I'm delighted to be able to let y'all know that I am the featured poet in the current issue of Soul-Lit, a journal of spiritual poetry.

One of the magazine's editors, Wayne-Daniel Berard, interviewed me for the issue's central feature story. Here's one question-and-answer, to whet your appetite:

Can you describe the relationship between your being a rabbi and being a poet?

For me the two are very consonant. In both professions, words matter. When it comes to Torah and prayer, the words are incredibly important. Our mystics tell us that even individual letters of the Torah have the capacity to contain deep meaning! The words we speak in prayer are polished and honed by years of use. One of our daily prayers tells us that God speaks the world into being in every day. Like God, we too can speak worlds into being, and poetry is one of the ways we do that.

When we speak words during religious ritual -- a baby-naming, for instance, or a wedding, or a funeral -- those words are carefully-chosen and important, and they create change in the world around us. In poetry, too, words matter deeply. I love the way that both of these worlds regard words.

I also think that being a rabbi, being a mother, being part of the wide world -- all of these things make me a better poet, because they keep my eyes and my heart open to the things around me. The more I pay attention, the more engaged I am with my world, the more I have to draw on when I write poems.

And, I think that being engaged with poetry helps me to be a good rabbi. One of my spiritual directors when I was in rabbinic school is a longtime scholar of the Baal Shem Tov, and he always had relevant and meaningful Besht quotes to offer. I do the same with poetry. I often share poems with congregants when I think those poems might speak to where they are or might offer a kind of spiritual medicine which they need.

In a practical sense, my congregational job is technically half-time, which means there is spaciousness in my life for poetry. Of course, congregational obligations sometimes push poetry out of the way; if there is a funeral, for instance, that trumps everything. But I try to maintain space in my life for both of my vocations. I think they enrich each other.

Read the whole interview here: Soul-Lit Feature. Along with that interview, they published six of my poems: Belief, Baruch She'amar, Meditation on Removing Leaven, No Limit, Word to the Wise, and Standing at the Edge. The issue contains a lot of other wonderful poems as well -- browse the whole listing here.

My thanks to the editors for kindly featuring my work!