Drunk with Words
I am into my third week of teaching the poets of Medieval Spain and I feel their words, the contours of their verses seeping into me.
I first began teaching these poets in 2004 to a special group of students at UPENN- part of the school of continuing education- a night school for smart dropouts and people looking to explore areas they never were able to—a “recovering” lawyer—a 55 year old painter who never finished college- a 23 year old poet/misfit with a vulnerable soul, a sweet smile and a sharp analytical eye—these are the students that stand out in my memory but there were a few more. The poetry was so deep and vast that all I could do back then was use it as a window onto the complex and rich historical context of convivencia in medieval Iberia. What can these poems of wine, and love and war and heartbreak both divine and human tell us about the multi-cultural world of al-Andalus/Sefarad?
I re-engaged these poets shortly before beginning my time at YU through Peter Cole’s marvelous translations in his “The Dream of the Poem”. He came to speak at Brandeis and it felt like I was meeting a rock star! His book was really an “event” for me- another opportunity to fall in love with language and to sense the prophetic energy of poetry in its power to make the old, locked-up sacred texts come alive and speak anew.
My first semester at YU I taught the medieval poets in a small seminar on Jewish culture in Medieval Spain- and that is when I began in earnest my engagement with the poems and poets beyond their “historical value”. The students were very bright but were ill equipped to think about poetry. These were “gemarah kops!”- bright young men trained in the creative analysis of the legal portions of the Talmud. They wanted to harmonize (“meyashev”) the poets incongruities—I wanted them to relish in those fissures. It was a good experience for all. One of my students was really taken with the biography and the poetry of Shmuel HaNagid, he wrote a long essay on one of the poems and decided to pursue it further in his paper. He contacted Peter Cole with questions and Cole was gracious and helpful.
Each time I teach this course I feel like I am uncovering a lost continent for myself and the students- At YU they find kindred souls—models and ideals that at once feel modern and very distant. I am all for the search for models—as long as we are clear that we are “using” history.
In my reading and my teaching I never forget that these poems are a product of their time and place, but over the past few years I have been able to let the context sink back into the foreground and allow the words to enchant me- to lead me down a path all their own.
Shacharticha—I have searched for you—the poets inhabit the world of the young lovers, slipping out before dawn to find each other- mostly they only find heartbreak, abandoned encampments, empty gardens with only a scent of memory of the wine-sweet kisses. We go back and forth between the erotic, the earthly, the divine and transcendent. Between the personal and the national. Each current informs the other. One of the great challenges in teaching this material lies in its fundamental complexity. The poems themselves are written in a lucid manner- the language is clear. The difficulty lies in the complex reality of the world that both informs and is informed by the poetry. It is a tightly wound system where each element impinges, inspires and shapes the other.
This semester I have the distinct pleasure of teaching the same course at Stern College for Women in the morning, and then the same material to my students at Yeshiva College. The repetition is edifying- it strengthens my hold on the poems, it softens my eyes to their intricacy and their lucid, piercing simplicity. The same poems “play” differently in both classrooms for a variety of reasons. Selfishly I enjoy seeing the way the same lines perplex and delight in such different ways.
I prepare by intoxicating myself with the material- I read and re-read the poems, in Hebrew, in Cole’s translation, I look at his fantastically erudite and useful notes. And I return to the poems—I jot down some notes, make a loose plan of the poems I want to focus on and the order I want to look at them. And I just hope the energy- the dynamic cycle of reading, of soaking up the words and resonances- holds. That I can keep it from spilling out (of my ears??!). Once I enter the class, it doesn’t matter because the students questions –the lacunae in their knowledge that I thought I already addressed- but obviously did not!; their genuine surprise over a detail they did not notice; or their consternation or confusion over the strangeness of the poems- they are thankfully often strange and foreign!— and their energy guide the readings. But I need the immersion so that I can be open to them.
In an attempt to let the words of the poets come alive for my students I have been showing clips of some Israeli performers interpreting the verses of the medieval poets. Ibn Gabirol transformed by Berry Sakharov’s punk middle-eastern fusion, or Moshe Ibn Ezra joyously performed by the extravagant “Israeli Andalusian Orchestra” featuring R’ Haim Lok and Meir Banai and my new favorite, Etti Ankari who has so deeply imbibed R’ Yehuda Halevi’s words that her songs sound timeless- ancient, and yet current. Sometimes they feel like the soundtrack of a dream.
In an interview she recalls how at first she just sat in front of the poems, not able to make sense of them. She says that they were “closed off to me (stumim) until I sat and I sat with them. . . . I realized that the poems did not open up- I became open to them.”
I want my students to get that, to hear the message of the sacred text- of sacred reading- where the reader is before the text, open, searching and vulnerable. (without the beeps and ticks of our digital cage)
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(Drops
of rain on a dry summer day in the Alhambra!, gardens like this would
be the ideal setting for reciting and enjoying these poems.)
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Some links to the modern rediscovery of the Hebrew Poets of Al-Andalus:
Here Etti Ankri shares an insight into how she finally began to really understand the poems of Yehuda halevi and then she sings one of his highly charged divine love songs—
Yedidi Halo Shachachta-
My Beloved, have you forgotten
How you used to sleep between my breasts. . .
Berry Sakharov and his heavy hitting orchestra!! Play In Gabirol
Here R’ Haim Lok plays with Sakharov’s group singing Ibn Gabirol’s awesome “Shachar Avakeshcha” “At Dawn I have sought you out” (the sound quality is off but the energy is right ON)
Israeli Andalusian Orchestra playing Moshe Ibn Ezra’s popular “El Nora Alila”
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