Thursday, January 9, 2014

Release, Please: A Poem for the “Shabbat of Poetry”

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | BeShalach Shabbat Shira 2014

Release, please

Release, please, this bound one
By the power of your right hand
Receive the song of your people,
      Exalt us, Lord, and make us
pure. Almighty one, protect
      those who seek your oneness:
Bless them, and cleanse them – bestow
      Upon them your merciful justice.
Mighty one, holy one, in your
      Goodness guide your assembly.
Turn, sole one on high,
      To those who remember your sanctity,
And accept our cry and plea –
      You who fathom all mysteries.

Translation by Peter Cole

Translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms
with the foreignness of languages to each other.
Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator

This Shabbat is known as “Shabbat Shira”, the Shabbat of Song, thus named because we read the Song at the Sea, perhaps the first Hebrew poem. This month many Bronfmanim have committed to study a book of poetry in honor of Edgar Bronfman (other are studying Mishna Pirkei Avot or one of two books). I have been plowing through a new anthology of Hebrew Mystical Verse, with Hebrew original and new translation side by side. It is there that I came across the above translation.
I often find that poem’s are locked to me, until I read them in translation. The translations’ attempt to –as Benjamin described it - “find the intention toward the language into which the work has been translated” allows “an echo of the original [to] be awakened”. I guess I see the light of a poem best through the dull refractions of a translation.
Those who fathom mysteries might have recognized the source of the poem quoted above: the Hebrew poem “Ana b’Koach”, which appears in numerous places in the Siddur. Here are two translations and the original, side by side:
Release, please, this bound one
By the power of your right hand
Receive the song of your people,
      Exalt us, Lord, and make us
pure. Almighty one, protect
      those who seek your oneness:
Bless them, and cleanse them – bestow
      Upon them your merciful justice.
Mighty one, holy one, in your
      Goodness guide your assembly.
Turn, sole one on high,
      To those who remember your sanctity,
And accept our cry and plea –
      You who fathom all mysteries.

Translation by Peter Cole, The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, 2012, pg. 35

אָנָּא בְּכֹחַ גְּדֻלַּת
 יְמִינְֶךָ תַּתִּיר צְרוּרָה
קַבֵּל רִנַּת עַמְֶּךָ
שַׂגְּבֵנוּ טַהֲרֵנוּ נוֹרָא
נָא גִבּוֹר דּוֹרְשֵׁי
יִחוּדְֶךָ כְּבָבַת שָׁמְרֵם
בָּרְכֵם טַהֲרֵם רַחֲמֵי
צִדְקָתֶךָ תָּמִיד גָּמְלֵם
חֲסִין קָדוֹשׁ בְּרוֹב
טוּבְךָ נַהֵל עֲדָתֶךָ
יָחִיד גֵּאֶה לְעַמְּךָ
פְּנֵה זוֹכְרֵי קְדֻשָּׁתֶךָ
שַׁוְעָתֵנוּ קַבֵּל וּשְׁמַע
צַעֲקָתֵנוּ יוֹדֵעַ תַּעֲלוּמוֹת



