SOURCE: Abramson, Glenda. “Amichai's God.” Prooftexts 4 (1984): 111-26.

[In the following essay, Abramson discusses the theme of faith in Amichai's poetry, concluding, “Amichai's God is like no other God in Hebrew poetry.”]

One of the most noteworthy facts about the poetry of the first Israeli generation of writers, popularly called the Palmach generation, is its shift in religious orientation, the culmination of a process which had begun with the Haskalah. They demonstrate their own detachment from the past and abandonment of interest in parochially Jewish matters in lyric poetry which is predominantly secular in feeling and intent, by the imaginative use of Jewish religious symbols and imagery set in secular contexts and by reinterpreting the biblical and rabbinic sources to suit their modern environment. The recalled biblical or liturgical text serves as a springboard for wholly modern ideas, creating variations of inspiration on ancient themes. Yehuda Amichai excels in this process which, through its ideological dialogue with the past, has created a unique form of poetic discourse and, in effect, a new exegesis. Amichai reapplies traditional observations and judgments to his own existential world, and so demonstrates not only a knowledge of the sources concomitant with an intensively orthodox upbringing, but also an instinctive awareness that they can be of value to his life and that of his generation.

In many respects, however, Amichai differs from his fellow writers. Whereas some of them, notably T. Carmi and Amir Gilboa, were, like him, educated in orthodox Judaism, their religious knowledge is peripheral to the central burden of their poetry. Other Palmach poets, like Gury, Hillel or Treinin, were educated on the Yishuv where biblical study was formalized and less emphasis placed on the acquisition of rabbinic literature. For most Israeli writers, whether traditionally educated or not, reference to the sources is the most obvious acknowledgment of their cultural ancestry and it also serves to fashion their language into a unique and idiosyncratic literary tool. For their argument, however, remembered orthodoxy and biblical sources do not provide the substantive metaphor as they do in Amichai's case. In his hands they are more than allegories or means of irony but are, paradoxically, the fabric from which his wholly secular poetry is cut. The entire ethical framework in which the sacred texts are fixed, of which the biblical people are representatives, constitutes his metaphor, not only its parts taken in isolation, as is the case with his contemporary writers. Moreover, he extends the process of allusion and textual reference to create a phenomenon which is wholly his own and which is particularly noteworthy in his poetry written between 1948 and 1968, to which this present study is confined: his literary alteration of the nature of the God of the Hebrew Bible to the notion also of God as a metaphor, his internalization of God as an image for a number of situations and states of being.¹

In contemporary Israeli poetry we find some of the poets addressing or referring to God in various ways but in their case, and judging by the tenor of their verse, it is naive to attribute this to any deep religious feeling. These poets clearly no longer possess the traditional faith in an ordered universe or in divine love and protection. Few have matured in a theocentric environment and faced the consequent rebellion and guilt. Their poetry does not view God as an arbiter of their personal fate nor do they perceive God as a component of their own identity, as does Amichai, only of their common historical identity. Consequently God does not occupy a central place in their poetry; most of them refer somehow to Jewish tradition through allusion or allegory, but few directly to God and when they do it is, with few exceptions, in the unaltered context of that tradition, most commonly in a poem on a biblical or historical topic. Conventional apostrophe, without theological function, occurs frequently, especially in the poetry of Ayin Hillel and Abba Kovner; some poems are cast as prayers, such as Gury's Tefillah (“Prayer”) or Zach's Shir leyamim nora'im (“Poem for the High Holy Days”). Gilboa equates God with the burgeoning earth and love in Holedet (“Birth”). Yitzhak Shalev, who generally demonstrates a prophetic ardor associated with poets of an earlier generation, expresses uncharacteristic tartness when he questions God who “kisses warriors and closes their sightless eyes / Do you know the mouth of the warrior you kissed this time?”² Later in the poem he calls upon God to give a sign to the dead soldier's comrades that death does not extinguish the joy and beauty of their lives for otherwise there would be no point to the world's beauty. To Shalev, God is the Jewish deity, performing the deity's function, giving and taking life, with man the impotent onlooker. His language suggests prophetic awe of God the King; it is the language of supplication, without irony but with some redeeming anger. Benjamin Galay expresses similar sentiments in his poetry on the subject of war by the stark paraphrase of Isaiah 38:18 out of its context of piety: “For the dead cannot praise you today, God.”³ Abba Kovner alludes with meaningful, even shocking, understatement to God in relation to the Holocaust.⁴ Other poets mention God in passing or by implication in poetry on the subject of the Akedah.

