My friend from Kehilat Yedidya, Nir Levy, has been commemorating the current protest movement with a poem a day. Levy, who writes under the penname Nahir Libi, is the author of a fine first book of poetry, Mahol HaNefesh, which he’s also turned into an intriguing and moving show integrating readings of his poems, autobiographical passages about his struggle with schizophrenia, and music.

To preserve something of the original’s music and form I’ve taken liberties—perhaps too many liberties—with the original meaning. But Nir has consented to allow me to post the translation here. I add the original Hebrew below so that those who know the language can criticize my approach.

How Goodly are Thy Tents
The current Balaam lives in a luxury high-rise
Out of sight of the people whom the tycoons now curse
From his penthouse the people cover the city like flies
Not like ants, but a crowd churning, shouting, and worse.
Will he be the one who’ll seek to revile but whom God prevents?
Why risk chortling: Israel, how goodly are thy tents?

מה טובו אוהליך יעקב

בלעם של היום הוא דר במגדלים.

בלי העם אשר אותו עתה ‘טייקונים’ מקללים.

ומ’אקירוב’ הציבור נראה כמכסה את עין העיר

לא כנמלה,אלא כהמון,רוחש,גועש,רועש,מסעיר.

ומי אותו יבוא לגדף יִימַצֵא מברך אותו ברחוב

ומקלסו בפה מלא: “מה טובו אוהליך יעקב”.

כ”ט בתמוז תשע”א / 31/7/11

illustration by Avi Katz

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

There is great and Godly wisdom here, a discovery, or acknowledgment, or a reading of the world. That unity of the soul that the man in search of God seeks can, paradoxically, only be found in the multiplicity, ambiguity, and weirdness of the world that God created.

I have taken a long time to write this, many years, because we are meant to speak well of the dead, and because criticizing another man’s relationship with God is tantamount to saying that one knows better than he what God wants.

But I happened to hear “Pied Beauty” read out loud last week, and it was almost like prophecy, a message that I was required to convey. But please note: what I question here is not Gavriel’s faith, which I cannot fathom and which was certainly more profound than my own. What I suggest is that eulogizing a man by saying that he was tamim, whole in his faith, may be inappropriate praise.

God was unfair to Gavriel—He took him at a young age. Perhaps, had he had a chance to gain the wisdom that years bring, had he had a chance to watch his children grow and discover the world for themselves, to see how different each one would become from him and each other, while yet preserving so much of what he gave them, his faith would have become—not less intense, not less fervent—but less of one piece and therefore more all-encompassing. Perhaps, had he died when he should have and not when he did, I would have stood up a year later at his memorial service and said: “Glory be to God for dappled things.”

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Necessary Stories Live!

The one great emotion most neglected by poets is the profound love of the long-married couple written from the perspective of middle age. Most poets who reach that age (one wonders what Byron might have sounded like at 60), the male ones in particular, seem to be hung up over their lost libido. From C.K. Williams to Hanoch Levin, they devote poem after poem to old loves or desperate attempts to regain the sexual passion of youth.

Giora Fisher, photo by Dafna Kaplan for Helikon

MY WIFE WATCHES ME
Giora Fisher

I’m asleep.
My wife watches me
I feel her eyes scanning
My balding head
Examining the brown blemishes
The date of expiration
Stamped by time.

I sleep
But my heart wakes, waylaying my wife
Waiting at the edge of sleep
For the verdict of her eyes.
And only after it hears a sigh
A sigh of no pain
And without regret
Just a quiver of wistful desire

My heart, too, subsides
And slumbers.

translated by Haim Watzman

אשתי מביטה בי

גיורא פישר

אֲנִי יָשֵׁן.
אִשְׁתִּי מַבִּיטָה בִּי
אֲנִי חָשׁ בְּעֵינֵיהָ הַסּוֹרְקוֹת
אֶת רֹאשִׁי הַקֵּרֵחַ,
בּוֹחֲנוֹת אֶת הַכְּתָמִים הַחוּמִים
תַּאֲרִיךְ תְּפוּגָה
שֶׁהֶחְתִּים וְהִטְבִּיעַ הַזְּמַן.

