Living Inside Language with Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel

Christine Perrin: This is Christine Perrin, host of Composed, A Timeless Way of Living, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute that explores living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, and draws the classical tradition into contemporary times.

Christine Perrin: Welcome to Composed, Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel. Such a pleasure to see you here. Annie is a poet, translator, and teacher of writing, language, and literature at Shalem College. She's the director of the English program there. She's a mother of three, and she lives in Jerusalem.

Annie, can you tell us a little bit about yourself to get started?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: I was born and raised in Minneapolis. And in 2001, I came to Israel on a Fulbright scholarship. I was supposed to go back, but met my husband who's Israeli. He's from a kibbutz in the southern part of Israel, near the Gaza border. And we got engaged shortly thereafter, and I stayed.

And we live in Jerusalem. I've been living in Jerusalem now the majority of my adult life, actually, and that's where we've raised our kids. And it's really great to be here. Thank you.

Christine Perrin: I'm so glad you're here. Thank you. And thank you for talking to us at night. At the day's end, we're fresh with the morning here. Could we just hear a little bit about your childhood and your biography, how you ended up, you know, sort of in Jerusalem on a Fulbright and and now as a teacher and translator and poet.

Give us a little bit of background to start.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: So I was raised in a home in a psychic space, I think, where and maybe this is a bit stereotypical of the Midwest, but I think it was especially unique what I was given. There was the assumption that people are good. And even when people behave badly for the most part, they have good intentions. And I don't I don't know how many people grow up with that. I feel really lucky for it.

It's a lot of what I think Natalia Ginsberg is referring to in her essay, the little virtues, which is the title the title essay of one of her collections. And it was these little virtues that I feel were such a gift to to grow up with, and at the core of them was that sense that the world is benevolent. My book of poems, my most recent collection of poems, Means to Be Lucky, that was published with Poets and Traders Press, t r a I t o r s, not traders. So the majority of the book is my own poems, but it also translations from the Hebrew of several I admire. The press itself is based at the New School, and they're interested in this hybrid relationship between translation and the poet's own work, so to speak.

And, you know, the book is thinking about that, that question of what we're given and how what we're given is not a given and asks really what what are our responsibilities with what we're given. And I think that this sense of wholeness that I was really lucky to grow up with can often, I think, lead a person or obfuscate even the wrongs that are that are in the world, lead a person to ignore them or obfuscate them, make us not want to look at evil and at pain. Because why would you want to look outside of it, right, if what's inside is so good? But I'm lucky, I think, also because my upbringing, it pushed against that tendency. I think it has a lot to do with both of my parents who both have a deep sensitivity toward other people and a deep sense of empathy in the moment, in the moment by moment choices that we have to make, as well as in the way they formed their lives.

But I can specifically, just to give an example, remember a time when my father it was around the time of my bat mitzvah age. I was probably about 12, and he slammed the phone down, something I did not see very often. He's not a man with a temper, but he slammed the phone down, and he said, they can't do that to a good man. To make a long story short, he was deeply distressed with the way that somebody in our community was being treated. He saw it as an injustice, and he stepped he stepped to the helm and really led the community through a process of rectification.

And this is just one of many examples. They're not particularly political people, and family was really the center of their lives and still is. And yet there also was a sense that what comes to mind at the moment is this line, this sentence from the ethics of the fathers. It's a book in the Mishnah. It's the a book of exposition on the five books of Moses on the Torah.

It's codified around February. And it says it's not up to you to complete the work, but neither may you neglect it. Right? You you also have to at least get started. I would say that those are a few of the things, a few of the principles that I was raised with, a few of the examples.

Christine Perrin: Those are so helpful. It strikes me. I hear you piecing together two strains. One is, a kind of high ethical bar or umbrella, and the other is this sense of dailiness and what is asked of us in the day. And I'm very you know, I've learned so much from living life in your friendship, and I have, observed that living patterns as part of the day, the week, have been a big part of your life.

