Holy! Holy! Holy! Reimagining the Holy Tongue and the <em>Kedushah</em> Prayer
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Wendy Zierler
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Wendy Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at HUC-JIR in New York.
A few years ago, Israeli television personality and food writer Gil Hovav visited my Hebrew language course. Hovav is the great grandson of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the man commonly credited with reviving Hebrew as a spoken language in the land of Israel. He began by describing a phone call he had received one day in the newsroom, informing him that, “shuv zeh karah, it has happened once again”: the gravestones of his great-grandparents, grandparents, and everyone else in the Ben Yehuda family plot on the Mount of Olives had once again been vandalized by members of Neturei Karta, a group of religious extremists who reviled Ben Yehuda’s memory because of his role in turning Hebrew, leshon hakodesh—the holy language—into a secular vernacular. It would be on Gil, once again, to call his elderly great-aunt, Dolla, and tell her about the desecrated tombstones. When Gil got through to her, however, she was unfazed; as in the past, the gravestones would be cleaned and restored. She had just one question: What language did the vandals use for their graffiti? Hebrew, Gil answered. Well, if it was in Hebrew, she said, “then we won.”
The Neturei Karta vandals are not wrong: in using Hebrew, Israelis and others speak and write every day in a language previously reserved for prayer, ritual, and holy study. Though it was once set apart, as if in a protective case, the Hebrew language is now a mundane instrument of everyday communication—in the street, the market, the newsroom, and the bedroom—all the while remaining, at least for some, a language of prayer and sacred study. At the same time, Gil’s great-aunt Dolla is also right: if even the Neturei Karta use it, secular modern Hebrew is truly alive and thriving.
As someone deeply involved in teaching modern Hebrew language and literature to rabbinical students, I am committed to the notion that there is something to be gained nationally, spiritually, and religiously by fully embracing the secular revival of the Hebrew language. I can’t help but marvel at the fact that Hebrew is now a living language and vernacular, in every sense of the term; furthermore, I marvel that those who have learned how to live in that language can now approach the sacred aspects and usages of the language with renewed vigor and understanding, and with a sense that they are participating in the ongoing development of all aspects of our secular and religious lives. This development diminishes the unique status of Hebrew as leshon hakodesh, but it also has the equal and opposite effect of bringing in new sources of inspiration and creative insight from previously unrepresented corners of the community. I think we see this most saliently in the works of those early 20th-century poets who were working toward the revival of Hebrew both as a literary and spoken language, especially in their poems that explicitly incorporate biblical and liturgical references to kedushah, holiness.
My sense of the multifaceted power of modern Hebrew begins with thinking about what we mean when we say that Hebrew is leshon hakodesh. According to Maimonides, the rabbis formulated the script of tefilah, prayer, as a set Hebrew text only because of the Babylonian exile:
When Israel was exiled in the time of Nebuchadnezzar [586 BCE, after the destruction of the first Temple], they became interspersed [nit‘arvu נִתְעָרְבוּ] among the Persians and Greeks. Children were born to them in these foreign countries and those children’s language was confused [nitbalbelah, נִתְבַּלְבְּלָה]...When Ezra and his court saw this, they established eighteen blessings in sequence [the Shemoneh Esreh prayer, also known as the Amidah].…
The prayers could be set in the mouths of everyone. They could learn them quickly and the prayers of those of the stammerers [ha‘ilgim הָעִלְּגִים] would be as complete as the prayers of the most eloquent. It was because of this matter that they established all the blessings and prayers so that they would be ordered in the mouths of all Israel, so that each blessing would be set in the mouth of each person unable to express himself. (Hilchot Tefilah 1:4, translation adapted from Eliyahu Touger)
Maimonides suggests that if the Jewish people had never been exiled from the land of Israel, they might have been able, because of their location within Israel and their organic facility with Hebrew, to use their tools of everyday expression to speak succinctly and eloquently to God in a posture of prayer. Instead, with exile, they became mixed among other nations, their language became babeled/babbled or garbled, and in terms of their capacity to pray, they became inarticulate, or, in other words, ilgim. This is why they needed a set formula for the Shemoneh Esreh (the Amidah), the centerpiece of rabbinic statutory prayer. This implies that the very idea of Hebrew as leshon hakodesh—a term that only begins to appear in post-exilic rabbinic literature—derives from a sense of being apart from the language, of using it only ritually, rather than intimately and organically. Elsewhere, Maimonides reinforces this idea by explaining that the sacredness of Hebrew derives from it not having specific nouns for the human sexual organs and for other matters pertaining to sexual intimacy. (The Guide for the Perplexed, Friedlander ed., Part III, Chapter 8).
