Poetic sustenance
July 01, 2008
Toward the end of the second morning of ulpan, we read a shir (poem or song) by Naomi Shemer called "כַּד הַקֶּמַח / Cad hakemach," which means "the jar of meal" or "the jar of sustenance." (If you read Hebrew, here's a link to כַּד הַקֶּמַח in the original.)
First Michal prompted us to remember the story from I Kings chapter 17, wherein there is a famine in the land and Elijah the Prophet shows up in the home of a woman who has no bread, only a little flour and oil, and her son has died. He tells her that her jar of sustenance won't become empty, nor will the dish of oil run short, until rain comes to replenish the face of the earth. And he brings her son back to life. That's the story. Then we looked at the shir.
It's in pretty simple Hebrew. Michal read it for us once, and then went through it slowly, translating the words we didn't know. "Wadi." "Dish." "Shortage." Poetic terms for "finish" and "rain." And then we read it and translated it. Here is my clumsy rendering:
The jar of sustenance
I was reading in the book of Kings
in chapter seventeen.
I read about the man of God
who said:
"The jar of meal will never be finished
nor the dish of oil run short
until the rains come
on the face of the earth."
(To think) that in this dry wadi
if the rains don't come
this man creates these words
from his heart!
"The jar of meal will never be finished
nor the dish of oil run short
until the rains come
on the face of the earth."
Maybe this man has known shortage.
Maybe he's tasted the bitter root.
Maybe he's wrapped himself in his soul (like a cloak.)
He turns and says:
"The jar of meal will never be finished
nor the dish of oil run short
until the rains come
on the face of the earth."
And in these hard days
these days when the rain doesn't come
I always think of that man
and I remember:
"The jar of meal will never be finished
nor the dish of oil run short
until the rains come
on the face of the earth."
This is a desert, Michal noted. Obviously rain really is an issue here. Do you think that's what this poem is about? I think it's about peace, I said.
We talked some about the political context in which the poem was written, which particular "hard days" she might have been referring to. And then we listened to a recording of the song, and a few people sang along, but I was lost in the poem itself; I can't remember the melody now, just my emotional response to the poem, which was intense. I was so moved by the experience of translating a poem in this language which until recently felt opaque to me. And the realization that here even secular readers "get" a reference to the book of Kings.
And the craftsmanship of the poem, how the refrain takes on a different meaning each time it appears. How the story of what Elijah said to the woman during that time of famine becomes a refrain in our day, a way of expressing the hope that God's abundance will come through when it's needed. Shemer doesn't directly reference the part of the story where Elijah revives the boy, but it's implied, so the poem is also about revived hopes and dreams, revived spirit, the faith that everything's going to turn out okay.
I think reading it here -- in this place where the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is always present in the collective consciousness -- makes it even more powerful. Do we dare to believe that the jar won't run empty, that the oil won't run out, until the rains of peace come to replenish our world and make it bloom?
Technorati tags: Judaism, Torah, poetry, NaomiShemer.