This collection of poems by Rachel Barenblat, one for each sedra of the year, is a good example. No male rabbi would have written a poem that says:

Postpartum depression caused the Flood.
God was elated when creation was born
every facet unfolding a reflection
light and darkness, as above so below

But God ached all over, God felt hollow
God walked in the empty garden disconsolate
already nothing was the way God planned it
and Abel's blood cried out from the soil

Could the whole project be a wash?
In God's heart, regret bloomed hot
and a tempest of sorrow rained down on earth

Still, some simple sweetness in us
roused divine compassion like milk
found favor in God's tired eyes.

It is a tender image of the creation that we have in this poem, is it not?

God the mother gives birth with elation, and then God goes through the feeling of emptiness that follows after every birth, and the sense of disappointment at the way things turn out that follows some births, and then, when regret blooms hot, and God is tempted to wash the world away, a compassion for us, something like the milk that every mother feels inside-- that needs to pour out for her own sake as well as for her child’s sake, comes out and saves us.           

Let me share just one more poem from this collection. In order to read it, you must put aside your politics, at least for a moment. You must forget the fact that self-defense is a necessity in Israel and that searching those who would go through its checkpoints is an essential task, a matter of life and death for Israel. Try to forget for just a moment, if you can, that those who come to the checkpoints may, and often are carrying hidden weapons. Try to forget for a moment, if you can, that America does the very same thing that Israel does, before it lets anyone board a plane. Try to forget all these undeniable truths for just a moment, and try to focus if you can, as this poem does, on the damage that doing these searches does to the minds and the souls of the eighteen year old Israeli soldiers who must do these searches all day, every day. And then, after you have winced at the painful truth expressed in this poem, you may go back and reaffirm all these facts and you may understand that these searches are absolutely necessary and yet you can understand that it is sad that this is so.

The poem is called ‘Downside” and it is based on the warning at the end of the book of Bamidbar that  you must guard yourselves against the people who live in the land that you are about to take possession of, or else they will harass you. 

Here's the part
God apparently didn't say
at least not aloud
where anyone could hear:

dispossessing anyone
not as easy as it sounds
and tends to have
occasional side effects

feelings of guilt
among the tender-hearted
and a certain hardening
of those who do battle

refugee camps
persisting for generations
breeding bitter fury
which tends to explode

and don't forget
the damage done
to your chelek Elohim,
the eternal spark in you

which dims a little bit
with each interrogation
each humiliation
of another face of God.

You have to wince for a moment when you read this poem, and then you can shake it off if you want to, and you can go back to the practical world, the world in which searches may be ugly but in which they are necessary. But this poem will go with you, and on occasion it will make you wish that it were not so.

Read the rest of the poems in this collection and they will help you see the portion of the week in a new light. Some will make you smile; some will make you angry, but all of them will make you see the words of the Torah in a fresh and different light, and that is what Torah study is meant to do for us each year.

70 faces is available for purchase on the Phoenicia Publishing website and also at Amazon, though the publisher and I both make a little bit more if you buy the book via the press.