In 2009, With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry Footnote 1 broke a long-standing, unspoken contract with English readers of Hebrew verse. This contract assured readers that, while they could expect to encounter individual expressions of loss or alienation (the province, after all, of the poetic), when it came to matters of collective concern, nationalistic expressions of support and solidarity for Israel were de rigueur. In gathering together a set of poems featuring forty-two dissenting voices (some well known, others less so), Iron Pen exposed readers to the divisive outrage occasioned by the chronic violence defining the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In addition to poems of grief and fury, the editors made a special effort to include works that deploy what they call a “poetics of empathy,” by seeking to make vivid the sufferings of those Palestinian Others whose pain has been largely obscured or rendered invisible.Footnote 2 This objective informs Dahlia Ravikovitch's “The Story of the Arab Who Died in the Fire”—a powerfully horrific witnessing of an immolation. It is also at work in those poems seeking to recover specific persons from the gutters of history by inscribing their names—“Nir Ismail,” “Ali Joarish,” and “Hilmi Shusha”—real victims who are bleakly, painfully commemorated. The impulse is admirable. But at least one reviewer found the volume lacking, complaining that it reduces the idea of political verse to little more than a rant, offering little insight into the complexities riddling the now decades-old “situation.”Footnote 3 Leaving aside for a moment the particular strengths or shortcomings of the volume, we should note that the focus on empathy is compelling to those of us interested in thinking about poetry and ethics, and, more pointedly, about what poetry can do when it comes to understanding not only how we might engage an Other—a presence that is wholly external to and distinct from the self—but also why we might wish to do so, even as such an engagement might be risky and demanding.
Lately, empathy has garnered a fair amount of attention—particularly among sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists tracking its steady decline. This worrisome turn has been taken up by those of us in the humanities who have seized on other studies showing that the study of literature and history can reverse the trend by asking readers to identify with and entertain perspectives other than their own. While fiction has received most of the attention, poetry, with its own proclivity for bearing witness to the experiences of others, has been similarly celebrated. But not everyone is so sure of empathy's virtues. Paul Bloom, for example, lodges a thoughtful yet stinging “case against empathy,” pointing out that this act of feeling into the lives of others “has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow minded, and innumerate.”Footnote 4 Turning back to some of the narratives and portraits in the pages of Iron Pen, we see that Bloom's position seems especially relevant. Like it or not, the Israeli poets gathered there (almost all of them Jewish) are linked to the ruling power structure, and many of their efforts to represent, or “feel into,” the lives of Palestinian Others seem well meaning but, finally, paternalistic. After all, how can anyone know what another person feels as they are being burned alive? How can anyone know at what point reason abandons the body and “all the bonds of family” are broken (as Ravikovitch's poem asks us to imagine)?
Such questions can be preemptive, giving way to a worrisome silence as we fumble for the right, or at least a more effective, response. But even as Iron Pen poses hard questions about affect, ethics, politics, and poetry, it also offers a compelling response in the form of Admiel Kosman's “Poem for Mohammed.” Or, as I would put it, “Poem to Mohammed”—for the poem is pointedly dialogic. Unlike some Israeli protest poetry that seeks to represent the grief and despair of the Palestinian Other, Kosman gives us a speaker who is at once sincere and obtuse, thus dramatizing just how hard it can be to establish a relationship with an Other. From the outset, the poet works to shatter the hermetic lyric space, as his speaker appeals to Mohammed, the subject of his dialogic effort: “listen / listen to me.” Indeed, the move invites us to consider the poem in light of a much larger debate about the status of the lyric—among the most vexed genres of contemporary verse. Despite its complex lineage, we tend to think of the lyric in narrow, monologic terms as a refuge from ordinary social demands, and as a strategy for constructing a coherent, autonomous self. As Helen Vendler declares, lyric is “the genre that directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech.”Footnote 5
Susan Stewart counters this narrative, arguing that “the history of lyric is the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of the imagination.”Footnote 6 Some chapters in this alternative history are more complex than others. Consider, for example, the challenge mounted by the poet Paul Celan, whose excruciatingly dense lines include a virtual thicket of pronouns, as the “I,” “you,” and “we” swirl around each other in a “shadowy-uncertain and constantly changing way.”Footnote 7 Such tangles are central to Celan's project. In his famously difficult and evocative ars poetica known as “The Meridian,” Celan states that instead of thinking about poetry as a means of crafting a self (the typical lyric objective), he understands it as a form for seeking out the Other: “A hope of poems has always been in just this way to speak in the cause of the Other—perhaps even a meeting with this ‘wholly Other’ … and a not all that distant, a quite near other becomes thinkable again… . The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other.”Footnote 8 Urgent, yet filled with halting detours, Celan's address reflects both his great longing for the Other's presence, and his profound uncertainty that such an encounter is within reach.
Celan's visionary commitment to shrugging off the lyric pretense of the self speaking only to oneself provides a powerful context for appreciating Kosman's own demand that the You be present. The speaker of “Poem for Mohammed” appeals to the Other who is the subject of his dialogic address: “listen / listen to me.” But unlike Celan's clotted, fractured lines (a quality that becomes more prominent over time), Kosman's work is more pointed and direct. In part this may be a matter of history: although Kosman's speakers certainly know trauma, they are not without hope. It is also, however, a matter of poetic orientation. Celan is called to witness: he is the poet survivor who lives to tell the story. Kosman is called to teach: he is the poet rebbe who patiently, bravely, instructs his reader about the obstacles that must be overcome and the risks that must be taken if one is truly to encounter the Other, that person who is wholly apart from the self. As we will see, his poems continually press upon us how we can never pretend to know the Other, much less empathize with him/her, since that kind of relational knowing can only come with taking in the Other's response. Requisite to such a response is a genuine willingness on the part of the self, the speaker who initiates the dialogic process, to forgo prior versions of identity in the face of the Other. The process can be a harrowing one, as “Poem for Mohammed” makes clear. The poem's title alone is disruptive. For to even name the Other is immediately an act of recognition; in this particular instance, the name is both a commonplace one and one that invokes the sacred.