Rather than being indicative of an overall preoccupation with the presence of God, these and other similar examples are the significant exceptions in poetry which generally does not display any particular vision of God in man's life, in the world or even in the context of Jewish tradition. “God” is used as a catchword to authenticate the poets' cultural identity without the need to explore its meaning. The Job-like sentiments expressed by Shalev, Galay and Kovner and the equations of God and nature by Gilboa and Hillel are not typical of their verse and occur infrequently in that of the other poets of their generation, with the notable exception of Amichai. God appears in their poetry as a kind of universal listening-post, the receiver of the poets' anger, despair and occasional exaltation but not as part of a world view in which he has or is required to have a role to play. This absence of God is perhaps not surprising in the work of a group of intellectuals whose own literary tradition has been tempered by contact with a clearly nontheological body of Western European and American writing and who, moreover, have been witnesses to the Holocaust and subsequently involved more than once in war and national disruption. Nevertheless they do not deny the existence of God but place in question the degree and nature of his relationship with his creatures. Meanwhile Jerusalem appears to have replaced him or become his surrogate as the spiritual focus in their work. It is Jerusalem that has been invested with their vision and which obviously offers some dialectical response for it is to this “locus of ascent,” in Robert Alter's evocative phrase,⁵ that their veneration is directed and which provides the transcendental link between present and past.

Apart from Amichai only one other poet of the Palmach generation, Nathan Zach, has attempted to probe the nature of the deity and to speculate on man's fate as a creature of God. Zach is the closest to Amichai in his ironic spirit yet his particular view proposes less about God than the gods. His intellectual canvas is broader, drawn from Western European historical culture so that the Lord he addresses or invokes is not Amichai's God of Jewish Law but a deity at the nub of a philosophical discourse applying to all humanity, not the dominating factor of one man's life. Some of Zach's poems, however, touch on a theme that much preoccupies Amichai and which was hinted at by Shalev: the nature and degree of God's involvement with mankind. For example he suggests that God watches men in the world in much the same way as a person sitting on the curb watches others go by. The reader is left with a sense of God's indifference and the lack of contact between the watcher and those being watched without “our knowing, our understanding or asking.”⁶ Another poem takes an evolutionary view of mankind, with God unaware of its development, its needs or its changing nature as he sets about making his own world pleasant.⁷ In a deceptively simple, even naive tone, Zach describes how God forgot what he had thoughtlessly done to Job and, when reminded by reading the biblical account, became inconsolable.⁸ By the effective use of paradox Zach tends to emphasize the eternal contrast between the conceptual planes separating God from man. According to him neither God's world nor his language are man's and human destiny as envisaged by God is not one that man is capable of understanding. Zach's colloquy with God is therefore abstract and cosmic, closer to an attempt at objective analysis of God's nature and function than the Jobian, almost domestic tone of Amichai's argument.

Amichai is therefore unique among the Palmach poets in his incorporation of God into the fabric of his work as a primary factor in his personal development. The key to his view of God is supplied in his profound spiritual biography, Mas‘ot Binyamin ha'a’aron miTudela (“The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela”), and it is in this major work that the effect of his religious schooling is made most apparent. It offers a clear existential reason for the centrality of God in his writing and demonstrates the beginning of the process charted by the rest of his poetry by which the Jewish God of his childhood becomes, through a series of permutations, an introjected element of the psyche.

