The space between my hemispheres
is not a bridge but a truce.
A fibrous ceasefire of white matter
tugged from both sides,
one side crisp with law and commentary,
the other soft, like dusk on a page not yet written.
I live there,
in that narrow corridor of synaptic ambiguity,
where the left speaks in footnotes and prohibitions,
and the right whispers in broken metaphors
and dreams it dares not name.
There is no tower here,
only the hushed architecture of tension,
between tradition’s muscular grip
and the heretic’s trembling hand reaching
for what cannot be said.
The left makes me legible—
a man in a bekeshe,
dancing with Daf Yomi beneath fluorescent light.
The right leaves me undone—
a mystic who weeps at shadows
powerless over the naughty side of the tracks
finding the uncanny in the white spaces between the holy letters
I negotiate this space daily,
a smuggler of forbidden questions,
dragging poetic contraband
through the obsessions of Halachah.
Sometimes I am caught.
Sometimes I am blessed.
What some call this dance
a war of perception—
the left dissecting truth
into parts it can own,
the right embracing wholeness
so wide it defies utility.
But I—I am neither victor nor victim.
I am the space between.
And in that space,
I listen for voices not mine—
the Rabbis and the rebels,
the scribes and the madmen—
and try to love them all
in one trembling corpus
that dares to call itself
a soul.
