Dr. Stanley Nash, Professor of Hebrew Literature

Our distinguished guest for this evening, Meir Wieseltier, is one of Israel's foremost poets. He is arguably Israel's most profoundly political or ideological poet. At the very least, I would venture to say that he captures the restlessness and malaise of deeply sensitive Israeli artists and intellectuals better than anyone else. One may characterize the dominant mood in his poems as a kind of bleak tenderness. Yes, underlying some of the occasionally harsh Wieseltier formulations, underlying some of his stark despair, there is a profound softness and compassion -- in contrast to the relentlessly strident anger in the poetry of some of Wieseltier's colleagues. One of my students described a Wieseltier poem that we were studying, (Ma`aseh be-Yitschak), "A Tale about Isaac," as reminiscent of contemporary German cinema of social protest. The suffering of this impoverished boy Isaac is clearly a kind of modern-day `akedat yitschak, a sacrifice of Isaac; it is a story foregrounding the Zionist State's failure to prevent the economic and sexual exploitation of an adolescent boy in a way that is as shocking as holding a knife to his throat.

There is a definite shock value to Wieseltier's poetry, a graphic imagery that can indeed be as evocative as the cinema or almost (but of course not quite) as upsetting as the artwork of an artist like Yigal Tumarkin. This power to upset us stems not merely from an unusually graphic narrative style or from a love of sensationalism but from an uncommon degree of empathic societal involvement and caring. Listen to the lyrical pathos in Wieseltier's description of his beloved Tel Aviv from his book "Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim" ("The Sixties in Brief"). The poem is entitled "Mezeg Avir" "Weather":

Weather
The weather I like the most in the world
Is the weather of Tel Aviv on a winter night.
Tel Aviv is like a woman who has been thrown into a bathtub with her clothes on,
Hooligans did this to her, and she is roaming
Now mortified in the streets hoping for an act of kindness.
Do an act of kindness for this city.
Say a word of warmth to her.

This is only one of about twenty Tel Aviv poems by Meir Wieseltier that I made notes about in preparing for this evening, all of them capturing the pulse of the city and at the same time imbuing it with an emotional expressionistic tone that clearly reflects the temperament and sensibilities of our poet. Here is just one more Tel Aviv poem entitled "Allenby," translated by our colleague from HUC-JIR in Los Angeles, Dr. Stanley Chyet. Allenby is, of course, a well- known street and shopping area in Tel Aviv.

Allenby
Suddenly leaves struck the street
And a stifled shiver rose
To become an elegy on love's
Severed tongue.
And the brilliantined flowers
Turned their heads from the wind
Which shoved them against windows
Where mannequins stood
In pressed suits
Like idols blind
Deaf, mute in a
Ravaged city.

The line "Like idols blind / Deaf, mute" helps us to segue to the motif of religious, or quasi-religious, or anti-religious, resonances in Wieseltier's poetry. As an American- Jewish religionist who studies Israeli literature and teaches at a Rabbinic seminary, I am particularly intrigued by references to religion, holiness, God, the Bible and the soul whenever these appear in the poetry of such distinctively secular poets as Chaim Gouri, Amir Gilboa, Yehudah Amichai, Natan Zach and Meir Wieseltier. Although the title of one of Wieseltier's books is (Davar Optimi `Asiyyat Shirim) ("It's an Optimistic thing the Making of Poems"), I can not report that there is a great deal in the way of an upbeat tone in his poetry. Concern, caring, a photographic eye for human suffering, outrage, gut-wrenching compassion and sensitivity -- yes -- but optimism? -- hardly! Not infrequently, Wieseltier hints that Jewish observances are a form of "pagan" externals or robotic ritualism that masks an indifference to the real sufferings of individuals in our overly technological society, and especially, to the casualties of war. One brief jolting poem [untitled] says it all:

Ha-Radio omer kaddish
The radio is saying Kaddish,
And community functionaries are traveling
From funeral to funeral
With mechanized eulogies.
With furious oratory thundering
And forging a contorted facial expression.
The people all stand up as one
Before the cantor who is trilling
In Ashkenazically accented Aramaic
Shalom `al kol Yisrael
Shalom upon the entire house of Israel,
And with a time-honored trill he closes
The pagan broadcast.
(from "Davar Optimi `Asiyyat Shirim," p. 64)

