Jehuda Halevi, probably the foremost Hebrew poet since Biblical days, has enriched the Jewish tradition with its most beautiful expressions of the religious Jew’s impassioned longing for Zion. Born in Toledo around 1080, Halevi was one of the great worthies of the Jewish golden age in Spain, synthesizing in his thought and writing the traditions of Hebrew and rabbinic literature, Arabic poetry, and Greek philosophy. Towards the end of his life, he set off for Palestine in the hope of hastening the day of redemption. We know he reached Cairo, and there the record ends. According to legend, he died outside Jerusalem reciting his “Ode to Zion.”
The selection below is not a single poem, but is an arrangement of short passages from various parts of Halevi’s poetic works. The arrangement and translation is by Charles Reznikoff. Mr. Reznikoff did not here attempt an exact reproduction of Halevi’s rhymes and rhythms—he finds justification for this in a sentence from the writings of the poet himself: “It is but proper that mere beauty of sound should yield to lucidity of speech.”—Ed.
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My Heart in the East
and I at the farthest West:
how can I taste what I eat or find it sweet
while Zion
is in the cords of Edom and I
bound by the Arab?
Beside the dust of Zion
all the good of Spain is light;
and a light thing to leave it.
And if it is now only a land of howling
beasts and owls,
was it not so
when given to our fathers—
all of it only a heritage of thorns and
thistles?
But they walked in it—
His name in their hearts, sustenance!—
as in a park among flowers.
The bitterness of parting and the honey of
your kiss;
would that, after my death, I could still hear
the sound of the golden bells upon your
skirts!
In the midst of the sea
when the hills of it slide and sink
and the wind
lifts the water like sheaves—
now a heap of sheaves and then a floor for
the threshing—
and sail and planks shake
and the hands of the sailors are rags,
and no place for flight but the sea,
and the ship is hidden in waves
like a theft in the thief’s hand,
suddenly the sea is smooth
and the stars shine on the water.
Wisdom and knowledge—except to swim—
have neither fame nor favor here;
a prisoner of hope, he gave his spirit to the
winds,
and is owned by the sea;
between him and death—a board.
Zion, do you ask if the captives
are at peace—
the few that are left?
I cry out like the jackals when I think of
their grief;
but, dreaming of the end of their captivity,
I am like a harp for your songs.
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