I remember you saying once you strive to narrow your life in order to enlarge it in the hopes that it would be enlarged by some narrowness, some boundaries, some harnesses that Robert Frost might say moving easy in harness. Could you talk about some of those patterns that that you were you were raised with or you embraced as an adult? I would

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: say that the pattern that's most important for me right now in my life and has been now for several decades would be Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Thursday evening and much of Friday is usually spent preparing, making food for the Sabbath. And even though I don't think I would define myself as strictly orthodox per se as an ideology, my practice of Shabbat is very much like orthodoxy. And in general, I mean, I would say that probably people would place me there in terms of my observance, at least in in in many ways. I just don't like to really go set myself into a category, and there are so many ways of living my Judaism and also other traditions that have informed my life.

So I I don't define. I define on what we call in Jerusalem the spectrum the spectrum of religiosity. It's one of the few things that I think, you know, you can do here. Well, it's one of many things you can do here, I guess, as a Jewish person that you can't in many other places, but it's, it's one of those little gifts, that flexibility that that I really enjoy. But, anyway, Shabbat is a time where it's just a big fat reset button in my week.

It's just the biggest reset button you can find, and it's a day where there are so many things we aren't allowed to do. Right? We we don't turn on and off lights. We have them on timers. I don't get into a car.

I definitely don't use my phone. That's the greatest gift of all and all of the food I've made beforehand. So there's a sense of really of feasting and of enjoyment and of time together and of resting, just resting the mind. I can't even write, which sometimes is hard because I'll read. And at times, I'll even have to say to myself, maybe I shouldn't read this person now, this poet, because I wanna go straight into writing after I've immersed myself in this writer.

I mean, there's also there also are those kind of tiny little textural decisions that that get made. But I would say Shabbat is really the most important for me.

Christine Perrin: It's so interesting to me that in the very center of what you understand as a pattern that offers rest is feasting. You and I have both loved the book Only the Lover Sings, and Yosef Peeper says that a feast is necessary. It's a necessary category, a necessary experience to make art or to have philosophical or religious contemplation. And yet here, that's just built into your way of life. It's built into your week.

It's built into your bones, almost your DNA. And I wonder, you know, now you grew up and you're a poet, but you did it long before that. And I'm wondering about, you know, what perspective that gives you on that comment about people, about feasting being a necessary element for art making. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Wow. Okay. It's such a mystery, a mysterious conjoining to me. Took me a long time to think about what I thought it meant. But I'm very interested in the fact that you did it before you even knew that someone said that.

You did the feasting.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: I came to it because I had our family, as a child, we always had fried and egg dinner together, and that was always very important. But I wasn't observant of, you know, the full twenty four hours, and I would sometimes go out after dinner. And our family where I when I grew up, that was how it was. And then in high school, I started wanting to observe a little bit more according to the what we call halacha, which translates as the way. People translate it as law, but the root of the word really means the way, the walking.

And I wanted to practice closer to that. I had been exposed to it in summer camp. And I think that I was drawn to it because it was just a beautiful way of life. I think my living here in Jerusalem and my Jewish practice, they of course, there's with any religious practice, I think there's always this, you know, certain push and pull and guilt and sense of obligation and where do I fit into this? And it's impossible not to have that when when community is part of the mix as well.

But it was more of a gravitational pull, I think, than ideology, both my being here as well as my Jewish practice.

Christine Perrin: Every time you say something, there are a thousand things I want to ask you about. But I'm going to discipline myself and ask you I heard you say about beauty's gravitational pull, the beauty of a way. By the way, I love that distinction. Law, way, that's remarkable. But the way that you were pulled in by beauty, and I'm just wondering what role that sense of beauty being a gravitational pull has played in your life, as a poet, as a as a mother, as a teacher, someone who's composing a a weekly life and commitments.

How how have you understood the role of beauty?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Well, you know, it's funny. Nietzsche is probably not the person we would think we would bring into this conversation, but he refers to beauty as a kind of bait. Right? A bait that draws us into the world. I actually don't read him as nihilistic as much as I I actually and a student of mine actually helped me to understand that.

I have the most wonderful students. I love them so much. And sometimes I I forget they're not my own children. But a student helped me to to see in Nietzsche this side that is very much that very much loves the world. And I think we can see it a lot in his aphorisms, but I would say that pleasure and joy are are really underrated.