Allusion is a standard feature of much Hebrew verse, and Kosman's work is no exception. But unlike such luminaries as Yehuda Amichai or Natan Zach, who routinely invoke the Bible to challenge the boundary between the secular and the sacred,Footnote 9 Kosman works to different ends. Even as he constantly gestures towards the biblical and the liturgical, he rarely cites whole lines or verses. Instead, Bible and prayer compose a richly communicative frame for the hard truths and recognitions that he seeks to make available. This sort of light touch informs the speaker's opening address to the slumbering “you”: “Mohammed, oh Mohammed, are you still awake?” The scene whispers of the Song of Songs, a text that, as we will see, figures large for Kosman. In this instance, it brings to mind the well-known moment in chapter 5 of that poem, when the lover tries to awaken the beloved. For here the Edenic reciprocity, characteristic of so much of the biblical poem, is violently interrupted by the “watchmen” of the city who viciously attack the beloved as she searches for her love. In a poignant account of this episode, Alicia Ostriker suggests that it be read as a call to justice—a moment when fantasy gives way to the brutalities of social reality.Footnote 10 The gloss speaks powerfully to Kosman's own effort, since Mohammed's world is profoundly lacking in reciprocity as well as justice.
The poem opens with the speaker—a solitary sentry standing guard as “the wind blows / over the curled up village.” The dark undertones lapping at the edges of this sleepy nocturnal scene become more pronounced upon recognizing that in Hebrew mekhurbal (translated here somewhat romantically as “curled up”) can also mean “well covered.” This alternative rendering brings with it the possibility of reading this unspecified village as one of the many demolished Arab townships dotting the Israeli countryside that have since been built over. In this unsettled and unsettling landscape, the speaker, alone in the still hours of his watch, calls out: “Mohammed, oh Mohammed, are you still awake?” The absence of response, the requisite expression of the engaged presence, triggers an identity crisis, which finds the unspecified speaker frantically casting about for a coherent sense of self:
These stuttering lines make for a complicated portrait, as Kosman's penchant for irony (even sarcasm) comes into play. On the one hand, they can be read as part of a strident send-up of a certain strain of Israeli vulgarity, often typified by a belligerent insistence on the sanctity of such identity categories as “us” versus “them.” On the other hand, the same lines can be read as one expression of the poet's fierce commitment to a model of identity—individual as well as collective—that depends on dynamically interacting with a You. For to meet an Other, in hopes of establishing an I-Thou relationship, means risking losing the trappings of the self, and submitting to a state of profound disaggregation. Again, Song of Songs is hauntingly relevant, as we recall the powerful allegorical tradition linked to the poem: it has been read by the rabbis as a love story between God and Israel, while Christian commentators understand the relationship as between Jesus and the Church. Regardless of the particular associations, the implications are breathtaking. This Mohammed, who may occupy the place of either lover or beloved, has been elevated to sacred status. But Kosman is not interested in merely shocking his readers with simple associative inversions or reversals. Rather, he seeks to have us understand, as fully as possible, the dark implications of a world in which the Other is all but absent. In the world of Song of Songs, the lovers thrive (even if only for a short while) in a lush sanctuary of reciprocity and mutual recognition, as both partners take turns trying to “rouse” one another—in the usual sense as well as in the sexual one. The world of “Mohammed,” however, is pointedly antithetical to these paradisiacal glimpses. In Kosman's poem the prospect of an animate Other is at once desirable and fearsome. After tentatively addressing the Other—“Oh Mohammed, are you still awake?”—the speaker cautions Mohammed against waking “anyone up” and betraying the speaker by reporting his psychic break. In both instances, Kosman uses the verb ʾaʿorer (meaning to awaken and to arouse), urging us to think about his poem as the dark negative of the reciprocal I-Thou relationship depicted in the biblical song. But he does not leave it there. The final stanzas take a near-apocalyptic turn as the speaker frets:
Although the English word here is again translated as “awaken,” in the Hebrew original the speaker actually reaches for a different verb in this final address to the slumbering Other, takeeẓ (from the verb lehakiẓ). While it clearly means “awaken,” the word also appears in such prophetic texts as the books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, where, for example, God promises that Babylon, Israel's archenemy, will die in a drunken stupor—as they will “sleep an endless sleep. / Never to awake” (Jeremiah 51:39). This context makes the poem's final image more readable and more terrifying. Evoking perhaps a scene like Ezekiel's account of the Valley of the Dry Bones, the poem leaves its readers in a hard, desperate place. For this resurrection, this awakening of those who once lived in one of the numerous ruined Arab villages haunting the landscape, which Kosman calls “yesterday's sand,” will have apocalyptic consequences. For once confronted with the Other, the speaker's already fragile sense of self will implode: “everything inside / will crumble.” Old identity categories such as “soldier,” “policeman,” and “guard,” which depend on a hierarchal model of relation, will be rendered obsolete—and new, as yet unnamed, modes of being will have to be discovered. After all, “arising” evokes “uprising,” the English translation for the Arabic term intifada.