אֲנִי יָשֵׁן
לִבִּי עֵר, אוֹרֵב לְאִשְׁתִּי
בִּקְצֵה הַשֵּׁנָה מַמְתִּין
לִפְסַק הַדִּין שֶׁל עֵינֵיהָּ.
וְרַק לְאַחַר שֶׁשָּׁמַע אֲנָחָה
שֶׁאֵין בָּהּ כְּאֵב
וְלֹא חֲרָטָה
רָק שֶׁבֶר רוֹעֵד שֶׁל עֶרְגָּה

נִרְדָּם גַּם לִבִּי
וְנִרְגָּע.

More poetry on South Jerusalem

Shahar Bram

Robert Frost

The original Hebrew version can be read here. I’ll follow my translation with some notes to explain what excites me about the poem.

North of Boston / Shahar Bram

If you want to watch the mending of fences
Come to this place. The leaves are falling and with them the fences
Lose some of their value. The trees send their branches
From yard to yard, the lawn is swamped with spies.
The season’s routines: to walk along the fences, to check out
The birds chirping, to prepare for the frost. It’s fall
And from yard to yard the neighbors take counsel.

Those lines, which keep me here, resound
In my head: Good fences
Signify a journey.

The title, of course, refers us directly to Robert Frost’s volume of that name, and the first line to the poem “Mending Wall” with its famous opening and closing lines: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and “He says again: ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” And note that Bram includes Frost’s name in the poem—except that in Hebrew the reference only works if you translate the poem as you go along, since the original word is “kara,” the Hebrew word for the ice-dew of a cold morning. In Hebrew, the season’s routine is to prepare for the winter chill, but the Hebrew, lehitkonen la-kara, could just as well be rendered, with a tweaking of the vowels, as “to channel Frost,” which is presumably what Bram does when he encounters a fence in Massachusetts.

That reference also points out the contrasts. Frost’s narrative takes place in the early spring, when he and his neighbor meet to repair the wall that separates their properties, a wall that has been covered in snow all winter. Bram’s poem happens in the fall, and the fences (Bram uses “gader,” fence, rather than a word for “wall”) are concealed by fallen leaves rather than snow.

Fences and walls connote division, but gader connotes definition (hagdara). Frost uses his apple trees to denote the futility of division (“My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines”), while Bram’s trees ignore the fences, stretching their branches over, trespassing into the next yard. What does cross the wall in Frost’s poem is advice—the neighbor’s sanctimonious advocacy of the wall. Bram has no interlocutor, but what crosses the wall is the trees—“etzim,” in Hebrew akin to the word “advice,” “etza,” as the neighbors take counsel.

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it / Where there are cows?” Frost thinks to himself. Cows can’t cross where there are walls, but the animals in Bram’s poem are birds, who like the trees blithely ignore the fences, mended or not.

Now, what about those spies? It’s a weird, jarring reference in my English version, one that seems to come out of nowhere. In the Hebrew the word meraglim also seems out of place, although if read as a verb with some stretched connotations (regel means “foot”) it could evoke people shuffling through fallen leaves.

But Bram clues us in two lines previously, where I’ve rendered “the trees send their branches.” The Hebrew verb is “sholhim.” The name of the Torah portion in which Moses sends spies from the wilderness into the Land of Israel is from the same verb, “Shlah.” So we’re not just north of Boston, we’re also in the Sinai wilderness, south of the land where Hebrew is spoken.

Here’s where Bram’s use of sound comes in. My repetition of the “ch” sound, “to check out / The birds chirping,” is a lame attempt to represent Bram’s repeated use of the “tz” sound, from his first word, “Ha-rotzeh” through “etzim” and “etza” and “mi-hatzer le-hatzer”” (“from yard to yard”), to the birds themselves (“tziporim”) and their chirping (“tziyutz”). It’s a virtual blast of trumpet (“hatzotzra”) sounds. So while no trumpet appears, we’re prepared for the surprising last line.

Because if we read the Hebrew with English in mind, we expect Bram to channel Frost, and to end “Good fences / Make good neighbors.” But if we listen to the sounds, in Hebrew, we hear the trumpets in the wilderness, blown to signal that it was time for the Israelite camp to move on during its 40-year journey.

