Part 10 can be found here, and the series begins here.
Half-awake, Half-dreaming in a Jerusalem Hospital
As I lie on the hospital bed, there begins to arise in me the illumination of an extraordinary accounting.
It will soon be four o’clock in the morning. The whole hospital is enveloped in sleep. There no longer reach me, in my corner, any moans. Not from nearby rooms and not from my own two neighbours, who lie in a row with me on their beds. They have received sedative injections and lie sunken in sleep. From time to time, the figure of a hospital sister slips in, she passes shadowy through the half-darkness, going to the sleeping, looking at them and leaving. Passing my bed, she wishes to stop, but when she notices that I lie with half-open eyes, she thinks I am falling asleep and quickly hurries out. My watch-doctor sits in his seat at the foot of my bed, pressed into his corner, and struggles with sleep, which has continued to beset him since midnight. I reassure him that he may go to sleep, that I’ll pay attention the glucose drops myself, that they drip in there regimented way. I also start to assure him that I feel better and it will soon be four in the morning and there has been no worsening, this is the best sign. He agrees with me. He even say that, according to his impression, I may start to feel certain that the danger of an operation is past, the proof is: None of the chief doctors have come here again, through the night, to me, as they did at the beginning of the night. They displayed unease then, if their unease had continued, they certainly would have already been here several more times. When they don’t come — that’s a good sign. Yes, he agrees with me. And he permits himself to surrender to the sway of sleep as he sits there in his seat at the foot of my bed.
And me — what do I do? I do not properly fall asleep. Why? — I don’t know. But it is so. I willingly allow myself to be dominated by a state of half-wakefulness, half-dreaming, in the depths of a sort of unsleep. There begin to repeat in me the images and the talks of the theoretical conference, but not in the order in which they happened. The entire meeting of the assembled Jews, both from America and Israel, starts to appear to me like a distant event which is unclear to me in the whole of its essence and character. Even more confused for me is my own participation in it. One this is clear to me with the very sharpest of clarity: I am in Jerusalem. The name of a city which bears in it the full seal of my Jewish fate, carries it in itself, and holds it deep within itself, like the clutching of a fearful secret. And I myself lie clasped in it — in its hands, squeezed in its arms — and can hardly move. I lie burrowed into a Jewish night and can barely live to see to the Jewish morning. What sort of clasping is it? Is it a sweet sinking into the arms of a mother? Why is the mother so silent, so hidden? How can a mother be hidden? They are perhaps the arms of a father, of a silent, strict, concealed-within-himself father — of a father who remains eternally locked within himself, eternally unrevealed? Perhaps they are the arms of God Himself, of our eternal Jewish God, of the one, from which — I talked myself into it, still in my youth — I turned away, from His providence and from His commandments? Did I indeed turn away from Him? When? How? If I have turned away from Him, how do I come to be here, in Ziv Hospital in Jerusalem? And for what did I sit for a whole week in new buildings of the university, on the mountain of Jerusalem and listen to talks and give a talk myself? What did we say? Around what did the argument go on continually for eight days and nights and about what did I speak, as well? I remember that when I spoke, my heart pounded, almost leaping out. I spoke rather loudly, harshly, but in me, as I spoke, something wept continually, almost as if in a state of resignation. A state as if a sharp knife passed over all my limbs; a state as if I would suddenly give a single cry: What do you want, Jews, from one another? Why do you torment yourselves and those near and around you in a fragmented panic, not understanding one another, as though we would tear fiery switches from the hand of God Himself and flog one another?
It seems that our Jewish fate suffocates us today more than ever before, and here, on the soil of Jerusalem, it engulfs us with even more fire.
So, all the talks — given; all the words — said; and — then what? What else? Does not the true Jewish conference happen only now — only now, here in the hospital night? Only now, here amongst sleep and half-sleeping operated-upon Jewish members? Is not this nocturnal stillness the true Jewish speech? Listen to it, hear its finest nuances, hear its breath, hear its wings, as well. See them. They hover over you, they touch upon your face…
Ach, how Jew-sick I am! — I recall my own poem which is indeed called ‘Jew-sick,’1 in a reference to ‘Love-sick’ and Song of Songs. Instead of love-sick — Jew-sick. An illness for which there is no cure, just as there is no cure for love-sickness — but for that sole cure: Song, shir, Shir HaShirim, Song of Songs. By all means, find this song — here, in a Jerusalem hospital bed.
