Reflection: Cantorial Intern Will Brockman

When a Poem Sings: Hebrew Poetry, Jerusalem, and the Music of Memory

This Wednesday marks Rosh Chodesh Av, carrying us into the final stretch of the Three Weeks — the period of our calendar bookended by the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls and the destruction of both Temples on the 9th of Av. During this season of historical grief, some Jews observe the practice of refraining from listening to music, so that the emotional texture of mourning might be felt more deeply. I appreciate the embodied practice of living with that silence. There is something deeply powerful about letting absence breathe. Yet for me — someone for whom music is as vital as air or water — setting aside song feels like setting aside the very vessel through which I hold, process, and synthesize Jewish memory. For me, music is not a distraction from the themes of this season in our calendar, but is, in fact, one of the ways we can enter it more deeply.

That ethos sits at the heart of the two-part class I am currently teaching, Shir Lach Shar: A Poem Sings to You. This class explores Israeli poetry set to music — poems that have crossed the threshold into song. While we happen to be meeting during the Three Weeks, the poetry we are exploring — from Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky to Rachel, Amir Gilboa, and Leah Goldberg — spans the full emotional landscape of the Israeli experience: love and loss, landscape and language, grief and hope, exile and return. Together, we are exploring a linguistic truth embedded in Hebrew itself: the word shir means both “poetry” and “song.” The two are inextricably linked. A poem already carries music within it, and a melody is simply a poem waiting for its words to be written. By immersing ourselves in these texts, we are navigating the “both/and” of Jewish existence: both our historical longing for the Land of Israel, and the lived reality of the modern State of Israel; both our inherited grief over Jerusalem’s destruction, and our ongoing responsibility to sing Jerusalem into the present. This is not an abstract exercise. Hebrew poetry allows us to encounter Israel from wherever we are in the world, travelling across seas by touching the most tender places within our hearts.

Teaching this class has given me the opportunity to dive back into the canon of Hebrew verse, and I find my own observance of the Three Weeks enriched, rather than diminished, by that return. One seasonal doorway into the larger world of Israeli poetry and song comes through words which Naomi Shemer wrote in 1967, which sit at the forefront of my mind:

אך בבואי היום לשיר לך
ולך לקשור כתרים
קטונתי מצעיר בנייך
ומאחרון המשוררים.

כי שמך צורב את השפתיים
כנשיקת שרף
אם אשכחך ירושלים
אשר כולה זהב

Yet today I come to sing to you
To tie crowns upon you
I am humbled to be of the youngest of your children
And the least of your poets.

For your name scorches the lips
Like a seraph’s kiss
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
Which is all of gold.

In these eight brief lines, Shemer masterfully weaves a tapestry from some of the most sacred threads of Jewish literature. Her allusions bring together the rabbinic image of Rabbi Akiva expounding upon the crowns of the letters of Torah; Jacob’s humbling encounter with the Divine after being saved from his brother Esau; the fiery moment when the prophet Isaiah’s lips are purified by a burning coal; and finally, Psalm 137 — the biblical vow, uttered in exile, that if Jerusalem is forgotten, song itself should cease. But Shemer does not gather these texts in order to silence us. She gathers them to reveal the overwhelming, prophetic weight of singing about Jerusalem. To sing of Jerusalem is not casual. It is not sentimental ornamentation. It is dangerous, sacred work. The name itself scorches the lips. And yet, Shemer’s answer to that danger is not withdrawal. She suggests that precisely because Jerusalem is so charged with memory, longing, holiness, and heartbreak, we must continue to sing of her.

That, to me, is one of the deep spiritual possibilities of this season. Engaging with Israeli poetry during the Three Weeks is not an escape from mourning. It is a way to inhabit it. And this is only one example of what happens when Hebrew poetry meets melody: a text becomes more than something we read. It becomes something we carry in the body, something that can accompany us through grief, tenderness, wonder, and hope. When we read and sing these verses, we are not ignoring the suffering of generations gone by. We are using the living, breathing Hebrew language to bridge the distance between the Jerusalem we lost, the Jerusalem we dreamed of, and the Jerusalem and Israel with which we remain in relationship today.

For those of you who, like me, find music and verse to be meaningful ways into the Jewish year, I warmly invite you to join us this Wednesday, July 15, for the second and final session of Shir Lach Shar: A Poem Sings to You. You are most welcome whether or not you attended the first session. Registration is still open on the website, and I would love to see you there.