The God of Israel

by A Leyeles

Back in March, I introduced the wonderful A. Leyeles—pen name among many pen names of Aaron Glantz-Leyeles—through his strange and wonderful poem “Worms.” Leyeles is by and large an idiosyncratic and introspective poet, and I’m taken with Zackary Sholem Berger’s description of him as “the virtuoso of loneliness” in a helpful and incisive introduction to Leyeles’ poetry.

The poem below is one of Leyeles’ best-known, and one of my favorites. It was published in his 1947 collection A Yid Afn Yam, “A Jew on the Sea,” but the particular text below is taken from an earlier anthology of Yiddish poets, published in New York in February, 1943. I don’t know exactly when Leyeles wrote this poem, but I mention that anthology because I’m fascinated by the idea of America’s Yiddish readers coming across this poem, and of Leyeles himself drafting it, alongside the still-breaking news of the catastrophe befalling Europe’s Jewish civilization. It makes me wonder: how is this poem a response to the Holocaust while it was still ongoing, and how is it a criticism of the cultures of Christian Europe which perpetrated or allowed that genocide?

Before we get into the poem, though, a quick reminder: Tomorrow, Thursday evening, June 15, at 7:00 pm EST, I’ll host the next zoom chat for paying subscribers. Our theme will be women’s poetry in Yiddish. Each of these zoom discussions has been wonderful, filled with lively conversation from diverse participants, and I’m looking forward to this next one. All paying subscribers will receive a zoom link later today, but if you’d like to come and aren’t able to afford the subscription, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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The God of Israel

The God of Israel is not rich.
I've seen the Sistine Chapel,
Notre-Dame, the Cologne Cathedral.
The eye revels in them, the eye is pleased.

The God of Israel is stingy.
He does not want to fill his museum with statues,
with paintings and drawings, altars, palanquins,
purple robes, three-tiered crowns.
He does not want to live in a palace.
The Jewish museum does not have much to show.
A Chanukah lamp, a curtain, a scroll,
a spice box, a tefillin bag, a yad,
a menorah, a Torah crown, implements for circumcision,
and ancient, ancient-past-ancient handwriting.
Another manuscript, and another manuscript, 
rolled up, bound up, tied together,
letters in love with letters.

What does the God of Israel want?
What does the God of Israel demand?
The God of Israel is a just demander.
The God of Israel is a harsh demander.
The God of Israel is a stingy demander:
seek for yourself, learn for yourself, suffer for yourself--
for your and for my own honor.

Back in a gray-gray past he took two heaps of letters
threw them from a mountaintop,
scattered them across the paths of the world.
They glittered with words,
they flamed with sentences,
and since then--
for thousands of years we search for them,
for thousands of years we gather them,
for thousands of years we interpret them,
and there is still no end
for the letters, for the sentences, for the words.

Another manuscript, and another manuscript,
rolled up, tied up, bound together--
letters in love with letters. 

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As is so often the case in this newsletter—why else would I pick the things I pick?—I love this poem, and my declaration of love is perhaps the most important thing I have to say about it. In a culture that habitually denigrates so much of what refuses to be commodified, isn’t a declaration of love for a Yiddish poem in itself a worthwhile gesture in itself? But it’s also a poem about love: about language as love, and poetry as love’s manifestation.

I read this poem as theology and ars poetica at once. The Jewish God wants not gaudiness, not external displays of beauty, but simple ritual objects and the humble, handwritten manuscript, which is itself already an artifact of love: letters entwined with letters in an erotic dance. And similarly: simple letters are as worshipful as a vast cathedral.

How could a poet not be smitten with this poem? How could anyone who, against our culture’s increasing disrespect for language as something real, believes that language deserves attention and dignity, and is, or at least can be, an experience of numinous creativity?

(I want to add here that my wife reads this poem in a totally opposite way. She sees it not as celebration of the Jewish God’s “stinginess,” but as criticism. Letters in love with letters, she says, but where’s the human touch in that self-referential relationship? Still, I think that this poem is celebrating the relative austerity and simplicity of Jewish life, and the central role text and language play within it. But it’s a worthwhile other reading, and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

When I lived in Jerusalem I would walk down to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and marvel at the sights and smells and sounds there: incense and oil and the sweat of pilgrims, weeping and chanting, icons and mosaics on the walls. I felt viscerally like an outsider in that Christian shrine, but also felt, if I’m being honest, a vague sense of envy. What Jewish spaces are as sensually rich as that? Where is the synagogue that rivals the great architectural achievements of Christianity?

Of course there are a number of compelling answers to these questions. But Leyeles’ answer is distinctive, and important: Jewish manuscripts, Jewish texts, Jewish texts about texts, along with the humble ritual objects found in any Jewish home, are our Sistine Chapel. All the beauty and desire one could find in the great works of Christian art are present in Jewish language, and because Jewish language interprets more Jewish language, forever and ever, then unlike the Sistine Chapel, the cathedral of Jewish language is unlimited in space or time. For thousands of years letters have continued their erotic dance. Language—which does not need to be consecrated, because it is itself already sacred, gleaming and flaming as God spills it from God’s hands—never ends.

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Something a little different for this art installment - a Jewish protective amulet of sorts, from 19th century India, courtesy of the Magnes Collection at UC Berkeley. Letters in love with letters!