It is necessary to decide whether the word “God” throughout Amichai's early verse (1948-1968) refers consistently to the God of his fathers, whether it is a term for the kind of arbitrary destiny defined in Hellenistic literature as Tyche, or for some unspecified cosmic power. From Amichai's earliest poetry, written in the forties and early fifties, the traditional and dogmatic conception of God undergoes a series of ironic transformations seen first on the background of his relation to mankind and then to the individual. For example the poem Elohim meraḥem ‘al yaldei hagan (“God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children”) is a mocking commentary to Rashi's interpretation of Genesis 1:1, which states that the creation of mercy preceded that of justice. The poem confirms God's mercy at first but then claims that he exercises a certain selectivity in the amount of compassion which he allows to his creatures. It also implies a connection between God's mercy and human purity for only kindergarten children are entitled to mercy, the rest of humanity, presumably, to justice alone. God dispenses less mercy to schoolchildren and none at all to adults who are left entirely alone, creatures without protection crawling on all fours, in a dreadful parody of childhood, to the dressing station. There is, however, some hope of redemption through love, for God protects lovers “like an oak over a man sleeping on a bench / in a public boulevard.” Yet this is not God's love but that of “those who love truly” (ha'ohavim be'emet), Amichai's consistent notion of love as a cosmic, almost metaphysical force that transcends and banishes evil and pain. The lovers are worthy also of the protection of the “last coins of righteousness / which mother left us,” a whole coin frequently acting as a symbol of completeness in Amichai's poetry. Crawling on all fours, wounded and incomplete, pulled about by powerful forces, epitomizes man's condition in his urban setting, in his isolation, abandonment, fragmentation and alienation, with God somehow the malevolent architect of these ills. It is left to man himself to put it right and in Amichai's world the redeemer is love, with God's kingdom attributed to the lover.

Amichai's uncertainty about God applies to the quality as well as the quantity of his mercy in the world. He suggests that God is uninterested in his creatures, often capricious, indifferent, or even “we were sure he was cruel / because of his untidy hair.”⁹ The poem Yad elohim ba‘olam (“The Hand of God in the World”) questions God's concern with his creation:

God's hand is in the world
Like my mother's hand in the entrails of the slaughtered fowl
On the Sabbath eve.
What does God see through the window
While his hand is in the world?
What does my mother see?

God looking through the window recalls the bloody hole in the poet's breast through which he peers into the world.¹⁰ The question of what the mother sees is rhetorical for presumably she sees the bloody organs of a dead chicken which she removes and discards. Because the cleaning of the chicken is akin to ritual activity on the eve of Sabbath, her hand moves surely and with purpose. Perhaps in view of the blood and death in the world God's hand, too, works to cleanse and purify it. Yet, as the mother is impassively performing a necessary action without any emotion toward the object, without “seeing” it, so God goes about his business without pity for his object, the world, in which his hand moves. The expression “the hand of God” is frequently used throughout the Bible to denote God's power; his hand in the world destroys, generally for the good of his people, and it moves in the universe against evil. At the same time the image connotes a terrifying and implacable force which devastates while it is doing good.

A poem of measured irony takes its title from a line in a hymn for the High Holy Days: Vehi tehillatekha (“And This is Your Praise”). Even the title is a parody, for tehilla (“praise,” “glory”) also means “psalm” and the poem is an echo of biblical psalmic structure. Yet its content is bitter, rendering the whole an anti-psalm, the very opposite of a hymn of praise; the poem's traditional lines, “and this is your praise” consequently assume an ironic and accusatory power.

God lies on his back under the universe
Always busy fixing, something is always wrong.
I want to see all of him, but I see
Only the soles of his shoes and I weep.
And this is his praise.

God keeps himself almost entirely hidden from man; this time it is not his hand but only his feet which are to be seen. Despite the ineffectual nature of his supervision in the world, the poetic “I” wants to see him completely, perhaps to regain his lost faith, yet God remains fragmented, adding to the sense of disorder and loss in the poetry in which he appears. “And This is Your Praise” presents God in prosaic terms associated with modern technology, as a garage mechanic. This is not the only example of God as a workman, a repairman of some kind whose hand moves with efficient purpose, for on another occasion, “dressed in blue workman's overalls,” he comes down to repair a hole in the middle of the road, a symbol of the empty space left by the death of the poet's father.¹¹ In this instance God is seen at work as a comforter, closing a dreadful gap, but his presence implies a certain menace as well for “the candle on the ground / stood as a lamp to warn the passers-by.” Or God is likened to a giant radar dish making decisions on the basis of what it sees as it moves.¹² In a quatrain God “begins at the edge of the green springtime / like a smoking and terrible factory. Perhaps / to mould us like iron,” to recast our destinies, reminiscent of the story of Job which begins with the fire of God falling from heaven and consuming Job's sheep and lambs.¹³

The image of God under the universe, “fixing” is an extension of that of his hand moving in the world and the mother's in the fowl. In yet another allusive twist of the biblical text in “And This Is Your Praise,” the poet comments on the line in Genesis 3:9: “And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou?” by inversion: “Only this time God is hiding and man shouts, Where art thou.” God is among the trees and forests—again concealed from man. Forests sometimes occur in the Palmach poetry as symbols of fearfulness and menace.

