Chariot(ess) of Fire: Yokheved Bat-Miriam's Female Personifications of Erets Israel

Abstract

What happens when Hebrew women poets begin to claim a place within the male tradition of femininely personifying Zion and the Land of Israel? This essay endeavors to answer this question through an examination of the Land of Israel poetry of Yokheved Bat-Miriam (1901-80), in particular, her magnificent poem cycle Erets Yisraʾel (1937). The author argues that in entering into this traditional male domain of female personifications of the land, Bat-Miriam demonstrates a willingness to transgress linguistic, thematic, generic, and gender categories. The author also contends that Bat-Miriam's highly elliptical, mystical language, together with the continually shifting and blurring identities of both the land and the female poetic speaker, anticipate the efforts of such French feminists as Cixous and Irigaray to posit an alternative woman's writing, which defies traditional gender binarities and unsettles fixed meanings.

Where is she?Activity/passivitySun/MoonCulture/NatureDay/Night

Father/MotherHead/HeartIntelligible/PalpableLogos/Pathos.Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.Matter, concave, ground-where steps are taken, holding-and dumping-ground

-HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, "Sorties"¹

What can be said about a feminine sexuality "other" than the one prescribed in, and by phallocratism? How can its language be recovered, or invented? . . . How can they free themselves from their expropriation within patriarchal culture? . . . How can they speak (as) women? By going back through the dominant discourse. By interrogating men's "mastery." By speaking to women. And among women.

-LUCE IRIGARAY, This Sex Which Is Not One²

Since biblical times, male Hebrew prophets and poets have depicted the physical and spiritual contours of the land and cities of Israel, and by extension, the nation itself, by means of female personifications. In her study of biblical transformations of pagan myth, In the Wake of the Goddesses (1992), Tikva Frymer-Kensky offers a multifaceted catalog of these female figurations of Zion and the Land of Israel: mother, bride, good wife, bad wife, abandoned wife, maiden, daughter, the female "persona immanent in the city," lamenting its destruction and celebrating its rejuvenation, the beloved of "both Israel and God," who "brings them closer together in shared love."³ Common to all these female personifications, with their heterosexual love plots or their assumptions of female fragility and vulnerability, is their origin in the male imagination. As Frymer-Kensky explains, "Zion is a focus of intense passion and longing for the men of Israel. . . . They can express their love directly to this female figure in a way that they cannot have toward the remote, invisible, and masculine God."⁴ This masculine tradition of female personifications of Zion and the Land of Israel does not end, of course, with the male biblical prophets, but continues and develops in the gaonic and medieval periods with poets such as Eleazar Ben Kallir ("Em habanim"), Yehuda Halevi ("Tsiyon, halo tishʾali"), and Shalem Shabazi ("Ahavat hadassah"). The modern Zionist (male) poets carry on this practice as well, borrowing from tradition or composing their own new female metaphors for the Land of Israel and Jerusalem: a bereaved mother waiting for the return of her sons, a solitary queen,⁵ a captive daughter or maiden,⁶ or, as in the poetry of Avraham Shlonsky, where the hills and fields of Jezreel are compared to a herd of "young she-camels" clinging to the "breasts" of the Gilboa Mountains, the "milk of rivers flowing over the banks."⁷

I quote Shlonsky here in particular because of the way his Erets Israel poetry clearly illustrates the masculine prerogative of this long-standing poetic tradition. Shlonsky's poetic persona, like that of William Wordsworth or Walt Whitman, cavorts about in nature, drawing personal inspiration and spiritual nourishment from the feminized landscape. Female figures are present in this poetry primarily to serve and nurture the male poet's mission and gratify his desires. In the fourth poem of his cycle ʿAmal, for example, a "good mother" figure dresses and adorns her son Abraham in a coat of many colors (reminiscent of the preferential treatment granted to the...