There’s a poem by Yehuda Amichai that I love. It’s untitled, simply numbered “69,” and it appeared in a 1977 volume called Time. The poem is a Bar-Mitzvah poem, a blessing. In it, the speaker begs to kiss his young son once more, “while you still love it,” while the boy is still a soft-skinned Jacob and before he becomes “a hairy Esau of open fields.” The poet writes, “I’m on my way from believing in God / and you’re on your way toward it,” and then he says, “This too/ is a meeting point of a father and a son.”
When I first read it, the line, This too/ is a meeting point… took my breath away. And its resonance has only deepened for me. I feel the young and the old need to find a meeting point.
During the last year, I’ve thought a lot about inter-generational ties, conversation, argument — the pull between young and old, as well as the pulls within my own 65 yr. old self. There were times last fall, in the aftermath of October 7th, that I felt as if I were rushing down the street in one direction and passing my children going the other way, with me shouting on the fly, Hey, I need to tell you something! or, Here’s how it is for me….
The pathos of Amichai’s poem for me comes from the fact human beings live in time. We are necessarily on different journeys than the next generation, and may in fact pass our children going toward things that we are moving away from. That’s the heartbreaking, beautiful deal. The young cannot be older than their years, nor can their elders erase their lived experience. But while a single person can’t inhabit both youth and age simultaneously, a community can. In fact a living, vibrant community needs both simultaneously. It needs the younger generation’s passion, purity of vision, questioning, and fearlessness, and the wisdom and perspective of its elders’ lived lives.
Because of my own pain and that of my grown children around the horrors that continue to unfold in Israel-Gaza and, now, beyond, I’ve been pulled to consider, re-consider, listen, let things marinate. I have felt one way about the situation, then another; held this grief against that grief; changed my thinking any number of times. I have turned and re-turned, felt unsettled and uncertain — a vocabulary of inner life I associate with the month of Elul and the upcoming holidays.
When I consider who will be standing beside me in shul this year, it’s hard to imagine the dead will not be among them — Israelis and Palestinians. Yes, they will all be there. Remembering, I hope, from wherever they are, what was beautiful and lucky in life.
I want to end with part of a poem by the American poet, Gerald Stern. It’s called “Lucky Life,” and it begins,
Lucky Life isn’t one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace and of pleasure as I lie in between the blows…
It goes on to recount the speaker’s years of summers spent at the Jersey Shore, the trials and memories, and how they begin to run together. At the end of the poem, there is a kind of tashlich moment, followed by praise…which, to me, is at the root of all poetry.
Dear waves, what will you do for me this year? Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?…
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year? Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to. Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness. Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone. Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
Wishing everyone a sweet and healthy New Year, with points of meeting between generations, and with deepest prayers for peace.
***
You can read the full Yehuda Amichai poem here: https://pgrnair.blogspot.com/2016/06/bar-mitzvah-for-son.html
You can read the full Gerald Stern poem here: https://gradychambers.com/notes-on-strategy/2019/11/1/lucky-life