The imputation of blasphemy in this poetry is avoided only by its penetrating irony which serves to alter the implication of the text while still acknowledging its essential presence in Jewish thought. By building secular structures on sacred foundations Amichai does not reject the original but debates with it and scrutinizes it with the logic born of twentieth-century experience. His most ironic and probably his best-known comment on the topic of God's mercy is his exposition on the opening lines of the Jewish prayer for the dead: “Lord full of mercy who dwellest in the High Places.” He enters a dispute with one of the most moving prayers of Judaism, one stressing the fundamental concept of the merciful God and gives the remembered text new relevance which is telling in terms of the modern world and particularly the events in Israel over the past thirty years.

O Lord full of mercy,
If the Lord were not so full of mercy
There would be mercy in the world
And not only in him.

In this poem Amichai explains why he has counterposed “O Lord full of mercy” with the line “I … can say that the world is empty of mercy.” It is the horror of having to transport bodies down from the hills on which he used to pick flowers after being a “salt-king by the sea” and standing free from duty at his window, “counting angels' footsteps,” angels which, characteristically, are not seen but which represent a vanished world of aesthetic or religious unity.¹⁴ Now he fails in his need to communicate his agony, being a simple man who uses “only a small portion of the words in the dictionary” but is forced, nonetheless to solve insoluble cosmic riddles. He is homo sapiens in all his weakness, shaking his fist at implacable powers beyond his understanding.

In Reah habenzin ‘oleh be'api (“The Smell of Petrol Rises in my Nostrils”), the nostalgia of the lover contains bitter mockery expressing itself, as usual in this poetry, by the emotional manipulation of a well-known text: “The jet plane makes peace in its high places / over us and over all who love in autumn.” The source of the lines, some of the best-known in the liturgy and now part of the common idiom, is Job 25:2: “Dominion and fear are with Him. He maketh peace in his High Places” rendered in the prayer book as “May He who maketh peace in His High Places make peace for us and for all Israel.” The poet has removed the verse from its original framework which extols God as protector of heaven and earth, and given it an ironic, fateful power. In a world which is empty of God's mercy, in which his hand moves with an unknown purpose, the jet planes either “make peace” or bring death as if they were God's deputies. Again the implication is the uncertainty of God's purpose expressed by a textual variation that creates a new commentary on the quality of God's dominion. Also, the transposed piece of liturgy “expresses a kind of wistful regret for the world of faith in which God made peace on high—in the poet's world lovers between battles must depend instead upon circling jets for their fleeting moments of precarious happiness together.”¹⁵

The cosmic controlling power is not always designated as God but assumes the guise of angels or the earth. Common to them all is a celestial indifference to the affairs of men. For example the earth, like God tinkering under the universe, is as busy as a farmer, unaware of the “young wounds, without fathers, wandering throughout the world.” The uncaring earth is, in this case, likened to the uncaring God.¹⁶ The earth forgets the footsteps of those who have trodden it—“a dreadful fate.”¹⁷ Dust, described as “God's weariness in the world” covers everything, “my answering mouth and my questioning mouth / the travels of my blood and the hands of the angel locking up.”¹⁸ Stones and desert dust occur throughout Amichai's writing as images of sterility, emptiness and futility. A strong statement about arbitrary fate or God's lack of interest in the world appears in a poem entitled Mal'akhei goral (“The Angels of Fate”):

Angels sick with boredom
cut people out of a big sheet
and paste them, anyhow,
side by side.

These are not whimsical ideas, as some critics like to suggest; in fact the assertion of “whimsy” derogates the ideological seriousness of the verse which is deceptively couched in simple, attractive and, above all, accessible images.

In the poetry from 1962 to 1968 the attitude of Amichai's lyric “I” has altered as has his notion of God. His evolutionary view of God seems to follow a process of religious maturing: from inveighing against the primitive, anthropomorphic deity who walked on earth among men, he invokes the Lord of the Universe worshipped by the Jews throughout their dispersal. We see in the poetry a transition from the concretized God possessed of eyes, hands and feet, untidy hair and workmen's clothing to the God of the Talmud who no longer dabbles capriciously in human affairs, no longer a personal adversary or a manipulator of man's destiny, like the God of the early books of Job. The blending of the images of the father (av or avi) and God in the later poetry provides the abstract, ethical image of the deity. Initially the poetry offered a clear distinction between the two: the father stood for tradition and Jewish values, historicity and spiritual morality. He was depicted as a tender, loving, devoted and pious man, kind even to his enemies, able “to draw love from his slender body like a magician draws rabbits and towers from a hat …” while God appeared as capricious and often cruel.¹⁹ Only in some of the prose, particularly in the novel Lo me‘akhshav lo mikan (Not of This Time, Not of This Place, 1963) do the two images coalesce, but whether or not they are conceptually separate, a clear relationship exists between them: God is in some kind of communion or complicity with the father that excludes the son: both are punishing him for his defection. “Benjamin” describes their shared moral vigilance:

Angels resembling holy scrolls
with velvet robes and white silk skirts,
crowned with silver and silver bells,
angels fluttered around me, sniffed my heart
and said uh-uh to each other
with grownups' smiles. “I'll tell your father.”

(p. 101)

The later poetry's ambivalence about the father permeates the novel as well. The figure of Dr. Mannheim dominates the childhood of its hero, Joel, not only as a surrogate father, but as a relentlessly zealous rabbi and a stern and forbidding patriarch. Joel's real father, a salesman, is described in tender and loving terms as gentle and kind, the obverse of Mannheim who commands Joel's attention and his fear. The fate of Mannheim's collected sermons in Weinburg is indicative of the author's attitude to them and to their creator: while visiting the ruins of a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht, Joel find a wooden box. When he opens it the wind catches sheets of paper stored inside and scatters them all over the city. They are Dr. Mannheim's lost sermons: one is caught and used by a farmer to wrap cherries, another to wrap a bottle of wine, another floats on the river—all of them reduced to inconsequential pieces of paper. The religious discipline of Joel's childhood is disintegrating and for a while he is able to view it and its guardian with detached irony:

Then, as if continuing his prayer [Mannheim] asked suddenly in a whisper: “Who are you, my son? [Genesis 27:1]. … I can't turn my head because of a chill; I can't turn my neck; my neck is stiff. I have become stiff-necked [Deuteronomy and elsewhere].” … Suddenly he coughed and asked: “Who is with me, who? [2 Kings 9:32].”²⁰

It is impossible to avoid the domination by God and the father which appears with an almost obsessive consistency throughout Amichai's mature verse. Sidney Mendel has made a useful analysis of the levels of domination of the son by the father in world literature and it is entirely relevant to Amichai's poetry.²¹ Mendel cites the allegorical father, represented as a God-figure with human physical attributes; the moral father, the representative of the God of the Scriptures and his commandments, who is frequently referred to in Amichai's poetry in conjunction with sexual love; the political father who appears in Amichai's work primarily in the guise of biblical leaders or monarchs, such as Saul, Joseph and David, who are adept at fulfilling social commands; the anagogic father, Amichai's most prominent, who both suffers and inflicts suffering as a result of the son's rebellion. It is difficult to separate Amichai's images of God and the father, since their function in the later verse is so similar. This function seems to radiate from the focal point of all Amichai's verse which is the father's death and the consequent assumption of having murdered him by rejecting his world, committing the dual sin of patricide and deicide. In this ideological respect his verse is a paradigm for all the writing on the subject of the loss of the father that greatly distinguishes Israeli literature. “I belong to the last generation / that knows body and soul in the absolute / “What do you think you'll do tomorrow?” / I can't give up myself. I've given up / smoking, drinking and my father's God, I've given up everything that may hasten my end.”²² It is a paradoxical attitude on the part of one whose life has been constructed on the sacred, as if some force inimical to God is warring with the impulses toward continuity and identification. “Grandfather, grandfather, chief rabbi of my life / sell my pain as you used to sell / the hametz on the eve of Passover: let it stay in me and even hurt me, / but let it not be mine, not at my disposal.”²³ “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela” is a long mea culpa for diverting what should have been piety and religious fidelity into the paths of love and other, secular, concerns, for answering his father's “way” with “many ways.”²⁴ There is, consequently, an imputation of reproach in the image of the father as he appears in the poetry, particularly in his unbroken silence, his elusiveness and unapproachability. In a later verse the poet tells us that he and his father used to act out a scene in which the father's death was a knife of guilt raised above the son's head.

In his eyes
Were reflected all my future sins.
We played the binding of Abraham and Isaac
His early death
Was the knife pointed at me.(25)

Everything he has done or even thought from that point on has been no more than this same accusing knife. Since he goes on to say that no one, even God, will know that it is a game, it is clear that it is God who is holding the knife and turning the game into reality.