And I would I say pleasure as well. Right? The pleasure of the world, it draws us to it, and it draws our attention to it. When I think of for instance, when I think of going on vacation. Right?

So we were blessed to go with the kids to to Greece for for a few days this summer, and there's a way in which whenever I go away to another country, I suddenly am so absorbed in what I'm seeing. Right? Everything is so interesting. Even the people and their faces on the street. Where is this woman in her day?

What is her job like? People seem to be hap maybe it's the place places that we go. That's where you go on vacation to places where people are generally happy. Okay. Granted.

But yet these are all regular ordinary places where people live. Some more beautiful, some less. And people always I always imagine them happy at least. Most of the people that I see and the people that don't maybe maybe have kind of a neutral expression or seem less happy, I started to notice in myself that I have a tendency to assume that they're happy simply because I'm happy and also because I think to myself, how could they not when they live right next to this seashore or next to these beautiful this beautiful architecture? How could they not be?

And then, of course, I zip past the old city on of Jerusalem on my way somewhere else, and and I need to remind myself that vacation isn't so much to give us a break. It's more to remind us how to look. It's more of a time to remind us how to pay attention and how the quality of our attention, the draw of whatever beauty or newness that's pulling us, that helps us to pay attention. And I think when we pay attention, we're we're better people in general. When we pay more attention on the whole.

That's where I've learned a lot, I would say, from Buddhism. There's a wonderful Buddhist teacher named Sylvia Bourstein. She's probably about 90 some years old. And as you can maybe hear in her last name, she's actually Jewish. She's what they call the Jubu.

You know? And she she has this sentence where she says, when the mind is clear, behavior is impeccable. Now, of course, our minds are hardly ever fully clear, but I think what clear means is when we are clear on what is happening in our mind. Right? When we are noticing and aware of it and accepting of it, aware both in the global sense of the patterns of our thinking, the good ones, the healthy ones, and the less healthy ones, and of what what we're thinking in that moment or what's passing through us in a moment.

If we're paying attention, we usually will make the right decision. And I've come to trust that a lot more and more as I've gotten older. In some ways, it's counter to the sort of stricture of law that, let's say, orthodox more orthodox Judaism would maybe incline me toward or especially incline me toward when I was younger. So, yeah, those are a couple of things that I think of when I think of beauty.

Christine Perrin: Thank you. You mentioned in that exploration your students and, you know, your forgetful sense of their studenthood. I'd love to hear more about Shalem and your teaching there. My understanding is that it it's a a Jewish classical college that's modeled after Saint John's College in Annapolis. I don't know if that's correct.

But you you have a particularly interesting manifestation of student culture, and and then you also have the various roles that you play as someone who's highly developed in language, but also teaching people English language. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: I would just one small correction. I would say it's not a Jewish college per se. Right? But it's it's here in Israel. It's in Jerusalem.

It's Israel's first liberal arts college, and we have a really rich core curriculum, like you said, that is, to a large extent, based on the classics. And the students in their first year have a range of courses that introduce them to classical literature, and we're also highly selective. So the students, in addition to needing to have done well in high school and perform well on a series of tests that they take, they also are personally interviewed. I say to the admissions committee, I feel like you give me a gift each year, just this big, huge gift when the semester when the year begins. And so the students, they they tend to be very curious.

I can hardly think of a time I've read poems with them where I didn't take a note or two from something somebody said or more than one person said that illuminated the poem in a different way for me. I like to say to them sometimes at orientation. Sometimes I I help lead parts of the orientation, and I I like to say to them that this is this is an invitation to not be cynical. For three and a half years, to just not be cynical. And now cynical does not mean and I say this to them.

It definitely does not mean don't be skeptical. It doesn't mean don't doubt, and it absolutely doesn't mean don't ask questions. On the contrary. Right? Jaded people don't ask questions.

Naive people don't ask questions. Naivety isn't isn't a function of trusting others to try to learn what they might know, to try to understand better how they see the world, to see what they have that I could incorporate into my own being or just my my perspective on a given subject that's on my mind. That's not naivete. That's that's naivete's opposite. And, yeah, the students tend to I don't think that they need me and my invitation for it.

I think that they are naturally inclined toward that, and it's just a pleasure to teach people like that.

