JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ialik, Ḥayyim naḤman
in 1889. They provided a framework of ideas that helped his
contemporaries translate their Jewish loyalties from a religious
context into a modern, philosophically oriented humanist rationale
for Jewish existence. Bialik recognized Aḥad Ha-Am
as his great teacher. He wrote of this period, “… the day a new
essay of Aḥad Ha-Am’s appeared was a holiday for me. “ Bialik
later wrote a poem in tribute to his mentor: “Receive our blessing
for each seed of… idea/That you have sown… in our desolate
hearts.” But Aḥad Ha-Am also had an inhibiting influence
on Bialik’s poetic imagination. Preferring a classical and lucid
style, Aḥad Ha-Am discouraged many of Bialik’s ventures into
more modernist or more experimental poetry.
First Stay in Odessa
The break with tradition occurred in the summer of 1891 when
amid disruptions in the yeshivah, Bialik left for Odessa, the
center of modern Jewish culture in southern Russia. He was
attracted by the literary circle that formed around Aḥad Ha-
Am and harbored the dream that in Odessa he would be able
to prepare himself for the entrance to the modern Orthodox
rabbinical seminary in Berlin. Penniless, alone, unemployed,
and hungry, he earned a livelihood for a while by giving Hebrew
lessons. He continued to study Russian literature, reading
and admiring the poetry of Pushkin and Frug, as well as the
stories and novels of Dostoevski and Gogol. He was tutored
in German grammar and read works of Schiller and Lessing.
At first the shy youth did not become involved in the literary
life of the city but when he showed his poetry to Moses Leib
*Lilienblum the latter commended the poem “El ha-Ẓippor” to
Aḥad Ha-Am who passed it on to Yehoshua Ḥana *Rawnitzki
to be published in the first volume of Ha-Pardes (1892, p. 219f.).
The poem, a song longing for Zion written in the style of the
poets of the Ḥibbat Zion era, was favorably received by the
critics. During the six months he spent in Odessa, Bialik wrote
several poems and made the acquaintance of prominent literary
figures with whom he was to establish lasting relationships.
He was especially close to Rawnitzki and their friendship
was to develop into a unique collaboration in literary and
publishing endeavors.
Return to Zhitomir
When Bialik learned, early in 1892, that the yeshivah of Volozhin
had been closed, he cut short his stay in Odessa and
hurried home in order to spare his dying grandfather the
knowledge that he had forsaken his religious studies. On returning
home he found that his older brother too was dying.
Dejected by the whole atmosphere, which for him embodied
the chronic despair and spiritual squalor of Jewish life,
he wrote “You have not changed from what you were/Old
oldness, nothing new/Let me join your company, my brothers,/Together
we will rot till we stink” (“Bi-Teshuvati” (“On
My Return”), 1892). Another poem of this period which is
reminiscent of Frug “Mi-Shut ba-Merḥakim” (“From Wandering
Afar”) also develops the theme of unfulfilled return.
The alienated son, full of youthful vitality, is repelled by the
melancholy of a moribund traditionalist society. The death of
Judah Leib *Gordon, the last significant poet of the Haskalah
period, in the summer of 1892, closed an era. Rawnitzki asked
Bialik to compose an elegy for the second volume of Ha-Pardes
(1893, p. 248f.), and he complied with “El ha-Aryeh ha-Met”
(“To the Dead Lion”). Like other early poems, it still showed
the influence of the Haskalah poets and was omitted from the
collected poems. The elegiac mood characterizes a considerable
part of Bialik’s early work and tears are a recurring motif
in the first volume of poems (1901). Before leaving Odessa he
wrote “Hirhurei Laylah” (“Night Thoughts,” 1892; “My song is
a bottle of tears, a bottle of tears”), and in a later poem “Shirati”
(“My Song,” 1901) he describes his mother’s tear falling
into the dough she is kneading and it is this tear that enters
his bones and is transformed into poetry.
1893–1896
In the spring of 1893, after the death of his brother and grandfather,
Bialik married Manya Averbuch (d. 1972) and for the
next three years joined her father in the timber trade in Korostyshev,
near Kiev. Since business kept him in the forest for
long stretches, he read widely and broadened his education
considerably during this lonely period. At that time he wrote
“Al Saf Beit ha-Midrash” (“On the Threshold of the House of
Study,” 1894) which predicts the ultimate triumph of Israel’s
spirit. While the themes of the poem, which poignantly speaks
of the abandoned house of study, are vocation and return, the
underlying priestly symbolism, relating to the Ninth of Av,
the date on which the poem was written, endows the house
of study with the universal metaphor of ancient ritual. In the
hymn “Birkat Am” (“The Blessing of the People,” 1894), written
several months earlier, which is permeated by intricate allusions
to Temple ritual, the poet metamorphoses the builders
of Ereẓ Israel into priests and Temple builders. Temple
imagery seems to be a predominant symbol both of Bialik’s
thought and of his poetry and is a basic point of reference of
his brilliant cultural interpretation of the two Jerusalems – the
earthly and the celestial – in his address at the opening of the
Hebrew University (1925).
1897–1900
In the spring of 1897, failing in business, Bialik found a position
as a teacher in Sosnowiec, near the Prussian border. The
pettiness of provincial life depressed him and he wrote several
satires that were published under pseudonyms. During
this period he started to write stories (e.g., “Aryeh Ba’al Guf,”
1899) and to experiment with Yiddish writing. Some of his
poems appear to reflect the life-affirming themes of the “new
way” embraced by the writers of the 1890s, although Bialik
remained wary of what he felt was the literary pretensions
of its members. The poet’s ire against Jewish apathy toward
the rising national movement found expression in “Akhen
Ḥaẓir ha-Am” (“Surely the People is Grass,” 1897) in which
he called out to the people, “Even when the horn be sounded
and the banner raised/Can the dead awaken, can the dead
stir?” Widely acclaimed, it was the first of his poems of wrath
and reproof in which he speaks to the people in the tones of
562 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3