Where does all this leave us? I read it this way: an expatriate Israeli poet resides in America. His head rings with both Hebrew and English language, verse, and literary associations. Like Frost, he does not like fences that divide people, but the languages he hears in his head divide him and, more frustratingly, his readers. His readers in Hebrew do not catch the American-English resonances in his verse, and his interlocutors in America cannot appreciate the Hebrew/Jewish/biblical resonances. He’s stuck alone on the fence, in the wilderness, undefined, everywhere a spy, always journeying.

Mt. Nevo, photo by Argenberg

אֵינִי קוֹבְלָה! בְחֶדֶר צַר
תִמְתַק כָל כָך עֶרְגַת מֶרְחָב,
לִימֵי תוגָה, לַסְתָו הַקַר
יֵש אַרְגָמָן וְיֵש זָהָב.

אֵינִי קוֹבְלָה! נוֹבֵע שִיר
מִפֶצַע-לֵב בְאָהֳבוֹ,
וְחוֹל-מִדְבָר—כְּיֶרֶק-נִיר
מֵרֹאשׁ פִסְגָה, מֵהַר נְבוֹ.

I don’t complain! In a narrow room
The need for space becomes so sweet;
On melancholy days, in autumn’s chill
There’s scarlet and gold to see.

I don’t complain! A poem wells up
From a wounded heart, a heart in love,
And desert’s sand is like a greening field
From atop the peak, from Mt. Nevo.

The dust rose so high to the sky that heaven and earth seemed to have reverted to a dull yellow primordial chaos. The engines of dirt-caked, drab army transports rumbled, the horns of master sergeants’ white vans honked. I stood, trying to be seen and heard, at the Fatma Gate in Metula, seeking a ride up to my base at Ana, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

As of early summer 1983, the IDF had been bogged down in Lebanon for a year. Rational procedures and clear rules had been drafted for transporting soldiers to and from and through the Cedar Republic, but like so many army regulations, few knew them, and no one obeyed.

The way to get from Metula to Ana was to stand as close to the gate as the military police would allow and hold out an arm. An occasional driver would notice the lonely soldier through the smokescreen thrown up by the Holy Land’s parched soil, take pity, and stop long enough to ask where I needed to go. More often then not, they were going somewhere else. I needed to be back at base by 3 p.m.; driving straight up from Metula, the trip took at least three hours. It was already nearly an hour before noon, and I was getting desperate.

A large supply truck rumbled up and stopped. “Where to?” the driver asked, scooting over to lean out of the cabin’s passenger window. “Ana,” I said. “Like I know where that is,” he replied. “Like it’s Ramat Gan.”

It turned out that his destination was our division headquarters, further south. I could probably find a way from there to my base, where I served as a sergeant under the Nahal Brigade’s chief intelligence officer. Anyway, at this point, I had no choice. I climbed into the cabin.

In infantry training, one is taught to take note of any unusual or out-of-place phenomenon. An overturned rock or trampled piece of desert brush can warn you that an enemy is close by; the distant sound of sloshing water or the clink of tin cans can reveal an improvised firing position. My sharply-honed senses thus immediately took in that the driver, who introduced himself as Yossi, was wearing nothing but a pair of bright red briefs.

It’s the red briefs that brought him to mind this week. My older son brought home rock star Barry Saharoff’s new album, Adumei Ha-Sefatot. The album sets, to rock music heavily infused with Oriental cadences, 12 poems by Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, the 11th-century Iberian master of Hebrew poetry. The name of the title track translates as “The Red of Lips.” The poet uses this phrase, in an allusion to the Song of Songs, to refer to emissaries who have brought him a message from a close friend who has rejected him. Or from a God who has hidden his face. In Ibn Gabirol, the earthly always corresponds with the divine.

That morning at the Fatma gate I was a few weeks before my 28th birthday and I had already entered into a complicated relationship with God. It was a relationship that caused me a lot of anxiety, but at least it was a relationship, which was more than I could say for what I had with the woman who interested me at the time.

Yossi was lanky, with olive-dark skin and kinky hair long enough to indicate that he was a reservist and not a regular, like me. He drummed on the steering wheel and chanted a popular Mizrahi song as his bare feet described debka steps on the accelerator and brake pedals.