I’d like to argue, however, that the whole problem of safah ileget, a language that seems incapacitated or insufficient to the task and challenge of prayer or important sacred communication, begins long before exile, in the Bible itself! I see this in biblical accounts of sacred speech, prophecy, and prayer. It is not just the confused exiles who suffer from a crisis of language when faced with the awesome task of communicating with or on behalf of God, but also those who should have lashon tsachah, clear or fluent language—the biblical Hebrew prophets themselves, from Moses to Isaiah—who repeatedly doubt their capacity and the fitness of their (Hebrew) words to capture and convey God’s message. While some words of our prayers are derived from and built on the speeches of the prophets, confusion, inadequacy, even desecration is in the DNA of leshon hakodesh itself. I think that consciousness of this reality should function as a spur to do and speak better, to live up to the ideal of sacredness inherent in our unique human capacity to speak.
I’d like to look at one representative biblical test case of this idea that occurs in Isaiah 6, a chapter describing the prophet’s experience of a holy vision. It is from this Isaiah text that the rabbis derived the kadosh, kadosh, kadosh section of the Kedushah prayer, one of the holiest moments in daily prayer, recited as part of the morning and afternoon Amidah. As such, we might think of Isaiah 6 as a pinnacle of sacred language; but the original Hebrew text is saturated with images of defilement and desecration. From there, I want to look at how national poet Laureate Hayim Nahman Bialik (1878-1934), and a younger female contemporary of Bialik, Yocheved Bat-Miriam (1901-1981), one of the first modern Hebrew woman poets, revisited and revised the imagery and language of Isaiah 6 in their poetry. These poems, key texts of the modern secular Hebrew revival, create a picture of the alternating profanity and sacredness of modern Hebrew and what it might tell us about speaking prophetically, albeit in a new, everyday way.
Isaiah 6 brings us the prophet’s vision of fiery six-winged seraphim flanking God and calling out, “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh!” with ensuing smoke and quaking. The scene recalls the smoke and thunder of revelation at Sinai in Exodus 19, but while that epiphany follows three days of pre-Sinaitic purification, Isaiah’s vision is accompanied at the outset by a sense of defilement. His vision takes place in the year the death of King Uziah—a famously prosperous king who reigns for 52 years but is stricken at the end of his life with the skin condition tsara’at. The Bible considers both death and tsara’at defiling, and so Uziah’s death represents a kind of double impurity. On the heels of Uziah’s death, Isaiah’s vision attests to God’s eternal kingship in marked contrast to the mortality of human kings. It stops Isaiah in his tracks, leading him to say: “Woe is me! for I am silenced; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Eternal of hosts.” (6:5) One of the seraphim responds to Isaiah’s exclamation of O “Woe is me!” by touching his mouth with a ritspat eish, a glowing coal or stone, thereby taking away his sin and “kashering” his lips, as it were. To be sure, there is something terrifying in the idea of the prophet’s lips being ritually burned to render them pure by one of God’s angels. This implies that a kind of wounding is necessary to make one’s mouth and lips fit for sacred speech. (The rabbis will later describe baby Moses reaching for coals and maiming his mouth, thus explaining his status as kevad peh kevad lashon— heavy of mouth and tongue—in what has become a well-known midrash, Exodus Rabbah 1:26).
As soon as his lips are purified, Isaiah hears God’s call for a messenger and volunteers, though the picture of what will result from all of this is less than optimistic: “And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said: ‘Here am I; send me.’ And He said: ‘Go and tell this people: hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.”
So much for Isaiah’s pure, holy lips! Even with the seraphim’s purification of them, Isaiah’s prophetic message to the people is doomed to be an exercise in frustration, as God tells him outright. He is being commissioned by God not to bring about the improvement of the people or their repentance, but to ensure their punishment. As Abraham Joshua Heschel notes in his book, The Prophets:
The mandate Isaiah receives is fraught with appalling contradiction. He is told to be a prophet in order to thwart and to defeat the essential purpose of being a prophet. He is told to face his people while standing on his head. Did he not question his own faculties of seeing, hearing, and understanding when perceiving such a message? What gave him the certainty that it was God’s voice speaking to him? It is generally assumed that the mission of a prophet is to open up the people’s hearts, to enhance their understanding, and to bring about rather than to prevent their turning to God.
