I’d been living in Israel for barely weeks when I spotted a young soldier chuck his machine gun on a car rear-seat like it was a bag of laundry. Some months later, on a crowded bus to Jerusalem, I was packed in so tightly next to a security guard wearing a pistol that I could feel its hand grip pressing against my hip.
Such is the reality of Israeli life and could explain why there are few celebrated modern Israeli soldier poets: Being called up is no fuss when everyone’s part of the citizens’ army.
But for religious soldiers, time for devotion is everything and I bet there’ll be many among them reciting Tehillim – Psalms - as they leave home and prepare to join their units for the current IDF Operation Protective Edge.
It’s said that the biblical King David wrote the psalms and as he’s probably the world’s most famous soldier poet, I’ve decided to share Psalm 144:
| 1. Of David. Blessed is the Lord, my Rock, Who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
2. My kindness and my fortress, my high tower and my deliverer, my shield in Whom I take refuge, Who flattens peoples beneath me.
3. O Lord, what is man that You should know him, the son of man, that You should consider him?
4. Man is like a breath; his days are as a fleeting shadow.
5. O Lord, bend Your heavens and descend; touch the mountains and they will smoke.
6. Flash lightning and scatter them; send forth Your arrows and confound them.
7. Stretch forth hands from above; deliver me and rescue me from great waters, from the hands of foreigners.
8. Whose mouth speaks vanity, and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.
9. O God, I shall sing a new song for You; with a psaltery and a ten-stringed harp, I shall play music for You.
10. Who gives salvation to kings, Who delivers David His servant from an evil sword.
11. Deliver me and rescue me from the hands of foreigners, whose mouth speaks vanity and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.
12. For our sons are like saplings, grown up in their youth; our daughters are like cornerstones, praised as the form of the Temple.
13. Our corners are full, supplying from harvest to harvest; our flocks produce thousands, yea, ten thousands in our streets.
14. Our princes are borne; there is no breach nor rumour going out, nor is there a cry in our squares.
15. Praiseworthy is the people that has this; praiseworthy is the people whose God is the Lord. טו. אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֶׁכָּכָה לּוֹ אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֶׁיְהֹוָה אֱלֹהָיו |
But to return to modern Israel, I would like to look at the work of Aryeh Sivan (né Bomstein) which is said to “evoke a sense of shared public experience at the same time that it expresses provocation and protest”. This, it may be argued, is the essence of army life: hierarchal but somehow still an equaliser because of that mutual knowledge.
Tel-Aviv-born, Sivan served in the Palmach Unit during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, later becoming a high school teacher of literature. He has published 16 collections of poetry and a novel and has won many prizes.
Asked for whom he writes his poems, he told the Haaretz newspaper: “"Whoever comes across my poems. I write out of inner pressure to write something. I don't think about whom it will reach and whom it will please, or with whom it will curry favour. Writing is an inner act of the writer ... The writing itself is what gives me satisfaction”.
So, pleasing everyone or no-one, I conclude here with Sivan’s To Live in the Land of Israel which was written in 1984. The translation is by M Salomon.
* Zvi Hurvitz, the poem’s dedicatee, was a member of the "Bilu" group, a movement whose goal was the agricultural settlement of the Land of Israel. Its members were known as Bilu'im.
“To Live in the Land of Israel
To the memory of Zvi Hurvitz:
Pioneer, commander and bereaved father.“To be cocked like a rifle, the hand
clutching a pistol, to walk
in a closed, harsh line, even after
the cheeks are filled with dust,
and the seared flesh is fallen away, and the eyes can no longer focus on a target.“There is a saying: a loaded gun is bound to fire.
Not true.
In the Land of Israel, anything can happen:
a broken pin, a spring rusted through,or, the sudden cancellation of your orders, without explanation,
as it once happened to Abraham on Mount Moriah”.
© Natalie Wood (11 July 2014)
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