Introducing Admiel Kosman: “From the Bible, till Buber, Including Jesus”
“Poem for Mohammed,” a lyric effort to interrupt a dominant historical narrative, serves as a powerful introduction to Admiel Kosman's art and vision. Hardly a singular achievement, the poem should be understood as part of a finely conceived project devoted to dramatizing a process of self-making, grounded in the transformational ideologies of the great philosopher Martin Buber. In this way, Kosman importantly contributes not only to the world of Jewish/Hebrew/Israeli letters, but also to the world of poetry at large. While the aesthetic implications of Buber's thought have certainly been noted, I do not believe anyone has ever plumbed them so thoughtfully or thoroughly as Kosman has.Footnote 12 Before detailing some of the ways in which Kosman's poetics are informed and shaped by Buber's thought, especially as worked out in I and Thou, a few words about the poet's background will first deepen our understanding of his project.
Well known to many readers of contemporary Hebrew verse, Admiel Kosman is the author of twelve books of poetry and six scholarly volumes on midrash, gender, and sexuality; the winner of several major prizes in Israeli letters (including the Bernstein Prize, the Brenner Prize, and the Prime Minister's Prize); and a regular contributor to Haaretz, Israel's leading left-leaning newspaper. Known as a founding member of Mashiv Ha-ruaḥ, a poetry collective constellated around the idea of “new” religious verse, Kosman is widely recognized as a major figure on the Israeli literary scene. But Kosman has not garnered much in the way of attention from an English-speaking audience, since relatively little of his work was available in translation—that is, until 2011, when, with the publication of Approaching You in English, a representative gathering of poems (written mostly between 1998 and 2003) became available to a whole new readership that may be differently attuned to his concerns and insights.Footnote 13 In the foreword, Lisa Katz, one of the volume's two translators, cites extensively from a wonderfully generous interview conducted in 2010 by Amir Friemann.Footnote 14 The exchange opens with the question: “Who are you?” To which Kosman responds, “This might sound strange to you, but actually I see the course of my life as one of getting liberated from definitions of identity.” Kosman's biography bears witness to a restlessness arising from a courageous resistance to fixed categories of belonging. Born to a traditional, Zionist family, Kosman grew up attending various yeshivot. After serving in the Israeli army (in a special unit for observant soldiers), he studied ceramics, painting, and graphic design at Bezalel, Israel's prestigious art academy—a somewhat daring choice for a promising yeshiva bokher. But instead of completing his degree in design, Kosman turned to academic pursuits, and eventually became a professor of talmudic studies, receiving his PhD from Bar-Ilan (an avowedly religious institution), and then joining its faculty, where he taught Talmud until 2003. For the last fourteen years, he has lived in Berlin, teaching Jewish studies at Potsdam University, in addition to serving as the academic director of the Abraham Geiger Reform Rabbinical Seminary. As this narrative suggests, Kosman is a restive soul, driven perhaps by an ongoing desire to know the Other—a desire that makes for poems that cannot simply nor easily be described as “religious,” since this desire can well lead to encounters that might be construed as transgressive. Indeed, this driving desire to encounter the Other, with all the risks such meetings entail, emerges as a prominent concern in his writings. After naming some of the categories from which he seeks release, including those of “Jew, Man, Israeli,” Kosman explains that shedding categories is an ideological cornerstone: “My understanding of what a Jew is … I think that this idea passes through, like a thread from the Bible till Buber, including Jesus, that to be Jewish is a kind of swimming against the general current, against the desire to be … in the center in order to achieve more. The movement is always a swimming against the current in the sense of giving in, of not putting ourselves at the center, of seeing the Other as a subject.”Footnote 15
The Bible, Buber, and Jesus? This evocative—and perhaps provocative—trajectory speaks to Kosman's expansive imagination as well as to his propensity for the outposts of Jewish thought.Footnote 16 Buber, in particular, is a seminal figure for Kosman, who is a serious student of his thought. Indeed, the latest Hebrew translation of Buber's seminal text, I and Thou, opens with a long meditation by Kosman detailing what “I-Thou” means, spiritually as well as psychically.Footnote 17 As Kosman understands it, much of our existence is spent in what he calls “the kingdom of the self”—a region presided over by the ego. But if one is genuinely receptive to an Other, so much so that one is willing to sacrifice the I as an autonomous entity, then it is possible for an “inner miracle” to occur. This “miracle” is neither spectacularly obvious, nor is it long lasting; rather it is a fleeting shift in awareness as the “egocentric center” gives way—ever so slightly—making room in one's “inner world to sense the other.” Such is one of the primary aims animating Kosman's own project—as in poem after poem, working within the lyric frame, Kosman shows just how hard it is for the I-It relation to become one of I-Thou.
Furthermore, Kosman is drawn particularly to Buber's curious status as one who straddles the boundary between “inside” and “outside,” perhaps because it is a position that he himself shares. Writing about Kosman's 1998 collection We Have Reached God, the poet Hava Pinhas-Cohen points out Kosman's singular capacity to purposefully make his readers uncomfortable by confronting them with hard truths about God's darker nature. His poems often probe the obstacles we inevitably face when seeking intimacy with a divine Other who demands much in exchange. These difficult truths are largely overlooked in the world of traditional Judaism, a world Kosman knows well.Footnote 18 This deep impatience with religious niceties informs Kosman's affinity for Buber, whom he perceives as an Other “within” Judaism. Like Buber, Kosman is interested in challenging long-standing identity positions and in naming those sites of resistance shoring up such perspectives.
