A longing to reconnect intimately with the world and those around us after we have experienced profound loss is part of a sacred journey. It sets us underway once again. View the study sheet here. View the zoom recording here.
Yom HaShoah, Remembrance of the Holocaust, observed on 27 Nisan (April 17-18, 2023). Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day, observed on 4 Iyar (April 24-25, 2023). Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day, celebrated on 5 Iyar (April 25-26, 2023). Israelis consider those eight days to be Days of Awe. They represent Jewish existence at the precipice of oblivion followed by an honoring of those fallen fighting to defend Jewish sovereignty and then by the rebirth of that sovereignty in the land of Israel. In that Jewish story, to be reborn is to re-enter history and all of its responsibilities.
The source of that near extinction was a Germany that had become infected with a murderous anti-Semitism. Nelly Sachs, Ingeborg Bachmann and Anselm Kiefer are three artists from within the German culture, two poets and a painter, who struggled to understand the source of that infection. They used their art to explore the abyss of mass murder and to illumine a path back to life. For all of us.
Nelly Sachs was a Jewish poet, born into an assimilated family in Berlin. She escaped Germany on the last flight to Stockholm. She descended into a profound depression and found her way through her poetry to both personal restoration and professional recognition. Her poem “But Perhaps God Needs the Longing” describes a solace from grief, one which is achieved through the rededication we make of our life while on earth. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.
Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. Her father, a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party, was an early supporter of the Nazis. Shortly after the war, she met in Vienna the poet Paul Celan, a newly arrived German-speaking Jewish refugee from Romania, whose parents had died in the Shoah. They fell in love and maintained an intense personal relationship for ten years. In her writings, she explores that aspect of German culture which had produced National Socialism, patriarchal degradation of women, and a subjugation of the Other. She finds within literature the power to deny final and absolute answers. Her poem “Bohemia Lies by the Sea” expresses a confidence in the utopian potential of the poetic word.
Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany in 1945. As an artist, he has explored the consequences of German history and the culture of death it produced. Pictured here is his painting Bohemia Lies by the Sea. It is inspired by Bachmann’s poem. Kiefer’s work, at over 18 feet in length and 6 feet in height, is an immense reflection on Bohemian soil and what grew there. Bohemia is a landlocked region in Central Europe that had been annexed by Nazi Germany. Growing in the soil is a field of poppies, which are associated with sleep and which are also evocative of military veterans. A path heads upwards toward a narrow band of horizon, upon which is inscribed the title of Bachmann’s poem.
The piece is more construct than painting. It is composed of thickly applied paint, layers of shellac and charcoal, with resins dripped on the raised surface, which is not flat canvass but textured burlap. When exhibited, large chunks of the application often fall off. A sense of impermanence and ruin contends with the path’s trajectory, which is toward a dream (the sea abutting landlocked Bohemia) that seems ever unrealizable. Yet, the journey continues through the fields of loss. “Art is longing,” Kiefer writes. “You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”
This sense of longing, conveyed also in both Sachs’ and Bachmann’s poems, is an affirmation of the will to be underway, to journey onward despite the dangers and the awareness of life’s fragility. It is a sacred determination that is artfully presented in Parshat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. The portion begins with the recognition of death, describes the Yom Kippur rites which enact a death-and-rebirth ritual, and concludes with a recitation of ways to elevate our relations with one another (the Holiness Code).
The trajectory of this journey is across the field of life, which consists of a soil on which grow poppies the color of death. The path through it, however, is marked by sacred longing, a desire to move forward, and by a guide on how to treat those we encounter along the way. In Sachs’ poetic framing, “in the sky of longing worlds have been born of our love.” It is a longing that shapes intimacies through which the world, and we, are born anew.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) Thursday April 27 as we explore the holiness of being underway.
Oil, emulsion, shellac, charcoal and paint on burlap Bohemia Lies by the Sea by Anselm Kiefer
