Peter Waldor — a passionate but skeptical Jewish person. Photo by Ginny Twersky
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Poems by Peter WaldorDecember 27, 2007
In his poem “Insurance Man,” Peter Waldor homes in on the impossible distance 21st-century Jews have traveled from the common biblical career of shepherd and the close relationship the tender of the flock had with God.
“All my life I dreamed / of being a shepherd, / not an insurance man,” writes Waldor.
But while an insurance executive is what he is, Waldor does not suppress his spiritual or artistic vision in actuarial tables. In his first book of poetry, Door to a Noisy Room, to be published in January by Alice James Press, spare verse and stark images turn again and again to biblical figures and themes.
“I think I’m a passionate Jewish person, but I’m also a skeptic,” said Waldor in a telephone interview. “The questions and skepticism in my poetry are my way of wrestling with Jewish tradition.”
Waldor’s passion for Judaism and his life as an insurance executive are an inheritance. His late father, Jerome Waldor, was a leading philanthropist in the MetroWest Jewish community, and Peter served as vice president of the Waldor Agency, the New Jersey brokerage firm his father founded. When the company was acquired by Brown & Brown in March 2004, he joined its newly formed New Jersey subsidiary, Brown & Brown Metro, as CEO, and now serves as its executive vice president.
His poems, meanwhile, have been published in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Margie Mothering Magazine, Mudlark, Negative Capability, Ploughshares, Potomac Review, RUNES, Sugar Mule, Tikkun, West Branch, 2River, and 420.
Although Waldor isn’t the first insurance man to turn to verse (Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser, former United States poet laureate, were both insurance executives), colleagues still don’t know what to make of his dual identity.
“Friends in either world have trouble understanding my foot in the other world. But for me, it makes perfect sense. They’re all connected,” he said.
Some of his poetry, like “Insurance Man,” offer direct references to his career; others come more indirectly from his interaction with that world.
Meeting the muse
Waldor does not shy away from his struggle with religion. He questions the relevance of God in our world and jettisons traditional ideas about sacred texts. His unexpected perspectives on familiar stories, and juxtapositions of 21st-century images with biblical scenes yield a kind of modern midrash.
Door to a Noisy Room also examines love, family, aging, and modern life.
Waldor lives in Short Hills with his wife, Jody Miller, and their three children.
A member of Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Summit, Waldor grew up in South Orange and attended Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills with his family; his mother, Rita Waldor, is still a member there.
Local references dot his stanzas. “Ebed Melech, the Ethiopian Eunuch” opens at the Roman Gourmet Pizzeria in Maplewood, where “Three young men/study the Bible/….” South Orange gets its own poem, “South Orange Winter” and is obliquely referred to in other verses.
He attributes his interest in Judaism to his parents’ commitment to Jewish communal work and their love for Israel. In the 1990s, Jerry Waldor served as president of what is now United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and on the boards of a variety of local Jewish organizations. He sent Peter to Israel three times as a young person.
It was during one of his trips, a summer stay at Ulpan Akiva in Netanya when he was 22, that his passion for Judaism and Jewish literature was ignited.
“I wrote a whole book of poetry that summer,” he said. Some of those poems, notably “The Enemy’s Music” and “Moloch and Jesus,” made it into this volume.
Waldor discovered poetry as a child. “I was hit on the head by the muse when I was 12 years old. She didn’t tell me it would take 25 years to write my first decent poem. If she had, I would have told her to go away. I started writing that night and never stopped,” he said.
At Tufts University, Waldor received the American Academy of Poetry Award, and went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He served as poet-in-residence at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., before heading into the insurance business.
Waldor has followed his father’s path with regard to community service, although some of his choices reflect his own interests. He sits or has sat on the boards of the Trust for Public Land (Newark Advisory Board), Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, New Jersey Y Camps, Cerebral Palsy of North Jersey, JCC Metro West, and the Waldor Memorial Library. The library, located on the Aidekman Jewish Community Campus in Whippany, was established by Jerry and Rita Waldor in memory of Jerry’s parents and brother.
Waldor said he considers himself hasidic “because of my devotion to the stories of the hasidic masters. But most hasidic people today would probably not like the association,” he said. He expresses his Jewish identity mostly through his interest in Jewish literature, from the poetry of Paul Celan to sacred writings.
“Some people might think it’s blasphemous, I guess, to call the Bible literature,” he said.
