The Poem That Shook the World

First, some housekeeping notes on this newsletter.

Friends, I created this newsletter for a few selfish reasons. I like to write and writers enjoy their readers. If I impose a deadline on myself (twice a month) to produce something, I become more observant and reflective about life. I do not want to analyze current affairs from the vantagepoint of left or right. There is enough noise in our bunkers that I don’t need to add to the din. I also want to keep in touch with old friends and former congregants. I answer every email that my readers send me. I am grateful to you for your notes.

I figured twice a month would be good to achieve both goals.

However, during these upcoming days, I am going to break the pattern. The news from Israel and Gaza is emotionally crippling for me. I will send out notes reflecting the corners of the conflict when I feel that I have something to share that my readers do not hear from their news sources or their social media silos. If I have something to add, I will send it earlier and forego the twice a month schedule (just for now!).

After Thanksgiving, Judi and I will be traveling, and email may not be available to me. Do send your notes to me if you react to my writings, or simply want to stay in touch. Please understand that, in the month of December, I may not respond to you immediately.

Below are my reflections on memory.

One of my dearest friends sent me a thoughtful article from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem based educational facility and Jewish think tank, entitled The Memory Trap, by James Loefler. My friend is concerned about the human suffering in both Israel and Gaza. He has a great heart and I admire and love him for it. I also am concerned about the human suffering in both Israel and Gaza. Maybe where we would differ, if we do, is that my friend is praying for peace to come as soon as possible in this miserable detestable war. I am, however, a bit of a laggard. Like decent people everywhere, I pray for peace to come as soon as possible, with this added caveat: peace can only come in the wake of victory for Israel, which will also be a victory for civilization, which will also be a victory for the Palestinian people. 

Peace cannot be achieved unless Hamas is defeated. Tragically, until Hamas is rendered toothless, both Israelis and Gazans will continue to suffer.

I think of Hamas as a cancer in the body of these two peoples. The body won’t live until the bad cells are destroyed. As of this writing, the cancers of terrorism and barbarism are still virulent. Whose fault is it? Let’s assign blame appropriately to all the actors in this miserable drama when the war ends, the hostages are reunited with their families and the dead are buried. To take this analogy further, maybe the patient was overweight, smoked and drank too much or lived next to a toxic waste dump. Still, as of this moment, the enemy is this cancer. When the blame game is over, we can move forward with what is important—creating opportunities for peace and joy once again. What matters now is the defeat of Hamas terrorism so both Israelis and Palestinians will have a real chance to live and flourish. And getting Israel’s political house in order would also be a big help. 

I may be wrong. But I hope that I am right for the sake of all who are suffering now. 

I assume that nobody who reads this missive is experienced in the art of war or knows what needs to be done on the battlefield to achieve victory. The generals and pundits do not need our opinion from the comfort of our armchairs. But each one of my readers is an expert in moral outrage and human compassion. And every person suffering, wherever they might be, is entitled to both our outrage for their anguish and compassion for their brokenness. 

Back to The Memory Trap. The author is telling his mostly Jewish audience that we should not define this moment by the events of the past. In our historical shortcuts, we describe the events of October 7 as Israel’s 9/11, or Israel’s Kristallnacht, or Israel’s 1903 Kishinev pogrom. For reasons that I will not enumerate here, what is happening now is neither 9/11, nor Kristallnacht, nor Kishinev. The horrible moments today feel like these calamities from yesteryear, but the author of The Memory Trap is telling us that October 7 is something altogether different. We should not let the trap of historical memory determine our future response to the challenges of this moment. Good point. I understand. These are new times, new events, new moments—today is not yesterday. The greatest horror for Jews or Palestinians is for us to be trapped in historical memory and see the world only through yesterday’s pain and failure without any hope for the future. 

How can we escape the memory trap? 

Let me journey back in time to my teenage years. When I was fifteen, I attended the Reform moment’s Torah Corps, an intensive program of Jewish learning. For six weeks I was surrounded by two things I grew to love dearly: Jewish study and girls. On this page, I will focus on the first. 