Christine Perrin: And they do service before they come? Military service?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Typically. Yes. Because it's, you know, it's compulsory here. Yeah. Many of them also do a year beforehand of some kind of community service.

For instance, our daughter, she was she worked for a year with mainly with youth, the youth from Kibbutz Beiry. Kibbutz Beiry was one of the Kibbutzim in the South near the Gaza border that was hit very, very hard on October 7. Many people were killed. Many people were kidnapped, and she was part of the informal education for for that year. Many young people here do that right after finishing high school before they go to the army or or before they do a different kind of national service.

Christine Perrin: So it strikes me. I mean, that's remarkable, your daughter's experience sort of in the presence of of history in a very tangible way. But it strikes me that in general, you're getting these students who have lived, have served, and then have decisively chosen a a liberal education, a liberal arts education. There's a scale that's remarkable in that, like you say, they're all interviewed. That's quite, I would say, disappearing in the world, that kind of education, that kind of student.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Yeah. In general, we just are living in a more and more, I think, cynical world, and there's also a lot of despair. Right? I mean, there's just despairs in so many places and so many reasons for despair. Right?

So not just here, everywhere. Right? So that's also something that we're we're carrying.

Christine Perrin: Yes. I mean, people have talked. It's becoming a cliche almost the the meaning problem. Right? The meaning crisis.

And that maybe is not an easy segue, but maybe it is to the fact that you've translated Job, the book of Job. You were invited to be the translator of that text, which I would just love to hear more about that process, about how it formed you, and what it informed you of in terms of this meaning problem that we're talking about.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Yeah. So Corin publishers approached me to translate the book of Job. This was several years ago, and they wanted a literary translation. They wanted the poet the poetry to come through. Job is known to be very difficult etymologically, philologically.

It's the redactor or writer of the book must have known been a real polyglot. At least that's what professor Ed Greenstein, who was the scholarly adviser for my translation, that's what he believes. Job was written probably something sometime around June, but people don't know exactly. It's one of the oldest of the books. And I was really blessed to work with Ed because I mean, first, he's just a mensch, but, also, he has a really interesting understanding of the book, and he has spent decades of his whole of his own life studying the book.

He put out a scholarly translation shortly after the shortly after, shortly before, I don't even remember that the the Koran edition came out. This was part of the larger Koran translation of the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures that that was published. I believe it came out 2020, 2021. And so Job, you know look. We know the story more or less.

Right? All these terrible things happen to Job. He loses everything. He seems to have been a pretty wealthy man and to have been quite lucky going back to that subject. Right?

And he did a lot of good. Right? And then he loses everything, and his friends come, and they all have great advice for him. And they all are there to tell him all kinds of things, all of the cliches that we know. God's ways are mysterious.

We can't understand. You must have done something wrong. Okay. That's a little tactless. Right?

But look into your heart. See what you did wrong. Right? But even the friends who maybe we would cringe a little bit less when we hear what they have to say, they're basically sharing general beliefs, conventional wisdom, so to speak, to Job. And Job says, no.

Sorry. This should not have happened. I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm putting and he even puts God on trial in the story. And he's not afraid. He's not afraid to repeatedly assert that this is wrong.

This is this is this is wrong that this happened to me, and it shouldn't have happened to me. I don't deserve this suffering. At the end of the story, god says to the friends, he berates them and says, Job spoke the truth, not you. But then he says to Job he starts to ask Job. It's and he starts to ask, do you Job, about whether he understands these wonders of nature?

And he start the the the deity in the story starts to just account for all these wonders of nature. And Job, they're questions. It's like a series of questions. And when I was translating it, I could feel in my body, in my cells, the difference. You know, when I translate poetry, I say the words out loud.

I mean, Job, I did not get to the point of memorizing. But, generally, when I translate a poet, I get I either memorize the poem or get pretty close to it being memorized. I get it. I really assimilate it. When we get to Job, the deity speaking, suddenly, the deity would be paraphrased in exactly the same way.

Right? And this is one of the main things that I hope my students of poetry come out of when I teach poetry is that you can paraphrase and get basically the same meaning. Right? But it's completely different. God is speaking of the mysteries of the universe and allowing them to stay mysteries.

