Poetic justice
Thu., March 24, 2005 Adar2 13, 5765
By Nadav Shragai
Reprinted with permission from Haaretz ©
http://news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/556541.html
While the voice of the religious right has hardly been heard in modern Hebrew
poetry, some younger writers are expressing their deep pain and anger in the
face of the approaching disengagement. Literary critics are impressed by the
new writing, much of which has appeared in the pages of the poetry journal
Meshiv Haruah.
In the office of Avner Shimoni, head of the Gaza Coast Regional Council,
hangs a framed document containing several lines written by the national poet
Haim Nahman Bialik: "Here in the Land of Israel, in the place that
turned life into poetry, poetry will turn to life ... No force in the world
will push us from our place in this land, or turn us back."
In other places in Neve Dekalim, the Cultural Forum Sings With Love
(Haforum Hatarbuti Sharim Be'ahava) put up ads for
a competition to pick the best anthem expressing solidarity with Gush Katif.
"Every era has its anthem, and every struggle must have its anthem, too,"
the ad reads. "Writers, composers and performers are invited to send
their works to the council." The auditions will take place at the
end of March. The panel of judges will include singer Ariel Zilber, who moved
to Elei Sinai a few weeks ago; singer Itamar Eliasi, soloist with the Prison
6 band; singer Etti Levy; Rami Danoch from Sounds of the Oud; and lyricist
David Zigman.
Meanwhile, the new, updated rap version of the old Meni Beger song written
after the Yamit evacuation is playing frequently: "This was my home/
with a garden and a coop/ tomorrow morning strangers will live there/ and
all our memories will disappear/ we've battled so long/ that we forgot about
what/ for me this is a war/ for them this is business/ for me this is home/
for them this is just another line on a map/ a long time ago this became more
than just land ..." It's not an anthem, but it may well be one of
the songs that accompany the upcoming evacuation.
The need for a catchy tune and words that will grab the masses is obvious,
but at the same time, in relative silence, another, deeper and more personal
and thoughtful sort of poetry is being written, a poetry that is very far
from fitting such songwriting demands. A poetry of pain in the face of the
anticipated disengagement and evacuation. Most of the writers belong to a
group that blossomed in the past decade and consolidated around the Jewish-Israeli
poetry journal Meshiv Haruah. Many of the men are
yeshiva graduates, some from hesder yeshivas, which combine yeshiva study
with military service. Many of the women are graduates of ulpanot, yeshiva
high schools for religious girls. Some are the sons and daughters of well-known
rabbis.
Poets from the right, the few whose work has crossed over into the mainstream,
like Yonadav Kaplun, Admiel Kosman and Hava Pinhas-Cohen, have been actively
writing for many years now. But generally, "right-wing poetry" has
been identified as poetry with a nationalistic perspective. Prof. Yohai Oppenheimer,
who studies political poetry in Israel, wrote in his 2003 book "Hazekhut
Lomar Lo" ("The Right to Say No") that
a rightist poet ostensibly speaks in the name of the nation while the leftist
poet ostensibly speaks in the name of the individual. The writers in Meshiv
Haruah seem to shatter this consensus. They deal with a variety
of themes, not only political ones. Many succeed, through poetry, personally
touching on the elements that make up their lives, fears and faith.
The latest issue of Meshiv Haruah was devoted to
the disengagement, but not necessarily to the disengagement plan. The writers
addressed different kinds of disengagement. A few supporters of the disengagement
plan, such as Yossi Sarid and poet Tal Nitzan, contributed poems, but most
of the issue was dedicated to the personal pain that goes with the uprooted
and the uprooting.
The opening poem was written by Tami Gilboa from the Morag settlement in
Gush Katif. Gilboa's husband is still under house arrest after he and some
others demonstrated in front of Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Gush
Katif over the lack of a response to the firing of mortar shells. In the poem,
entitled "Medabrim Harbeh `Al Sharsheret
Enoshit" ("A Lot of Talk about a Human Chain"),
Gilboa expresses a longing for normal life, even if she is a "settler":
"I want a house without thinking/ I want to live without being .../ I'm
just one little settler woman/ afraid of a road that is too long/ on a white
donkey/ anointed for war/ and believing/ always believing."
Another personal and painful poem, "Hazmana Lebechi"
("Invitation to Cry"), was written by Eliaz Cohen of Kfar
Etzion, who grew up in the northern West Bank. The poem transfers the terror
of the coming uprooting from Gush Katif to Eliaz's own home in Kfar Etzion
and describes the behavior of the evacuee and the evacuator: "To
you the good and loyal soldier who one day when the order comes/ will approach
our home/ I will run to you with open arms ... I will run I will embrace you
and I will lead you/ at the doorway I will grasp your collar, I will tear
it / all the way to the heart ... In silence we will walk one last time among
the rooms of the house ..."
