Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire

Abstract

Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate, Editor Toward the end of these pages, Zisl discloses the functions of tefillah, saying such prayer teaches us to "mourn our brokenness and beg for the divine." Provocatively, Zisl compares prayer to eroticism, as both are practices of yearning and desiring, spurred by awareness of our own incompleteness. These are not activities that stay within designated times and places. Rather, their practice infiltrates all our lives and opens the way for "creative possibilities." I might add to this a third parallel, already implicit throughout Zisl's text, and that is the work of writing. Writing remembers what was, and reveals what might be. Writing gives accounts that bring forth justice. Writing strives for redemption. It weeps and it laughs. Its imperfections abound, and yet within the words we catch fleeting encounters with others that intimate wholeness, holiness. Zisl's text that follows here is tefillah, and we the readers participate (erotically and prayerfully) in mourning and begging, the work of repair and rediscovery, as we assemble our own pasts and futures. It is a creative work of nonfiction, emerging at the interstices of queer theology, Talmudic learning, social justice, and personal memoir. It brings the past to bear on the future, and the future on the past. When Zisl first approached me with their essay, I realized this would be ideal for our journal CrossCurrents, since it checks so many of the boxes that define our publishing output: creative work, engaged with issues of social justice, and rooted in religious tradition. The only problem was that the text was too lengthy to be just another article in our pages, while breaking it up felt like missing the integrity of the whole work. So, we created a special, special issue, something we've never done here at CrossCurrents. We're devoting this entire issue to a single work of a single author. The fact that we can print each journal issue as a stand-alone book made this an opportunity we wanted to take [End Page V] advantage of and we were thrilled when Zisl agreed to work with us on the venture. God, The God of Unmet Desire reflects the deep learning and yearning of its author, interpreting ancient Hebrew liturgy through Black diasporic poetry or feminist science fiction to wrestle with individual and social quests for racial, economic, and gender liberation. Thus, it translates ancient meanings via modern social life. Even so, it remains resolutely traditional. There's an apology in here, an argument for a God, and a relationship with that God who is expansive, who revels in words and wonders, who delights in sex and sensuality, who cares for the oppressed and desires liberation. As I read and re-read Zisl's text during the process of editing, I kept thinking about width, wideness. The text opens and closes with a passage from Psalm 81, "Open wide your mouth . . ." If you close your mouth, you'll miss the honey. So, open wide. I worked through the text, opening myself to something new, attempting to make clear the varieties of voices that emerge and ink-bleed through the white pages. In the process, I had to think about width in a very physical way. How wide are the margins? How much indentation to give a passage? Is a block of text centered? Flush right? Flush left? Do the quotes from others have the same indentation as the author's own voice? How much width should there be in the text and in the margins? Voices vary and, in print, width makes those distinctions clearer. I was reminded of pages of the Talmud in which the mishnah is placed at the center, gemara extending that below, and then Rashi and other commentaries circling and swirling around the center. What a feat of production it must be to produce such a work! So much of it comes down to width: to the ratio of text to other text, as well as the white space surrounding the text. Margins in any book are key because that's where the reader engages, jots notes, queries, or just...