I suppose I should explain how the poem below came about. I'm not jewish, and I did write from the "we" point of view.

At the time I wrote this poem, I was friends with a woman who was very religious and was celebrating the High Holy Days. We had a long discussion on what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur was about for her. After our discussion,I tried to imagine myself as someone of her faith, and out popped this poem.

Is it pretentious? Perhaps. My friend spoke so pasisonately about the High Holy Days, and what they meant to her and their significance in jewish history that I was moved, inspired to write this poem.

I showed it to her and she liked it very much. She liked that I understood and could relate to what she had been trying to tell me. I showed it to another friend of mine at the time, who was from Saudi Arabia, and he said I was being totally too zionist.

On NPR this morning, I heard an interview about Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone. He said he chose to write science fiction, because he could have martians say things and not get any flak about it. If he had real people saying these words, he would have been censored.

I wonder about pretentiousness as I write my fictional stories, since all of my stories are written about people opposite to me. My screenplay is written from the point of view of middle aged professional baseball player. Am I being pretentious then to write from male point of view, since I am not a man. My baseball player is irish too, and I'm not irish. What about male writers through history, who have written from female point of view? Are they any more pretentious? What about Liam Neeson and Raffe Fiennes, the actors who played the jew and the german in Schindler's List? Are they prententious since they're neither jewish nor german?

These are questions I ponder as I write my stories, since I have no intention of writing fictional stories that have anything to do with my real life. My real life is boring, and uninspiring to me as story subjects. What causes me to write stories is when I wonder what it would be like to be a middle aged baseball player whose father is dying, but who's spent half his life hating his father. What would it be like to be non-college educated woman from the south, now living in california, who comes home from work one day, to find her gambling, alcoholic boyfriend lying dead in a pool of blood in the hallway? What it would be like be an overly religious woman who finds herself in an S&M relationship and loving every moment of it and at the same time feeling a sense of incredible guilt about it? I'm weird. These kinds of characters and their stories interest me. They make me wonder what it would be like to be these people. They make me want to understand what they feel and why they do the things they do.

Maybe it's that actor training I've had kicking in, where I often acted in the roles of women who were nothing at all like me. Where I spent hours pretending what it would be like to Lucky from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or the disgruntled wife in Edward Albee's The American Dream, or the crazy professsor's wife in Albee's Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or the morphine addicted mother/wife in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Where I wrote pages and pages pretending to be my character and writing about what I felt about the other people in the play, what my life was like, what I loved, what I believed in, and what I was trying to saying in this play. Was it pretentious of me to pretend to be any of these characters and write from their point of view? I even played Lady Macbeth once, and did the "out out damned spot" speech, and had to write about what it would like to see blood that wasn't there out of guilt.

Fiction is a strange thing because the essence of fiction is to tell a lie.

fiction
\Fic"tion\, n. [F. fiction, L. fictio, fr. fingere, fictum to form, shape, invent, feign. See Feign.] 1. The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind. --Bp. Stillingfleet.
2. That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.
The fiction of those golden apples kept by a dragon. --Sir W. Raleigh.
When it could no longer be denied that her flight had been voluntary, numerous fictions were invented to account for it. --Macaulay.
3. Fictitious literature; comprehensively, all works of imagination; specifically, novels and romances.
The office of fiction as a vehicle of instruction and moral elevation has been recognized by most if not all great educators. --Dict. of Education.
4. (Law) An assumption of a possible thing as a fact, irrespective of the question of its truth. --Wharton.
5. Any like assumption made for convenience, as for passing more rapidly over what is not disputed, and arriving at points really at issue.
Syn: Fabrication; invention; fable; falsehood.
fic·tion Pronunciation Key (fkshn)
n.
1. a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
b. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
2. A lie.
3. a. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
b. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories.
4. Law. Something untrue that is intentionally represented as true by the narrator.

Word History: To most people “the latest fiction” means the latest novels or stories rather than the most recently invented pretense or latest lie. All three senses of the word fiction point back to its source, Latin ficti, “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Ficti in turn was derived from fingere, “to make by shaping, feign, make up or invent a story or excuse.” Our first instance of fiction, recorded in a work composed around 1412, was used in the sense “invention of the mind, that which is imaginatively invented.” It is not a far step from this meaning to the sense “imaginative literature,” first recorded in 1599.

Perhaps that was my mistake. I should have said my poem below is a "fictional" poem.