How odd that this prophetic story gave rise to one of the most climactic prayers of our liturgy! Read in its original biblical context, the seraphic utterance of kadosh, kadosh, kadosh coincides with a moment not of spiritual elevation but of inadequacy and injury, and a premonition of national disaster, too.
But perhaps this is precisely the point: neither prophecy nor prayer is meant to be easy, accessible, or automatic. In human communication, there is often a gap between what we say and what we mean; how much more so when we use language to try to speak to or on behalf of someone as inscrutable as God. The idea of Hebrew as leshon hakodesh—not just some everyday, arbitrary set of sounds and signs, but something that originates with God and that is pronounced by seraphim on high—fires us up with a sense of the divine potential of language. But reality typically falls short of the ideal. God remains remote and unresponsive. Language falls flat, and people fail to listen.
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Bialik’s Defiled Holy Tongue
Hayim Nahman Bialik, arguably the most important poet of the Hebrew revival, consciously fashioned his poetic persona after the manner of the biblical prophets and knew this problem with Hebrew all too well. In more than one major poem, Bialik explicitly revisited Isaiah 6, using the language and story of the biblical prophet to express his own frustrated efforts at communication[1] and his sense of being an ish temei sefatayim, a “man of impure lips,” living in the midst of an am temei sefatayim, a “nation of impure lips.”[2] One such poem is titled, “Halfah al panai” (“It Fleeted Over My Face,” Nissan 1916), which he wrote in the midst of World War I and against the backdrop of Communist government repression and decrees against the publication of Hebrew books in Russia:
H. N Bialik (1873-1934), “It Fleeted Over My Face”[3]
Your breath fleeted over my face and set me all afire,
And Your fingertips terrified the strings of my heart,
And speechless I crawled, imprisoning my rumbling spirit;
My heart enveloped within and my song flooded not my mouth;
With what shall I enter the Holy place, how shall my prayer be made pure? –
And my speech, God, became entirely abominable, like foul talk,
Every word within it defiled to the very root,
Every idiom entirely violated by contaminated lips,
Every expression having been dragged to a brothel.
My pure doves, that I sent to the heavens at morning,
Returned to me at evening—now as ravens schooled in the dung heaps
A shriek thickening in their throats and carrion in their mouths.
Words drum and surround me, encircling me like a band of whores,
Bedecked in vain jewelry and adorned in the finery of deceit,
Reddish eyeshadow on their eyelids and scheming rot in their bones,
Their wings the spawn of adultery, bastards of brainwave and pen,
Arrogant and proud all of them, haughty of tongue and hollow-hearted,
Multiplying with the thorn and the thistle, leaving no room for escape.
Day by day, with the sweeping of the gutters and the emptying of chamber pots,
Their putridness bursts forth upon all those closed up in their rooms, pouring out their hearts,
Sullying their very breath and sapping the spirit of its purity.
Where can I flee from their stench? Where can I hide from their multitudes?
And who is the seraph who will scald my lips with his fiery coal?
I shall go out among the birds of the field, chirping before the morning,
Or shall rise up and walk to the children, playing innocently at the gate,
I shall blend into their congregation, train in their banter and prattle –
Bathe in the breath of their mouths, and with their spotlessness cleanse my lips.
חָלְפָה עַל-פָּנַי
חָלְפָה עַל-פָּנַי נִשְׁמַת אַפְּךָ, אֱלֹהִים, וַתְּלַהֲטֵנִי,
וּקְצֵה אֶצְבָּעֲךָ הֶחֱרִיד רֶגַע מֵיתְרֵי לְבָבִי,
וַאֲנִי זָחַלְתִּי וָאֶדֹּם וָאֶכְלָא הֶמְיַת רוּחִי;
בְּתוֹכִי הִתְעַטֵּף לִבִּי וְזִמְרָתִי לֹא-שָׁטְפָה פִי:
בַּמָּה אָבֹא אֶל-הַקֹּדֶשׁ וְאֵיכָכָה תִטְהַר תְּפִלָּתִי – ?