His friends, in the best case, are speaking of the mystery and not speaking mystery. What god the deity is saying to his friends is, you don't even know the not knowing. You don't even know the not knowing that you're purporting to be so important. You aren't intimate with it. You're not you mean, you're much less you're not familiar with it.

It isn't yours. And until it's yours, you won't be able to help Job, and you have no authority to speak of these things. Maybe you can help him in other ways, but you can't help him by trying to talk about something you don't know. I think it's probably very much the difference in a diff on a different plane between, let's let's say, pity and compassion, right, or pity and empathy. Right?

In pity, also, there's a degree of fear. Right? You're try you're separating yourself from that person. And these friends had lots of reasons to be afraid. They didn't want want Job to have Job's fate.

Right? And whether or not Job does or doesn't know these mysteries, he doesn't pretend to know, and he doesn't back down. If I may, I would like to give you show you this what I learned from Ed here at the end of the of Job where the it's right before the final narrative where God has said to Job, you spoke the truth. And then Job answers, and he says he's been translated as saying through I mean, the King James version, the JPS, the Jewish Publication Society version. Almost like, I can't think of a version actually that did not translate Job as saying, I abhor myself.

I despise myself. I repent. And I I repent in dust and ashes. Okay? Or I repent seeing I am dust and ashes.

Okay? That's how he's usually it's usually translated. And there's actually a very, very well known phenomenon of biblical translation of plagiarism, probably not intentional in biblical translation simply because I think this probably has to do with the fear of changing something that we that we've understood in a certain way. It has to do with keeping tradition, probably. It probably has to do with many things.

But, actually, Ed Ed Greenstein, professor Ed Greenstein, who's studied this very carefully, and he himself is an expert in the philology, he says there's no reason to believe that what's written in the Hebrew, I'm just, finding it here, is the word. Okay? I'll read it in Hebrew. Okay? That's Job's last sentence that I just told you how it's usually translated.

There's no reason to believe that means despise or abhor. It's much closer. Even in colloquial Hebrew nowadays, it's much closer to I am spent. I am exhausted. I am tired of.

And no evidence according to Ed of it meaning I repent. And, again, even in contemporary Hebrew, the root of that word means I take pity on, or it can mean I take comfort in. Okay? And, it more usually means I take comfort in. But Ed under understands that word as well.

In earlier Hebrew, he translates that word as take pity on. And so we have here Job actually saying, I am utterly spent. I take pity on dusted ashes. I take pity on the human condition. I take pity on how hard it is to be a human sometimes.

I can understand suffering much better now, and it is really hard to be a human, and it's really hard to know anything. Right? And he doesn't back down, at least the way that I understand it, and that was a real gift for me. It was a gift to hear the deity in the language and the poetry that normally I wouldn't have bothered to read the Hebrew, to be honest. When I first read Job, I read it in English.

And also to be able to understand Job as a much more fierce character, character, but also a much more compassionate character who who learns from from life. Going back to lack of cynicism. Right?

Christine Perrin: Yes. Wow. Thank you for that full picture. It's a beautiful picture. At so many levels, my mind is going in many directions.

What strikes me about this last thing that you're saying is that his own suffering enlarged his understanding of his brotherhood to other humans and that god voice was part of what enabled that. And also not falsifying, the mystery, letting the mystery the antinomy of experience, the mystery, as well as the thing realized, dwell right next to each other. What a remarkable thing for you to unearth, and that's how I hear it. I hear you talking about bones and earth and rhythms in that language. I wanna pick up on one thing you said about hearing the tune and not just the words.

You said when you got to those questions, you felt it in your body. And it just strikes me that, you know, of course, as a poet, but even in some of the other ways that you're talking about living patterns in your life taken from your parents, taken from your weekly commitments and habits. Say more about what that means to not just have the words, but to have the tune. To not just have the content, but to have some language or rhythm or encounter with the thing as an experience and the way that language does that. I mean, you talked about your your editor being a polyglot, and and you are that as well, at least to me.

