On Lies, Truth, Health and Illness in Hebrew Poetry

Introduction

An article published in March 2020 in an Israeli newspaper offers insights to parents wondering what to tell children who ask anxious questions about the pandemic. One of the experts consulted, Michal Daliot, warns against telling too much of the truth to young children. “There is no need to tell them all the truth, and there is no reason to give them information which is not necessary to them.”[1] Advice offered on the CDC website in the United States says in essence the same thing, but from a somewhat different perspective: “Provide information that is truthful and appropriate for the age and developmental level of the child; ” it suggests.[2] Both of these examples, and countless others in every language and on every platform, speak to an often-overlooked question in the COVID crisis: is Truth one of the pandemic’s victims?

“Like so many, I have been disturbed by the challenges to truth that have enveloped American life…”

Like so many, I have been disturbed by the challenges to truth that have enveloped American life, exaggerated beyond the usual modest distortions that characterize government and international diplomacy, advertising, or representations of institutional behavior. The moral bar in the United States has definitely been lowered, and that situation has influenced us in almost every aspect of our (now, much reduced) daily activities, even when it comes to Jewish life. But it is not the moral or ethical climate that I wish to analyze in these remarks, but rather the part played by the nature of language and the character of communication in a complicated modernity. Let us consider the ways in which language helps pave the way for an occasional necessary departure from telling the absolute truth.  

Legitimate Impediments to Truth Telling

There are, of course, situations where we protect the innocent from bad news or from the likelihood that they will suffer from too direct a statement of truth; or, even from circumstances where we have a legitimate reason to conceal our purposes as we try to mask what reality lies behind appearance. We certainly do not tell a three-year-old about the fragility of most adult relationships, and we find a way to be indirect with a cancer patient whose prognosis is not very good. Most of our attention in this short essay will be occupied by what I will call ‘linguistic enablements,’ qualities of language that are inherent in its very nature, as it constantly changes and accrues metaphoric association and irony, double meaning and rich suggestiveness. Activities as diverse as poetry, crossword puzzles and translation all bring these instances to the fore, since they all demonstrate aspects of language which go beyond the simple transmission of information. It is in moments of extreme tension, where society is stretched sometimes to breaking point, that the role of language in imparting and concealing the truth is highlighted. Shakespeare (Hamlet Act 2 Scene 1) cleverly placed a deep truth in the mouth of his arch buffoonish truth teller, Polonius, who proclaims to Reynaldo whom he dispatches to check up on Horatio – “Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth… By indirection to find direction out.”

Emily Dickinson has summarized beautifully the function of poetry for the business of truth telling: 

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise. 
As Lightning to the Children eased 
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind. [3]

So much for examples from the Anglo-American tradition. In Hebrew, too, there are many significant examples of “indirection”. One should avoid the temptation to suggest that Hebrew is uniquely suited to word play, since all languages have one or another version of ludic enhancement. But when it comes to the “New-Old Tongue”, there are some particularly interesting contours to the questions of half-truths, incomplete truths, or just plain lies. 

The Beginning of Nuance

One of the earliest modern examples of a related ambiguity emerged at what some call the eve of the modern Hebrew literary revolution in the Sabbath homilies of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), the enigmatic leader of the tiny Ukrainian community who preached rich notions to what must have been a rain-soaked shivering congregation on Saturday mornings. It is an irony that cannot be overlooked that in the Fall of 2020 Israeli society is gripped by the question of whether thousands of worshippers should be allowed to travel to Uman in the Ukraine to mark the New Year at Rabbi Nachman’s grave, incurring perhaps grave risk of infection in the process. At the peak of the greatest medical crisis of a generation, Rabbi Nachman has re-emerged as a central protagonist.

