Soon enough, however, the dream of actually journeying to Zion became a main theme in Halevi’s writing, animating the “Songs of Zion” while driving the plot of Halevi’s theological-polemical masterpiece, The Kuzari, a work that reinterprets all of Judaism in light of the centrality of the Land and that concludes with the rabbi moving to Israel, as Halevi would do in real-time.
Among Halevi's “Songs of Zion,” perhaps the most famous poem, and deservedly so, is, “My Heart is in the East.” Here is Halkin's relatively free translation of the poem:
My heart in the East
But the rest of me far in the West ──
How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?
How, in the chains of the Moor,
Zion bound to the Cross,
Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?
Gladly I’d leave
All the best of grand Spain
For one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust.
Writes Halkin: “‘My Heart in the East’ is a living poem – and a perfect one. It is… the last moment of equipoise in a man tensing his muscles to jump and to take Jewish history with him.”
Halevi's “Songs of Zion” move us because, aside from their aesthetic perfection, we read them in light of Halevi’s later, courageous decision to realize his heart's desire. What's more, both the poems themselves and Halevi’s personal example speak to “the great intellectual and political debates regarding Zionism and the state of Israel” that animate so much of Jewish life today.
A national poet who composed his “Songs of Zion” approximately 800 years before the Zionist spirit awakened, Sephardi Ideas Monthly is delighted to introduce our readers to Yehuda Halevi’s Shirey Tsiyon through the work and words of Halevi’s kindred spirit, the great Zionist littérateur, Hillel Halkin.
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