As a speaker of English, Hebrew, and Arabic. You've learned since you've been there. So so can you give us a little bit more on that score?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: You know, the first thing that comes to mind, I think that the way in which music operates in poetry that we could spend, you know wow. We could schedule another 12 podcasts, and I would enjoy that so much, and I would wanna interview you too. I would say that I'll take it from a different angle, actually. I'm pretty sure this was the case when I was learning Hebrew as well when I became closer and closer to fluency in Hebrew. But then it happened to me in Arabic, and it's still happening to me in Arabic because my Arabic is not at the level of my Hebrew yet.

But I started learning Arabic about ten years ago. Was really important to me to learn Palestinian dialect and to be able to speak with people here. And it's been central to activism that I do, although I really hate the word activism, to be honest. I feel like it separates it out of my my life and out of the fabric somehow, but I haven't found a better way of talking about it yet. I would love to.

And it's been important for friendships, some of my closest friendships that wouldn't exist had I not learned Arabic and had those people not been open to letting me stumble through my Arabic in the especially in the beginning stages where I didn't speak as well as I do now. But when I speak Arabic, I mean, it's almost to the point of embarrassing. Right? Because I become so joyful and so energized. It just opens me up, and it must have something to do with what you said about the rhythms of being entering into another rhythm.

It opens me up not just culturally, but also I have this suspicion possibly neurologically. And someone maybe has done a study on this. I don't know. But I think that when our mind is absorbed in an other sounds, in other structures, the grammar of another culture and of another ways of living in the world. It's not just one.

Right? Every person is different. Every family is different. Every community is different. But these structures that are not mine so there's a way in which that mind being absorbed in it, I think, has it's very similar to that kind of attention that we were talking about before that draws one in when they're on vacation, let's say, or visiting or seeing something beautiful or just looking at the bougainvillea that they've planted on their windowsill when the light is hitting them a certain way.

Right? All of those things we we can take such joy in. And so learning Arabic and speaking it with people and being with people in their language and really being able to do that now has been one of the very best things and most rewarding things that I've done as an adult.

Christine Perrin: Tell us about some of the practical ways that learning Arabic took form in your life. I mean, you were doing this study in the midst of many other things, parenting, teaching, writing, and translating, and publishing. You say it very modestly, but how did you learn Arabic?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Well, thank you. First of all, I should point out I speak. My reading is very rudimentary. I decided that at the age at which I was starting to learn, my goal was to be able to speak with people and make friendships and connections and do work that I could only do if I if I knew Arabic. And so I focused on speaking.

I taught myself the letters, and I can read basic. You know? But I don't I don't I didn't invest in that. What I did was I at the college where I teach at Shalem, Shalem College, we have an unbelievable program. The students begin those who choose that for their major, it's called Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

Those who choose that for their major learn Arabic better than anyone at any institution here in Israel. We're known for our Arabic program. And for a long time, I had wanted to learn Arabic. I had taken, like, a short course about ten years before that. It wasn't happening, and I knew I had to do it, and I wanted to so badly.

And so I asked they they had a course in spoken Arabic, which was already after the students in the major had taken a year of intensive literary Arabic. So I had the chutzpah, I guess, to ask, could I join the course? I promise that if I'm a problem or if I interrupt or disturb, you just kick me out. If, you know, I'm asking questions that aren't allowing the class to to continue, I will just try to sit there, and I'm just gonna write everything in transliteration, and I wanna see what I can get. And they were generous, and they allowed me to join.

The students were also very sweet about it. And I just wrote everything in English transliteration. And we have a great teacher who really taught it from the basics. So I got the a good structure, a sense of the grammar structure. It was a course that lasted the whole year.

And we also have tutors from most of whom come from East Jerusalem, Palestinian tutors who work with our students one on one on their English. Sorry. Not on their English. On their Arabic. Although in our English program, we also have tutors working with students on their English one on one.

Language is a big thing at our college. So I I worked with the tutors. When there was when there were openings, I would work with the tutors, and then I started to have friends. Right? One of my closest friends is a Palestinian woman who lives in a village only about twenty five minutes from here.

And sitting with with her or her family or her friends who don't have too much English and definitely don't have Hebrew, having those relationships solely in Arabic, of course, that also makes a big difference. I also learned over an app while I was working on my Arabic. I'm pretty obsessed, and there's an app called HelloTalk. It's one word, and it's a language exchange app. I met a woman in Syria who got married when she was, 15.