וּשְׂפָתִי, אֱלֹהִים, שֻׁקְּצָה כֻלָּהּ וַתְּהִי כִּשְׂפַת פִּגּוּלִים,
וּמִלָּה אֵין בְּקִרְבָּהּ אֲשֶׁר לֹא-נִטְמְאָה עוֹד עַד-שָׁרְשָׁהּ,
וְנִיב אַיִן אֲשֶׁר לֹא-הִתְעַלְּלוּ בוֹ שְׂפָתַיִם נֶאֱלָחוֹת,
וְאֵין הֲגִיג אֲשֶׁר לֹא-נִסְחַב עוֹד אֶל בֵּית הַקָּלוֹן.
יוֹנַי הַזַּכּוֹת, שִׁלַּחְתִּין לְעֵת בֹּקֶר שָׁמַיְמָה,
שָׁבוּ אֵלַי לְעֵת עֶרֶב – וְהִנָּן עֹרְבִים מְלֻמְּדֵי אַשְׁפַּתּוֹת,
צְוָחָה נִתְעָבָה בִּגְרוֹנָם וּבְשַׂר נְבֵלָה בְּפִיהֶם.
אֲפָפוּנִי מִלִּים תּוֹפֵפוֹת, כַּעֲדַת קְדֵשׁוֹת כִּתְּרוּנִי,
נוֹצְצוֹת בַּעֲדָיֵי שָׁוְא וּמִתְיַפְיְפוֹת בְּחֵן רְמִיָּה,
חַכְלִילוּת הַפּוּךְ בְּעֵינֵיהֶן וּרְקַב הַזִּמָּה בְּעַצְמוֹתָן,
וּבכַנְפֵיהֶן יַלְדֵי נַאֲפוּפִים, מַמְזְרֵי עֵט וְרַעְיוֹן,
עָתָק וָשַׁחַץ כֻּלָּם, לְשׁוֹן רַהַב וְלֵב נָבוּב,
עִם-הַקִּימוֹשׁ וְעִם-הַחוֹחַ יִפְרוּ וְאֵין מִפְּנֵיהֶם מָנוֹס.
יוֹם יוֹם, עִם גְּרֹף הַבִּיבִים וְעִם שְׁפֹךְ הָעֲבִיטִים,
יַבְקִיעַ בָּאְשָׁם עַד-אַף כָּל-נִסְגָּר בְּחַדְרוֹ וְשׁוֹפֵךְ לִבּוֹ,
לְטַמֵּא עָלָיו הֶבֶל פִּיו וּלְהַשְׁבִּית רוּחוֹ מִטָּהֳרוֹ.
אָנָה אֵלֵךְ מֵרֵיחָם? וְאָנָה מֵהֲמוֹנָם אֶסָּתֵר?
וּמִי-הוּא הַשָּׂרָף אֲשֶׁר-יַגְעִיל פִּי בְּרִצְפַּת אִשּׁוֹ?
אֶל צִפֳּרֵי הַשָּׂדֶה אֵצֵא, הַמְצַפְצְפוֹת לִפְנוֹת בֹּקֶר,
אוֹ אָקוּמָה אֵלְכָה-לִּי אֶל-הַיְלָדִים, הַמְשַׂחֲקִים לְתֻמָּם בַּשָּׁעַר,
אָבֹא אֶתְעָרֵב בִּקְהָלָם, אֶאְלַף שִׂיחָם וְלַהֲגָם –
וְטָהַרְתִּי מֵרוּחַ פִּיהֶם וּבְנִקְיוֹנָם אֶרְחַץ שְׂפָתָי.
(ניסן תרע״ו)
Bialik’s poem explicitly invokes all the imagery of Isaiah 6, and the highlighting above identifies some of the specific words and images that echo that chapter. As in the biblical text, there is a moment of fiery divine revelation. God’s breath passes fleetingly over the poet’s face and “sets him all afire.” Note the marked absence, however, of the words kadosh, kadosh, kadosh. This absence is all the more striking given the presence of virtually all the other details that figure in the biblical vision. As in the case of Isaiah 6, the experience of divine revelation shuts the poet down and renders him speechless, stricken with a sense that his language, like that of those around him, is putrid and profane; just as a sacrifice that is not consumed in time is deemed pigul,[4] he refers to his prophetic or prayer language as sefat pigulim, a language of sacrifices that have become an abomination. Profanity of every sort surrounds him on all sides; “their wings” (kanfeihem), in marked contrast to the holy wings of the seraphim, are “the spawn of adultery, bastards of brainwave and pen.”