I took a course on Hebrew poetry. We examined Hebrew poems from a soft cover compendium entitled, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself. Our teacher was T. Carmi an accomplished and published poet from Israel. Interesting to me that the only poem I distinctly remember reading was Chaim Nahman Bialik’s The City of Slaughter. Bialik, the best known of the nascent modern Hebrew poets, composed the poem in 1904 in response to the massacre of Jews in Kishinev. (I have placed a version of the poem below. It is long and powerful. If you have time and the desire, I recommend the poem to you. Sit with it, it’ll be worth your while.) I suppose that it is human nature to remember the horror over the beauty, that our memory preserves evil longer than goodness.

Frankly speaking friends, I do not know how it is possible to fully escape the memory trap, or even whether we should. My wife is a psychotherapist. I cannot count the number of times she pointed out to her clients, her friends, or her family, “That was then. This is now. You are no longer (choose one) the little boy, the little girl, the helpless spouse, the bullied child, the abused teenager, the spurned friend . . . That was then. This is now. In what ways is this moment different and are you different from when you were (choose one) a five-year-old, or ten, or twenty-five or fifty or seventy? That was then. This is now. You are different now than you were then.” 

As human beings, we should exert our spiritual strength to avoid the memory trap. That was then, this is now. We are different now from what we were on 9/11, Krystallnacht, and Kishinev.

But we are human beings and we do not live in a vacuum. Our accumulated memories determine who we are. From the moment of our birth, our psychological and spiritual canvas fills up with images and experiences that fashion the way we see the world and understand our place within it. It is precisely what we remember which make us human, unique, and special. Only through memory can we contextualize our lives. A human being is not fully alive without memory. My greatest fear as I age is that I will begin to forget the things that make me uniquely human.

Memory is not a trap. It is life. 

Memory is the key to who I am as an individual. Memory is the key to who the Jewish people are. Remembering can be painful. Living without memory is impossible. 

The trap, the conundrum we face, is to remember what needs to be remembered, to swear never again to the atrocities which have haunted us, and at the same time search out now ways to respond to our challenges—especially when the old ways prevent us from charting a new way forward. 

Remembering and forgetting. We need both to live in this challenging world. 

In the City of Slaughter 

by Haim Nahman Bialik 

This poem was written by Haim Nahman Bialik in 1904 in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. It is considered the most influential Jewish poem of the twentieth century.  

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; 
Into its courtyard wind thy way; 
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head, 
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, 
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead. 
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach, 
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach; 
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall 
Those burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal 
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending 
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal. 
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble 
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript. 
Fragments again fragmented 

Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way 
Unto the attic mount, upon thy feet and hands; 
Behold the shadow of death among the shadows stands. 
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; 
They did not pluck their eyes out; they 
Beat not their brains against the wall! 
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher bad it in his heart to pray: 
A miracle, O Lord, and spare my skin this day! 

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs 
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs 
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, 
Concealed and cowering -the sons of the Maccabees! 
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions! 
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame 
So sanctified My name! 
It was the flight of mice they fled, 
The scurrying of roaches was their flight; 
They died like dogs, and they were dead! 
And on the next morn, after the terrible night 
The son who was not murdered found 
The spurned cadaver of his father on the ground. 
Now wherefore dost thou weep, O son of Man? 

Brief-weary and forespent, a dark Shekinah 
Runs to each nook and cannot find its rest; 
Wishes to weep, but weeping does not come; 
Would roar; is dumb. 
Its head beneath its wing, its wing outspread 
Over the shadows of the martyr’d dead, 
Its tears in dimness and in silence shed. 

And thou, too, son of man, close now the gate behind thee; 
Be closed in darkness now, now thine that charnel space; 
So tarrying there thou wilt be one with pain and anguish 
And wilt fill up with sorrow thine heart for all its days. 
Then on the day of thine own desolation 
A refuge will it seem, 
Lying in thee like a curse, a demon’s ambush, 
The haunting of an evil dream, 
O, carrying it in thy heart, across the world’s expanse 
Thou wouldst proclaim it, speak it out, 
But thy lips shall not find its utterance. 