In this homily, Nachman draws an analogy between truth-telling in our daily situations and the idea of health and healing. His “method” (if one may call it that) was partly to utilize the midrashic tradition and partly to employ a straightforward authoritarian stance. He both suggests how things might be, and tells you how they should be: 

And with regard to the stories of the true Tsaddik. For example: A doctor might become ill and have to give himself over to the care of “the greater doctor.” The ill doctor wants that (greater) doctor to prescribe what he knows, in order to take out a tooth or to perform surgery, but the great doctor knows precious remedies that ought to be given. Similarly it may happen that a person comes to the scholar, to the Tsaddik of the generation, who is a physician of the soul, and he may wish that the Tzaddik give him prescriptions and other remedies, according to all that he knows; but the truth of the matter is that the Tsaddik has more direct means of cure. And sometimes it is necessary to give a certain drug to someone who is ill which, if given all by itself and as it actually is [in unalloyed form] the sick person will undoubtedly die, and in such case the potion has to be mixed with other elements. And indeed there are people to whom it is necessary not to reveal the inner truths of the Torah because Torah is meant to be (only) a cure…as it is written )Babylonian Talmud Yoma 72b): For the Torah has two strengths: (it has) the potion of life and the potion of death…that is why the Torah must be clothed in stories that capture the surface, so that one can eventually get to the Torah that actually exists. For the Torah itself is actually attired in Sippure Ma’asiyot (tales and inventions)  because Torah cannot be transmitted as it really is. 

This passage is one of the homilies that introduces Nachman’s people to his stories, which are the best known among his writings to us in the West. His homily draws on the notion that Torah was healing, doctors healed, doctors had to shield people from terrible truths, and Torah had to shield from awesome truth. Like with others, the solution to the complexity of religious truth was both to simplify and obscure at the same time.[4]

Some of the most sophisticated discussion of the equivocal nature of language has been contributed by Haim Nachman Bialik – poet, essayist, editor and to many the ‘father’ of modern Hebrew poetry. He was especially interested in the difference between prose and poetry, the way in which words create reality, and how translation functions in the transmission of meaning. He wrote several essays of linguistic significance just as the Hebrew language was occupying a place in the national revival. By 1915 when he wrote his essay “The Hidden and Revealed in Language”, there was a significant “stable” of Hebrew writers, and enough journals (if not enough readers) to make significant some of the issues he raises in the essay. Bialik argued that language had the power to create barriers to simple meaning, and he dealt in a surprisingly cosmopolitan way with the fragility of poetry as it combines with a particular richness for achieving deep hermeneutic exploration. Through all of this one senses his attention to the nuanced way in which translation illuminates our linguistic activity. He understood that language unfolds in organic ways over which no system is adequate to have control. “For it is clear that language with all of its associations does not introduce us at all into the inner area, the essence of things, but that, on the contrary, language itself stands as a barrier before them.” Bialik continues to argue that language as such does not get to the essence of things being described, but that poetry may come the closest. At the same time, poetry creates a precarious walkway over an abyss that can swallow us in our effort to get meaning. 

“Is it any wonder that although we have the trust and confidence when we speak, as if we are actually transmitting our true thought or feelings along calm waters over an iron bridge, we don’t imagine how fragile that bridge really is, and how deep and dark are the depths below from which we are saved only by miracle… It is clear that language with all of its manifestation never really takes is into the internal meaning of things. But to the contrary, it actually divides between the words and the things itself.” 

Truth and Lies in Hebrew Poetry 

The Hebrew poets Tet Carmi (who taught for many years at HUC in Jerusalem) and Malka Shaked have written boldly about the “lie” in poetry. First Carmi:

Everyone is a poet
Thinking one thing
And saying another
Saying one thing
And thinking.

“Everyone is a poet
Thinking one thing
And saying another
Saying one thing
And thinking.”

Malka Shaked’s affirmation of the same poetic licentiousness is contained in these brief partial verses: 

Even the lie in a poem which lies in wait
is tangled and tied up
with the truth
As if connected 
Like the simple ram
Who sought
To escape from
The horns of the altar
But got caught up 
By his horns
In the brambles.

