Atar Hadari
Mosaic, July 31, 2014
“And every time I carry the bag to Jerusalem or anywhere else, I think about Mrs. al-Faroukhi and that sunset, about what we carry with us, and about what baggage is.
And so far God has answered my prayer, and my Jerusalem is not destroyed. I do believe I can still go back there. It is not destroyed.”
When we first met, my wife asked me to join her in Jerez, Spain, where she wanted to spend two weeks studying with one of the best teachers of flamenco. There was no room at the fancy hotel where the rest of the students were staying, so we ended up at a cheap pension in the rough part of town. It was a ramshackle old building with a chessboard marble floor in the lobby and a worn banister running up in elegant oblongs to ever dingier flights near the skylight. The room was small, we left the windows open at night, and that was when, amid the noise and the cats yowling and the smashing of glasses, we heard the singing.
The songs wafted up long after midnight. What were they about? I couldn’t tell you; I don’t speak Spanish. My wife does, but she maintains that it’s impossible to translate canto jondo, which literally means “deep song.” What makes it so haunting is the tone, the cry, the mournful, lamenting attitude of the singer. It’s easy to make fun of, and afterward we did, composing pseudo-laments like “And the cheese/the cheese on my toast it was melted/but the crust/the crust on my toast it was hard”—another instance of what’s lost in translation. But if you’d heard those street people singing outside our window in the early morning just as the heat started to give way to a cooling breeze, it would have stirred your blood.
That is what the kinot—Hebrew dirges sung on Tisha b’Av—reminded me of the first time I walked into a synagogue on a kibbutz in Israel and heard them being sung just after the chanting of Eikhah, the biblical book Lamentations, which is the greatest kinah of all. How could Jerusalem have been destroyed? How could the Almighty have done that? What is this life about, anyway?
How does she sit abandoned,
The city of many peoples—like a widow,
The minister of nations become a tributary.
Weep she shall weep at night
And her tear on her cheek hangs
She has no comforter
Of all her lovers;
All her friends betrayed her,
And became her foes.
Judah was exiled through want
And from the weight of the labor.
She sat among the nations and found no rest,
All her pursuers overtook her
Between the straits.
The roads of Zion are mournful
Bare of pilgrims
All her gates are desolate
Her priests groaning, her virgins sad
And she too is bitter.
Her persecutors have become great
Her enemies are tranquil
For God made her suffer for all her crimes
Her whelps went captive before the foe.
And there went from Zion’s daughter all her diadem,
Her ministers became like deer that found no grass
And went off weak before the poacher.
Jerusalem recalled in the days of her wandering
All her delights that had been in days of old
How her people fell in the hands of the foe
And no one helped her,
Her enemies saw her
And laughed at her being stilled.
Jerusalem sinned a sin
That is why she became an exile
All who respected her despised her
For they saw her bare.
She too groaned and recoiled,
Her stain is on her skirts
She did not remember her conclusion
And she fell miraculously,
There is no one to console her.
* * * * *
Hear ye all the nations
And see my suffering
My maids and lads
Have gone in chains.
I called those who loved me
They deceived me:
My priest and elders
Starved in the city,
For they searched for food for themselves
To restore their souls.
Look Lord how I am sorry
My guts have sizzled
My heart has overturned in me
For I raised a rebellion.
Without, the sword has severed sons,
The house within is like a prison.
They heard me for I groan
There is none to comfort me. . . .