Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880-1990

Introduction

1 Introduction Nation and Discourse Poetry and Nation May the hands of our brethren, wherever they are, Who pity the soil of our land, be strong Do not lose heart, rejoicing singing Come shoulder to shoulder to the people’s aid!1 in 1894, Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), who would soon be crowned poet laureate of Jewish nationalism, published his Hebrew poem “Birkat ‘Am” (Blessing of the People). The poem, popularly known by its opening Hebrew words as “Teh ˙ ezakna” (Be Strong), was soon adopted by wide sectors of the Jewish national movement; it was set to music, and its first stanza was regularly performed alongside or as an alternative to Naphtali Herz Imber’s “ha-Tikvah” (The Hope), the anthem of the Zionist movement. As its proclamatory tone suggests , the poem does not seek to meditate on the state of things, to articulate a train of thought or to give voice to sentiments, whether collective or individual. Rather, quite explicitly, it stages a performance of a certain type of public discourse, a discourse that would give rise to a national collective and shape it, “a discourse of a nation,” as I shall 1. Bialik 1983, 240. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are mine, and all emphases are in the original. Even in places where I cite existing English translations, I have often modified the translation to reflect more accurately the literal meaning of the original. 2 ✦ Rhetoric and Nation call it in this book. No wonder, then, that wrapped into the lines of its first stanza are the themes that were to play a key role in the formation of that discourse. First and foremost among these key themes is that of language. Indeed, the very Hebrew of the poem is crucial to its performance of a discourse of a nation. The emergence of Modern Hebrew is commonly linked to the emergence of Jewish national sentiments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bialik, more than any other poet before or after, is credited with the refashioning of the ancient Jewish lingua sacra into a modern and national poetic vernacular , an appropriate vehicle for such sentiments. “Be Strong” hinges its performance of a discourse of a nation on this linguistic transposition . It posits a succession of biblical allusions only to invert and reinvest them with new meanings. Most evident in its first stanza is the allusion to Zechariah 8:9: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Let your hands be strong, ye that hear in these days these words by the mouth of the prophets, which were in the day that the foundation of the house of the Lord of hosts was laid, that the temple might be built.” Whereas the biblical verse deploys language as a link between a past of prophetic promises and a future of messianic realization, “Be Strong” turns language into the articulation of a present marked, as we shall see, by uncertainty. The biblical language of the divine is thus transposed into an articulation of the human. More is at stake, however, in this transposition than “mere” language , for the transposition of language entails a radical transformation of the biblical conception of territory and history. Certainly, both poem and biblical text relate a historical narrative of destruction and exile that is to be transformed by the return of the scattered people and by territorial reconstruction. Similarly, in both texts territory becomes the object of (re)construction and the correlate of a spiritual renewal. Still, Zechariah defines territory as terra sancta and history as historia sacra, that is, as charted by divine language and as markers of its realization. “Be Strong,” on the other hand, accentuates the inherent material linkage between territory and the human when it defines territory by its ‘apharot, its soil or dust, whose radical ‘a/p/r Nation and Discourse ✦ 3 makes its first appearance in Genesis 2:7, as the matter out of which man was created. The poem, likewise, defines history as determined by a human will to come together. In other words, Bialik’s poem charts territory and history as human realms. At the core of Bialik’s transpositions lies a new aesthetics that aims to produce a new bodily experience and, more than that, a new subjectivity . This new aesthetics comes to the fore in the vicissitude of the synecdoche “let your hands be strong.” In...