Published: 14 November 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
At their weekly class of Yiddish mysticism, they poured the wine as usual, but didn’t know what to drink to. The group found a special poem, out of which this song grew.
The greatest scream in the world is silence. But there is a rung which is yet higher than silence: song - Reb. Mendl, a 19th century Hasidic master.
A week or so after October 7, still deep in shock and grief and glued day and night to the Israeli news and WhatsApp messages with my family and friends in Israel, my friend and teacher, local scholar of Kabbalah and Yiddish poetry, Nathan Wolski messaged our Yiddish mysticism and poetry group. He asked whether we should meet, as we have almost every week for the last three years, to read and learn something together.
Usually he gives us a few options to choose from for our weekly wine and mysticism session - a Yiddish mystical poem, a passage from the Zohar, a chapter from Heschel’s book on the great Rabbi of Kotsk, some Maimonides on Aristotle and God. But this time when he wrote to the group, he didn’t know what we should do. He had nothing.
A few nights later we gathered at his house. We poured the wine as usual, but we didn’t know what to drink to. We prayed for the safe return of the hostages, for the souls of those who were brutally murdered and tortured, for our family and friends in Israel, for the demise of Hamas. And then, like we so often did, we turned to Hillel Zeitlin for guidance.
But this time was different. Zeitlin was a famous Warsaw writer, poet and mystic. We’ve studied many of his Yiddish poems and we’ve made an album of songs based on some of them. But the poem Nathan had found was different to the poems we’ve studied, which are usually about the ecstasy of finding God and the devastation of losing Him, and the agonising beauty of existing between these modes of being.
Those poems range from the fullness of God, to the absence of God and back again. And on and on. This kind of bipolar, always searching and finding and losing, type of engagement with Divinity and Being makes sense to me in a way that Judaism and God seeking never has. There is room in it for belief and doubt and beauty and darkness and everything in between. I hadn’t come across this type of Judaism before.
