Hastings Vigil for Israel

In 1903, Chaim Nachman Bialik, the noted Hebrew essayist, wrote a poem entitled “In the City of Slaughter.” He wrote the poem just a few months after the Kishinev pogrom – describing the scenes of that horrible massacre in Eastern Europe, in which 120 Jews were murdered by their neighbors. That massacre – and Bialik’s widely circulated, grim poem about it – marked a turning point in modern Jewish history, causing thousands of young Eastern European Jews to turn towards Zionism, insisting on the Jewish right to self-determination.

An excerpt from the poem reads:

Get up and walk through the city of the massacre, 

And with your hand touch and lock your eyes

On the cooled clots of blood

Dried on tree trunks, rocks, and fences; it is our kinsmen. 

Go to the ruins, to the gaping breaches,

To walls and hearths, shattered as though by thunder. …

Those holes are like black wounds,

For which there is no healing and is no doctor. 

If Bialik’s disturbing poem described the brutal massacre of 120 Jews, I shudder to think of the poem he would have composed in the wake of Hamas’s terror attack against Israel two weeks ago – in which the number of Jewish lives taken was more than 10 times what Bialik felt so pained to describe, and in which, what’s worse, more than 200 hostages were abducted.

Since the terror attack, many Jews – including me – have felt incredibly uneasy. Over the past two weeks, many of us have not been sleeping well; we have had trouble focusing on our responsibilities; we’ve been constantly buzzing with anxiety.

These uneasy feelings are only in part a reaction to Hamas’s terror attack. Equally, these uneasy feelings are a reaction to the thousands of years of attacks that the Jewish people has suffered, in nearly every country in which we have lived – an age-old, recurring trauma that is deeply embedded in our psyches.

The painful truth is that Bialik’s grim poem about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom was not the first Hebrew elegy – nor, unfortunately, will it be the last – to be composed for our murdered fellow Jews. Regrettably, our literature of destruction stretches all the way back to the Bible – all the way back to the Book of Lamentations, in which the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah described the massacre that took place in Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE. Jeremiah’s ancient words are eerily similar to Bialik’s:

Prostrate in the streets lie

Both young and old.

Women and men alike

Are fallen by the sword.

They were slain on the day of wrath, 

Slaughtered without pity.

Hamas’s terror attack re-triggered these deep seated memories – which have been with us for thousands of years. Any Jew whom you know today is here because, somewhere along the line, their ancestor was a survivor. And survivors are burdened with trauma.

Because of Hamas’s actions, the State of Israel now faces an incredibly difficult task. It must simultaneously defend itself, making sure that Hamas is never again able to terrorize innocent civilians in Israel – and also, at the same time, it must do what it can to protect innocent civilians in Gaza, whose reckless leaders have once again dragged them into the line of fire.

Facing this nearly impossible task, it would be understandable for Israelis, for the global Jewish family, and for people of conscience around the world to easily lose all hope.

But when hopelessness starts to overcome us, we must turn to another influential Hebrew poem written at the turn of the 20th century, a poem that would later be set to music, and serve as Israel’s national anthem – a poem which proclaims that even when the world tears us down, that even though we have known thousands of years of trauma and suffering, still, od lo avdah tikvateinu, we, the Jewish people never give up hope. 

May this be true in our day. Amen.