To be sure, Buber's work did not always garner extensive scholarly interest in the Jewish world; during the last decade or so, the tide has turned and a number of studies devoted to placing this theologian-philosopher in a range of conceptual contexts have appeared.Footnote 19 Indeed, 2015—the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of his death—provided an occasion to mount all kinds of events dedicated to revisiting and reclaiming this thinker as a distinctively and decidedly Jewish thinker. Yet in contrast to Emmanuel Levinas (who is arguably indebted to Buber) or Franz Rosenzweig, the full poetic potential of Buber's vision is only beginning to be realized. This oversight may be a response to Buber's propensity for offering dense abstractions without the benefit of specific proof texts. More interestingly, his genuine receptivity to truths beyond those that a narrowly construed account of Jewishness offers makes it somewhat difficult to fix or contain his thinking; indeed, his work sets a precedent for the kind of interfaith exchange that may set some on edge. According to Buber, entering into that state of being known as “I-Thou” requires that one not only renounce preexisting versions of the self, but also engage the Other fully, regardless of the risk to all prior categories of belonging—including such binding designations as those of religion or nationality. As it turns out, poetry can serve this dialogic function. Buber understands poetry as a performative mode, explaining that “the poem is spokeness to the Thou, wherever this partner might be.”Footnote 20 The line belongs to a remarkable essay, “Distance and Relation,” written in the turbulent years following the founding of the State of Israel, in which Buber intuitively argues for distance as requisite to functional relations with the You. Distance enables potential dialogue partners to recognize the differences that set them apart, effectively creating a space for each to recognize the Other as a genuine Other, and not merely as a version of the self. For Buber, “between” is the image of redemption, rather than “unity”; in dialogue, partners do not seek to eliminate either the distance or the difference between them, but rather seek to traverse these through speech—an act that Buber often figures as a “bridge.” As Buber's disciple, Kosman makes his poems the site of discursive bridge building, but he recognizes just how risky this endeavor can be, explaining: “Getting to know the Other, the bridge that you build to the Other—is always in some way to be liberated from the place where you have been before. In meeting with the Other, you leave something of your identity behind, on the other side of the bridge.”Footnote 21
The cost of encountering the Other is made especially vivid in “Poem for Mohammed,” where we encounter a speaker whose dialogic efforts fail in the face of a silent addressee, and who is then reduced to a stuttering monologue. It is a haunting rendering of Buber's claim that “language is about communication, language never existed before address, it could become monologue only after dialogue broke off or broke down.”Footnote 22 In this way, Kosman contests the long-standing tradition that represents the Arab Other as a static presence, even as he acknowledges the potential cost of dismantling such a narrative that underwrites the stable Jewish/Israeli self. But the poet does not just leave it here. As Buber repeatedly stresses, to be in a genuinely reciprocal exchange means engaging in a fluid process without expecting to discover a fixed identity position. And so Kosman approaches the project from different directions—by shifting positions, and by trying out different frames of address, so that the categories of “self” and “Other” remain mobile, never fossilized or predictable. As we have seen in “Poem for Mohammed,” the “You” is the Arab/Other. But when we now turn to another poem, entitled “I Try to Wake You in the Dark,” we encounter an “I” belonging to an Arab youth longing for an Other so that he can realize himself through dialogic exchange.
“I Called Him, but He Gave Me No Answer”: The Dialogic Imperative
Throughout Kosman's poetry, the Song of Songs sounds a constant refrain. Its allure merits closer consideration. As already noted, the biblical poem is often celebrated as an idyllic respite from the hierarchal world of the Hebrew Bible. A densely woven sequence of lyrical exchanges between lovers whose desire is wholly shared and reciprocal, it offers a precious glimpse into a world where mutual love is a vital social bond. By way of poetry, we discover a world where being depends upon relation. Although Buber never specifically refers to the poem, he certainly recognizes love as the paradigmatic experience through which most of us come to know an Other as a “You.” He writes, “Love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its content or object; it is between I and You.”Footnote 23 Kosman is similarly interested in exploring the transformational dynamics of love; but perhaps even more evocative to him is the Song's status as itself an incarnation of Otherness—a textual outsider that challenges and transforms the doctrinal self, the normative condition. Indeed, the Song's sacred pedigree was subject to protracted debate, resolved only once Rabbi Akiva famously declared it to be the “Holy of Holies,” definitively worthy of being canonized as a biblical text. But as a cautionary note, Rabbi Akiva warned against singing the Song in “banquet halls” as if an “ordinary song”—an injunction that speaks to its slippery status as a text that blurs the boundaries between sacred and secular love, and points towards a sense of holiness as something other than religious.Footnote 24 The long-standing allegorical tradition of reading the poem as an account of the relationship between God and Israel may have preempted casual renditions of the poem as a secular love song, but it did little to restrict its appeal to “others.” Indeed, the poem provided a rich allegorical frame for Christian theologians, some of whom read the poem as a representation of Christ's love for the Church, while others understood it as an allegory detailing the marriage between God and the Virgin Mary. This last reading provides the groundwork for Arthur Green's provocative account of the Shekhinah, the feminized incarnation of the Jewish Godhead, which occupies an important place in contemporary theology as a Jewish (specifically kabbalistic) response to a Marian interpretation of the Song of Songs.Footnote 25 That is, the biblical poem provides a site for Jewish thought to expand its contours and remedy a lack by actively engaging with an Other. This is not to say that all of these various exegetical angles are conspicuously operative in Kosman's texts; but his exquisite attentiveness to the status of Others certainly invites readers to become similarly attuned to the powerful consequences of the presence of all kinds of Others, in the interest of complicating one's own sense of self, belonging, and affiliation.
