Camp is over, after a great season. Today is Rosh Hodesh Elul, and I’m back in New York. Summer is departing, and autumn looms. (And I will resume blogging. Thanks for patience during a hiatus.)
I love autumn, my favorite season. It brings me football, and leaves carried on cool breezes, increasingly frantic preparations for the High Holidays, and readying my kids for another school year. This school year will be particularly emotional, as our oldest child begins his final year in high school, his final year living full-time in our home. That passage certainly makes this 45-year-old feel the leaves swirling away.
Yes, fall is the season for feeling middle-aged, a time for remembering who you used to be, and who you were going to be, and for reorienting your horizons to who you are, and who you might yet become. It’s kind of unbearable, but nonetheless it’s a salutary way to approach the High Holidays, with their insistent reflections on life’s brevity and on inescapable moral and spiritual responsibilities.
Speaking of middle-age …
I’d like to recommend a wonderful lyrical poem on the theme by Rabbi Judah HaLevi (c.1075-1141), one of the giants of medieval Spanish Jewry, an accomplished philosopher and an astonishing poet. Don’t miss last year’s Nextbook biography of him by Hillel Halkin. This poem and others (Hebrew originals with Halkin’s translations) are available in a free e-book at http://nextbookpress.com/books/1589/the-selected-poems-of-yehuda-halevi/. Have a look at the poem I’m discussing here, which Halkin titles “A Man in Your Fifties,” as #24 there. (Another fine recent work is Ray Scheindlin’s Song of the Distant Dove: Judah HaLevi’s Pilgrimage. You can find this poem, called “Still Chasing Fun at Fifty?” on pp. 184-189 there. In the idiosyncratic translation of Franz Rosenzweig, sub-translated again into English, the final section of the poem appears as #88, p. 258 in Richard Cohen’s edition of FR’s Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda HaLevi.) This poem is a literary meditation upon HaLevi’s real-life pilgrimage from riches and fame in Spain to the Land of Israel, ravaged by the Crusades and poverty. In the summer of 1141, he reached the Holy Land, where he died, presumably very soon after arrival.
In this poem, HaLevi calls on his middle-aged self to grow up. No more lust and sloth and immediate gratification. You’re too old for such lazy, juvenile self-indulgence. Live in accordance with God’s commands, not your own sensual drives. This first half of the poem is fine but not extraordinary, employing a conventional medieval theme.
But HaLevi really hits his stride in the second half, when his pilgrimage toward a grander destiny begins, as he takes a mighty ship out into the Mediterranean Sea, where it is overwhelmed by a terrifying storm. The power of this image emerges when you see that the creaky ship of the poem is not only his carriage to the Holy Land, but is itself a figure for HaLevi’s own dwindling life and his own aging body. It once seemed so strong! The cedar masts stood stiff, the sails billowed proudly and the sailors were skillful and fearless! Now tossed on towering waves, the ship is taking on water, tall masts crumple like straw, sailors are helpless, fainting away with terror, and the passengers pray for death.
But the middle-aged medieval poet does not yet go down with the ship. For although time always erodes our bodies as it leads us onward toward death, mortal people still may discover moments of timeless peace and grace when they place themselves in God’s hands.
The final section of the poem expresses this experience of grace beyond time as it describes the sea storm passing into calm, the sun setting, the stars emerging in the night sky, and their reflections flickering in the ocean water. I’ll give you these lines in Halkin’s translation.
Now the waves subside; like flocks of sheep they graze upon the sea.
The sun has set, departing by the stairs
Up which ascends the night watch, led by its silver-sworded captain.
The heavens are an African spangled with gold, blue-black
Within a frame of milky crystal. Stars roam the water,
Flare and flicker there, outcasts far from home.
The seaward dipping sky, the night-clasped sea, both polished bright,
Are indistinguishable, two oceans cupped alike,
Between which, surging with thanksgiving, lies a third, my heart.
Man, he could write! The image of the night sky, dressed like an African girl draped in precious jewels, reminds you of Shakespeare (“She hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear”).
As a religious person, I find this such a rich expression of deep spiritual absorption. It’s what Freud called the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and its Discontents, though he averred he never had such a feeling himself. Well, I have, and have been blessed to have them more than once or twice. And I cannot imagine expressing them better than HaLevi’s image of three seas: above, the starry night sky; below, the open ocean, twinkling with starlight; and poised between them lies the third ocean, the human heart.
I love the Weil-Anderson “September Song,” especially the Sinatra version (“And the days dwindle down to a precious few… September, November … And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.”) But today, on Rosh Hodesh Elul, August 31, 2011, I will reach back to the 12th century for my “September Song.” Grow up and realize you cannot outrun time. Your aging boat will have to ride out too many storms. But fear not and keep still, for your heart is an ocean.
- Nedarim, Daf 79 - January 12, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 78 - January 11, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 77 - January 10, 2023