Beyond the suburbs go, and reach the burial ground. 
Let no man see thy going; attain that place alone, 
A place of sainted graves and martyr-stone. 
Stand on the fresh-turned soil. 
There in the dismal corner, there in the shadowy nook, 
Multitudinous eyes will look 
Upon thee from the sombre silence 
The spirits of the martyrs are these souls, 
Gathered together, at long last, 
Beneath these rafters and in these ignoble holes. 
The hatchet found them here, and hither do they come 
To seal with a last look, as with their final breath, 
The agony of their lives, the terror of their death. 
Question the spider in his lair! 
His eyes beheld these things; and with his web he can 
A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man: 
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled; 
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled; 
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung, 
And of a babe beside its mother flung, 
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest 
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast; 
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word, 
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard. 

Then wilt thou bid thy spirit – Hold, enough! 
Stifle the wrath that mounts within thy throat, 
Bury these things accursed, 
Within the depth of thy heart, before thy heart will burst! 
Then wilt thou leave that place, and go thy way 
And lo- 
The earth is as it was, the sun still shines: 
It is a day like any other day. 

Descend then, to the cellars of the town, 
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled, 
Where seven heathen flung a woman down, 
The daughter in the presence of her mother, 
The mother in the presence of her daughter, 
Before slaughter, during slaughter and after slaughter! 

Note also, do not fail to note, 
In that dark corner, and behind that cask 
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks, 
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath 
The bestial breath, 
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood! 
Such silence will take hold of thee, thy heart will fail 
With pain and shame, yet I 
Will let no tear fall from thine eye. 
Though thou wilt long to bellow like the driven ox 
That bellows, and before the Altar balks, 
I will make hard thy heart, yea, I 
Will not permit a sigh. 
See, see, the slaughtered calves, so smitten and so laid; 
Is there a price for their death? How shall that price be paid? 
Forgive, ye shamed of the earth, yours is a pauper-Lord! 
Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late. 
When to my door you come to ask for your reward, 
I’ll open wide: See, I am fallen from My high estate. 
I grieve for you, my children. My heart is sad for you. 
Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you 
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws; 
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause. 

Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead 
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers, 
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed, 
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting, 
To hear the cry of their agony, 
Their weeping everlasting. 
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up, 
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed; 
Thus groans a people which is lost. 
Look in their hearts – behold a dreary waste, 
Where even vengeance can revive no growth, 
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction 
Rises, no blasphemous oath. 
Speak to them, bid them rage! 
Let them against me raise the outraged hand, 
Let them demand! 
Demand the retribution for the shamed 
Of all the centuries and every age! 
Let fists be flung like stone 
Against the heavens and the heavenly Throne! 

And thou, too, pity them not, nor touch their wound; 
Within their cup no further measure pour. 
Wherever thou wilt touch, a bruise is found, 
Their flesh is wholly sore. 
For since they have met pain with resignation 
And have made peace with shame, 
What shall avail thy consolation? 
They are too wretched to evoke thy scorn. 
They are too lost thy pity to evoke. 
So let them go, then, men to sorrow born, 
Mournful and slinking, crushed beneath their yoke. 
So to their homes, and to their hearth depart 
Rot in the bones, corruption in the heart. 
And go upon the highway, 
Thou shalt then meet these men destroyed by sorrow, 
Sighing and groaning, at the doors of the wealthy 
Proclaiming their sores, like so much peddler’s wares, 
The one his battered head, t’other limbs unhealthy, 
One shows a wounded arm, and one a fracture bares. 
And all have eyes that are the eyes of slaves, 
Slaves flogged before their masters; 
And each one begs, and each one craves: 
Reward me, Master, for that my skull is broken. 
Reward me for my father who was martyred! 

And so their sympathy implore. 
For you are now as you have been of yore 
As you stretched your hand 
So will you stretch it, 
And as you have been wretched 

So are you wretched! 
What is thy business here, o son of man? 
Rise, to the desert flee! 
The cup of affliction thither bear with thee! 
Take thou they soul, rend it in many a shred! 
With impotent rage, thy heart deform! 
Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed 
And send they bitter cry into the storm.