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.
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
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.