Holy and Profane in Israeli Contemporary Poetry (Hebrew and English)

Tehila Hakimi

Woman, if you don’t know what it is
to be a woman, to be a womb with which
you do what a woman is supposed to do
with a womb, a word gendered male, I’ve checked,
a word that comes from compassion but has no compassion for you
woman, when they tell you what to do with your womb
you don’t feel anything like compassion for others
and what’s in your womb is the other
for what have you come here now
why did you get up
for what are you a woman at all,
go back to the womb you came from.

© Translation: 2020, Lisa Katz
First published on Poetry International, 2020

p.s. Translator's Note: In Hebrew the word for womb (rekhem) shares a root with the Hebrew word for compassion (rakhamim). In English, by contrast, the Latin word for womb (hustera) is the origin for the English word hysteria, a very different semantic field.

https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/30117/auto/0/0/Tehila-Hakimi/WHAT-IT-IS/en/tile

Shlomit Naim-Noar

So How Come You Are Not Married TR: Rachel Korazim

Lightning strikes twice in the abandoned forest clearing and there is no witness.

This is not how things should have happened, and you had acquired all the virtues, you hopped eight times over a burning hanukkiah, you preyed in Uman, read the Song of Songs forty day consecutively, you thought that at twenty six you will be married with two kids, an ever rising list of disappointments.

She is too choosey for sure. What is she looking for already? Does she really think anything better than this will ever happen to her? Everyone compromises in the end. Maybe this time it will happen. She does not really have a motherly voice. Maybe this time it will happen. Maybe you should try not talking at dates. You are simply too smart. Do not try to be smart. Maybe you should lose some weight, yes, that will surely help. Maybe this time it will happen. Maybe this time. Maybe

There is no place left for nature and its unravelment and every taxi driver recognizes the wound.

And when will the mind get distracted, when

Mashiach

Shlomit Naim-Noar

In Answer to a Question: TR: Larry Barak

No. I did not raise a family until I met the man I married. At age thirty-six I married, I could have been a mother to teen-agers, to have married young, to have spent nights in lust or in silence, to quarrel over where we'll be for the Seder, and why the sink is dirty, why always me and where were you, and to be divorced in bitterness, to do a diet or two, to die my hair, to take an organized tour, to forgo faith and to repent, to recycle a mortgage, to buy an apartment or two, or at least to renovate the one we have already because the walls too must be replaced sometimes, no? and to change cars every three years and to go on a biennial vacation, once to ski in winter, and once to Europe or even once to India, for two months, with our four kids. Because that's the way we are. And we were divorced because we felt that love had died and then companionship had died. Maybe, in fact, you died and so at age 36 I became a penniless widow.

I certainly could have done all that and be created anew

but there

was nothing

I simply lived, and waited, and traveled and read and returned and wrote. And waited, and went out on dates and smiled, and lost weight and regained it, and cried and went out on dates and talked too much and then smiled and shut up for there was nothing more to say about so what's new by you. And once again I waited and I went out on dates, and was silent and I wrote and I cried and I waited and I decided and I tried and I waited until he came and turned over

Everything.

Yona Wallach -- A Doe

A Doe

In a hidden crevice between cliffs

A doe1 is drinking water

What of me and her?

Those are but the cliffs of my heart

That is but the spring of my life

These are but all that is concealed.

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Yona Volach -- Tefillin

Come to me
Let me do nothing
You do it for me
Do everything for me
Everything I start to do
You do instead
I will lay tefillin I’ll pray
You lay the tefillin for me
Bind them on my arms
Play with them inside me
Pass them delicately over my body
Rub them against me
Arouse me everywhere
Make me faint with sensations
Run them across my clitoris
Tie up my hips with them
So I can come quickly
Play with them inside me
Tie up my hands and legs
Do things to me
Against my will
Turn me over on my stomach
Put the tefillin in my mouth a bridle bit
Ride me I am a mare
Pull my head back
Until I shriek with pain
And you are pleasured
Later I will pass them over your body
With unconcealed intention
Oh, how cruel my face will be
I will pass them slowly over your body
Slowly slowly slowly
Around your throat I’ll pass them
I will wind one end a few times around your throat
And tie the other to something stable
Something very heavy perhaps rotating
I’ll pull and I’ll pull
Until your last breath escapes
Until I strangle you

tr. Ruth Tsoffar

Almog Behar

I, too, have often thought that Israel is not Jewish enough.