In Carmi’s image, the most prosaic among us become poets when a distance is created between what we say and what we think. And in Shaked’s Genesis-infused image, lies and truths are tangled and tied up like a ram entwined in the brambles.  

The Experience of Editing and Avoiding Complete Truth

In one of his poems Yehudah Amichai describes the act of filtering from the Hebrew Bible, and then tells of an encounter that resonates with particular acuity this year: 

I have filtered from the Book of Esther
Its vulgar joy and from Jeremiah
The howling pain in his bowels. And from 
The Song of Songs the endless pursuit o
After love and from Genesis
Its dreams and Cain and from Ecclesiastes
Its despair, and from Job… well, Job.
And I pasted together a new Bible from the remainder. 
I live all censored and pasted up and with borders, and I am happy.

…

A certain woman (I met) in our street last night asked me about the welfare of another woman
Who had already died before her time or before anyone’s time for that matter
But out of great fatigue, I answered her:
She’s quite well, she’s quite well. 

In the original Hebrew, the woman asks after the welfare of the mutual acquaintance by asking about her shalom. In Hebrew, this is the way on asks about one’s welfare. “How is your shalom” so that the answer is, in some literal sense, not an editing of the truth, but an editing invited by the way the language is used. 

Yona Wallach (1944-1985) was a revolutionary poet whose poetry was informed by her own post-modern thinking, and by her rejection of contemporary norms. This section of a longer poem is translated according to the work achieved by Tsafrirah Lidofsky Cohen in her analysis of Wallach as meeting ground of psycho-analysis, linguistics, postmodern understandings and literary history.[5] I may tamper (with acknowledgement) with some of the translation for purposes of making my own point—which, indeed, is part of what the Wallach poem is about in the first place:

The Masks that Come Down

The masks that come off the face and fall down
Not the coming up ones those are seemingly a name for forging
These are the eternal masks of the living theater
The golden ones the good looking and abstract the rich
That those in black and white that divide the world
Those rich ones that stand to guard the expression
Those masks that guard from evil doer and evil spirit
Don’t leave me naked full of shame
The Book of Genesis is a positive story
Which is associated with its negative interpretation
Oral legends are rendered a scientific material
But the ideational milieu is the main thing
The material is rendered as dead while interpretation breathes as if it is living
(the poem continues for over 150 lines.)

In simple terms, and in terms that I like to teach my students in the garb of a simple idea (even if difficult to “swallow”)—that we live in masks, that we reveal only parts of our selves, that the parts of ourselves that are revealed serve particular functions, that once a text has its canonical rendering and understanding it may be frozen into simple ideas, and this rigidity is created by the very commentary tradition that actually keeps the primary text alive. The poem asks a deep  question that has occupied us in this paper: is the poem a way to get to the truth behind the lie; is it a way of editing out the unsavory, or a way of preserving the unsavory? 

These days of sickness and anxiety, this era of euphemism and blurred language, these times when we are forced to consider which images to employ and which filters to apply, these are days in which poetry can act as a conduit for nuanced meaning. We end with a poem penned in recent weeks by Jerusalem poet Gil’ad Meiri and translated here for the first time:

Time in the Days of Corona 

We are in lockdown, King 
Corona XIX, 
Rules the streets
With an invisible pitchfork.
Tucked up at home, fixed timings
Become dissolved
Time
Solid
Linear
Is losing minerals, 
Melting, 
Slowly reverting to its liquid state.
By order of the crown, routine
Has been locked up in the tower 
And we are returning to a certain time, 
To circular time, simply
When time was time- 
A sense 

In Rabbi Nachman’s Uman, in Bialik’s Odessa, in Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, in William Shakespeare’s Stratford – the poet strives to reveal and conceal with nuance. Now as in all times, we return to circular time.

[1] https://www.israelhayom.co.il/article/739011

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/talking-with-children.html

[3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56824/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-1263

[4] See Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), and in contrast see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 

[5] See Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen, “Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman” – The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003), especially p.220.