Not the easiest life. You know, she would share with me about about her life, and she was one of the best teachers I ever had. She was obsessed with learning English, as obsessed with English as I was with Arabic, if not more. And she was bound and determined, even though she wasn't able to finish high school, to have great English, and, honestly, she does. She's really she's taught herself from online and from these exchanges, and she taught me Arabic, and I learned techniques from her for studying and for learning better.

I learned techniques from this Syrian woman whose face I've never seen that I use with my students when I teach English. I gave her tips that I discovered through my learning of Arabic. It's all cross pollinated. There's also a dear friend of mine, a Gazan, who I met on the app about toward the beginning when I was learning, and we managed to meet, in the summer. He left he managed to get out of Gaza a little bit before October 7 in the summer of, 2023.

He made a very treacherous way from Gaza to Turkey to Greece and then to The Netherlands, and he's there now. And this summer, we were able to meet in Amsterdam on my way back from a visit to my family in The States. And it was just one of the most marvelous days, honestly. One of the most marvelous days of my life. It was just so beautiful, and we both felt so much what a miracle it was that we could meet and talk and that he was free finally.

And there's so much pain still. There's so much fear. There's so much worry. There's so much I mean, if I start to talk about it, I'll cry, so I would rather not. But the situation is so is so bad, and he's lost so much.

And and yet the fact of our meeting was just so it was such a joy for both of us, such a natural joy. And we we just had a great time jumping from cafe to cafe and talking the whole day.

Christine Perrin: It's remarkable to me that your love and commitment to language, which partly was an accident of birth. Right? I mean, little living in the Midwest and being Jewish and going to Hebrew school, probably. I mean, I don't even know that part of it, but that flourished or flowered into going to the University of Maryland and studying literature and writing poems. The kind of thinking, and living, and teaching, and fellowshipping that has come out of language itself, out of that devotion, and curiosity, and love, and even just capacity to work hard at something when you understand its purpose, when you understand its telos to you.

It almost has composed your life. I mean, I'm just construing the things that we've talked about here. And it strikes me that your view of language as a vehicle of friendship with Job, with these Syrian woman, and and your friend in The Netherlands, with your husband. I mean, with so many it's so deeply relational. I wonder if you could tell us about an intellectual friend, a literary friend of a book that has lived for you recently.

Obviously, your whole life has been made up of living books, and I also hear you saying that there's a kind of democratization, you know, that that you feel this great sense of possibility of learning from from anyone and from, meeting people inside the language. But has there been a book recently that in a life of books that has, struck you in this way?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Yes. Well, you spoke about friendship. Right? And I feel that I made a new friend very recently. I finally read the novelist Stefan Spike's memoir, The World of Yesterday.

I had heard people speaking of the book as a neocolpa of sorts to his humanism that Zweig was Jewish, Austrian. He was a novelist who was very popular in his day until the Nazis banned him. He lived through both world wars and was crushed by what happened to the virtues and values of Europe and his dream along with many of the other intellectuals of his time of a united Europe. People who had spoken to me of the book always seemed to feel that Zlig was saying, I believed in all these values, but where did that get me? Right?

And we hear people talk that way. I hear people talk like that a lot. And not only is it dispiriting, I find it wrongheaded, and I'm glad I didn't take their word for it because they had kind of disinclined me to read it. It's just the sort of what I'd heard snippets in the air of the book. And finally, I just went and I read it myself, and I'm so glad I did.

And I'm gonna recontextualize this a little bit, but what comes to mind for me is Shakespeare's sonnet 65, which was one of the sonnets to the, to the fair youth. And in the sonnet, he conveys his deep seated fear as to whether the beauty of his beloved and his love of itself will last through time, how can something eternal and true also be so fragile? And he concludes that sonnet. He says that in black ink, my love may still shine bright. And he concludes the sonnet with that hope or even that conviction and that belief.

And Zweig's own black ink, as I read it, is a testament to that fact that values and virtues, actually, they don't die. There always is gonna be evil. There's always gonna be death. There's always gonna be suffering. But when the ink dries, the intentions remain.