In “I Try to Wake You in the Dark,” theological, rather than erotic, valences dominate. While it may well be that for Kosman, as for Buber, human love for the Other/You is inseparable from love for the divine Other/Thou, in this poem the “You” registers as divine—a reading that engages the traditionally allegorical reading of Song of Songs whereby God is cast as the lover and Israel as his beloved. Again, chapter 5 of the biblical text resonates, when the lover (God) seeks out the beloved, beseeching entry. She refuses, only to quickly regret her decision. When she opens the door to receive her lover, he is gone, leaving her to search wildly in the streets. This is the episode Jacob Soloveitchik takes up in his well-known essay “Kol dodi dofek” (My beloved knocks). Written in 1965, Soloveitchik's essay draws on images in the biblical narrative to affirm the divine inevitability of the Zionist cause.Footnote 26 His celebration of the establishment of Israel as a sacred occasion, rather than strictly as a secular achievement, has become a mainstay in the canons of religious Zionism. As a counterweight to this reading we should note how, as Ilana Pardes has demonstrated, the Song of Songs was corralled into service by secular Zionism, variously read as both a pastoral ode dedicated to celebrating the natural wonders of Palestine, as well as an allegorical tale binding Jewish nationalism to the beloved Bat-Zion (the daughter of Zion).Footnote 27
Placing Kosman's poem within this rich textual and discursive legacy makes the radical nature of his poetic rendering that much more acute. For his poem finds the speaker seeking to rouse a long slumbering divine Other, the You, who is identified as an exilic figure—a transplant perhaps “From Mecca or Medina, / Jerusalem or Hebron.” When it comes to hierarchizing sacred sites—those places where God might be said to dwell—Kosman levels the playing field. In true Buberian fashion, Kosman never renders God as an It—but only as a You—a true dialogic partner. Just as importantly, Kosman deploys the dialogic model to disrupt the usual trope of the Arab Other, by assigning this part to the “I” speaker, “a tender youth, in the dusk of madness” who has been “throwing words at You / expecting You. / For no reason.” Throwing words, instead of stones: Kosman provocatively suggests that this all-too-common act of violence (Arab youths throwing stones) could be understood as a misguided expression of a deep longing for a dialogic relation. A few lines later, the valence becomes more pronounced as the speaker queries, “Perhaps some of the words hurt you?” Again, the translation mutes the full force of the line. The Hebrew word, rendered here simply as “hurt,” is paguʿ—which in contemporary Hebrew means “to wound,” a verb often used in conjunction with a terrorist attack—while in Biblical Hebrew a variation on the same verb, pagaʿ, means “to meet,” or “to encounter.” Bringing both these readings to bear makes for a wonderfully complex reading, as we then can see the attack as stemming at once from a desire to hurt and to make contact. This image of the linguistic terrorist becomes even richer and more resonant when read alongside Arthur Cohen's beautiful gloss on Buber's ontology. Cohen writes, “The world will not surrender its truth to violence, but only to the truth in which the Thou is spoken.”Footnote 28 That is, these desperate outbursts need to be received not merely as expressions of barely repressed outrage, but as real longings for a dialogic engagement with a fully present You.
In general, Kosman's poems are spare and lean—an aesthetic move compelling us to wrestle for hard truths. Each line, each word, is charged with multiple meanings. Such is the case when the speaker admits that, even as he addresses the “You,” he has no “reason” to expect a response. With this move, the poem speaks perhaps to those who would say that those Arab youths who initiated the uprising had no “reason” to act so defiantly—a dismissive claim that is hard to sustain when faced with the speaker's plaintive query: “Can you hear my voice / in the dark? To the right, down / there in the tunnel?” The word neekbah, “tunnel,” which brings with it a punning reference to nekevah (feminine)—as in the feminized Arab Other—as well as perhaps invoking the Nakba, the Palestinian displacement—garners a cluster of associations that suggestively place the speaker at a highly contentious site: the “City of David” in East Jerusalem. With its recently recovered tunnels and waterways carved during the reign of King Hezekiah (about 701 BCE), this “archeological park,” a project spearheaded by the settler group Elad beginning in 1998 when it was given control over the site, has seriously compromised the viability of Silwan, a nearby Arab village, and has forced upon us, once again, a set of hard, messy questions about the status of Jerusalem, a site sacred to three religions—and the status of Israel as a Jewish state.
For Kosman, the solution is not political, at least in a narrow sense. But it does require a seismic paradigm shift in perspective, entailing the recognition of the Other—in this instance the Arab—as a Subject capable of being a full-fledged Self. Kosman makes the point vivid by reaching for yet another biblical allusion, with even more scandalous reverberations. The poem concludes with the speaker envisioning a response: “Because if You awaken … You will say / suddenly: Where art thou? [in Hebrew, ʾayekah].” The word is singularly expressive, reaching back to Genesis 3:10, when God punctures the silence surrounding Adam and Eve in the wake of their historic infraction, not only demanding accountability, but drawing humanity into a more nuanced, complex mode of relation grounded in reciprocal exchange, since ʾayekah is commonly understood to be an invitation to conversation.Footnote 29 With this interpolation, Kosman destabilizes the dominant concept of a hierarchical relation to the divine, instead imagining God as a dynamically engaged conversation partner. But there is more, for with this single word, Kosman's speaker asks that the You become an I, and in turn indicates a willingness to become an Other—not in the usual sense of a static figure that the Self uses in the service of crafting an image, but a You that will necessarily require the I also to become a You, a full-fledged dialogue partner capable of sacred exchange. In this way, Kosman envisions how an ethos of mutuality, the kind informing the Song of Songs, might transform the contemporary landscape—in which Jew and Arab might share a dialogue as equals, both I and You mutually and at once. Indeed, only by crafting a “real world” dialogic attachment to an Other, may divinity be thus accessed.
