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Weekly Jewish Wisdom: A Hard-Earned Birthday
by Dr. Erica Brown
“Dawn had not entirely broken before we began working. We were fourteen in all, barefoot and with callused hands, completely tanned, scratched everywhere and with hardened faces and ardent hearts. The air was filled with our songs and debates and laughter.”
Rachel
The Israeli poetess, Rachel, was born Rachel Bluwstein on September 20, 1890 in Saratov, on the Volga River in Northern Russia. Her father, a former soldier in the Czar's army, was a wealthy and pious merchant. Her mother, born into a long line of rabbis, was a well-educated woman. Rachel spent her childhood and youth in Poltava, in the Ukraine, where she learned Hebrew with a tutor, wrote her first verses in Russian, and became interested in painting. She, like many young Jewish Russians, dreamed of Zion.
In 1909, she and one of her sisters visited Palestine for what she thought would be a short time before she returned to her studies in Europe. In Jaffa, she met Hannah Maizel, one of the first pioneers who created an institution where young women could learn agricultural techniques. The two sisters moved to Rehovot, then a small village, determined to learn Hebrew and spent only one hour a day speaking Russian. Every day they also recited poetry. Rachel is generally considered to be the first student in her agricultural school.
In April 1911, Hannah and her students moved to the Kinneret, a place she quickly came to love and a focus of her poetry. Rachel's grave, beneath a palm tree planted on the lake’s shore, has become an important pilgrimage site for Zionists and poets.
The above quote is taken from her writings, and this excerpt was written on the Kinneret’s shores. Our quote tells of the challenges that she and other young Zionists faced when they came to the land. It also speaks of a powerful commitment to build up a desolate land, before Israel was a state. In one poem, Rachel comments on how little she can give back to Israel in a highly personal way: “I know how humble are the gifts the child offers her mother.” In her writings, she continues her thoughts, mixing hardship with appreciation:
On occasion, one of us shivered with fever on her poor mattress but none of us ever lost, even momentarily, this feeling of gratitude that we had for our destiny, for we worked ardently and enthusiastically.
One of her most famous poems, with the Kinneret at its center, expresses a sentiment that many of us are feeling today as we celebrate Israel’s sixtieth birthday – what must have seemed an impossibility in Rachel’s eyes.
Perhaps
Perhaps all this never was,
Perhaps I never rose at dawn to till
The garden by the sweat of my brow?
Nor even on long burning harvest days
Atop a sheaf-laden cart
Raised my voice in song?
Never purified myself in the quiet blue and innocence
Of my Kinneret,
Oh Kinneret,
did you truly exist?
Or were you only a dream?
When we reflect on Israel’s short history of existence, its long-history of war, its rise as the lone democracy in the Middle East, its holy places, its Nobel laureates and Olympic prize winners, its accomplished scientists and novelists, it is hard not to ask Rachel’s same questions to Israel: “Did you truly exist or were you only a dream?” We celebrate Israel’s Day of Independence by nurturing that dream.
Shabbat Shalom
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