Neta Stahl
13 December 2023
I was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where my father, two siblings, and their families still live (or rather lived until 7 October). When I think about the attack, I think about it as occurring at night, not only because of the darkness of what happened, but because for the last twenty-five years, I have lived in the US. So for me, it started at 11:30 pm with the initial report by my family members that they entered their home-shelter, hearing shootings all around. (my beloved sister-in-law was murdered, the rest of my family survived).
I never went to bed that night, and at the end of the following day, trying to make sense of that which the mind still cannot grasp, one thought kept running in my head, and that was that I finally gained access to the depth of the words of the poets whose poetics have been at the center of my research for many years. Working on Hebrew literature while living in the US, I had always thought that I had an intimate understanding of the poet Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–1992) phrase, “the secret of the Torah of longing,” which he used to describe the pain of longing for his loved ones. But it turned out that I didn’t. Mine was the longing for a place and a community that I could still visit, something that these poets could not do. Having emigrated to Palestine before WWII, they learned of the destruction of their home communities in Europe and the murder of their entire families when they were already in a safe heaven.
I didn’t yet understand the longing for one’s own memories and the pain that such memories could bring. How can one recall the landscape of her childhood when it is tainted by the blood of family members, dear friends, and their own children or grandchildren? I used to tell my friends there that they live where my memories are, and now they, too, do not live (there) any longer. To be sure, I do not mean that what had been done to my childhood community is a Shoah—a word that some of the writers I work on, including Yeshurun, avoided (they used the traditional word Hurban—destruction—instead). But for me, 7 October is the closest I could get to what this generation of writers experienced when they learned of the loss of the world of their childhood and of the atrocities that had been done to their family members and loved ones.
The poet whom I was thinking about when I first realized that Kfar Aza, as I knew it, is gone was Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896–1986), a Yiddish and later Hebrew modernist whose 1951 monumental poetic response to the Holocaust gained a canonic place in the Jewish literary canon. But now that Gazan civilians are killed by the hundreds each day, it is Yeshurun to whom I return. Ever since that horrible night, I have not been able to get back to my new manuscript on Grinberg. Both poets wrote about their loved ones, the agony of losing them, and the world they lived in. Both poets expressed their longing for that world and bore a sense of guilt for leaving their family behind. The two poets lamented the destruction of their home community, but Grinberg’s lamentation is imbued with anger and an urge to take revenge, while Yeshurun never calls for revenge and focuses on the life that was lost rather than the circumstances of their death and those who were responsible for it. Yeshurun blames himself for leaving because he focuses on the pain of longing and his own actions (or lack thereof, such as not answering his mother’s letters) when his family and childhood community were still among the living. In the few poems in which he refers to a collective guilt, it is a collective guilt of an entire generation of young people who, like Yeshurun, left their families and communities in Europe and immigrated to a new land, leaving behind their Jewish tradition, language (that is, Yiddish), and culture:
I left a country, I left a language, I left a people,
I left a city. I left Perlmutters-Jews. I left their language.
I left my father, I left my mother and I left my brothers and my sister.
And I went to the Tel Avivian soil of the Land of Israel, and I took a Tel-Avivian Hebrew.
(December 12, 1988).
Moreover, while for Grinberg, Jewish suffering led to his Zionist and later radical right-wing, semi-fascist ideology that called for shedding blood for the sake of a Hebrew national redemption in the land of Israel, Yeshurun also identified with the pain of the Palestinian victims of the Nakba. He refused to ignore the agony of losing one’s land, home, and community. He viewed instead the loss of his family and the destruction of his hometown as a moral legacy to forever remember this pain and, therefore, never inflict it on others:
וְאַבָּא-אִמָּא, מִן מִלְקוֹחַ
– אֵש-אֵל-רַבְרַבָּא מִלְקָח –
.צִוּוּנוּ יַהְנְדֶס לֹא לִשְכֹּח
.וְעַל פּוֹילִין לֹא לִשְכַּח
[And father-mother
Ordered us from the fire
Not to forget [our] Jewishness
Not to forget [what happened] in Poland. ]
(“Pesach al Kukhim,” 1952).
In his idiosyncratic language (to which a translation cannot do justice), Yeshurun uses the word Yandes, in the Yiddish dialect of his parents, which means Judaism or Jewishness, and embodies a deep moral commitment to do no harm onto others.[1] The notion that his Jewishness obliged him to remember the Holocaust is not exceptional, of course. But for Yeshurun, this memory of the atrocities is important not for the sake of revenge or for preventing them from reoccurring to Jews, but for precluding them from reoccurring to any people, to anyone. Perhaps most important is the moral injunction that he finds in his Jewishness to never become the perpetrators ourselves. In other words, as Jews, we are obliged to never do to others that which had been done to us. It is the legacy of Jewish suffering that calls for empathy for the suffering of others and for moral responsibility to never be on the side that inflicts this pain. Yeshurun, like Grinberg, speaks in the name of the murdered Jews, but while Grinberg cites them as calling for revenge, Yeshurun invokes his poetics to remind his fellow Jews that for traditional Jews, what it means to be a Jew is very different than what is done in their names. Many of the people who were murdered on 7 October were not observant Jews, and their world was very far from the world of traditional Jewish communities. Living right next to Gaza, many of them were peace activists who were not blind to the pain of the Gazans, and in that sense, they had more Yandes—Jewishness—in them than religious nationalists who call for the murder of Palestinian children, women, and the elderly, because they were born on the wrong side of the border. The dead that I lament call us to maintain our Yandes and not kill young children in their names.
There is another reason this call is relevant to me today here in America. In the academic circles of which I am a part, some leftist scholars and intellectuals refuse to see the perpetrators of the 7 October attack for what they are. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the humanity and, therefore, the pain and suffering of the innocent victims of the atrocities committed by Hamas. My hope is that both they, as well as those who call to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth, will find in themselves their Yandes-Jewishness, in Yeshurun’s sense of the word, namely, guided by the moral injunction to see the pain of innocent others as they see their own.
Neta Stahl is associate professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and director of the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
[1] For a meticulous discussion of the meaning of Yandes in Yeshurun’s work, see Amos Noy, “Those Who Pass Over,” Te’oriah ve-Bikoret 41 (Summer 2013): 199–221.
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