This poem has enchanted readers for centuries with its opening phrase in Hebrew: : אנא, בכח “Please, by the power”. “Oxymoron of oxymorons” as one Israeli poetdescribed it. This opening phrase has enchanted modern Hebrew poets as they employed it in various means. Please, with power. Please, without power. Please, softly; Please, with full force. Please.
But Cole, our translator, has flipped the order of the words, releasing something which seems to recover a new "echo of the original":
Release, please, this bound oneBy the power of your right hand
In Cole’s rendition, the focus is not on the power, but on the bound one, and its need to be released. Who is the bound one? In one new Siddur, the following explicit translation is preferred:
Please, by the power of Your great right hand
        Set the captive nation free.
“The bound one” becomes “the captive nation”, losing the nuance and double meaning which has propelled this song for generations. In Hebrew liturgy the bound one refers just as much to a person’s soul – bound in the twine of the physical body – as it refers to the bind of exile. And what is that exile, that captiveness? The exile of the Jewish people, or the exile of God herself, the exile of the Shekhina. Truly, in the mind of the Kabbalists, those three are all one. כולא חד – an individual’s soul, the Jewish people, God’s feminine presence in this world – they are all metonymic of each other, all echoes of something greater than all three, yet equally present in every individual’s existence. And it is that bind for which we ask release.
As the poem continues, it weaves power and gentleness, protection and prowess. From the first “please”, it cajoles the powerful God into a different dynamic. God’s powerful right hand, which appears in the Song of the Sea with all its scary might – נָטִיתָ יְמִינְךָ תִּבְלָעֵמוֹ אָרֶץ – “You stretched out your right-hand / the Underworld swallowed them” (Exodus 15:12) is asked to engage in the most delicate of tasks.
Nuance is everywhere. The Jewish people are described as those who “seek your oneness” (not those who know anything for certain). God – as one who “fathoms all mysteries” (so different from, say, “knower of truth”). The “mighty one” is asked merely to “guide”. The “sole one” – to “turn”. The “fathomer of all mysteries” – to “accept”. Asking God to make us pure, we seek to be cleansed. Yet the image this conjures is that of a parent washing a baby, the full force of the adult body honed into an almost painful delicateness as it handles the fragile bundle. In Cole’s echoing, “Release, please” the image is of an amazingly powerful force minimizing itself (tzimtzum!) in order to very gently unwind a tightly knotted ball of string.

This poem has a long and clouded history. Scholars squabble if it was written in the 16th century Galilee, 12th century Germany, or 9th century Babylonia. Tradition claims it harkens back to 2nd century Judea. What is known is that this poem is actually a poetic encoding of God’s 42 letter name (as opposed to, say, the seventy-two letter version, or the four letter one). In Hebrew the poem consists of seven lines with six words each – totaling 42 words – the first letters of which make up the 42-letter name. It is with this name that God created the world, says the Talmud (In case you’re curious, it begins אבגיתצקרעשטנ…). Being the most potent of names, it must be hidden from humans, who might abuse its power for their narrow-minded intentions. The best place to hide the name is, of course, in plain view, so it was encoded into poetry. Here’s a challenge: take these 42 letters and try to write a poem using them as the first letter of each word. Over the generations, various poets attempted to write poems which begin with those specific letters (such as אנא באש גבורת ידך תלהט צרי). It is the Kabbalists soduko.
Most of those poems have been left to languish in musty manuscripts. A handful were published. Ana b’Koach is the only one to receive inter-generational success, even becoming a hit on Israeli radio a few years back. With its mixture of Nuance and mystery alongside clarity and potency, it has managed to transcend the math and mysticism and become its own being. In some siddurim it appears in as many as 13 different places.
The poem is recited at times of liminality, those times which are “betwixt and between”: before falling asleep, or just as the soul leaves a body. Most prominently, it is recited just before Lecha Dodi, during Kabbalat Shabbat, at the exact moment between the work-week and the holy-day. Times of transition are times of vulnerability, times in which we feel the fact that we are “in a bind”. Whether it is the call of freedom, or the burden of constriction, we feel the weight of our boundedness most deeply. It is from there that we call out: “Release, please”. Or at the very least: loosen the straps on our existence.

In prayerbooks – but not in the original poem – an additional line is added: “Blessed by the name of His
glorious kingdom for ever and all time.” ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד – the same response as is said upon reciting God’s explicit name, or after the first line of the Sh’ma. A version of this sentence, said in Aramaic, makes for the famous responsive line of the Kaddish – יהא שמיה רבה מבורך לעולם ולעולמי עולמיא Yehey Shmey Rabba…
With its beginning and ending, this poem evokes a different one, from Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy”:
Sit down, master, on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless worlds between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mishael