“You’re not in uniform,” I noted.

He stopped his song long enough to look me up and down. “It’s hot,” he said.

“They won’t let you into Lebanon if you’re not in uniform,” I told him, although I wasn’t really sure if this was correct.

He thought this over and pulled on his shirt, which had been draped over the seat behind him. But he didn’t button it.

“Shoes, too,” I said. “You shouldn’t drive without shoes.”

He inserted his feet into a pair of sandals on the floor, revved up the engine, and proceeded to the gate. A tired military policeman appeared out of the dust below us like the spirit of Samuel from the Witch of Endor’s vapors. He checked the truck’s papers and waved us through.

Be-katav stav be-yadav metarav u-vervivav
U-ve-‘et berakav ha-me’irim ve-khaf ‘avav
Michtav ‘alei gan mi-tekhelet ve-argaman
Lo nitkenu ka-hem le-hoshev be-mahshavav…

That’s track seven on the Saharoff album. Notice all those “v” sounds – they are raindrops pounding on the ground. They get lost in translation, of course:

When the autumn writes in its rain-ink
With its lightning-bolt pen and its hand of clouds
A missive in purple and blue on garden leaves
Naught could be truer to one who thinks His thoughts…

Remember that in Ibn Gabirol’s universe the rain doesn’t come on its own; it’s a divine manifestation. The rain is God’s means of writing himself on the tablet of the earth.

As I careened through southern Lebanon with Yossi, the summer’s desiccation certainly seemed like a sign of God’s absence. The truck listed right and left like a lost ship in a turbulent sea. Yossi took the narrow, pockmarked road as if it were the way to hell without the pavement. He did not slow down for curves. At one point, he went off the road to take a shortcut through a field, this in a country where anything that wasn’t covered with asphalt was suspect as a mine field. Only by cursing loudly – and I was one of the least profane soldiers ever to serve the State of Israel – was I able to get him back on the road.

Two minutes later the road took a sharp turn to the right, Yossi lost control, and the truck swerved, flipped over, bounced off an embankment, landed on its right side, and slid into an irrigation ditch.

I found myself sitting at the steering wheel, parallel to the ground. The roof over the passenger seat had been flattened until it nearly touched the seat where I’d been sitting.

“Oh shit.” Yossi’s voice came from some place beyond. “You all right?”

I climbed out of what was now the cabin’s top hatch. The truck was totaled.

A few minutes later a jeep came by. It took us to a nearby medical base. Other then some scratches and bruises, we were both fine. Yossi was arrested, and I was released to continue to find my way to my unit. I hadn’t been standing at the base’s gate for more than ten minutes when a military pickup truck came by, heading directly for Ana.

I needed to talk. I thought that the fact that I had nearly died ought to be of interest to my fellow intelligence sergeants and my commanding officer. Upon arriving, I ran to throw my duffel bag on my bed and then to report to the intelligence office. Some of the guys were there, drinking coffee. I told them about the accident. They told me that I had the night shift manning the radio receivers. Outside, I ran into the chief intelligence officer. I told him that he’d nearly had a squashed sergeant on his hands. He said he was glad I was okay and went on his way.

The base was the village’s unfinished new school building. The classrooms served as our offices and living quarters. A tent erected between the building’s two wings served as a synagogue. I generally preferred to pray in my room – the tent was stuffy. Also, I had little patience for some of the other religious soldiers, who believed that if they prayed long, loudly, and meticulously, God would keep them from harm. My feet led me to the synagogue tent not because I needed not to pray, but because it was the only quiet place where I could think through the accident. I needed to ponder what it meant, if it meant anything at all, and what God had to do with it, if He existed, and if He cared.

To my surprise, the synagogue wasn’t empty. A bearded man in his mid-thirties was sitting on a bench, absorbed in a book. He had the slight frame, dark skin, and wiry hair of a Yemenite. He smiled and introduced himself as Amnon. He was a reservist, sent to Ana for a month to serve as brigade rabbi.