In the sense that it lacks sensitivity toward the stranger, the orphaned, the widowed; in the sense that it does not leave the land fallow in Jubilee years; in the sense that it does not prohibit usury and interest; in the sense that it is not multilingual and Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino are not amply heard; in the sense that our children in the state education system will not learn enough about Jewish creativity in exile; and in the sense that the East (Mizrach) will continue to be repressed, hidden, denied, and ridiculed, and Jewish-Arabic culture will continue to live in exile.

Meir Buzaglo, a philosophy professor at Hebrew University, has often said that Judaism was caught unawares by statehood. Thus, for example, halacha still does not ask how a Jewish state should function on Shabbat, as a modern state in need of electricity and hospitals on the seventh day of the week. Halacha remains oriented from the perspective of a minority-Jewish community living within a non-Jewish majority. The Jewish texts that once sought revenge against oppressive non-Jews—written as a Jewish minority’s sublimated symbolic revenge against an oppressive majority—change their meaning when adopted by a majority-Jewish society ruling over others. Judaism has still not asked the meaning of justice in the framework of a modern state, or about the distribution of wealth and exploitation in relation to a neoliberal economy (unlike the communal framework of tzedakah).

We still face a lengthy battle over Judaism’s character. Our Judaism, to put it simply, has been stolen from us for more than a century. In fact, it has undergone a series of severe reductions. Secular Zionism reduced Judaism to a state and sovereignty, and sought to cleanse itself and its Judaism from any trace of the “diaspora” or the “East,” considering them contemptible and inferior, respectively. Haredism, meanwhile, has reduced Judaism to halacha. Religious Zionism has reduced it to territory. And Israeli-Jewish life has reduced it to Holocaust remembrance—remembrance that sometimes blurs whether the perpetrators were Europeans or Arabs. Nonetheless, its primary conclusion, it seems, is that we need a strong army. And it is incumbent upon us to hate those who do not enlist in that army, whether Haredim, Arabs, or leftists. (This hatred is meant to ensure an “equal burden,” as if we have already achieved sufficient equality of the burdens of poverty, inadequate wages, and life in the country’s periphery.)

Practically speaking, the first thing many—if not most—Israeli Jews will answer—with little to no shame—when asked about what constitutes the Jewish identity of a place is that it must be free of Arabs: a home free of Arabs, a school free of Arabs, a city free of Arabs, a government free of Arabs, a dreamed-of state free of Arabs. One might look at one’s Jewishness and remember that things used to be otherwise, wider, and might demand something different in its name. But by now one can no longer be sure that such a Jewishness remains.

There are many more matters for us to clarify: what is the meaning of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel when the Messiah has yet to arrive and the age of exile established for us by HaKadosh Baruch Hu has not yet ended? Is the modern political concept of sovereignty, upon which secular and religious Zionism are based, congruent with Torah and halacha’s grasp of our belonging to the Land of Israel or of the Land’s belonging to Hashem? Does the Land of Israel belong to the people of Israel or the other way around? Do those whom the Master of the Universe chose to live here in our place not merit collective rights by virtue of the fact that He did not annul his choice that they live here?

The struggle over our Jewishness and its definition remains quite long. We must re-learn the tradition of Mizrahi Judaism that has been erased, and the Jewish-Arab and Jewish-Muslim symbioses. We must continue opening up the study of sacred texts—including the Gemara—to women. After several generations in which those who defined themselves as secular (and with them the entire secular state education system) deserted Jewish texts written from the Tanakh to the Palmach, and after several generations in which Orthodoxy monopolized these texts, recent decades have brought many to learn Gemara anew, to interrogate the debates of the Bavli and Yerushalmi, to move between aggada and halacha, between Hebrew and Aramaic. (It goes without saying that within the secular-religious dichotomy, the “traditional” is erased and the opportunity to choose an alternative, complicated relation between ritual, text, and context is foreclosed.) I hope we witness a similar revival of Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino.