Unlike the biblical prophet, Bialik’s speaker has no means of purification and thus desperately asks, “Who is the seraph who will scald my lips with his fiery coal?” The secular poet cannot rely on any form of divine intercession. And so, at the end of the poem, he sets out to rejuvenate and purify his own spirit by going out “amid the birds of the forest in the morning, and the children playing innocently at the gate.” The sacralization of the poet’s language, paradoxically, will come from ruach pihem, from the spirited words of school children, the next generation of the Jewish people, who will speak the Hebrew language organically and innocently.
Bialik devotes some 17 lines in this poem to a metaphorical description of the defilement of his language, much of which hinges on images of harlotry and adultery. The language in this section of the poem is also evocative of Isaiah 3, with its famous denunciation of the haughty Bnot Tziyon, the daughters of Zion, who go about walking mincingly, halokh vetafof, tinkling as they strut. The prophet’s description of these daughters and later of the city as a personified, violated Daughter of Zion, includes a harrowing description of how they will be stripped, degraded, and demeaned as punishment for their wantonness. (Isaiah 3:16-26) Bialik’s use of this imagery alongside the description of his defiled language supplies an explanation for the prophet’s claim to be a temei sefatayim among an am temei sefatayim, a person of defiled lips living amid a nation of the same. It also lines up the division along gender lines between tahor and tameh, between sacred and profane or secular, with the feminine standing for the profane. It is the whoring Bat Tziyon, the daughter of Zion, that has defiled the masculine prophet’s lips. It is because of the tumah (impurity) of Bat Tziyon that the people will be unable to hear his prophetic message and are doomed to punishment. Bialik’s appropriation of these words in his effort to dramatize his own Hebrew language crisis and to represent the obstacles impeding the revival of the language, identifies women and femininity as part of the problem rather than its solution.
What, then, might it mean for a woman to enter into this conversation about language and holiness? I began by asking what it means to speak and write in leshon hakodesh in a secular age, to take a once-sacred, prophetic, and liturgical language and use it as an instrument of everyday communication, and, in this case, modern literature. What might it take for a modern Hebrew female poet, one of the first, to revisit the language and imagery of Isaiah 6 and the related Kedushah prayer, and make it her own? What does it mean for her to take up this language, given both Isaiah’s and Bialik’s use of feminine personification to depict the people in their language in its most defiled, abased state? The following poem by Yocheved Bat-Miriam,[5] part of her first published poem cycle, “Merachok,” was written only a few short years after Bialik’s “Halfah al panai.” It responds to Isaiah, to the Kedushah, and to Bialik’s poem, with an entirely different message:
I take out my soul
And lift it in my palms,
And carry it to the heights,
In a whispered prayer, hidden, deep.
Before the gulfs of silence that arose before me
In this dark night.
Gulfs of silence arose before me,
And were revealed in the depths of depths
Sounds, echoes occurring
And coming from a distance,
Flowing, joining and raising in my eyes
Light movements, quivering, trembling
From above to below,
From east to west,
From north to south,
Like the rustling of silent, swift wings,
And opposite them colors
braided in different ways,
centering
and embroidering wondrous embroideries;
its own sound and movement,
movement and its own color,
color and its own form,
form and man.
Like waves
one after the other
they came to me in this dark night.
And as if hands were outstretched from above
Down towards me,
Took hold of me,
Stood me on my feet,
And with touches of careful fingers,
Touching and yet not touching, so mournfully
And caressing, passing over me,
From my head to the palms of the feet
With which I immersed,
One and two,
In a clear running spring,
And a drop from my wet hair, fell on my eyes,
And my eyes cleared
And widened.
I was purified, refined
And wondrous I became
I take out my soul
And lift it in my palms to the heights!
אֶת-נִשְׁמָתִי אָנֹכִי מוֹצִיאָה
וְעַל כַּפַּי מְרִימָה,
וְנושְׂאָה לַמָּרוֹם,
בִּתְפִילַּת-לַחַשׁ טְמִירָה, עֲמוּקָה,
לִפְנֵי תְּהוֹמוֹת הַדְּמָמָה, שֶׁקָמו לְפָנַי
בְּאֹפֶל הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה.
