Melech Ravitch's Despairing Prayer

"Reciting the Shema"

Thanks for tuning in to today’s installment of Di Freyd fun Yidishn Vort. I’m excited to share another poem by Melech Ravitch (1873-1976), whom I’ve discussed twice before.

First, though, a quick note: a few months ago I taught a Yiddish poetry translation workshop, through the wonderful Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. It was a great success, and I’m excited to offer another round of this workshop, designed for intermediate Yiddish readers. This time, by popular demand, we’ve added in an option that will work for folks in European and Israeli time zones. You can find more information or register here, and feel free to reach out directly with any questions.

Back to Melech Ravitch: I love this 1925 photo (courtesy of YIVO) of Ravitch with his wife, Fanya, their children, and Israel Joseph Singer. Singer—a great writer, and the brother of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer—he tends to look vampiric in pictures. Enjoy the weirdness of this portrait: Ravitch’s subtle and wholesome smile, his sweet looking family—and IJ Singer, staring at the camera like an off-brand Nosferatu.

I’ve sketched Ravitch’s remarkable life before: his birth in small-town Poland, his combat in World War I, his travels in Australia, and Central and South America, before settling in Montreal, where he was a cultural leader for the Yiddish-speaking community.

According to Ravitch’s Montreal neighbor, Irving Massey, Ravitch referred to himself as the first Yiddish modernist:

I don’t think he’s right to call himself that, and if anyone reading this knows of others who described him in those terms I’d be curious to hear about them. But even if Ravitch is wrong, it’s a telling act of self-mythology. Certainly he was among the first Yiddish modernists, but like most grandiosity I think that—as the video suggests—his claim to be the first bespeaks a deep insecurity.

We don’t need to speculate or psychologize. We find an existential anxiety, and even a despair, in some of Ravitch’s writing, including in today’s poem, which was written in November, 1961, and published in his final collection. There are a number of references to Jewish liturgy and theology here, so if you’re a little less familiar with that side of things, you can see my comments below.

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Reciting the Shema

There is sadness
deeper than weeping—

there is suffering
saltier than tears—

there is loneliness
lonelier
than death—

there is despair
more awful than the moment of drowning—
and sadness,
suffering,
loneliness,
despair—
they come to me each night, all four of them,
and stand in silence by my bed:
to my right, sadness,
to my left, suffering,
before me, loneliness,
behind me, despair.
And above my head, the dark shekhinah——

and a vision appears by my bedside,
a vision of your face—brother, human—
the same
as yesterday—today,
as tomorrow—today,
as today—today—

and then I lift my eyes
to the dark shekhinah,
and with a sadness deeper than weeping,
with a suffering saltier than tears,
with a despair more terrible than drowning,
with a loneliness lonelier than death,
I say the shema:
sadness,
suffering,
despair,
be good to me.
At least for an hour tonight,
at least for a minute—
and they are good to me,
and I discover the consciousness of the absolute,
and absolute night:
shhhh—

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The poems I've shared already by Melech Ravitch have a distinctly mystical bent, and this is no different. But unlike "Let us Learn," here we see a darkness and despair underlying the mystical impulse, and an uncomfortable emphasis on the ineffability of "the absolute."

A quick word, though, about some of the Jewish theological and liturgical elements. The Shema is the foundational Jewish prayer, traditionally recited several times a day, including before sleep. Some versions of the night time Shema, like the one in the important 11th century Mazkhor Vitry prayerbook, include an invocation of angels, which Ravitch alludes to quite clearly here. Consider the angelic invocation:

May Mikhael be at my right,
and Gavriel at my left,
before me, Uriel,
and behind me, Refael,
and above my head, the Shekhinah of El

alongside Ravitch's description of his psycho-spiritual pain:

to my right, sadness,
to my left, suffering,
before me, loneliness,
behind me, despair.
And above my head, the dark shekhinah....

The term shekhinah refers to the indwelling presence of God, and to the archetypal divine feminine in Jewish mystical thought. 

