Studying Torah
And make for the tent a covering of tanned ram skins, and a covering of dolphin skins above.
—Exodus 26:14
Dolphin skins? What?
Where would the Israelites
find dolphins in the desert?
We sit at a table and debate,
thick books with footnotes open.
Is the Hebrew translation off?
Was it some other animal?
The woman on my right
offers a theory from the Talmud
suggesting a unicorn, a miraculous
multi-colored creature appearing
for a single Divine purpose
only to disappear thereafter.
Perhaps it’s just semantics,
the man across the table posits.
Cheesecloth isn’t made of cheese.
Dolphin skin could be a color,
goat leather dyed purple or blue.
Speculation continues in our cozy synagogue room
where we study with bagels, Shabbat mornings
9 a.m., returning week after week to puzzle over
an ancient document revered for centuries
as a doorway to the Divine.
Gripped by the desire to decode
what we cannot know, we examine each word,
turning it over and over like a precious gem,
gleaming with finely cut facets.
Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including The Sunlight Press, Gyroscope Review, One Art, and Amethyst Review. She is also the author of two poetry books for young readers, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence. (Albert Whitman, 2020) and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit www.jacquelinejules.com
Amethyst Review 