The soldier then asks in a whisper: "Have you packed?" and, at
the end, the poet writes: "everything is full of symbols you say/
falling on my neck weeping/ my loyal, good soldier, now it is finally all
right to cry."
Universal problem
Literary expert and cultural critic Dr. Ariel Hirschfeld says of the collection
of disengagement poetry in Meshiv Haruah, "There
are some good and interesting things there that have honesty in them. It's
nice that they didn't claim the concept of disengagement for themselves and
didn't close themselves within their political philosophy. To this writing
about the disengagement, they added people who are totally unaffiliated with
them, who talk about disengagement in general.
"This is an interesting openness, since they clearly understand
that disengagement is a universal thing that occurs not only in concrete places,
but also in other dimensions, in the psyche, in the process of maturing and
in the consciousness. On the other hand, they also touched in a very convincing
and tasteful way on the painful political side of it.
"In general," says Hirschfeld, "the people of Gush Emunim
and Yesha haven't managed to create a convincing cultural mode of speaking
over the years, one that could break out of their closed circles. The Meshiv
Haruah group, especially with the disengagement poems, is doing so, also because
it is including voices from outside its circle, and because in their writing,
they're expressing recognition of some universal aspect of themselves. The
disengagement is not being presented solely as their own personal story."
Meshiv Haruah was founded in 1994 by Shmuel Klein,
Eliaz Cohen, Yoram Nissinovich, Nahum Pachnik (son of Rabbi Shalom Pachnik
of the Beit El yeshiva) and Na'ama Shaked, with the aim of establishing a
platform for Hebrew poetry. "The sense was that the cultural map
in Israel didn't include anything that could give expression to the wide range
of the Israeli experience in connection with the Jewish experience and tradition,"
says Shmuel Klein. "One thing we wanted to do was to create a medium
for an unmediated encounter between religious and secular."
The journal has been banned at several yeshivas, on the rabbis' instructions.
It has been accused of "dealing in impurity and pornography." But
other religious-Zionist rabbis and intellectuals see it as an artistic-spiritual
enterprise that encourages the individual to give expression to his inner
world. Besides the 16 issues of the journal that have appeared so far, the
group has also sponsored literary and cultural events that have included artists
from the fields of music, theater and the plastic arts.
One regular program is the annual poetry festival called Yemei
Ahava Leshira (Days of Love for Poetry), which has
been held for the past eight years in Jerusalem during the Sukkot holiday.
Meshiv Haruah has no central office and no one on
the production, editing and writing staff receives a salary. The journal relies
on a budget from the Education Ministry's Art and Culture Administration and
on contributions from various foundations.
Devouring Palestinians for dinner
Prof. Uzi Shavit, a scholar of literature and poetry and the CEO of the Hakibbutz
Hameuhad publishing house, says of Meshiv Haruah:
"It's a refreshing and important phenomenon, since from the very
beginning, religious Judaism has hardly taken part in the new Hebrew poetry,
which has been around for over 200 years now. The new Hebrew poetry was primarily
secular poetry. In the past decades, there have been religious poets such
as Zelda, Yonadav Kaplun, Admiel Kosman and Hava Pinhas-Cohen, but each of
them worked in isolation. This is the first time that a group of young people
has arisen and is writing modern poetry that fits into the mainstream of modern
Israeli poetry.
"These are religious people who have a free outlook and don't see
themselves as subject to the censorship of any rabbi; young people who have
spent most of their lives in Judea and Samaria, and some who were born there.
It's the only reality they know, and at the same time, they are totally free
in their positions. They don't belong to any clique, they're not just mouthing
slogans, and they're displaying professionalism in the most positive sense
of the word - and I'm not only referring to the poetry on the topic of the
disengagement. The Yamit evacuation didn't spawn a similar phenomenon. The
Oslo period and the disengagement have done something. It's a sociological
phenomenon.
"From a certain perspective, they remind me of Albert Camus, the
Algerian-born French writer. This is their homeland. They grew up there. These
aren't people who are saying: We came here on a mission for the nation. These
aren't people who chose to live there. These are people, most of them young
people, who were born there, or at least grew up there from the time they
were very young. Therefore they are not political in the regular sense of
the world, but more spiritual-literary. Something new is emerging here, and
we'll have to watch and see where it leads."