As Kosman understands it, we spend our lives largely entangled with and by our own egos, chronically blind to the Other. Only rarely do we experience what he calls an “inner miracle” or a “breakthrough”—a brief moment when we are able to apprehend someone as wholly distinct from ourselves—a traumatic occasion when we are wrenched out of our usual obtuseness. In Kosman's work, many of these breakthrough moments are precipitated by political ruptures, but in at least one instance, love rather than fear compels the speaker to seek out the Other, in all their difference. Thus Kosman animates Buber's account of love as a paradigmatic instance of an I-Thou interaction: “Love is the responsibility of an I for a You.”Footnote 30
To be clear, when speaking of “love,” neither Buber nor Kosman mean ordinary erotic attachments. Taking a dispassionate stance, Kosman acknowledges that only rarely do such alliances afford the kind of mutual recognition of which Buber speaks.Footnote 31 But elsewhere Kosman writes in a more romantic vein. In his essay “About Two Silent Women and Two Men's Models of Loving God,” Kosman speculatively probes Buber's account of Kierkegaard's decision to break off his engagement to Regina Olsen as a prerequisite to his quest for “a profound relation with the absolute.”Footnote 32 Contrasting that decision with Buber's own longtime marriage to Paula Winkler, Kosman argues that these life choices are theologically instructive. While Kierkegaard viewed human attachments as stumbling blocks in one's journey towards the divine, Buber believed that only by crafting a dialogic attachment to a “real world” Other can divinity be accessed. Kosman lands hard upon this difference in order to counter those who would read Buber as a Petrarchan humanist, and ultimately as a secularist. Instead, Kosman links Buber to Hasidism, whose followers embrace both material being and the divine as of a piece. To be sure, these insights are not wholly unique to Kosman; Arthur Cohen charts Buber's lineage along the same lines but to different ends. While Cohen is interested in shoring up Buber's credentials as a distinctively Jewish thinker, Kosman wants us to understand and appreciate Buber as a theologian (in the broadest sense) rather than a secularist.
But it is Kosman's poetry, rather than his prose, that is our best source for understanding how the dialogic model may serve both persons and God. Once again, the Song of Songs is Kosman's touchstone. As we saw in “I Try to Wake You in the Dark,” the biblical song serves as a frame for reimagining the static Arab Other as a fully animate, responsive self—a poignantly political, urgent effort. But not all of Kosman's work is quite so polemical. In “I Told the Jerusalem City Watchman,” for example, we discover an abstract meditation on the acute fragility of an identity (an I) crafted in relation to an Other (a You). Once more, the scene evokes chapters 3 and 5 of the Song of Songs, in which the beloved wanders the Jerusalem streets in search of her love. Engaged in a parallel search, Kosman's speaker explains himself repeatedly, “I told the Jerusalem city watchman that my beloved lives here.” In the absence of the beloved, the speaker is utterly disoriented, manifesting the kind of loss that may result from a trauma, be it occasioned by love or by war, finding himself bereft of all the usual accoutrements of a stable social self: “I forgot everything, / my name and my place of origin, the name of my hilly country / and the site of my distant and foreign town.” Familiar, yet strange, the poem strikes an absurd note, as the speaker appeals to the watchmen, explaining that while he is bereft of all official modes of identification and possesses not a shred of documentation, he brings “two tablets of a loving heart, / of a loving heart, very heavy, / made of marble.” One strong reading of the line must, of course, include Moses, who transmitted the tablets and their laws from God to the people of Israel. Initially, the idea may register as wonderfully shocking and innovative: Moses, the paradigmatic insider, is cast as an outsider, protesting his lack of proper documentation. Then we catch our breaths, stop—and remember that Moses was, after all, an Egyptian, an outsider. This is Kosman's surrealistic touch at work; it may well be that truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, Lisa Katz suggests that the speaker is at once Jewish and Palestinian—at once the self and the Other. She grounds her reading in the Hebrew meaning of ʾahuvati, “my love,” which could mean that the object of the speaker's desire is either Jerusalem, the city itself, which would make him a Zionist and/or a traditionally religious Jew—or a human lover, barred from the city because he is a Palestinian “without official permission” and “identity papers.” Katz thus concludes that a “Jewish heart” dwells within the speaker, even as he may be a “Palestinian without papers.”Footnote 33 Such a reading importantly gets at the political energy surging throughout Kosman's work; but it also might be seen as a Judeo-centric predisposition. These “two tablets of a loving heart” also bring to mind Paul's instruction in 2 Corinthians 3:3: “This ‘letter’ is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.” That is, the speaker's identity crisis troubles both mutually exclusive categories of national belonging as well as those of religion; he may occupy not only the borderland between Jewishness and Arabness, but also between Jewishness and Christianity. In this way, Kosman dramatizes the extent to which engaging an Other demands a genuine willingness to suspend expectation, so that he or she can become known—in all his or her uncomfortable complexity. For to the reader, the speaker is an Other; and the poem (once again) is a bridge, a means of negotiating distance and difference, but not eliminating it.