תּהוֹמוֹת דְּמָמָה קָמוּ לְפָנַי,
וְנִגְּלוּ בְּמַעֲמָקֵי-מַעֲמַקִים
צְלִילִים, הֵדִים מִתְרַחָשִׁים
וּבָאִים מֵרָחוֹק,
זוֹרְמִים, מִתְאַחְדִים וּמַעֲלִים לְעֵינַי תְּנוּעוֹת
קַלּוֹת, מְרַטְּטוֹת, רוֹעֲדוֹת
מִלְמַעְלָה לְמַטָּה,
מְמִּזְרַח לְמַעֲרָב,
מִצָּפוֹן לְדָרוֹם,
כְּרִפְרוּף כְּנָפַיִם חֲרִישִׁיּוֹת וּמְהִירוֹת,
וּלְעוּמָתָם צְבָעִים
בִּדְרָכִים שׁוֹנִים נִשְׁזָרִים,
מִתְרַכְּזִים
וְרוֹקְמִים יְדִיעוֹת וּרְקָמוֹת נִפְלָאוֹת;
צְלִיל וּתְנוּעָה שֶׂלוֹ,
תְּנוּעָה וְצֶבָע שׁלָהּ,
צֶבָע וְצוּרָה שֶלוֹ,
צוּרָה-וְאָדָם.
כְּגַלִּים
זֶה אַחַר זֶה
בָּאוּ אֵלַי בַּלַּיְלָה הָאָפֵל הַזֶּה.
וּכְאִלּוּ יָדַיִים הוּשְׂטוּ מִלְמַעְלָה
לְמַטָּה אֵלַי,
אָחֲזוּ בִּי,
הֶעֱמִידוּנִי עַל רַגְלַי,
וּבְנְגיִעוֹת אֶצְבָּעוֹת זְהִירוֹת,
נוֹגְעוֹת וְאֵינָן נוֹגְעוֹת, כֹּה נוּגוֹת
וּמְלַטְּפוֹת עָבְרוּ עָלַי,
מֵרֹאשִׁי עַד כַּפּוֹת רַגְלָי,
בָּהֶן טָבַלְתִּי,
אַחַת וּשְׁתַּיִם,
כִּבְמַעְיָן זַךְ וְקוֹלֵח,
וְטִפָּה מִשַׂעֲרוֹת רֹאשִׁי הָרְטוּבוֹת
נָפְלַה עַל עֵינַי,
וְהִבְהִירוּ עֵינַי
וְגָדְלוּ,
וְאָנֹכִי טָהַרְתִּי, נִצְרַפְתִּי
וְנִפְלָאָה הָיִיתִי.
אֶת נִשְׂמָתִי אָנֹכִי מוֹציִאָה
וְעַל כַּפַּי נוֹשְׁאָה לַמָּרוֹם!
Like Bialik’s poem, which begins with the passing of nishmat Elohim (God’s breath or soul) over him, Bat-Miriam’s begins with the mention of nishmati—her breath or soul that she carries lamarom (to the heights), bringing to mind the line כְּשֵׁם שֶׁמַּקְדִּישִׁים אוֹתוֹ בִּשְׁמֵי מָרוֹם, in the same manner that the angels sanctify God on high, from the Kedushah prayer. Like both Isaiah and Bialik, Bat-Miriam’s poetic speaker confronts debilitating silence. But whereas both the biblical Isaiah and the modern Bialik are undone by this silence, Bat-Miriam, the intrepid newcomer—whose advent is made possible only by the secular revival of the Hebrew language[7]—describes a spiritual awakening. The entire poem is permeated positively by the language of Isaiah 6 and the Kedushah: her revelation includes the rustling of soft wings, k’nafayim; divine hands stand her up on her feet—as if standing for the Amidah!—but they touch her carefully, not scorchingly. “They unite”—mitakhdim —recalling the veyahon am hamyachadim shemoֹ line in the Kedushah recited during the musaf Amidah.
Another line that echoes the Kedushah liturgy is Leumatam…mitrakzim, “sounds and colors and sensations concentrate and merge before me.” In marked contrast to the head-to-toe debasement described in both Isaiah 3 and in Bialik’s poem, Bat-Miriam’s poetic speaker is caressed by God from her head down to the soles of her feet. And in this way, she is purified, clarified. Nifla’ah hayiti: “I was made wondrous,” she proclaims, as if the entire poem is acting out the kind of marvelous spiritual renewal we aspire to in our prayers.
