PAST , PRESENT AND FUTURE IN ISRAEL POETRY
Past, Present and Future in Israel poetry.
My research of Israel’s poets brought me to the realisation that due to so many in number, I can only present a few ones. These I chose, because they combine in their writings the need for closeness to God with their pursuit of goodness sought and prayed for in Jerusalem.
No other City urges the inhabitants and the visitors to turn to their Creator.
Israel choses life since the time of Abraham, a man who heard God’s covenant spoken to him and to his line through Isaac, Israel and the twelve tribes succeeding into the very present. In Genesis12:1-3 God clearly states to Abraham,” Get yourself out of your country, away from your kinsmen and away from your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you, and I will make your name great; and you are to be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse anyone who curses you; and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed.’’ God is eternal and so is His word. No one and nothing can change this spiritual law embedded in Israel, given by Eternity and for the good of all the nations.
Only on this basis life is multiplied. As we look at our first poet, King David, who reigned from 1010-970 BC. we find the master of poetry. He exposes the depth of human pain, hopes and aspiration intertwined with the need of always staying in close relationship with and accountability towards God. He understood God’s request for truth and purity in the inmost heart of himself and mankind. (Psalm 24&51)
In Psalm 122 he writes ‘’I was glad when they said to me,’ The House of Adonai! Let’s go! Our feet were already standing at your gates, Yerushalayim... built as a city fostering friendship and unity. The tribes have gone up there, the tribes of Adonai, as a witness to Israel, to give thanks to the name of Adonai. For there the thrones of justice were set up, the thrones of the house of David.’’
About two-thousand years later, another poet, Yehuda Halevi, (AD 1075-1141) gained fame. Living in Spain as a member of the Sephardic Jewish Community, he experienced great restlessness due to political uncertainties and strife between Catholic and Muslim rulers. He moved his surgery as a physician frequently, was known as philosopher and famous for his vast body of poetry and treatises, for example the Kuzari, which is his best-known philosophical work. Many of his poems were directed to God.
I was particularly drawn to the one called, ‘Home Coming’, which he outlines as follows:
‘‘You support each one who errs.
Spread out Your arm in welcome to the one who returns home,
I follow Your leadership, having to forgo my own council,
May your light spread over my eye!
Salvation turn to the heart.
Prepare our return to You LORD, that we may return home.’’
Yehuda Halevi struggled between his longing for Jerusalem and the demands of his family and friends. Nevertheless, even as an aged man he took up courage and made, at last, his way to the Middle East. It is uncertain if he ever had reached Jerusalem. In either case, and sadly so, he passed away shortly after his arrival in The Land of Promise in 1141.
Seven-hundred and thirty-two years after Halevi’s death, in 1873, Chaim Nahman Bialik was born in the Russian town of Zhytomyr. After the passing away of his father while only eight years old, he was sent to his grandfather, who supervised Chaim’s further education. The plan of becoming a rabbi failed, because Bialik decided to study German and Russian instead. Being nine-teen years old he wrote his famous ‘EL HAZIPOR’ (To the Bird) poem, which shows that he may have experienced the trauma of the Jewish Community during the Odessa pogrom in 1881.
When I read this poem, the author impresses me as a man who is searching for lightness and connection, ease and distance from all hardship; for a place infused with serenity, warmth and certainty.
‘’TO THE BIRD’’
‘’Welcome back, lovely Bird, from hot lands to my window,I died for your sweet songs in the winter, after you left me at home.Sing of miracles far away. Is there, dear bird, tell me, much evil there too, and pain in that land of warmth and beauty?
Do you sing greetings from fruited valley and hill?
Has God pitied, comforted Zion, or is she a graveyard still?......’’
As a mature man, Chaim N. Bialik moved to the modern city of Tel-Aviv in 1924, and was a well-known translator of European literature into Hebrew. He gained influence as a celebrated poet, continued his travels giving lectures, and supported the building of the Hebrew University at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Before I close introducing Bialik, a moving note needs to be added. It is said of him that people approached him for decades in their’ need for explanations, clarifications and calming in times of grief, disaster or danger. Due to a heart attack, his life came to an abrupt end. Chaim N. Bialik passed away in Vienna on July the 4th in 1934.As a closure of this article, allow me to write my own poetry lines:
‘Why do you, activists of ‘Free Palestine’ seek the darkness of lies and deception; fading is the memory of beauty, the laughter in your own livesand the lines of hope in your own faces –with every scream- all a nebulous picture.
Why do you cry for the death of us, the Jewish Nation, where so persistently your own soul resembles tunnels of violence and despair? Why should we fear your deadly ambition,when the King of Kings walks in His field? Meeting us, we clasp His hands, listening to His melody,we sing, yes, we dance in His steps after pain and sorrow.