The words remain. Something that this friend of mine actually said, the my friend the Gazan friend I had mentioned to you, he said to me, I brought a couple gifts for him when I went to meet him, and he was a bit bashful and hesitant to receive gifts. And he said, you know, words mean so much more than actions. And they said, how can you say that? I said, people just talk and talk and talk and give a lot of lip service about the suffering that you and your people go through.

And I said, how can you say that? In fact, you know, there's a phrase in English, actions speak louder than words. And he said, no. He said, words, he said, can totally build a person, and they can completely destroy them. He said, we're and it made me think, wow.

In a world where we commodify so much and when we're trying to do good, often we can commodify and be quite quite harsh on ourselves. Words words matter. Words are actions also. When they're said with intent, I think that their intent can ripple, and they can enact things in the world. I think that for Zweig, you know, I felt like I found somebody who kind of understood some of the things that are are hard for me.

And there's a way in which I think that the the doubt that and my students brought this up a lot when we were reading this sonnet. We read it recently in one of my courses, and they were sensing some maybe ambivalence as well and doubt and real fear that that the that the speaker of that sonnet is feeling about what will happen to this beauty that I've encountered and this good and this love? And it can't last. It's so fragile. And and yet, what is that blank ink?

Are they you know, one of the students asked, black ink? Does it it's still black. Does it how can it shine? He says it shines, but does he really believe that it shines? And I think that we can't really have the faith without the doubt.

We can't really have the eternal without the fragile. I suppose that that's a real cliche, but for me, Stefan Zweig and the way that he describes his close friendships during that time with French intellectuals, Homer Holland was one of the the main friendships and how just being friends with them, it was considered a betrayal of his country. People looked at him as a traitor, and he couldn't believe how his countrymen, his fellow citizens, including the people who intellectually he resonated with, and he thought he resonated even more deeply than intellectually, spiritually. These people who were rigorous and serious artists and writers and thinkers, they were answering the national call without any questioning. And, you know, he felt this in World War one as well.

And I think that that despair is really on the other side of that despair is still a remaining hope and belief and faith in the things that really matter. You know? And I took that I I'm so glad that I read this book.

Christine Perrin: What a gift. I it makes me want to ask you to read sonnet 65 for us, and also to leave us with one of your own poems. I'm thinking of the poem Courage, but any poem that you would choose of your own because this seems like a flag, a a reply that you're making to these words and true things that fragile but eternal as well that you've cultivated and and loved and known. I feel so grateful to you for showing us how your own life as as a reader, as a person inside language is seamlessly woven together with living in a country, in a moment in history, in a family, among others, you know, striving to do this to the best of their ability with the materials they have. I'm so grateful.

Would you close us with those words, reading them to us?

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Wow. I would be honored. So I'll read the sonnet and yeah, and I'll think of a poem. Okay. Sonnet 65.

Since breasts, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, but sad mortality ores ways their power. How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea whose action is no stronger than a flower? How shall summer's honey breath hold out against the wrackful siege of battering days when rocks impregnable are not so stout nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays. Oh, fearful meditation. Where a lack shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid, Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? Oh, none. Unless this miracle have might, that in black ink, my love may still shine bright.

Christine Perrin: That Shakespearean killer couplet.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: I know. Oh. I know. Yeah. Okay.

I'm gonna look for my poll. One sec. So this is from means to be lucky. First things to make the person who write the poems, the poet said, and answering a question I must have asked but can't recall. You learn to live with your imperfect self, then went back to her dinner as if that were all.

Christine Perrin: Thank you. You learn to live with your imperfect self. The work of composing a life. Right? Very apt ending.

Thank you so much Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel for speaking with me today.

Annie Kantar Ben-Hillel: Christine, thank you. Thank you for this wonderful conversation, which is just it's always a gift to be able to talk with you and learn from you, learn from how you absorb and give back what you've metabolized so deeply. And I'm just so grateful to be able to talk with you. This is such a wonderful series, and I'm so happy to be part of it. Thank you.

Christine Perrin: Thank you. I'm grateful too.

Christine Perrin: You've been listening to Composed with Christine Perrin, podcast of the Humanitas Institute about composing well lived lives of virtue, craft, community, and delight.