Banned in the yeshiva
Eliaz Cohen was 7 years old when his family moved from Petah Tikva to Elkana
in western Samaria. He later studied at the Or Etzion hesder yeshiva under
Rabbi Haim Druckman. For nine years, he has been leading creative writing
workshops in Gush Etzion and for the past four years has also been working
as a social worker in various institutions. His first books of poetry caused
an uproar. "Mehumashim" ("Pentagons"),
published by Tammuz, was essentially constructed as an encounter between his
personal biography and the weekly Torah portions.
His second book, "Negi'ot Rishonot" ("First
Touches"), contained an erotic tension that some of the religious public
found difficult to digest, while his most recent book, "Shema
Adonai - Poems from the Events of 5761-5764," has been
interpreted in part as an alternative prayer to the traditional prayers. For
example, Cohen offers a version of the familiar "Travelers' Prayer"
written in the singular instead of the plural. In this book, Cohen also holds
a kind of dialogue with God, a dialogue that contains a broad spectrum of
emotions, including, at times, defiance and anger. After the book was published,
Cohen lost his job as a social worker in one of the well-known ultra-Orthodox
boarding schools in Jerusalem's Geula neighborhood.
From the start, Eliaz Cohen and his colleagues were banned from some of the
yeshivas, but their pioneering work paved the way for others who wished to
express themselves in this manner. Cohen was moved to write "Hazmana
Lebekhi" ("Invitation to Cry") out of
"existential anxiety," he says. Some of his relatives personally
experienced the fall of Gush Etzion in 1948. He says that, in light of the
anticipated evacuation, this poem and other such poems by him and his colleagues
are filling a fundamental void in Israeli culture.
"There's a pathology in this culture, that turns its back on everything
that is supposed to be derived from the Jewish fate," he explains. "It
has directed all of this repressed pain toward identification with the other,
with the Palestinian who is perceived as a victim, who is a product of our
story. I also see the direct relation between our independence and their nakba.
The question is how much you allow yourself to undermine your narrative. I
long for the day when the ruling elite in our culture will show the same openness
toward us as we have shown toward it, both in the last issue of Meshiv Haruah
about the disengagement, and in previous issues.
"Over the years, playwrights, poets and cultural people have scolded
us: `You're settlers! How dare you write poetry after you've devoured two
Palestinians for dinner?'" Cohen says. "As they see it, there couldn't
possibly be any art coming from the right, since we're busy killing Palestinians
all day long. I'm purposely exaggerating, but this is definitely the feeling
that has been blowing our way for years. As I see it, when my friends and
I write about a settler who is experiencing existential distress, whose friends
are being killed, who loses almost his whole family and is now about to be
evacuated, it's more authentic than a famous poet who tosses a sock filled
with money and medicines over the separation fence."
Poet Tal Nitzan, who published work in "Be'et Habarzel"
("With Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984-2004," Hargol
Press), participated in an evening sponsored by Meshiv Haruah at the Artists'
House in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. She read her poem "Khan
Yunis," which describes Palestinian suffering. Nitzan does
not sound all that impressed by what the Meshiv Haruah group sees as a significant
gesture of openness.
"I have no psychological difficulty identifying with the pain of
`my brother' compared to the pain of `my enemy,' she says."It's not a
psychological question, but a human and moral one. I don't divide humanity
into my brethren and my enemies and there are human experiences that are situated
much higher in my book, in the hierarchy of pain and injustice, than being
uprooted from one place to another. I can identify with the sorrow of the
settlers affected by the disengagement up to a certain point. But having to
move to a new residence, when it comes with compensation and alternative housing
that is already prepared, and especially when it is at last removing an obstacle
to peace, is not the end of the world.
"Therefore, manipulations like threats of violence wrapped in slogans
like `We have love and it will triumph,' and the vulgarity of the cheapening
of the Holocaust and the waving of orange patches, and the racism behind the
argument of how dare we try to move `Jews' - all of this repulses me. The
excessive volume of the cries of distress seems to point to vast egocentrism
and moral obtuseness.
"When Eliaz Cohen writes to a soldier, `In a whisper, you ask: Have
you packed?,' I think about the tenants in a building in Nablus. No one asked
them if they packed or not. They expelled them in the middle of the night
a month and a half ago. Not in a whisper, but with shouting and yelling. Of
all their possessions, all they were left with were the pajamas on their back,
and they demolished the building, all four stories, with everything in it,
not even as a `punishment' for something. Have any settlers from Gush Katif
stopped feeling sorry for themselves and tried to put themselves in the shoes
of these people, whose world was destroyed overnight? So if there's an `Invitation
to Cry,' my tears are reserved for the children who were searching for their
toys among the rubble the next day, even if according to the settlers' criteria,
they're not `my brethren.'"