And yet, the Jewishness of the state, according to those who passed Israel’s nation-state law, does not mean the study of Aramaic within the state school system, or the study of Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and Ladino in religious state schools. As far as they are concerned, as are likely the sad majority of Israelis, a Jewish state is an “Arab-free” state. For those who passed the law, it will secure their right before the High Court of Justice to legislate the segregation of communities and budgets for the Jewish majority, while ensuring that only the Jewish majority can decide the future of the state and the future of Judea and Samaria—which, it so happens, is home to a non-Jewish majority.

And so our Jewishness, like our Mizrahi-ness, has been taken from us and reduced to racism, segregation, and phobia. If the state is to become more Jewish, it must become more just, more Arabic, more Muslim, more Mizrahi, more Haredi, more traditional, more humane.

A version of this text was originally published in Hebrew in Mekomit.

Translated by Natasha Roth.

Ayat Abou Shmeiss

I don’t want to write about homeland
And about land
I don’t want to write about an identity that has been stolen
And about a girl who was killed
I don’t want to write
About humiliation oppression or anger
I don’t want to write about discrimination
I don’t want to write about love
Of an Arab man and a Jewish woman
Or a Jewish man and an Arab woman
I don’t want to talk about a wonderful friendship
And not just friendship
I don’t want to write about a dream to have peace
I don’t want to write about any warrior
And any hero
I want to write about the birds
That are not in the sky
Whose wings have been clipped

© Translation: 2019, Adan Masre

Ayat Abou Shmeiss

I’m divided in two
part A and part B
one side and the other
two opposites
but I’m close to them both
“Morning, mah nishmah
hamdullilah, wallah
be-seder, yallah
salamat, kuni be-kesher,
divided into salaam aleikhem and shabat shalom
upside-down and me in the middle
a kind of mental complex
I’m pulled in two directions
they’ll tear me apart in the end
in the most principled way
their censure
piling on my back like sand
and soon I’ll disappear
but each time I shake off
all that sand and stare
the impossible in the face
without written instructions
no one prepared me
to be both
to be two halves and yet not whole
but I’ve learned to live by halves
that’s how I am
imperfect
I love people
and can’t stand symbols
love the holidays (and sometimes celebrate)
I dreamt of living in peace and visiting my homeland
which now criticizes me
every year-and-a-half or two
and I don’t know how
to accept this with love
because in school I was taught
only to read and write
they left out love of land
but now I’m wiser
inside a rut
I’ve learned to discriminate years of identity
and when I face the establishment with my documents and papers
they choose to ignore them and see
only my language
my spoken language
my Arab eyes
my Moslem tongue
sometimes I quarrel with myself
force her to choose
but she cries
tells me one doesn’t choose
between father and mother

© Translation: 2019, Lisa Katz

Hanan Ben-Ari

Keep me safe from myself

Keep me true [or: Watch over me, truly/for real]

All the prayers, empty words

We've had enough silence, now speak

What do You want from me?!

What? What?!

Who asked You to throw a soul into me?

Why won't You come to me at noon?

Hold me, look into my eyes

You promised that You'll always be

the light at the end of the darkness

Piano in the sand, I just can't anymore

I've tried enough, now it's Your turn

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Adi Keisar

CLOCK SQUARE

My nephew Itai and I
are walking around
the Clock Square
in Jaffa.
More than 80 years separate us
from Oum Kalthoum
who performed here on a stage
and I’m trying to discover if the applause
got tangled in the clotheslines.
But where is Oum Kulthoum
and where are we
and opposite us there’s a shopkeeper, talking.
And my nephew Itai asks in trepidation
Adi, is he an Arab?

An Arab, I reply.
In Jaffa there are Arabs who live here.
And are they good Arabs or bad Arabs?
he asks breathlessly, tightening his hand in mine.
Fear presses his lips together.
In every nation there are good people and bad people
I reply.
He huddles closer to me
unconvinced
and I realize that reassurance is needed
here.
Good, I add.

And how do you know they are Arabs?
He pursues his investigation,
his eyes following a dove
strutting in front of a restaurant door.
Ordinarily, he’d be chasing it
and scaring it.
Now it’s part of a horror story.
Of course I know,
they are speaking Arabic
I reply
in the confident tone of someone
who knows the answer
isn’t quite right.
With that antenna kids have
he senses his aunt is herself confused
and his vigilance seeps into the sidewalk.
Don’t worry, they are like us
I extend him a lifeline.

So sometimes people think we are Arabs
and they are Jews?
His words make flocks of bird fly though my body
ripping my blood vessels in the commotion
and I want to tell him about my Grandmother Sham’a
and Uncle Moussa and Uncle Daoud and Uncle Awad
But at the age of six he already has
Grandmother Ziona
Grandmother Yaffa
lots of uncles
and fear and war
he received as a gift
from the state.

© Translation: 2016, Vivian Eden

Rita Kogan

TIME FOR PROOF

Which train will you put me on to prove I’m Jewish?
My toy train from childhood?
And what’s the destination to be –
A Ukrainian ghost town still oozing radiation?
A provincial town in Belarus, average-sized?
A marble tombstone tilted to one side, next to the granite banks of the Neva?
Would you ask me to count the dead from both sides?
Who by water?
Who by fire?
Who in the sunshine?
Who in the nighttime?
And a crown of Jewishness will be put on my head like a barbed wire tiara,
Like a mark of honor from citizen Cain,
So there: I’ve proved it.

© Translation: 2019, Alex Moshkin and Zackary Sholem Berger

Adi Asis

I CALLED GOD

I called God but there's no
God. But there was
God because I called
God. And if there wasn't
God what
did I call? And I called, I called
God. And there was, for a split
second, and there will be. He won’t
die. As long as
I keep calling

God.

© Translation: 2015, Shelly Marder

Tehila Hakimi

SACRED AND PROFANE

This poet once told me,
poetry is pure.
You have to approach words with the fear of God
the way you hold an ancient Torah scroll found in an archaeological dig.
And underground, in the trenches of meaning,
poets engrave letter by letter in a tablet
like idol worshippers
in the name of the holiest of holy poetry.
There’s nothing holy to poetry,
no poetry is holy.

I’ll write poetry
like a cockroach leaving tracks on the bathroom floor
like a tired cat in the sun
like a worker in a loud assembly line
on minimum wage and five hours’ sleep
like a programmer at Google
under fluorescents
I’ll write poetry
from the locker room at the gym
in bed without glasses, one eye shut
(to focus)

You can’t distinguish word from word
sacred and profane
ass and mouth
piss and black coffee
used tampon and God
one day I’ll be a filthy poet of rats
publishing poems in the sewers.

© Translation: 2019, Rachel and Adam Seelig

Yishai Ribo

Between Terumah and Tetzaveh

A slightly different birthday party

Everything seems to be just fine

Stages full of people and love

Between Tetzaveh and Ki Sisa

Esther, Purim, drinks, and joy,

Who will stay and who will travel

And who will pay the consequences

Between Ki Sisa and Vayakheil

The world stops gathering

To be quiet, to be closed down

Yishmael, Edom, and Yisrael

Between Vayakhel) and Pekudei

There’s no one in the city or field

There’s no one to deal with

The Tower of Bavel is once again confounded

Chorus:

What do You want us to understand from this?

How do we distance ourselves and draw near in this pain?

We want to live with You

And not to be alone

What do you want us to learn from this?

How will we know how to unify in this separation?

Until we give You,

the Keser Melucha

Between Pekudei and Vayikra

We are all in the same pot

The spring has arrived, Pesach is coming

And with it, much hope

“To rip up the evil decree”

“Come my beloved to greet the Bride”

We don’t have strength anymore

To cope, to battle on

Chorus:

What do You want us to understand from this?

How do we distance ourselves and draw near in this pain?

We want to live with You

And not to be alone

What do you want us to learn from this?

How will we know how to unify in this separation?

Until we give You,

the Keser Melucha

—

What do You want us to understand from this

How to disconnect and reattach this heart

We want to live with You

And not be alone

What do you want us to learn from this?

How will we know how to unite in this separation?

Shema Yisrael

Hashem is one and His name is one”

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Hanan Ben-Ari

Broken Hearts

Who knows every pain

who repairs every broken heart

creates light and darkness

makes peace and war…

Who sits in judgement1

covers in mercy

pardons and forgives

sees all and knows all

And who will heal my heart

for whom am I longing

like a sea that has no shore

just tell me who

who will embrace me and ensure

that I will not give up in the end…

Who was, is, and will be

who takes and gives renewed life

opening arms

growing wings

And who will heal my heart

for whom am I longing

like a sea that has no shore

just tell me who

who will embrace me and ensure

that I will not give up in the end…

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