As for summer, I seem to have spent part of it walking around with my head in the cloudless skies of 11th and 12th century Andalusia. Given our weird Chicago weather, I welcomed the mental sojourn in a place of magical sun-drenched gardens, magnificent minstrels, and dark-eyed beauties.
I had a paper to finish for my master's program at Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. My subject was Yehudah Halevi, an iconic figure of Judeo-Arab Spain and perhaps the most enduring and revered “singer of Zion” besides King David.
Turns out medieval al Andalus wasn't such a bad place to be. That's where the vaunted Golden Age took wing, as Muslims and Jews developed a shared culture marked by intellectual exuberance, literary exhilaration, and sensory exploration.
Schooled in the high arts and sciences of his time—Greek philosophy, Arabic grammar, medicine (he earned his living as a physician), Torah, Talmud, and Hebrew—in middle age Halevi turned his eyes to God and his heart to Zion. Later in life he embarked on his final journey, a pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael, where he is thought to have died in 1141.
Halevi’s secular love poetry was exquisite, the kind you roll around on your tongue and savor in your mouth. It was a privilege and a delight to accompany him on Metra commutes and on weekend getaways in the Wisconsin countryside (Lord knows what he would have made of either). Amid Midwestern maples and oaks I caught through Halevi's lacy stanzas the scent of his beloved anointed with myrrh and frankincense, heard the jingling of the bells on her skirts, imagined her sweet kisses and felt the pain of her parting.
The pulse of the man seemed to beat in my own veins as I caught the rhythm of his qasidas (odes) and muwashshahas (metered verses). Hadn't my maternal grandfather—a poet with a Hebrew surname from Poland, whose yellowed volume of Yehudah’s verse was ever by my side—claimed lineage from Toledo, the birthplace of Halevi? Hadn't I spent my life entranced by Arabic and Judeo-Arab Hebrew music? Might my own pen draw inspiration from the inkwells of Halevi and the towering Jewish poets of his time, like Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Moses Ibn Ezra? They polished gemstones of Hebrew into bejeweled verses, which glint with fire to this day.
After my summer basking in Halevi’s sensual love poetry, as the Days of Awe fast approach, I find myself turning to his religious and nationalist works, which for nine centuries have set the tone and given poetic shape to Jewish longing. When I sit in synagogue on the High Holidays and chant the piyyutim (liturgical poems) of Halevi and his circle, I hear my heart yearning, feel the world shudder between ecstasy and dread, and sense in the words of my forbearer poets a connection to eternal inspiration. Were I not to know the medieval poets by name, or feel their Hebrew in my mouth, their words might sound hollow or God-forbid, dead. My muse might have been deaf to their music, which echoes through the centuries and is sung anew.
His Thresholds
Seek the Lord and his thresholds, my soul,
and offer your songs like incense before him:
for if you’re pursuing the vapor of Time
and calling its spells and sorcery Truth,
and roaming in hope of it night and day,
and sleeping sweetly after its feasts—
know that your hand holds nothing at all
but a tree whose branches soon will wither.
Be before your God and King,
beneath whose wings you’ve come for shelter.
Let His name be hallowed and praised
by all through whom His breath still moves.
Yehudah Halevi, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole.