On the question of the human soul (or rather the "nefesh," the human psyche), Wieseltier has a great deal to say, and with a dazzling intellectual virtuosity of skepticism and denial. One would like to think that there is some humor in such a wistfully heretical statement as "the nefesh as vacuum cleaner in the closing years of the 20th century definitely has no existence" and also in the word play "hanefesh eynah ellah refesh" --"the nefesh (the human soul or psyche) is only garbage (refesh) with which "only the journalists are delighted to deal ....because..."in it / they [the journalists] / find an array of possibilities for headlines."(from "shishah shire nefesh," Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim, pp. 170-171). That Wieseltier has a self-reflective ability to laugh at the boundless capacity for human folly we can glean from a somewhat funny poem about his experience as a tourist in front of the Musee Picasso in Paris where he was conned into buying "a silly jacket" by a young Italian with a hard luck story. Perhaps some of what he says about God is also tongue-in-cheek. The name of the poem about the con-artist is "Musee Picasso or Some Words in Praise of Human Foolishness." (from Helit Yeshurun, ed., International Poets' Festival (Jerusalem: Mishkenot Shaananim, 1995), pp. 118-121.

In the marvelous poem ("Lo Ta`aseh Lekha") "Thou shalt not make for yourself," alluding to the second of the ten commandments, Wieseltier writes how in approaching the question of God:

Thou shalt not make for yourself
Like an Israeli who fantasizes to understand America,
So [he] sat down and tried to understand
God....
(Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim, p.154)

In the poet's efforts to conceive of God he utilizes traditional imagery:

"He place[s] God in his imagination on the Mount of Olives with a footstool of Jerusalem Stone. He put[s] a knitted yarmulkah on top of the site of the Holy Temple, close[s] his eyes and conjure[s] up a Wailing Wall four times the size."

But for all his fantasizing the poet keeps feeling like a soccer player who has kicked a wonderful shot toward the goal but the ball keeps bouncing back and hitting him in the head....In the end for the poet God remains like

... a tooth that has been extracted,
And as a momento, as a memory of a truncated childhood,
[Retained] as a keepsake in a box, in a drawer,
Inside a dresser,
Next to a worn-out comb.
(from "Lo Ta`aseh Lekha," Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim, p. 154)

In the same collection The Sixties in Brief (181-186), Wieseltier has an extended reverie entitled ( "Mikhtam Te'ologi") or "A Witty Poem on a Theological Theme," that opens whimsically:

This evening over chocolate cake and apples
There comes into my head
(Look what I am stirring up in my coffee)
On the matter of God.

The poet dismisses all of the talk about very physical treats in the afterlife and fixes on here-and-now Judaism with its belief in an all-seeing eye and an all-hearing ear in the universe, a God who is an eternal presence. I love the lines:
("mekarev o meracheq, aval tamid nokhe'ach")

[Whether God}draws [us] near or distances [us]
But he is always present...
He smites but takes in
The scream of the one smitten,

He wounds but sees
The blood that is spilled,
He kills
But retrieves the body--

Paradoxically, God inflicts pain, but yet God cares.

Then musing (much more seriously than when he said in the above-cited poem that ha-nefesh (the soul) eynah ella refesh (is nothing more than garbage), Wieseltier reflects on man's fundamental alone-ness in the world:

And the world is turned into an arena,
And you are at its navel
Facing yourself
A stubborn gladiator
And you seek
Only the heart,
You know that the rest hurts as well:
But you stick to your quest,
Only the heart: (raq et ha-lev)
And the audience is a fresco of multiple colors
And the heavens are a fresco of one color
And the blood too is only a fresco of crimson
And God sees the I (velohim roeh et ha-ani)
(Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim, p. 184)

And God sees the I (the ani, the individual)
velohim ro'eh et ha-ani

In light of Wieseltier's unhappiness with most conventional spirituality, this last line is a great comfort.

