interesting poem

[cellio]

Last week in class the rabbi distributed a poem by Yehudah Amichai that I like:

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

-- Yehuda Amichai

I don't see the conflict with Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) that Amichai does. It says "a season for every purpose"; it doesn't say only one per, in either direction. (The rabbi chuckled when I pointed that out.)

I thought I would have more to say about this text, but I'm having trouble articulating it. Oh well; I still wanted to share (and record for myself) the poem.

Comments

[cellio]

The thing in the Hebrew that jumped out at me is that for "man" he uses "adam", not "ish".

[murphstein.livejournal.com]

Looking at the English, I can't guess. Do you have any idea? Is he trying to invoke earthiness or a Biblical feel, or perhaps Adam Kadmon?

It's a realy nice poem. Thanks for sharing it.

[cellio]

I have no knowledge of what he intended, but I can talk about what that choice might mean to me. :-)

I think "adam" might be more universal -- "a person" than "ish", which is specifically masculine. Yes, both are linguistically masculine; Hebrew has no gender-neutral common nouns. But think back to the first creation story; God creates a "he-she", a singular being that is both male and female. That's Adam, who is later split into two beings, ish and isha. The first use of "ish" is when Adam refers to himself in naming Chava an ishah.

This isn't perfect, of course; the torah continues to refer to the man as Adam after the seperation. But maybe "adam" means "all people" or "any person" more than "ish" does? Certainly the sentiments expressed in the poem are not limited to men.

[murphstein.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, the universality of Adam Kadmon, which, as a modern American woman, I always *assume* includes women... (silly me).