12 October 2015
In Honor of Professor Nasser David Khalili, Chairman of the Maimonides Interfaith Foundation
| Sephardi Ideas Monthly is a continuing series of essays from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought that is delivered to your inbox on the second Monday of every month. In September, Peter Cole was our guide to the precocious poetic talent and keen, speculative intellect of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (see “An Andalusian Alphabet”). This month, Sephardi Ideas Monthly continues to explore “The Lost Andalusian Jewish Culture” with a look at the Andalusian, “proto-Zionist” poetry of Yehuda Halevi by featuring a chapter from Hillel Halkin’s award-winning eponymous biography, as well as a brief video interview with the author. |
 Hillel Halkin (Photo courtesy of Libros del Asteroide). Click here to watch Tablet Magazine’s video interview with Halkin on Yehuda HaleviYehuda Halevi The most romantic figure from the world of classic Andalusian piyyut, Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1070-75 – ca. 1141) was a celebrated poet, thinker, and communal leader who scandalized his Spanish Jewish contemporaries but inspired future generations by turning his back on the “Golden Age of Spain” and moving to the Land of Israel, then a dangerous war zone bitterly and bloodily contested by Crusaders and Muslims, that was a world away from the creative cultural energy of Andalusia. Halkin, for his part, is a gifted and prolific American-born writer and translator who, in the 1970’s, left the comfort, glitter, and rhythm of Manhattan for what was then the relatively provincial outpost of Israel. Halkin delineated his views regarding the centrality of Israel in his first book, To An American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic (1977), so the decision to charge Halkin with writing Halevi’s biography was natural enough. The result, Yehuda Halevi, was praised as “a tour de force… a complex, daring, and consistently fascinating biography of a complex and daring man,” that earned Halkin a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.  “Medieval Jerusalem” by Sarel Theron. Click here to hear Micha Shitrit’s “My Heart is in the East,” featuring Daniel Zamir on saxophone In the chapter featured in this month’s issue of Sephardi Ideas Monthly, Halkin sets the stage for Halevi’s Shirey Tsiyon, “Songs of Zion,” by shining a light on the brutal Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and “the mass slaughter of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, many of the latter herded into a synagogue in the Jewish quarter and burned alive.” Despite the very real danger associated with life in the Land of Israel, it was around the time of the massacre in Jerusalem that Halevi dreamt, literally, that he was in the Land, and as Halkin notes, “Like most people of his age, he took his dreams seriously.” Halevi recast the dream in the form of a poem, “Your dwellings, Lord,” which Halkin speculates was the first of HaLevi’s Shirey Tsiyon, “because, unlike the others, it does not express the thought or hope of an actual journey to Zion.” Read the chapter Soon enough, however, the dream of actually journeying to Zion became a main theme in Halevi’s writing, animating the “Songs of Zion” while driving the plot of Halevi’s theological-polemical masterpiece, The Kuzari, a work that reinterprets all of Judaism in light of the centrality of the Land and that concludes with the rabbi moving to Israel, as Halevi would do in real-time. Among Halevi’s “Songs of Zion,” perhaps the most famous poem, and deservedly so, is, “My Heart is in the East.” Here is Halkin’s relatively free translation of the poem: My heart in the East But the rest of me far in the West ── How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat? How, in the chains of the Moor, Zion bound to the Cross, Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must? Gladly I’d leave All the best of grand Spain For one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust. Writes Halkin: “‘My Heart in the East’ is a living poem – and a perfect one. It is… the last moment of equipoise in a man tensing his muscles to jump and to take Jewish history with him.” Halevi’s “Songs of Zion” move us because, aside from their aesthetic perfection, we read them in light of Halevi’s later, courageous decision to realize his heart’s desire. What’s more, both the poems themselves and Halevi’s personal example speak to “the great intellectual and political debates regarding Zionism and the state of Israel” that animate so much of Jewish life today. A national poet who composed his “Songs of Zion” approximately 800 years before the Zionist spirit awakened, Sephardi Ideas Monthly is delighted to introduce our readers to Yehuda Halevi’s Shirey Tsiyon through the work and words of Halevi’s kindred spirit, the great Zionist littérateur, Hillel Halkin. |