Wieseltier's portrait of the interpersonal and intrapersonal in this world is very austere, very bracing, very sad, but we come away ultimately comforted by this line: (velohim ro'eh et ha-ani). And God sees the individual. Wieseltier, as he appears in this vignette of elohim, is sensitive to ultimate questions and to the plight of the individual -- not so much of the Jews, but of the individual person -- in this world. This may not be the God of tradition, certainly not the God of Wieseltier's scathing poem Adoshem, Adoshem being the Jewish God of the galut, "lame," "toothless with the face of a withered old woman," but it is God nonetheless (Qitsur Shenot ha-Shishim, p.187). No, Wieseltier's portraits of God are not of one piece.

If we can cope with Wieseltier's picture of God as an extracted tooth saved in a drawer, we come to such quaint and lovely poems as the one entitled "TNaKH bi-Temunot" ("The Bible in Pictures") (from Davar Optimi Asiyyat Shirim, pp. 125-126). Wieseltier writes that as a very young child he became acquainted with the Bible as a place of exciting scenes: "a king falling on his sword ... a young fellow tearing open a lion, cities falling." "Afterwards," the poem continues "I became acquainted with the Tnakh in the stories of Genesis. / Then I quickly discovered/ that the Tnakh is made up of words: light, darkness, water,/ that it tells of humans powerless / in the face of titanic forces and a God who speaks.'

I skip over some wonderful lines:

The poem continues:

A long time passed until the prophets arrived
They already were people
Not unlike myself. And god
Became a poignancy (a "hemyah")
Rendered in the style of a fellow from Tekoa or from Anatot.

These so called "fellows" are the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. These great prophets of social justice leap out from the page as closest to being heroes for Wieseltier, in spite of the fact that they obviously encountered difficulties, not unlike those of the present:

Kings gave them respect
Since kings of a certain type respect outspokenness.
And a limited extraterritorial status
Was given to them by dint of the popular will.
Nonetheless there already occurred there
An extreme modernization of the human.
Shrewd, blind political machinations
Overwhelmed the fate of the masses,
Together with them [the masses]
The last of the God formulators [the prophets] went into exile.
"`attah `asu bitechum ha-efshari, matechu biqqoret, hishmi`u kinnah, hefichu tikvah"
Now they were active in the realm of the possible: they leveled critiques, declaimed lamentation, infused hope.
(from Davar Optimi Asiyyat Shirim, pp. 125-126)

Now just a bit of biographical data: Meir Wieseltier was born in 1941 in Moscow. From 1946 to 1948 he wandered with his family in Poland, occupied Germany and France. In May 1949 they arrived in Israel, going first to the Bet Lid immigrants' camp, then to Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet, then to Netanya where he grew up, and finally to Tel Aviv in 1955. He studied Philosophy, History and English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His career as a poet began in January, 1960. During the sixties and seventies he edited a number of literary magazines. He was co-founder and co-editor of the influential journal Siman Qeriah. Since 1967 he has also been publishing political articles. He has translated English, French and Russian poetry into Hebrew, as well as four of Shakespeare's tragedies Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Charles Dickens and E.M. Forster. He lived for a number of years in London and Paris. From 1986 to 1989 he was poetry editor at Am Oved Publishing House. He has been awarded the Levi Eshkol Creativity Prize(1977), the Elite Jubilee Prize (1984), the Bialik Prize (1995) and most recently, the highest of Israel's awards, the Israel Prize. He has served on the Faculty of Haifa University where he teaches a course on the Drama of Nissim Alloni.

Let me introduce to you one of Israel's foremost poets, a man to whom we may well apply the description that he applied to those biblical prophets with whom he identifies: Meir Wieseltier, Israel's gadfly and social conscience, a cinematographer in words, "`ha-`oseh bitechum ha-efshari: mote'ach biqqoret, mashmi`a kinah, mefi'ach tikvah," an intellectual "who is active in the realm of the possible: levels critiques, declaims lamentation, infuses hope" -- Meir Wieseltier.