“Is This Thy Voice?”: Rhetoric and Dialogue in Solomon Ibn-Gabirol’s Liturgical Poems of Redemption [Piyyutei Ge’ulah] by Ariel Zinder (review)

Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, who lived in the first half of the eleventh century, is considered one of the fathers of Hebrew poetry in Andalusia’s Golden Age. The cultural climate of that period largely dictated an adherence to conventions, but this did not prevent him from imbuing these forms with personal expression, in both his secular and his sacred poetry. One of the best examples of this is the way Ibn Gabirol shaped the redemption (ge’ulah) piyyut (liturgical poems that, on Sabbaths and holiday mornings, embellish the Ga‘al Yisrael blessing that closes the section of the service devoted to the recitation of the Shema Yisrael prayer). Their particular beauty has gained these poems a special place both in traditional culture and in modern scholarship.

Ariel Zinder’s book examines these poems from the vantage point of their performative character, that is, as texts that are actually chanted (or at least intended for this purpose) by a prayer leader and community of worshippers in the synagogue. As Zinder sees them, they are texts meant to do something in the world—to affect the community, and move he to whom the prayers are addressed. This perspective, explicitly influenced by J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory, shows itself to be particularly fruitful for a poetic corpus that stands out for a complex compositional structure, in which the voices of different speakers alternate, each one presenting an argument of its own.

The introduction to the book discusses the common current scholarly approaches to the redemption piyyutim of Ibn Gabriol. Zinder is able to show how these positions differ in their understanding of the function these piyyutim are meant to serve. Likewise, he shows how these positions sometimes reflect the way these scholars see the complex composition of the poems.

In his first chapter, Zinder delves into the interrelation between the rhetorical and poetic dimensions of the poems, showing how the tension between these two aspects deepens the dialogic quality of the piyyut. This quality, at its best, is not illusory, he says—it is not a cover for what is really a single voice (like that of Socrates, speaking for Plato, in the later Platonic dialogues) but rather a convoluted representation of a multi-faceted reality in which each voice is by necessity incomplete. The dialogic structure is not constrained to the role of an organizing principle of the text, but turns it into “a churning field of forces and voices that vie against and with each other to create a comprehension of the experience of exile and to bring about divine intervention [to end it]” (p. 16, my translation).

Chapter 2 maps out the voices that speak in Ibn Gabirol’s redemption piyyutim, describing the psychological, class, and gender characteristics that emerge from the linguistic-rhetorical choices attributed to each voice. Especially worthy of note here are Zinder’s stimulating analysis of the prayer leader’s alternation between different positions in the space between the Jewish people and its God, and of the lyrical mode of the people’s voice, with all the complexity that its representation as female implies.

Chapter 3, the book’s climax, bears the title “From the Strophe to the Whole Poem” (p. 77). Here Zinder demonstrates what happens in the poems beyond the voice of the distinct speakers in each individual single strophe—voices he clearly delineated in the previous chapter—when they become part of the mixture heard again and again in the poem as a whole. Here Zinder offers an ample tool kit for analyzing the finest threads in the textual fabric, threads that cannot be adequately described by blunt terms like “order” and “structure.” Thus, “enwrapping” takes place when a strongly expressive word is secreted between other words that soften its impact; “channeling” is...