Studded with biblical allusions ranging from Exodus to Isaiah and Nehemiah, the poem registers as at once strange and familiar. Practicing the art of what Daniel Boyarin calls “co-citation,” whereby a writer juxtaposes two or more biblical passages in the interest of creating a new text, Kosman weaves an intricate set of allusions to suggest a radically different way of regarding Jerusalem, that holy city of peace and the center of the Jewish “homeland.”Footnote 34 Positioning himself at the “Gate of Water,” the speaker brings to mind Nehemiah's account of the rebuilding of Jerusalem (3:15), while his address to the “good watchmen, guards, defenders of the city” evokes God's promise to restore the sacred city as prophesied by Isaiah (62:6). The confluence of texts produces a kind of temporal dissonance or narrative undertow that effectively destabilizes the status of Israel as a securely walled homeland, as a definitive resolution to a long exilic sojourn. These shadows of doubt get longer and darker as “good watchmen” may also be read as an ironic gesture towards the Neture Karta—that ultra-Orthodox sect that vehemently denies modern Israel as a Jewish nation-state, and whose name means “guardians of the city.” By the time a reader has sorted through these allusive layers, the idea of Israel as a secure Jewish homeland has become wholly denaturalized. Not only are there enemies within the city, who terrorize its inhabitants in the name of moral safekeeping, but one must be continuously aware of the fragility of the very walls upon which illusions of personal and collective security—literal as well as metaphoric—depend. At this turn, Buber's precept of “self growth,” a process that depends on being in relation to the Other, is especially resonant.Footnote 35 If the presence of the Other is requisite to self-realization, then one must remain vulnerable to his or her prospective presence, resisting the impulse to wall it out. This position informs the poem's haunting conclusion, which finds the speaker awaiting his beloved's imminent arrival, hoping that “she'll lift her gaze / to me—from behind the barbed wire.” The image is purposively ambiguous. Lisa Katz, for example, maintains that for most Israeli readers, any mention of “barbed wire” means to invoke the Holocaust—a reference that in this instance serves to remind readers of the origins of a state that now finds itself in a position of authority rather than victimhood. Secondarily, she mentions that “barbed wire” could well also signify the “barrier” or “security wall” that snakes along the West Bank. While this reading is hardly wrong, it doesn't allow for the possibility that Kosman is actually interested in inducing a state of multivalent perception, whereby the reader apprehends the image both from her own vantage (Hebrew/Jewish) as well as the vantage of the Other (Arab/non-Jewish). In this way he offers an opportunity for the reader to be (in Buber's words) “liberated from the place where (we) have been”—from the categories of identity that prevent us from engaging with the Other—even if it means relinquishing, or at least loosening, our hold on our most sacred touchstones, including the Holocaust. For to engage the Other requires giving up something of the self. That said, it is important to understand “giving up” as meaning more than merely ceding a position, or even a long-held belief; instead, it means a radical forfeiture. As Kosman explains, “In Buber's view all realms of human existence, including that of language, is [sic] viable only by means of sacrifice.”Footnote 36 “Sacrifice” is a strong term indeed—made especially pronounced in the two poems with which I will now conclude.
Interrogating “Lyric”: In the Language of the Other
According to Kosman, Buber challenges us to give up much more than a specific religious affiliation or political orientation. Buber's dialogic model of relation to the Other depends on a fundamental awareness and acknowledgement of what Kosman calls “our obtuseness.”Footnote 37 That is, when approaching the Other in the interest of activating a full-fledged relationship with a multidimensional subject (not just a flat object), we must be willing to name and to take responsibility for the various misreadings of and biases towards the Other that blind us to his or her presence. In the volume's title poem, “Approaching You in English,” Kosman makes good on this challenge, foregrounding his own obtuseness by addressing the problematic aura surrounding Hebrew, “the holy tongue,” as distinct from other, inherently less-than-holy, tongues. Kosman works to dispel this mystique and assert Buber's conviction in all language as an inherently dialogic medium. The poem returns us to an issue with which we began—Kosman's pointed adaptation of the lyric. At first glance, it seems that we are looking at a prototypical instance of the genre: an “I/You” poem that serves as an occasion for passionate self-expression. In the tradition of English letters, “lyric” often refers, as John Stuart Mill put it, to an “utterance that is overheard” rather than “heard.” But Kosman clearly has a different frame in mind. Structured as a plaintive address to an unspecified divine Other, Kosman's poem performatively explores Buber's insistence on dialogue (speech that is heard, rather than just overheard) as the only means by which we can know God, since God is accessible only by way of relation. Kosman puts pressure on this dialogic model by posing some difficult questions: If the Jewish self/center relinquishes the center to an Other, and speaks out of the position of otherness instead, especially if this means giving up the holy tongue (Hebrew) to traffic in the foreign, “strange” language of the Other (English, in this case), what kinds of risks does this entail for oneself and one's relation to God?
At this point, we might recall Buber's long career as a translator—a pursuit culminating with his German rendering of the Hebrew Bible (begun with Franz Rosenzweig in 1925 and completed in 1961). The whole project was undertaken in the interest of providing the non-Hebrew reader with the opportunity to establish an I-Thou relationship with the text. Instead of aiming for language that would be either conventionally pleasing, or easily accessible to the German ear, they opted for something much less comfortable, offering a nearly unintelligible German in order to preserve the otherness, indeed the “alienness,” of the Hebrew text. That is, translation itself entails a dialogic encounter with the Other—as the target language is transformed by virtue of coming into contact with an alien tongue; so, too, the reader is subsequently transformed by encountering the alien text.Footnote 38
Linguistic otherness is indeed Kosman's explicit concern. The poem begins with a tentative request, as the speaker claims linguistic amnesia: “Please, I'm encroaching on your generosity in English this time. I say / ‘help’ instead of ah-zor, ‘save’ instead of ho-she-ya. Because I've forgotten / how to unlock the words at the heart of ancient Hebrew.” Linguistic estrangement is an inescapable condition, written into both the original poem and its translation. (The two are printed side-by-side on the recto and verso pages of the book.) The English words “help” and “save” are transcribed as such in the Hebrew version; as a non-native English speaker, Kosman's discomfort is genuine. But the discomfort goes both ways, since the English version forces nonnative Hebrew speakers to trip over the Hebrew words ah-zor and ho-she-ya. Neither Hebrew readers nor those who are limited to English are given a reprieve from enduring the suffering that comes with occupying the position of linguistic otherness.