We started to chat. He said that he’d grown up non-religious, but that a few years previously he had discovered Chabad Hasidism. I told him that, in all honesty, Chabad’s mystical Messianism was not to my liking. I gave an account of my accident. He listened attentively, asking questions, inquired whether anything hurt. He suggested that perhaps it had been God’s will that I endure the accident, and survive. But he couldn’t say why God would have willed it.

And I thought, as we chatted, that Amnon and I would never agree on the nature of God, or the purpose of the commandments, or the literal truth of the Torah. I had no idea of God’s purpose, and the heart that led me to believe continued to wrestle with the mind that told me that I should not. Yet I felt, as I seldom had before, the divine presence between us.

If this were fiction, I’d write that an unseasonable downpour began at that very moment. But the skies remained clear. Through the window of the intelligence office I could see stars dotting the skies. In Ibn Gabirol’s poem, the v’s fade, allowing softer sounds to take foreground:

Lakhen, be-‘et hamda adama penei shahak
Rakma ‘alei baddei ‘arugot ke-khokhavav.
And as the soil longs to receive the sky
So it embroiders sky’s furrowed fabric with stars.

The rain waters the earth below, and the earth embroiders the skies. God writes the earth below and the earth paints the skies. We write words and paint pictures, and in creating, we emulate, and establish God. God is not in the accident, nor in its outcome, so much as in the sound of voices talking about it afterward.

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Necessary Stories Live!

It’s summer and the Jews are being perverse again. Instead of singing of sand and sea, next week we’ll spend a day fasting and lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. The lamentation lyrics get pretty sickening—blood flows, people get tortured and burned alive, famished women cook and eat their own children. Why do we need this annual national gross-out?

I’ll answer that question by adducing a stomach-turning, very un-Jewish, all-American poem, James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” which you can read and hear Dickey read on the wonderful poetry pages of The Atlantic, here. (If that doesn’t work, try the Poetry Foundation).

The poem is about a myth, an untruth, that becomes true. The monster in the jar becomes true not because it actually can be found in a back corner of a museum in Atlanta, but because it brings about a change in human behavior. There is an effect whose cause is an object fabricated by the human mind.

The reality of the fantasy is underlined by the poem’s structure. The first stanza states the problem, the huge force of the animal instinct that drives boys to copulate with the earth itself. But there’s something that is taboo, so forbidden that it overcomes even that nearly irresistible desire. Animals are off limits.

The second stanza is the story that the boys tell, the object they have created in their minds. The third stanza is the result: the story has directed the boys’ desire to its proper object. Perhaps the story was simply a fairy tale?

. . . Are we
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?”

After a brief segue come three long stanzas in which the non-existent freak speaks. Note that the pickled sheep-child speaks in his own words. In this sense he is more real than the boys themselves, whose thoughts and actions we only hear described. The monster was born, experienced life in “a blazing moment,” ate once, and died. “Dead, I am most surely living,” the monster says. And because the dead monster lives,

They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Note the double imagery of suffering and of resurrection/redemption. (Yes, yes, it’s Christ imagery, but this is a Jewish blog so we won’t go there.) The sheep-child suffers, dies, and in dying lives (but is not redeemed). The boys, in recounting the story of the sheep-child, suffer and are redeemed—not through resurrection, but by being directed to produce their own kind. Note that Dickey’s view of nature is very un-Californian—if we relax and do what’s natural, we and our kind die; if we go against our natures, or at least part of our natures, we and our kind live.

Each year, during the three weeks leading up to the fast of the Ninth of Av, Jews tell the story of how they led themselves to disaster. Over and over again we tell each other the stories of the callous, pleasure-loving Jews who threw the prophet Jeremiah into a dungeon, of the inhospitable Jerusalem socialite who kicked Bar-Kamtza out of his dinner party, of Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkulas who insisted on following the letter of the law rather than adjusting to special circumstances. These are not historical stories; it makes no difference whether they actually happened or not. They are myths that are real because they force us, the Jews, to recognize that our natural economic, social, and religious instincts have the potential to lead to death and disaster. If we attend to these stories, and change our behavior as a result, they are more real than history itself, because they can change us and change the course of the future. Our annual national ick-fest is a tool for redemption.