The poet is the lifelong sacrifice to the bitter tragedy of his father's death. He cannot successfully reconcile the many fathers who appear throughout the poetry and prose as emotional leitmotifs: the kindly, pious man, the orthodox patriarchal figure “trapped in the Holy Ark,” the strange, often pathetic figure of the story, Mitot avi (“The Times My Father Died”), the uncompromising, terrifying Dr. Mannheim of the novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place. It may be no more than his guilt that has transformed the gentle orthodox Jew into the relentless, immovable and Godlike figure of the later poetry, who spins like a top “in his eternity, lashed always into new gyrations / by the whipping strap of the phylacteries.” The more the father spins, the greater the son's guilt, yet there is a sense of the father himself as victim with God, who is the subject of the poem, the master applying the strap.²⁶ (In “Jerusalem 1967” God appeared as a policeman wielding a baton to prevent the city from achieving independence from him, to ensure his control by dividing it by force into its separate religious components.) The notion of man as the plaything of divine forces is reinforced by a mention earlier in the poem of children's toys in the room where God is about to pay a visit; also by references in other poetry to the book of Job, specifically to the disasters befalling Job as a result of the heavenly contest and the rapidity of their occurrence between “‘while he was yet speaking’ and ‘there came also another’.”²⁷ A brief reversion to the God who hides from man in the forest and plays capricious games is in the tantalizing five-line poem, “Revelation”:

Today God revealed himself to me
so:
Someone put his hands over my eyes
from behind:
Guess who it is!(28)

The recurring theme of this poetry, published after the Six-Day War in 1967, is the plea for personal self-determination. No longer does the poet wish to see more of God than the soles of his shoes or his hand. His view of his own relationship with God has altered with his changed view of God's nature. His tone of resignation has implicitly recognized God's position of eternal authority, his rebellion has changed to submission and the later poetry in which God appears is largely cast in the form of invocation or supplication, frequently through ironic versions of prayers or psalms. His plea now is for freedom from emotional subjugation just as earlier he rejected the bonds of social duty. He entreats God to give not only him but the world a rest and three times refers to Psalm 22:2: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” In the first instance it is a petition for the raising of religious strictures which have confined him all his life:

God, close your houses, give the world a rest,
Why have you not forsaken me?(29)

A more accurate, if inelegant, translation of the second line would be “why don't you leave me alone?” The second instance occurs as an ascerbic comment in “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela,” when the anomalies of Mandatory Palestine in the 30s are bitterly recalled:

My God, my God, why? You have forsaken me. My God, My God.
          Even then
He had to call him twice.(30)

The third is in the context of the terrible burden of inherited duty which characterizes the verse as a whole:

Far from here, on a different continent of time,
The dead rabbis of my childhood are seen clearly,
Holding tombstones high above their heads.
Their soul is wrapped up in the parcel of my life.
My God, my God,
Why have you not forsaken me?(31)

Yet with characteristic self-denigratory irony and some contradiction the poet declares that God indeed leaves the earth especially (davka) at the time when he, the poet, is living in it, an allusion, perhaps, to his destiny as a member of a historically decisive generation. In a poem whose title is an ironic counterpoint to Tchernichowsky's Ani ma'amin (“I Believe”) called “My ‘I don't Believe’” or “My Non-Credo” (Ha'ani lo ma'amin sheli), he says that despite the anomalies of his life he is still inclined to the righteousness of the God of his childhood suggesting that it is perhaps not God who is dead or unaware but his own receptivity: he is making it difficult for God to glorify his world if it is to be exemplified by the poet himself.³²

The poetry reveals that as the poetic “I” grows older and less inclined to do battle with his spiritual deficiencies he submits to the father and to God. At the same time he declares that God himself, whose fate ultimately must be “like the fate of the trees and stones, sun and moon, in which men stopped believing when they started to believe in him” will, like them, remain like a divine fossil, a reminder of the period of national faith.³³ This is an indictment not only of God's significance for man but of his people who have strayed so far from the covenant that he is preserved only as a monument to their spiritual history, like trees and the moon and stars, as remote and incomprehensible as they are and, it seems, as misinterpreted.

