Don’t get more house than you can keep

My mother warned

“don’t get more house than you can keep”

but the rabbis decreed

“Make for yourself a heart of many rooms”

And this scrap of instruction

Has me building room after room

To try to contain it all

To try to contain us all

This one

And this one

The pure and impure

The ones who deem me impure and the ones I deem so

The heart of many rooms

Is more house than I can keep

Like the old folk tale adding another chicken and another dairy cow into a too small home

So that we could all realize how big the house really is

How expansive we could be

So I’m just building chamber after chamber

To put all of this living mess

His tears and her rage

Our grief

My discomfort with their opinion

My fear with their vision of the future

Is it time to downsize?

Or is there room in this heart for all of us?

With apologies for the mess,

Yes.

*****

About the poem:

Over the last 11 months, I’ve thought often of this teaching:

Make for yourself a heart of many rooms, and enter into it the words of Beit Shammai and the words of Beit Hillel, the words of those who declare a matter impure, and those who declare it pure. (Tosefta Sota 7:12)

Hillel and Shammai, and their schools of thought, disagreed on nearly every issue. They disagreed even on their own red lines - what one deemed impure, or out of bounds, the other said was permitted.

How is it that they “behaved with love and friendship toward one another” (Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 14b) despite huge intellectual and cultural disputes and differences?

How did they build a heart with many rooms - maintaining their own deeply-held beliefs, while also still allowing themselves to sit alongside each other? This poem explores whether or not we can do this, and whether or not we have the option.