There’s another level to Dickey’s poem and to the myths of the destruction of Jerusalem. If we lack a sense of the transcendent, a willingness to believe (even as we think critically, as the boys do, doubting their own story) in the fantastic, we cannot believe our own stories. And if we cannot believe our own stories, we cannot be redeemed.

“I heard from somebody who …” says the poet. If we do not tell the stories, and we do not listen to them, year in and year out, if we do not change our lives as a result, Jerusalem will be destroyed again.

**************************************************************
Haim makes more weird connections between Judaism and poetry:

The Parting of the Red Sea: Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent”

And between Judaism and music:
Mendelssohn and Monotheism

And writes about two poems by C. K. Williams without mixing in (much) Judaism:
The Sinews of Our Souls: C. K. Williams’ “Dissections”
Birds on My Mind: “Doves” by C.K. Williams

And here’s a poem by Gershom:
Tribute and Desideratum

Photo by Chris Basset

C.K. William, a great bard of love askew and the missed opportunity, encapsulates this frustration with no little irritation and a measure of humor in his poem “Doves.” I came across it last week in my progress through Williams’ Collected Poems; it’s from his latest, best book, The Singing.

The poet has woken in the early dawn. He’s lying in bed, trying to focus on the morning light, on the morning’s sounds. But how can he? “So much crap in my head,/So many rubbishy facts,/So many half-baked/theories and opinions,” Williams sighs, like an overtaxed blogger.

It would be just so much bitching if the title sitting above these lines didn’t make us laugh. Dove, after all, is just a nice word for pigeon, but the dove sitting above these lines isn’t depositing its offal on Williams’ scalp, and even if it did, what difference would it make? There’s so much crap inside his head anyway.

In the second stanza, Williams tells us what he’d rather have in his head—“I recognize nearly none/of the bird songs of dawn.…”—instead of public affairs and politicians. But even without that he can’t concentrate on what’s really important, because of “the maddening who,/who-who of the doves.”

He doesn’t know the names of flowers, of trees; he, a poet, knows “so few poems entire.” Still, even through the clanking of the trucks and the maddening hoots of the pigeons he has some intimation of what he ought to be hearing.

Yet, in the final stanza, the garbage turns out to be more chaos than crap. In the midst of it there are faces and voices that are part of his life, all his memories. And the doves themselves, instead of being annoyances, in the end turn out to be the heralds that signal him, as he awakens, to sift through the detritus in his brain and find there things of value.

At first reading, that final stanza might seem like just a continuation of the complaint. But the music of the poem tells us that something has changed here. The first five stanzas begin with a series of three or four strong accents, one after another, the sputtering of frustration. But the first line of the final stanza has, arguably, only one real stress (on the “in” of “within”). Furthermore, the hard explosive consonants of the first stanza fade gradually away until they are almost absent at the end; the same happens to the maddening aspirated h of the doves. The final stanza uses mostly soft consonants—f, l and w.

Like all great poems, “Doves” takes us on an emotional journey. First we share the poet’s frustration, and his canniness in placing his finger on a feeling we’ve so often had but never properly expressed. Our frustration is softened as we recognize, in the poem’s center, a kindred spirit, inventorying those things that matter and those that should not matter. And, in the end, Williams leads us gently into acceptance, resignation, and perceptiveness about all the stuff we have between our ears. When we next waken in the early dawn, we’ll listen, and understand, much better.

Dear Niot,

You told Holocaust jokes at the table on Friday night. Ima and I grimaced and tried to segue into a discussion of the boots you are refusing to buy and your insistence on trudging through the Polish snow in running shoes. We acknowledged that telling jokes with your classmates would be a legitimate way of letting off pressure during your trip, although we didn’t think the ones you told us were particularly funny.

It was then that I knew how I was going to write this letter, a letter that your teacher asked us to deposit with him in a sealed envelope for you to read, in Hebrew, when you arrive in Poland. That’ll be at about the same time that The Jerusalem Report’s readers receive it in their mailboxes in English (and thanks for giving me advance permission to share it with them).
I reminded you that when your older sister and brother wanted to sign up for their class trips to Poland’s Nazi death camps, in what has become a routine part of the Holocaust curriculum for Israeli high school seniors, I objected. “Why?” you asked.

