony Lords of Canaan’s shores.
But I left you
when you took for yourself the crown.

I might have loved you, 
I said,
but I refuse to fear you.
When there’s one true God, 
I said, 
I’ll choose the many false.
Every Temple you build,
I said,
I’ll bury in idols.

But when you’re cast off from your throne
and wander again in the desert,
look for me then.

When another god is Lord,
I won’t hesitate
to make of you
my false and treacherous idol.
I’ll carve it well,
so that all may see you,
young and dashing 
as you were
when we first met.

3.

One would think I hardly knew you.
In all our time together
you never let me speak
your name.

But I don’t care.
We were strangers when we met
and strangers when we parted,
and if we pass each other 
in the streets
in coming years,
I’ll hail you
without words.

It’s true,
I found you out.
I asked around.
But really 
I don’t care so much for names. 
The lords and kings and sons of sons 
of sons of sons
across the centuries,
I can’t keep them straight.

If, in the heat of anger
and the drunkenness of night,
you hear me calling,
you may take it as a compliment.
But truth be told,
I wasn’t talking to you.

When I mean to speak to you
I’ll call you 
sister, brother, comrade.
Answer me then.
All other names are vain.

4. 

We’ll meet some Friday evening, 
sip sweet wine,
and I’ll tell you
to spend the night
because it’s too far
for you to go back home
and anyway next morning
you’ve got nowhere to be,
and when the sweetness
of the third
or fifth
or seventh glass
pours over your tongue,
you’ll start to tell me
it was all your plan.

How long ago you lured me 
into your garden
as an honored guest—
and sent me to your fields
to till them 
with my hands
and water them
with my sweat.
All because I wanted
to know
and see 
the naked, buxom world—
like you.

I wanted to taste,
you gave me dirt.
I wanted to fuck,
you gave me a plow.
But then,
when I wanted it all to end,
you gave me
a day of rest.

I said, back then
I couldn’t see your face.
I heard your voice,
but now it’s changed. 
I didn’t know
that it was you!

I said, I’ll take it,
your day of rest,
on one condition:
write back into your book 
the chapter you’ve omitted.
Tell us 
of the strike
that forced management’s hands.
Tell us 
of the farmhands 
who laid down their tools
and took for themselves 
the day you claim 
as yours.
Tell us 
of the delegation
that marched to your office
to add their demand 
to your commands.

I admit
my memory’s a little foggy,
but really,
would refugees from paradise,
hungering to be like gods,
turn themselves to slaves
without a fight?

You laugh
and say
let’s go to bed.
In the morning,
as we lie together
and the restless world
goes by,
I say, I’ll take it,
but on one more condition:
one day is not enough.

5.

Years later,
I heard
you had a son.
I won’t believe it.
Slander!
You, an orphan god,
made us as orphans.
We have no one but us
whose fortune we can claim.

So tell me 
then,
what father and what mother
should I honor?
The rib?
The mud?
I’d rather pay respects 
to all 
the sisters and the brothers
who come between 
the dust
and dust.

6. 

Yes, 
I was upset
after all 
you put us through,
when I had thought we had—
if not a covenant, then
at least an understanding.
At times the rage
within me
welled up
looking for a sacrifice—
but don’t you worry.
I found none.
As a rule
I do not kill
but only raise my hands 
against immortals.

7.

Why must you,
always staking out your claims,
beset by jealousy,
make men in your image?
Please
lend me to another god
to make of me a different man.

Will you let me go to them
who bore their chests
and danced
to make infertile deserts flood, 
or them who tired of the heavens
and the angels
and came 
to walk among the lonely 
and the rakes and tramps?

Or will you find for me
a god on earth
like her, the woman
on my neighbor’s terrace?
She spoke to me
the other day
with words as sharp,
and eyes as quick,
and heart as loud
and skin as bright
as all the thunderbolts
you’ve ever 
thrown.
She’s taken? 
I don’t care,
just introduce us, be a friend.
And ask her, will you,
which god is hers?

Then come 
and seek me
in her temple
in the morning,
wake me up 
and bring me home.

8.

But what do you expect of me?

You demanded for yourself,
in desert misery,
a tent of fine-twined yarn,
sweet incense
and onyx stones,
a chest perched on by angels—
payment from a people 
still mourning 
their lost calf,
still huddling under
your defenders’ swords,
still hungering
for honey
and thirsting for milk
and water. 

You ask me, then, 
to marvel at it all,
but you tell me 
not to take
even a stone or two
to share among 
the conquered?

9.

Don’t try me
with your talk
of petty theft
and stolen glances.
I was at the scene
of the real crime.
I saw the millions taken
in their huts
and camps
under an endless night.
I saw the bodies split
by flying words and teeth and knives
and left like litter 
on the sinking ground.

At dawn 
I heard the voices
pretending surprise,
rounding up the drifters
and the beggars
and the lonely.
But I had seen the perpetrators’ faces
in the light of fading lamps
and waning moons.

They were my neighbors
shouting high their oaths to truth.
I will bear witness,
but beware:
I’ve given my truth 
already 
to the strangers.

10.

Yes I, 
a stranger in the country, 
envy my neighbor.
I covet his large house 
built over years 
on the profits of his land
and the labors of his slaves. 
Don’t worry,
I won’t take it for my own.
I only want to steal inside
when he’s away,
to press my fingers 
to his steaming bread
and touch my tongue
to his cold wine
and set free 
all his slaves
and make love 
to his wife,
who gazes down,
her plaited tresses resting 
on soft bread
and breath
that whispers
letters red as wine
each time
I pass beneath her window.

This time
she tossed me down
the key.

(Yes!
I want and want 
and want
and won’t agree
ever to be satisfied.)

The gates fly open,
but she isn’t home. 
I go looking for her everywhere
until I hear her calling from above,
and up I climb.

She erects my stone on the mountaintop,
engraved with her commands,
and I don’t care
the stone will shatter 
when we roll down together.
The tablets strewn around
in pieces,
she’ll rewrite it all 
directly on my skin,
and the thunderings
and lightnings 
and the sounding of the horn
and the smoke that rises 
from our peaks
will mark
our brittle covenant
that breaks 
and makes itself
anew each day.

She promised nothing,
and that is why I followed her.
We wandered
through forsaken lands.

*Note: Three of these ten “insubordinations” were published in Pillar of Fire: A Collective Queer Anti-Zionist Haggadah (Pushcart Judaica and Making Mensches, 2024), pp. 66–67.