In this later verse the poet's outcries against God have lost something of their evocative power due to less concrete imagery and more conventionally metaphysical theological doctrine. Yet the notion of “God” and those signifying anger or guilt are equal abstractions, all indicating an emotional dilemma peculiar to the lyric “I” himself. The earlier, anthropomorphic God controlled the individual's destiny from the outside, as a father or a king, whereas now this external power has been internalized to represent one of the warring forces within the individual. The concept of the earlier God made little of free will: man was totally in his power with rebellion a consequence; later, the very gift of free will, the imposition by God of the possibility of choice, creates the moral anguish prominent in the verse, and the poet's awareness of his duty, be it religious or cultural, intensifies it. On many occasions he clearly indicates that he would like to relinquish it but is barred from doing so by the memory of his father. His supplication to God is that of a fleeing Jonah, that duty no longer be required at all, that houses of religion be closed, so that the possibility of decision and the certainty of guilt are removed altogether. Yet even this is a reductive oversimplification of extremely profound verse, for “religion,” “God” and all the related concepts are metaphors for anxiety, guilt and personal failure shared to a large extent by other poets of Amichai's generation living in a society which has both disappointed them and been disappointed by them. It is therefore unlikely that the God whom Amichai apostrophizes throughout his early poetry is confined to the deity; at first “God” meant arbitrary fate, capricious nature and illustrated man's helplessness at the mercy of cosmic forces. The second phase of the poetry internalized “God” as self-accusation, fear and regret.

On the other hand, the notion of “God” refers to a blameworthy external force, manipulating man against his will and generating his anxiety. It is customary in contemporary Hebrew verse to present the father as an emissary of God, the human embodiment of Jewish values. His death is an indication that these values have, for one reason or another, been dissipated. In Amichai's verse, however, the reverse seems to apply: the “God” who appears so often, menacing, teasing, working, punishing, stands for an aspect of the human father. The representational figure, avi, obviously a faithful portrait of the poet's real, remembered father, is exclusively positive. The character called “God” is the other, less sympathetic side of him, exacting and fearsome in his ability to arouse guilt. He begins as the all-powerful authority-figure, dispensing or withholding mercy at will, frightening to a child whose world he commands; he changes as the son, growing in his own power, perceives the effects of his rebellion; finally the father is reduced to an entity whose remembered power is respected and who must be placated for the sake of tradition and the prevention of further guilt. The relationship of God and the lyric “I” is, then, that of father and maturing son, with disappointment and guilt the counterpoint to recalled affection. “‘You are God's forgotten,’ my father said. / God forgot me. Afterwards so did he.”³⁴

The lyric “I” of Amichai's poetry berates himself constantly for his apparent apostasy or for the lack of talent to believe, for being without the active gift of faith which distinguished his forefathers, and for his consequent attraction to secular emotional or aesthetic pursuits: for he tells us that when Moses was given the Law he himself was sitting at the back of the class, dreaming and drawing pictures.³⁵ The refrain or premise of “Benjamin” is taken from Deuteronomy 8:10: “When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.” The poem's protagonist has eaten but he is not satisfied nor will he bless and his defiance begets the father's reproach and his own consuming guilt. The punishment is fearful: “Not only one finger of God but his ten fingers / Are choking me.”³⁶

Amichai's God is like no other God in Hebrew poetry in that he represents the poet's own sense of need for universal order and his personal quest for meaning. God represents both external fate in the sense of cultural determinism to which the poet cannot submit without ambivalence, and internal fate which is his own awareness of duty and guilt. Both are uncomfortable and the effort of adjusting to them continues in the poetry written in the 1970s and 1980s. Even in Amichai's recent collection Shalva gedola (Great Tranquillity, 1980) his father is repeatedly recalled, indicating that, despite the optimistic title of the book, personal tranquillity continues to elude its “I.” His fundamental dilemma remains unresolved and reconciliation with God is not in sight; he will go only part of the way with his father:

O my father, chariot of my life, I want
To go with you, take me along,
Set me down next to my house
Then continue on your way alone.(37)

Amichai's lyric “I” is still seeking the real nature of God, still dislocating pious texts into accusations of divine cruelty and, finally, still ironically self-aware:

A man told me
that he's going down to Sinai
because he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.(38)

Notes

1. Amichai's poetry is quoted from the following editions: Shirim 1948-1962 (Tel Aviv, 1967), to be designated in the notes as Shirim and ‘Akhshav bara‘ash (Tel Aviv, 1968), to be designated as ‘Akhshav. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2. Yitzhak Shalev, Elohai hanoshek loḥamim (“O God Who Kisses Warriors”) from Elohai hanoshek loḥamim (Jerusalem, 1957).

