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Just as it is audacious to stand up for justice, it is audacious to write a poem. It is audacious to read poetry. This collection of poems looks at life through a secular-albeit Jewish-lens, recognizing, even celebrating mystery, awe, joy, humor, justice and injustice without assigning divine authority. Joy Gaines-Friedler's decision to present epigraphs by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel originates with how deeply his philosophy, theology, and scholarship move her. Rabbi Heschel's social consciousness draws her to him and to what he calls the "Jewish prophecy of civil justice." That belief brought Rabbi Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. together to walk arm in arm across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965.
In the poem "The Hebrew Word for Mysticism is the Same as To Receive," the speaker drops to the ground to hold the hand of a girl suffering a seizure in a parking lot. Something spiritual takes place between these two strangers; something not explained through the notion of god, or God, yet recognized as a mitzvah, the Jewish call to action. The poems in Secular Audacity move through holidays and funerals. They take place in an amusement park, a car, an assisted living facility, a barber shop, a golf course, a city bus, the back yard while looking for monarch larvae. Joy Gaines-Friedler believes that poetry audaciously allows us to love the stranger, establish connections, and to embrace the ambiguities we live with every day.