Wading into contentious waters, Kosman's speaker reflects anxiously about the prospects of a dialogic relation with the divine conducted in anything other than Hebrew (“the ancient language”), bringing to mind how Buber (in contrast to Franz Rosenzweig) refused to privilege any single tongue at the expense of another.Footnote 39 Indeed, Kosman slyly links the language of the Other (English) to the holy tongue by way of a biblical allusion, reminding his divine conversation partner that this is not the first time God had to put with up with a disabled speaker, since his disorder is comparable to that of Moses, who was similarly “tongue-tied” (kaved–peh; Exodus 4:10). In this way the boundary between the foreign Other and the (Jewish/Hebrew-speaking) self begins to erode. But Kosman does not leave it there. As the poem draws to a close, he raises the stakes, suggesting that if language is a contaminating agent and that if to take on the language of the non-Jewish Other means to really be of the Other, then one necessarily risks genuine self-sacrifice:
Though generally the translations of Lisa Katz and Shlomit Naim-Naor seem wholly reliable, like many translators, they routinely choose poetic integrity over strict semantic accuracy. In this instance the choice is arguable, since by using the word “approach” they obscure Kosman's punning use of the word lehekanes, meaning “to enter,” which resembles the word kenesiyah, meaning “church”—by which Kosman reminds his readers that Jews cannot claim exclusive access to the divine. His meaning, however, is not altogether lost, since neither the English nor the Hebrew reader can escape the reference to the Christian ritual of making the sign of the cross (typically articulated by Catholics as “crossing oneself”)—which is again to say that if one engages the non-Jewish Other as an equal Subject, one must be prepared to risk certain long-held myths of the Jewish Self, especially that of chosenness and exclusivity (and a privileged relation to God).
For Kosman, this claim of chosenness is particularly toxic. In the interview cited earlier in this discussion, he states his position bluntly: “From my point of view the state of the Jewish people has been in a sick state for many years, and our focus on ‘the chosen people’ has been the main cause.”Footnote 41 Seeking a remedy for this spiritual affliction, Kosman sets about recalibrating the relational disequilibrium that has led to this state of affairs; because of this long legacy of chosenness and a fierce tribalism that leads to rigid views about belonging and inclusion, Jews are resistant to taking in Others as freestanding dialogic partners (rather than one-dimensional reflections of the self).Footnote 42 Since this condition is such a deeply ingrained component of the Jewish cultural imagination, it will take some sort of psychic rupture to initiate a new mode of being.
Poem after poem of Kosman's gives us an unspecified speaker in search of an Other, which brings us a little closer to understanding why Buber insists on the inherent fragility of the I-Thou construct. Buber writes, “Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter thinghood again and again” (69). This gloomy conclusion has garnered criticism from even one of his staunchest readers, Walter Kaufman, who argues that “this unacceptable claim” only makes sense as a preamble to the last part of the book, which focuses on God as the eternal Other or You.Footnote 43 But Kaufman's theologic move here obscures Buber's profound knowledge that it is desperately hard to recognize the Other as a distinct being, rather than a reflection of oneself. This is what Kosman seems to gesture towards in the volume's short, dramatic closing poem, “A Plea,”—or in Hebrew, “Teḥinah”:
It is a jarring choice on the part of the volume's editors to leave us with a poem that is so singularly stark and unlovely. But it is also a choice that affords powerful insight into the acute nature of Kosman's overall project and into his deep understanding of Buber. For this is what radical self-abnegation looks like—at least poetically and linguistically. As in “Approaching You in English,” Kosman foregrounds linguistic estrangement as a central strategy in a focused effort to dismantle the I—an autonomous version of the self—as a prerequisite to becoming part of the I-Thou by way of radical humility. What was previously employed intermittently now dominates: we are not simply confronted with a few awkwardly transliterated words or phrases, but an entire poem crafted out of broken English, transcribed/transliterated (and emphatically not translated) into Hebrew. The opposite page is not a translation into the Hebrew language, but a phonetic approximation (rendered in Hebrew letters) of “delete” and other English words. Which is to say that neither language outranks the other; neither side of the page yields much aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction. Here Kosman tries his hand at what has been described as “poprayer”—a parodic variation on a liturgical utterance designed to upend standard religious forms and assumptions, so as to set the stage for a more vital, renewed relationship with divine authority, grounded in the precept of I-Thou.Footnote 44 It is a moving instance of generative irony, as the speaker strips away all the usual trappings of supplicatory prayer (known as taḥanun, or more technically nefilat ʾapayim—literally, “falling on one's face”) to disjunctive ends. Laying bare the prayer's function as a spontaneous improvisational utterance driven by what liturgist Lawrence Hoffman puts bluntly as the recognition that “the ultimate nature of reality may be more complex than we would like to imagine,” the stammering speaker presses upon us the need to renounce those categories and labels that keep us apart.Footnote 45 This is the challenge that both Buber's thought and Kosman's poetry put before us.