I explained that I don’t want my children to be Jews who are Jews because they are victims. I don’t want my children to be Israelis because the world hates them. Our history, tradition, and culture are rich and powerful and provide adequate reason to want to be a Jew and an Israeli even if Hitler had never been born and the swastika never had reigned.

When your sister said she was going to Poland anyway, I was reminded of a comedy skit I once saw at a club in New York. A man and a woman sat side by side on a small stage with big smiles on their faces. “Hi, we’re Jews,” the woman said. “And we’re dead.”

The man continued: “We’re here to tell you that 90 percent of dead people are Jews. So if you’re not nice to us when you’re alive…”

“…We’ll get you when you’re dead,” the woman concluded with a wicked giggle.

Not funny, you say? Well, it got a lot of knowing laughs from the mostly Jewish audience. Because a certain element in the education that nearly all young Jews get, no matter what their religious background and politics, is that being dead, at the hands of others, is the natural state of the Jewish people. Being alive is the exception. If you’re a Jew and you’re alive it’s because you are unusually lucky, or because the goyim around you are unusually indulgent, or because you’ve fought off your enemies. The bottom line is that everyone hates us.

So five years ago, when your sister came home with the forms to sign up for her school trip to the concentration camps, I worried that the message she’d get there would be “I’m a Jew because everyone hates me. I’m a Jew because most Jews are dead.”

What an awful reason to be a Jew.

Why not “I’m a Jew because the Jewish people produced the Bible, whose stories and poetry have become the common heritage of mankind?” Why not “I’m a Jew because of my people’s ethos of learning, argument, and dialogue, because of the Talmud, midrashim, and thinkers ranging from Maimonides to Spinoza to Soleveitchik?” Why not “I’m a Jew because my people preserved its language and culture through centuries of dispersion and reestablished and recreated them in the modern state of Israel?”

When she returned from her trip, I saw that my worst fears had not been realized. She came back with a more mature and sober view of Jewish history.

Still, her trip focused primarily only one of the two lessons that we, as Jews, must learn from the Holocaust. It’s an important lesson: that we, as Jews, must defend ourselves. That our people’s history shows us clearly that we cannot be secure without a state and army of our own.

But, face it, we didn’t need the Holocaust to tell us that, and you don’t need to go to Poland to learn it. Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion all came to that conclusion long before Hitler enlisted in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Just yesterday, in a book I’m translating, I encountered this eye-witness description of a pogrom in Lvov: “The Jewish city is in flames and living people, or burnt bodies, are buried under the demolished houses.… More than a thousand victims were murdered brutally, women raped, men—bayonet wounds and bullet holes on their bodies, piles of burnt bodies, people were trapped in blazing houses and doomed to die in the flames.” That was in 1918, twenty years before the gas chamber was invented.

Growing up in Israel, as you have, in the age of suicide bombings, Qassam missiles, and virulent bellicose anti-Semitic rhetoric from Islamic extremists in Lebanon and Iran, you hardly need to go to Poland to learn that there are still people who want to murder Jews simply because they are Jews, and to learn that if we don’t defend ourselves, no one else will. In fact, that’s what you said at the Shabbat table on Friday night, in your own way—one that a Jewish boy couldn’t have dreamed of saying until just a few decades ago: “I’m a Jew,” you said proudly, “because we’re the strongest nation in the world and we don’t let anyone push us around.”

If that’s all there was to being a Jew, then we could save the cost of the trip to Poland. You could finish high school at the end of the year and follow your brother’s and your father’s footsteps into the army. After doing your part to defend your people, you’d have fulfilled your obligations as a Jew.

But there’s another big, important lesson that you’ve got to learn from the Holocaust.

You see, being a Jew doesn’t just mean fighting to defend Jewish lives. It doesn’t mean just keeping yourself alive. To be a Jew, you have to do something with Jewish your life, and that means understanding your life in the light of your people’s history and texts and stories. It means understanding yourself as a Jew, and as a human being.