From all words, from all speeches, I would like to extract but a few eternal tones, reveal them and entrust them to the sleeping, knife-surviving, sedative-enveloped, Jewish, operated-upon patients. I recall, in my half-reality, half-dream, the figure of a man who, at the end of the day, came into our hospital room, passed by each bed with outstretched hands and blessed us. I want to remember the features of his face, and I cannot. His figure is, at the moment, not clear to me. I only recall: He was dressed in a rabbi’s clothes. His face was almost hidden by an old-fashioned kapelush. At each bed, he stopped, spread out both his hands, a murmured some blessing. He also came to my bed, stretched his hands out over me, held them there a while, said something and silently disappeared.
I was so absorbed in myself, and in my terrible anxiety, that in my anxiety I was not able to properly look at the figure of the passing, blessing old man. But as skeptical as one of us may be toward such an phenomenon, they must, at a critical moment — and I was at a critical moment — be filled with belief in the power of a blessing. And I must say openly that I was filled with that belief and everything in me was strengthened by the blessing of the unexpected, passing by, passing through old man, and now, four o’clock in the morning, lying in bed in an almost-peaceful mood and my memory and thought fluttering in half-reality, half-dream — now I want to establish in myself the full image of that man, it begins to annoy me why I did not, at the time, look at the old man’s face and take seriously, at that moment, the man’s whispering lips and his outstretched hands. There suddenly appear before me my father’s Cohen-hands, how he had, when giving the priestly blessing at shul, stretched them out, lifted them and said: ‘Yevarechecha.’ How he stretched them out and lifted them under his tallis — this I know. I also did so myself. And here the old man held his hands, not under a tallis, but openly and he stretched them out truly like a Cohen dukhaning.2 Yes, yes, now, four in the morning, I recall that he held his hands like that. Yes, as if in dukhaning. It cannot be, though, that it was my father. How could my father come here, into the hospital, in Jerusalem? My father has been gone a long time. He died forty years ago. How, then, does he come here? And my father wasn’t dressed in rabbinical clothes and rabbinical kapelush. Unless, unless, I am mistaken that the man was dressed like a rabbi. Perhaps it seemed that way to me? Perhaps my father had disguised himself so that his appearing to me shouldn’t frighten me? That I saw dukhan-hands over me — I am certain.
Suddenly, there is a flash in me: Why can’t it be my father? Perhaps he came through gilgul mehilos3 — from our little shtetl, from Ihumen, and is risen in the techiyas hametim4 here, in Jerusalem? Forty years it took him, this rolling through underground paths, until he had rolled here to Jerusalem, and here he stood, rose from the underground paths and came to see me and bless me, after all of our division, after all of our father and son strife, after all of our wandering — forty years. Is forty years not a symbolic time? Did the wandering in the desert not take forty years until the Jews came to the promised land? But wait — do I not recall gilgul mehilos in another occurrence? Somewhere there — somewhere far away — in distant Siberia? Yes, something rises in my memory, a second figure, and I cannot recall now who that figure is…
I shake the half-awake, half-dreaming state from myself. I open my eyes. But my opening my eyes doesn’t bring me to full reality. On the contrary, I feel a longing to return to the dream state. I give the curtain, which divides me from my neighbours, a quiet pull. I see that they lie as they lay before. Both, I see, still sleep deeply sunken. It makes me happy. At the same time, something trembles in me: They lie stretched out, so still that something isn’t as it ought to be. Such sunkenness, such stillness! My God, is death not also so sunken, so still? Wait, wait: Death and gilgul mehilos, someone once, long ago, asked me to tell him the secret, how to make gilgul mehilos easier. Who? Let me remember…
H. Leivick, Tog, 18 January, 1958
Leivick in Vitim in 1912, about the time he would have been hacking a grave into the Siberian frost…more on this to come.
A long poem consisting of 16 8-line cantos from 1945’s I Was Not in Treblinka.
The priestly blessing, traditionally given by Cohens. Leivick was one, and wrote extensively about his initial eagerness to give the blessing and about the desire ending rather suddenly and provoking the burning of his first poems — in Hebrew, no less. I’ve written a bit about it before.
A process by which those not buried in Israel will, at the time of the Messiah’s arrival, roll there through underground tunnels for resurrection.
The resurrection of the dead at the end of the world with the coming of the Messiah.