With that settled, how should we understand this odd and anguished poem, a poem which I love, and by which I'm a little baffled? "Reciting the Shema" feels deeply unsatisfying to me, but I think that its refusal to satisfy, its insistence on not providing us with any answers or with any closure, is part of the point. Through the course of this poem, Ravitch travels from despair into a mystical state, a kind of union with "the absolute." He tells us all about his despair through striking analogies, but about "the consciousness of the absolute" he can say nothing. It is a secret, and can only be disclosed with a refusal of disclosure, as in the poem's final gesture: shhhh.

I've written before in this newsletter about apophasis and negative theology, and their place in modern Yiddish poetics. We see something like that again here, I think, and it is all the more striking because of the tangible, positive descriptions with which the poem begins: "a suffering / saltier than tears," for example, transposes "suffering" from an abstraction and into the world of concrete, universal sense memory. If suffering is salty then I can taste it on my lips; I can feel its sting. 

And in Ravitch's revision of the Shema's angelic invocation, psychic distress becomes at one a spiritual and a physical presence, located not in his mind, as much contemporary psychology would have it, but in the physical space surrounding him. Doesn't it feel that way sometimes, when you're really in despair? That your despair is not just the product of your consciousness but is real, a spiritual creature, filling the space around you. To me it does, at least, and I find that reflected in this poem with an uncommon clarity.

And out of such visceral despair comes the poet's impulse to pray. To whom, though, is he praying? 

"sadness,
suffering,
despair,
be good to me."

It seems that the prayer is directed not to God, but to the psycho-spiritual anguish itself. I might have expected such a prayer to ask that "sadness, suffering, and despair" should leave, or else be alleviated. But instead the poet asks that they "be good to [him.]" What does this mean, exactly? 

Aaron Zeitlin, in one of his poems, writes that one must pass through despair in order to find faith, and I think that something similar is at play here, although the faith that Ravitch's poem finds is not in any orthodox religiosity. As I read it, this poem is about finding mystical attainment precisely through despair, entering into grief so fully that it yields up its most profound insights. Entering into grief, and allowing grief to enter into oneself; there's a mutual agency here, a kind of reciprocal activity, between the poet's protagonist and the dark moods that visit him.

So much of our culture and our economy seems to be an engine for avoiding grief and suffering, and for entertaining or medicating ourselves away from sadness. We have an endless ability to find, and to sell, compelling ways to distract ourselves from grief and anxiety and from the reality of death. (To be clear, none of this is to denigrate psychiatric medication, or psychological treatment, which I credit with likely saving my life during a particularly difficult time in early adolescence!) In this poem I find a counter-cultural approach to the kinds of moods and experiences we tend to see as clinical problems in need of solutions.

For Ravitch, despair and grief are beings in their own right, beings which can induct us into profound mystical states beyond language. When I read this poem, it prompts me to ask myself: what do I habitually do to pull myself away from the sadness I sometimes feel, and how might I instead try to learn from it? If I were to treat it as a teacher, as a spiritual being with its own agency and wisdom, something I can find a genuine relationship with, rather than as a problem to solve or an enemy to flee from, what might I begin to learn?

There are, however, some parts of this poem that I don't have a good read on, and if you have any insights I'd love to hear them. The main moment I'm thinking of is the "vision" stanza:

and a vision appears by my bedside,
a vision of your face—brother, human—
the same
as yesterday—today,
as tomorrow—today,
as today—today—

How does this fit into the poem? What exactly is the vision here, and what is its relationship to its surroundings? Perhaps the "you" whose face the poet sees is a loved one who has passed away, thereby occasioning the grief and sadness; perhaps this stanza's unchanging yesterday, tomorrow, and today point towards the ways that death renders the dead static, fixing them at a certain point beyond which they can never change, while the living continue to move through time. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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In conversation with today’s poem, here is Mark Rothko’s “No. 61 (Rust and Blue).” I’m interested in the similarities between Rothko’s paintings—who, it’s worth noting in this context, spoke Yiddish in his childhood home—and Ravitch’s mystical poems, as they seem to have a shared concern with sadness and its relationship to the ineffable.