At 17, you are into fighting more than into reading. Despite my nagging, you don’t read much beyond the sports pages—certainly not poetry. But there’s a poem I’d like you to think about when you are in Poland—one you’ve probably encountered in literature class or in the seminars that prepared you for your trip. It’s by Dan Pagis, who spent much of his boyhood in a concentration camp. After the war he came to Israel and became a famous Hebrew poet. It’s called “Written in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar”:

Here in this transport
Am I Eve
With Abel my boy
If you see my elder son
Cain the human being
Tell him that I

Pagis packs reams of meaning into these six lines and 25 words, and we could talk about them for hours. But I want to point out just a couple things about the poem.

The first centers on line five. The original Hebrew is “Kayin ben-Adam,” which means both “Cain the human being” and “Cain the son of Adam.” Cain, we know from the biblical story (which we read in synagogue this past Shabbat), is the murderer, so Pagis seems to want us to identify Cain as the Nazi who has shoved his mother and brother into the transport and sent them off to the gas chambers. This Cain is a human being. Not a monster, not a supernatural angel of death or evil spirit, but a human being, the son and brother of his victims.

The second is that, in Hebrew, as you, though not my English readers, can hear, line three rhymes with line six—something I represent in my translation with an imperfect half-rhyme. From the literal meaning of the words, and the picture that the poem’s title creates in our mind, we see these lines as a scrawl on the boxcar’s inside wall, an message that Eve leaves unfinished because her strength fails, or because she dies.

But the rhyme, like the final chord of a song, provides closure—it makes it sound as if Eve’s message is not “I” followed by more words that we will never know, but simply “I.” If we read it this second way, the message that Eve wants the reader of her words to convey to her son and murderer Cain is “I.” That is, what you have sent to death is an “I,” a human being, just like yourself.

Here, in this handful of words, is the other message you need to come home with. The near-annihilation of the Jews was not accomplished by supernatural beings or by monsters in human guise. It was perpetrated by human beings—evil human beings raised on a tradition of anti-Semitism and militarism, but human beings nonetheless. Human beings like ourselves.

What Pagis is telling us in this poem is that every human being contains within him both the capacity to be a victim and the capacity to be a murderer. The fact that we have long been victims does not mean that we are immune to evil. On the contrary, now that we are, in your words, “the strongest nation in the world and we don’t let anyone push us around,” we need to take special care that we don’t let our power go to our heads. We need to remember that the non-Jews who live among us, and our enemies, too, are human beings.

Unfortunately, many Jews have become so enamored of physical strength and so sure of their nation’s destiny that they have turned off onto the dangerous road traveled by the self-righteous Slavic rioters of Lvov and their ilk, who were certain that in killing Jews they were doing God’s will and the will of history.

Niot, as you tread the steps of the slaughtered Jews of Europe and take in the enormity of the crime committed against our people, keep in mind that we are not Jews simply because most dead people are Jews. And we are not Jews simply because we can and will fight to make sure that we will never again allow ourselves to be victims of such a crime. To be Jews we must be alive. We are Jews because we are alive and because we have a religion, a culture, a language, and a history that affirms and gives life. A Jew should not settle for being merely a victim, nor merely a defender. Being Jewish means being a person who creates, not one who destroys or is destroyed. This is no joke: we’re Jews despite, not because, of the Holocaust.

With love,

Abba

Links to more Necessary Stories columns

Necessary Stories Live!

One of my favorite poets, Sharon Dolin, has four poems up at Nextbook. The first, “Let Me Thrum (6 a.m.)” is a wonderful fresh and new version of “Nishmat Kol Hai,” the poem of nature extolling God that we read every Shabbat morning.

What makes Dolin’s work stand out for me is her exquisite ear, her ability to create a poem that would sound like music even if you did not know English, and whose sounds are intimately woven into her meaning. It’s on full display in this poem, where the early morning poet both hears and observes:

antennae’d and furred
all sing all shirr all rub and buzz
and fling their call to You
in song-light as the mist still clings

Contrast those twittering consonants with the hollow, ominouis vowels in one of my favorites, “Regret,” (not at Nextbook, but you can read it here):

Here’s another sin you’re sunk within
owl-necked looking back
to where you might have been

The set of poems on display on Nextbook take us through the day, into the evening light, when she asks:

O God
May I still see
in the violet hour

Dolin helps us see–and hear it.

Listen to Sharon Dolin discuss her new book, Burn and Dodge, and read two of her poems, on NPR.