Going Out with Knots

Save 40% with code 6AF25. (Applies only to US and Canadian orders.) 75th National Jewish Book Awards Finalist in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice October 2025 Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots illuminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss. She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet—Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa—in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too. Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah. Free online study and discussion guide Praise “This book isn’t just a memoir, it’s a friend.”—Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Good Years “Going Out With Knots is at once deeply personal, literary, and evocative. This is a book I’ll treasure and give to people I love.”—Rabbi Rachel Adler, professor emerita at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and author of Engendering Judaism “This book is a gift to anyone seeking meaning in the midst of sorrow. Rabbi Zierler’s eloquent blend of personal narrative and poetic interpretation seamlessly melds ancient and new traditions to reveal the profound ways that Jewish texts and Hebrew literature can guide us through loss and healing.”—Rabba Sara Hurwitz, president and co-founder of Yeshivat Maharat “My suggestion: savor small installments. Allow yourself to absorb the fine nuances in the discussion of each poem. When Zierler masterfully weaves together her extensive knowledge of modern Hebrew culture and traditional Jewish texts, there are multitudes of gems along the way.”—Naomi Sokoloff, coeditor of Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making “[Zierler] shows the full complementarity between the hard emotional work of swimming through loss and the demanding cognitive work of learning more about what it is to be human, to love, to suffer and stumble in love, to look for God’s presence in the midst of loss and sometimes fail to find it.”—Review of Biblical Literature “The volume is equally remarkable for its stylistic accomplishment. Particularly noteworthy is the seamless movement between memoir, literary criticism, translation, and theological reflection. These transitions are grounded in the book’s central insight: mourning itself refuses disciplinary boundaries. Personal experience, literary interpretation, communal ritual, and religious reflection are presented not as separate modes of discourse but as mutually illuminating dimensions of a single human endeavor.”—Dr. Smadar Falk-Peretz for the Hebrew Higher Education Journal of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew