Bialik’s Prayer and Psalm 137

Nahman Hayyim Bialik (1873-1934) was born into a large, impoverished, and pious family. His father died in 1880. Without the means to raise him herself, his mother parted with him and entrusted him to the care of his well-to-do paternal grandfather. Nahman was 7 years old. He remembered the first six years of his life as the happiest he knew.

Bialik internalized the Hebrew of the Bible, the prayerbook, and the Talmud as a young boy. Every day, rain or shine, the language was his constant companion. He attended a famous Lithuanian yeshiva beginning at age 15. The experience enriched and embittered him at the same time. His youthful years were marked by other choices which determined who he would become. He read deeply in Russian and European literature, and joined a secret orthodox Zionist student society, Netzach Yisrael. His first publication, at the age of 18, was in fact a political tract. These aspects of his youth, combined with his grounding in traditional Jewish literature and the personal suffering he endured, prepared Bialik to be one of the great poets of all time.

For two periods of a few years each, he lived in Odessa, the great center of Jewish culture in southern Russia, and became part of the literary circle around Ahad Ha-am. In 1903, following the Kishinev pogrom, he went to Kishinev on behalf of the Jewish Historical Commission of Odessa. He interviewed survivors, and in the aftermath, composed two poems, על השחיטה “On the Slaughter,” reproduced and translated below, and a much longer poem entitled, בעיר ההרגה, “In the City of Slaughter.” The poems count as some of the most vehement poetry ever written.

Bialik eventually went to Palestine. He was widely recognized as the greatest poet of his generation. Bialik, along with Saul Tschernichowsky, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and others like them, fashioned Hebrew into a medium rich and plastic enough to serve the needs of a people reborn in a land he and many others claimed as their own.

“On the Slaughter”

Many commentators think this poem contains a string of blasphemies. That depends on how one defines blasphemy. I see no fundamental difference between Bialik’s poem and parts of the Hebrew Bible such as Job, Lamentations, a number of Psalms, and the laments preserved in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, and elsewhere.

Many commentators think this prayer is written by an unbeliever. That depends on how one defines unbelief. The remarkable thing is that after all that happened, Bialik leaves the question of the existence of God open, and utters a prayer nevertheless. Bialik’s protest is directed toward his fellow man and his fellow Jews as much as it is toward God. But he can still ask the heavens to seek God’s compassion on behalf of himself and his people.

I also believe that God answered Bialik’s prayer, though of course to say so is hardly a scientific statement, and by definition unverifiable.

What does Bialik’s prayer have to do with Psalm 137? Psalm 137, though very compact, covers more ground than Bialik’s prayer. 137:1-6 evoke the bitterness of exile and Sehnsucht for Zion. 137:7-9 pray for revenge and utter a blessing over the one who effects it. Bialik’s prayer transcends Ps 137:7-9 by calling for the destruction of the whole rotting universe in which the tears of the innocent cannot be properly wiped away, and the executioner cleanses himself in the blood of his victims.

The call for purifying destruction is not new. It undergirds passage after passage of prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible, and in apocalyptic literature, including Daniel, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Revelation.

Perhaps I identify with Bialik’s prayer because I remember praying a similar prayer as a youth. The prayer continues to rise to the surface of my life as the occasion demands.

It was during the Vietnam war. I was in middle school, and I would walk home amid the falling leaves on one beautiful fall day after another. Behind the house lay a park, where we neighborhood boys played pickup games of football at every opportunity. Then it was inside for supper, and as I waited, I would catch the news. Blood spattered the television screen night after night. A count of dead and wounded was given with ritual emphasis. President Johnson, I remember, came on one Saturday morning, interrupting cartoons, and announced he was escalating the US presence in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the anti-war movement became stronger, and turned violent, not least in my own hometown (Madison WI). Demonstrators trashed the commercial district on more than one occasion. Boys a few years older than I, some from my same side of town, planted a bomb in Sterling Hall at the University. A researcher, Robert Fassnacht, trying to save his life’s work, was killed in the blast.

I asked my parents about the war. They were not forthcoming about it. By now the war colored my outlook on life in general. It made no sense, or better, the sense that it made was endlessly horrifying. One night, I prayed with utter sincerity that God might end it all. It bothered me a little that I would have to die too, but it seemed a small price to pay to bring the world as I knew it to its just conclusion.

The unvocalized text of the poem and a literal translation are provided below. It is best to read Hebrew without vowels. If they are not provided for you, but you provide them, your working knowledge of the language is activated in the process. For the vocalized text, go here. In my next post, I discuss the poem line by line and as a whole.

על השחיטה

שמים, בקשו רחמים עלי!

אם-יש בכם אל ולאל בכם נתיב –

ואני לא מצאתיו –

התפללוּ אתם עלי!

אני – לבי מת ואין עוד תפלה בשפתי,

וכבר אזלת יד אף-אין תקוה עוד –

עד-מתי, עד-אנה, עד-מתי?

 

התלין! הא צואר – קום שחט!

ערפני ככלב, לך זרע עם-קרדם,

וכל-הארץ לי גרדם –

ואנחנוּ – אנחנוּ המעט!

דמי מתר – הך קדקד, ויזנק דם רצח,

דם יונק ושב על-כתנתך –

ולא ימח לנצח, לנצח.

 

ואם יש-צדק – יופע מיד!

אך אם-אחרי השמדי מתחת רקיע

הצדק יופיע

ימגר-נא כסאו לעד!

וברשע עולמים שמים ימקו;

אף-אתם לכו, זדים, בחמסכם זה

ובדמכם חיו והנקו.

 

וארור האומר: נקם!

נקמה כזאת, נקמת דם ילד קטן

עוד לא-ברא השטן –

ויקב הדם את-התהום!

יקב הדם עד תהמות מחשכים,

ואכל בחשך וחתר שם

כל-מוסדות הארץ הנמקים.

 

On the Slaughter

 

Heaven, plead mercy on my behalf!

If there is a God in you, and a path in you to God –

yet I have not found it –

may you pray on my behalf!

As for me – my heart is dead, prayer no longer on my lips,

already strength is gone, and hope no more –

how long, until when, how long?

 

Hangman! Here is the neck – Up! Slaughter!

Behead me like a dog, yours is the arm and the axe,

and the whole earth, my scaffold –

and we – we are the few!

My blood is permitted – hack off the head, and let the blood of murder stream out,

blood of suckling and greybeard upon your shirt,

and may it never, never be blotted out.

 

And if there is justice, let it shine forth now!

But if, after I am rubbed out from beneath the sky,

justice shines forth –

let its throne be cast down forever!

And let heaven rot in the evil of the ages;

and you go, arrogant, in this violence of yours,

and live by your blood, and be cleansed by it.

 

But cursed be the one who says; Avenge!

Revenge like this, revenge for the blood of a small child

Satan has not yet created –

and let the blood pierce the abyss!

Let the blood pierce through the deep-dark abysses,

and devour, in the darkness, and breach there

all the rotting foundations of the earth.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

hmmm - did you want to know someone has read this?

It is evocative of course even in English with various word orders reversed. Your translation I presume.

I too have a child whose life was destroyed not in such blind anger but from blindness and anger nonetheless.

I have too many detailed questions on the script and on the Hebrew - we would have to talk quietly ... in a year or two should I manage this continuing struggle to learn.

There are many places where I have no answer, but this denial of the throne of justice is not a place I have to go even in the psalms or Job or Qoheleth.

The axes of contradiction should not cross. Perhaps in the shadow of Yom Kippur, the irony of blood on us is more than his allusions can bear.

The fourth stanza, invoking terms more familiar, I find more appealing - hah - as if poetry should be lyrical only! But perhaps the abyss and the chaos describe our failure more adequately than the denial of the asymptote in the prior stanza. Perhaps too he recovers from his own extreme in writing the poem and expressing hope even in the corruption of creation by using the terms of its source.

I do sometimes have to walk in the relative safety of controlled violence - not by desire. I know the place of the lie and I try not to walk there even once. But no power of mine is able to help my own son - who, drugged up on his support money, visited me today. Through long practice, I was not negative. I am forced to preserve the home for positive therapeutic value. There is no simple death that frees me of this. I know of a mother whose child was killed - a similar brain damage from alcohol. She is still escaping years later. Here my wife and I can walk in love even though it is a privilege.

I do not find Revelation vengeful, by the way. Like you, I think(,) the purifying destruction has already been accomplished. Such at least is my limited knowledge or I presume or deny too much.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Bob, for sharing your take on this poem, and relating it to your experience.

Your comment about the book of Revelation not being vengeful is perceptive. It also applies to this prayer. There are a surprising number of common themes. Whereas Ps 137 does ask for revenge (an unrequited request which has nonetheless not been censored) and works within the narrow categories of justice and retribution (not unlike our criminal justice systems), both the book of Revelation and Bialik's prayer see that as entirely insufficient. Both see that the problem is deeper, and that heaven and earth as we know them are rotten to the foundation and need replacement. Tit-for-tat retribution for neither John the seer nor Bialik is a satisfactory answer.

There is a sense in which the blood of the innocent John the seer and Bialik knew did pierce through and overturn the rotting foundations of the respective worlds they protested against. What is left of the worlds that put Christians to death in John's day and Jews in Bialik's day? Not one stone upon another.

We now live in a world in which Christians and Jews self-determine their relationship to the larger oikoumene to a degree that John the seer and Bialik could only dream of. But do we acquit ourselves well in this brave, new world? I cannot answer affirmatively.

My translation, I hope, captures something of original's tremendous energy.

[eclexia]

Thank you, John and Bob, for wrestling with these things here. Much of what you say resonates with my heart, even when I can't always keep up with or follow the theology and scholarship. Both of you have said things--John, in this series of posts, and Bob, in a comment you made on one of Lingamish's posts--which roll around productively in my head as I grapple with my own questions.

There is a difference I see between a heart's broken cries and lamenting for justice, vs. being consumed and driven by the pursuit of justice and retribution, which as stated above, can never be enough. Sometimes I think we shy away from the 1st because we're afraid of the powerful pull of the 2nd. But, as you said in another post in this series, John, it has been too long since the literature of lament has disturbed the sleep of the faithful. We amputate part of our spirit and thwart our own longing for justice when we cannot lament.

At the same time, I can become consumed and even destroyed by bitterness when justice becomes a demand (on myself and on other broken people and broken systems) instead of a desperate cry from a heart that continues to trust and wait on God. I don't think it is an issue of whether or not to fight for justice, but where that comes from--am I driven because I have to accomplish it or destroy those being unjust? Or am I fighting for justice as my heart becomes broken, but still trusting God's character and promises, whether or not I understand his ways and timing. I'm not sure if I'm making sense--these are not well developed thoughts on my part.

[K.Charanyanond.]

Thanks for your post,I've learn some information and get new idea to work with.

[Ruth Housman]

How do we come to sites on the internet? I was thinking about the binding of Isaac because of a program I was watching last night on TV and somehow I got to Bialik and this commentary. Some years ago I heard a voice, and I did assume this to be the voice of the Divine, asking me by name, Ruth, what do you want me to do with this world? Do you want me to destroy it?

Now this was surprising enough and all I could say in horror was, Destroy this beautiful world. No.

These words have come to haunt me through the days and I have learned, through reading, that it is said the world was created and destroyed more than once.

The terrible things that do happen to people and that people do to each other, are horrific. There are such dark, dark places in life, and Biblically, this story of Isaac, is very disturbing if one focuses on a God of love. I do know I am experiencing massive synchronicity, or the astonishment of connects through story, so this does force me to the WALL, that Wailing Wall, constantly, in truth and metaphor.

I understand the paradox. Despite and through it all I must somehow believe there is a master storyteller at work here and that somewhere, someday, it will all become clear and all resolve in love. Perhaps Shakespeare was right, and, "all the world's a stage". A staging ground for what? Perhaps, in some inchoate way, this has to do with soul and a learning curve, about compassion and some deeper truth, for us all.

[JohnFH]

Ruth,

Thank you for your heart-felt reflections. I love your questions, your sense of revelation and mystery combined.

[A.Z. Foreman]

For what it's worth, I just translated this poem into English verse complete with a reading in Ashkenazi Hebrew.

[A.Z. Foreman]

And I forgot to post a link

so here it is

[JohnFH]

Thanks for your splendid work, AZ. You have a creative and interesting blog, one of the best I am acquainted with.

[A.Z. Foreman]

Thank you *bows*. I'll be translating the Song of the Sea as well as parts of שיר השירים in a month or so. Will be interested to see your take on it.