3. Binyamin Galay, ‘Al haholkhim shelo yashuvu (“Those Who Go, Not to Return”), in Modern Hebrew Poetry ed. Ruth Finer Mintz, (Berkeley, 1966), p. 312.

4. Abba Kovner, “My Little Sister” trans. Shirley Kaufman and Nurit Orchan, in Fourteen Israeli Poets ed. Dennis Silk (1976), p. 41.

5. Robert Alter, “Afterword: A Problem of Horizons,” in Contemporary Israeli Literature, ed. Elliot Andersen (Philadelphia, 1977), p. 338.

6. Ani yoshev ‘al sefat hareḥov (“I Sit on the Sidewalk”) in Natan Zach, Shirim shonim (Tel Aviv, 1974), p. 74.

7. Keshe'elohim amar befa‘am harishonah (“The First Time God Said”), ibid., p. 65.

8. Lefa‘amim mitga‘age‘a (“Sometimes God Longs For”), in Natan Zach, Kol haḥalav vehadvash (1982), p. 56.

9. Ha‘ananim hem hametim harishonim (“The Clouds Are the First to Die”), Shirim, p. 89.

10. Sometimes pus,
    Sometimes poetry

    Always something extracted
    Always pain.

    My father was a tree in a forest of fathers
    Covered by moist green.

    Oh, widows of the flesh, orphans of the blood.
    I must escape.

    Eyes sharp as can-openers
    Opened weighty secrets.

    But through the wound in my chest
    God glances into the world.

    I am the door
    In his dwelling.

    (Shirim, p. 88)

11. Ha‘ananim hem hametim harishonim, Shirim, p. 88.

12. Mas‘ot Binyamin ha'aḥaron miTudela (“The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela,” hereinafter “Benjamin”), ‘Akhshav, p. 133.

13. No. 26, Shirim, p. 135.

14. See quatrain no. 1, Shirim, p. 120:

    In the sands of prayer my father saw angels' footsteps.
    He taught me a way and I answered him with ways.
    Therefore his face was bright. Therefore mine is lined.
    Like an old office calendar, I'm covered in dates.

15. Robert Alter, “Poetry in Israel,” in After the Tradition: Essays in Modern Jewish Writing (New York, 1971), pp. 241-56.

16. Quatrain no. 38, Shirim, p. 128.

17. Vahagirat horai (“My Parents' Migration”), Shirim, p. 157.

18. Quatrain no. 41, Shirim, p. 129.

19. Sonnet no. 1 from the cycle Ahavnu kan, Shirim, p. 42.

20. Lo me‘akhshav lo mikan, [Not of This Time, Not of This Place] (Tel Aviv, 1963), p. 44.

21. Sidney Mendel: Roads to Consciousness (London, 1974) pp. 95 ff.

22. “Benjamin,” ‘Akhshav, p. 113.

23. Motarot (“Luxuries”), ‘Akhshav, p. 419.

24. See note 14.

25. Yom kippur. Erev. Avi (“Yom Kippur. Evening. My Father”) ‘Akhshav, p. 40.

26. Be‘inyan teḥiyat metim, (“Concerning Resurrection”), ‘Akhshav, p. 152.

27. Ani aḥaronam, (“I Am the Last of Them”), ‘Akhshav, p. 49. See Job 1:16 ff.

28. Hitgalut, (“Revelation”), ‘Akhshav, p. 194.

29. Sof elul, (“The End of Elul”), ‘Akhshav, p. 94.

30. “Benjamin,” ‘Akhshav, p. 102.

31. Shirei akhziv no. 10, ‘Akhshav, p. 200.

32. Ha'ani lo ma'amin sheli (“My ‘I Don't Believe’”), ‘Akhshav, p. 160.

33. Goral elohim (“God's Fate”), ‘Akhshav, p. 36.

34. Shir bapardes (“Poem in the Orchard”), ‘Akhshav, p. 33

35. Matan torah (“The Giving of the Law”), ‘Akhshav, p. 78.

36. “Benjamin,” ‘Akhshav, p. 108.

37. Shalva gedola [Great Tranquillity] (Tel Aviv, 1980), p. 18.

38. Ibid., p. 88.