The discourse between writers like Nitzan and Eliaz or between Yossi Sarid
and Rabbi Menachem Froman of Tekoa, who also took part in the event at the
Artists' House - Sarid read his poem "Itamar"
and Froman contributed a poem entitled "Vehayiti Kimeshuga"
("I Was As a Madman") to the disengagement issue of Meshiv
Haruah - sometimes sounds like a dialogue of the deaf. People feel close to
their own grief and not the grief of others. The sometimes very harsh writing
against the disengagement expresses pain, anger and much sadness, but mostly
it is writing that springs from a personal need.
The work of God
Ruhama Shapira, who lives in Shirat Hayam in Gush Katif, is the granddaughter
of Rabbi Eliyahu Kitov, author of the famous Sefer Hatoda'a.
Shapira grew up in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem in an unconventional
household. Now she is occupied with meditation, prayer and writing and in
"seeking God," as she puts it. She has lived in Shirat Hayam for
four years. The settlement was established after the bombing of the school
bus carrying children from Kfar Darom. The picture of her husband, Noam, holding
one of their daughters and coming under fire at the memorial service for Tali
Hatuel and her daughters on the Kissufim road is an image that stays with
you for a long time. After the memorial service, Shapira wrote a poem entitled
"Tzir Kissufim" which appeared in the
last issue of Meshiv Haruah: "Bleeding
heart volunteers with representatives of the law/ will wait politely for us
to leave willingly otherwise/ with decisive and reasoned thinking they will
remove us/ from our homes one by one/ load us on trucks for carting animals/
maybe the killer and his four wives will choose/ to live in the empty house
of Tali and her four daughters."
Shapira and Tami Gilboa from Morag took part in a creative writing workshop
organized by the Gush Katif community center. "There have always
been writers from the right," she says, "but condescension and insularity
on the part of the ruling clique didn't permit them expression on central
platforms." She's not angry. "Now the time has come to be heedful
and humble before God and man," she says. "Everything that has been
happening lately is the work of God. The politicians and all the authorities
- they're all tools in the hands of the Creator who is trying to wake us up."
Some of the writers rely on the religious sources, especially on verses from
the Torah. Rivka Tanir Hadar, a newly observant poet who lives in the Jewish
Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem and has had two books of poetry published
by Hakibbutz Hameuhad, took the commandment of the egla arufa, the "decapitated
heifer" from the book of Deuteronomy and writes about "Love/
that we haven't spoken about/ ever" that "cries now/ between us/
like a heifer/ decapitated/ in the riverbed."
"The ritual of the egla arufa was an expression of mutual responsibility
and accountability on the part of the public, when a person was discovered
slain in a field and the murderer was unknown. This mutual responsibility
and accountability is what is being killed in today's reality. And the present
political leadership, which is causing a sharp polarization in the nation,
is responsible for this," Hadar says.
Rabbi Menachem Froman wrote "I Was as a Madman" after
a night of nightmares. Froman says that that night, he had a dream in which
he saw settlements being uprooted. The images in his poem are borrowed from
the story of Rabbi Akiva, whose flesh was shredded with iron rakes by the
Romans. In the poem, the rakes are represented by the teeth of the bulldozer
that comes to uproot the settlements.
For those unfamiliar with the history of Gush Emunim: In 1973, Rabbi Zvi
Yehuda Kook, the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, took part in the first attempt
to establish the Elon Moreh settlement south of Nablus. After most of the
group was forcibly evacuated in an operation in which both evacuees and soldiers
were crying, only a few people remained, including Rabbi Kook.
In his book, "Ahim Yekarim" ("Dear
Brothers"), Hagai Segal described the moment in which he demonstratively
held open his coat and said to the soldiers who had asked him to leave the
area: "If you want, take a machine gun and kill me." Rabbi
Kook repeated this sentence twice and then he added: "Just as you
can't force me to eat pork and desecrate the Sabbath, you won't force me to
move from here."
Fifteen years ago, Froman was asked in a newspaper interview what he would
do if he was evacuated and he answered almost instinctively - "I'd die."
Today, Froman wants to stress that he does not recommend dying. He says that
his poem depicts a mental state being experienced by a good number of people
- a madness that he wants to warn about. The name of the poem is taken from
the section on curses in Deuteronomy (Chapter 28, Verse 34): "Thou
shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."