As previously mentioned, this poem is part of the very first cycle that Yocheved Bat-Miriam published in what became her very well-respected literary career. It was also the first such extended poem cycle ever published by a woman in the Hebrew language. Before the Haskalah (from the 1770s through 1881), Jewish women had little access to Hebrew literacy, given their general exclusion from Torah study and the arena of public prayer. The revival of Hebrew as a secular literary language and vernacular enabled Bat-Miriam to challenge some of the longstanding tropes about women and Hebrew. The result is a poem that considers how we can even dare to stand before God using the language of fiery angels—and, in a woman’s voice, emboldens us nevertheless to try. Yes, we are a sinning people, but we are capable of accomplishing wondrous things, including the modern-day revival of Hebrew.
Like the awful story with which I began this reflection, a story of Jews desecrating Jewish tombstones for the sake, supposedly, of preserving the sacredness of leshon hakodesh—a tragedy that Gil Hovav’s great-aunt nevertheless deemed a victory because the graffiti was written in Hebrew rather than Yiddish—we can look past the secular/religious divide and find new meaning in the Kedushah through the secular poetry of one of the first women to write in modern Hebrew.
Exposing students and Jewish community members to the spiritual and cultural resources available in modern Hebrew literature and culture, showing them what modern Hebrew can afford in terms of creatively enriching one’s contemporary Jewish identity as well as one’s understanding of classical Jewish texts, and illustrating how the entry of women into this tradition has enriched Jewish culture, contributing to its further development as well as challenging some of its age-old gender biases—all this is key to my own personal, pedagogical mission. I agree with my colleague, Samuel Schneider, emeritus professor of Hebrew at Yeshiva University, and his impassioned, talmudically inflected plea that modern Hebrew be emphasized in (Orthodox) yeshiva study:
An emphasis on the importance of Hebrew to [Torah] study is a win-win proposition. If we elevate Hebrew to a level of importance, it will be a clear gain for everyone—for you, rabbis, in your service to kodesh,—your holy work—for those of us who teach Hebrew, and first and foremost for our students. From my own experience I can attest to the joy of students when they succeed at cracking open the language of the text and applying what was learned in their Hebrew classes. They almost break out into a holy chorus of “Eishet ivrit, mi yimtza,” Lady Hebrew of Valor, who shall find?[8]
Schneider’s pun on Eishet Chayil, the Woman of Valor of Proverbs 31, wryly plays on the ways in which Torah study substitutes for eros, dating, and marriage for many young yeshiva students. But it also illustrates my argument about the high value of Hebrew as well as any treatise could.
Endnotes
[1] Bialik’s most famous discussion of language and revelation was his essay, “Gilui vekhisui belashon.” (October 3, 1915) See https://benyehuda.org/bialik/article02.html.
[2] See for example, a 1904 poem titled “Davar,” written in the lead-up to the first Russian revolution and in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom: https://benyehuda.org/bialik/bia067.html. For a consideration of “Ḥalfah al panai,” in relation to “Davar,” see Baruch Kurzweil Bialik veTchernikhovsky (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1964), 143-147.
[3] My translation.
[4] Thanks to my colleague, A.J. Berkovitz, for pointing out the significance of Bialik’s usage here.
[5] We know from Bat-Miriam’s own testimony the major influence Bialik’s poetry had on her education and literary development. Upon receiving the Bialik Prize in 1964, Bat-Miriam recalled that the first book she ever received from her father—a gift for memorizing a chapter of the Bible—was a book of Bialik’s poems. See Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Makhatsit mul makhatsit; kol hashirim, Ruth Kartun Blum, ed., (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2014), 429, 487-488. And one of the reasons she changed her last name from Zhelezhniak to Bat-Miriam was that Bialik had referred to the emerging modern Hebrew women poets as bnot Miriam.
[6] Yocheved Bat Miriam, Merachok Poem C (Kibbutz Hameuchad, 1985, 1932). All rights reserved by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers Ltd. Originally published in Hatekufah 14-15 (Tevet-Sivan, תרפ״ב), 529-554 and dated תרפ״א-תרפ״ב. My translation.
[7] For more on the emergence of modern Hebrew women’s poetry after centuries of female Hebrew literary silence, see Wendy Zierler, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).
[8] Shmuel Schnaider, Hakiyyum vehazikaron (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2010), pp. 347-48.
