Parashat Korach, Numbers 16:1-18:32

Haftarah 1 Samuel 11:14-12:22

Dear TBE Community,

In Jerusalem, when one walks down the street Emek Refaim toward the neighborhood HaMoshava HaGermanit, the German Colony, one passes an abandoned overgrown lot. It lies behind a rusting green fence, and one might overlook the signs that are affixed to the locked gate. On one sign is a poem, titled Rosh Ir – Mayor – and the other sign announces that this abandoned lot is supposed to become the Yehuda Amichai neighborhood, named after one of Israel’s most prolific and famous poets who lived, as the sign notes, from May 3, 1924 to September 22, 2000.

The Hebrew of the sign is confusing, at least for a non-native speaker like me. The Hebrew says כן מוקמת – here is established, or arguably, here will be established the Yehuda Amichai neighborhood.

But evidently, that sign is old, and whatever the aspiration and intention expressed in the Hebrew passive verb mukemet, it has not been, will not be fulfilled. Not far from the abandoned lot, further up a slope, surrounded by modern high rise apartment buildings, was placed a big hewn rock, a monument dedicated to Amichai’s memory, overlooking the space of the never-to-be neighborhood like a parve, lukewarm compromise.

I walked past this lot many times and took many photos of it from various angles by night and by day, as if documenting the vacant tristesse could somehow elucidate what had happened. I couldn’t understand – while any person, and any famous person to boot, will have antagonists, people who dislike or like to sabotage them for any reason, I felt saddened: What had happened, that the name of one of Israel’s poetry giants would sit there on this rusting sign, the lasting marker of some strife, some falling out, some political scheme? I imagined that younger generations, non-Israeli, non-Jewish tourists who might not know Amichai’s oeuvre would come to associate his name with that bog of failure and abandonment. I never really found out though I asked around, even Amichai’s widow who lived a few blocks away from me and seemed loathe to talk about it. Some real estate speculation, people eventually said, and a lot of protests and wrath and now a place that feels almost biblical, like the locations where earth, fire, or plague swallowed or consumed rebellious people.

That a place in Jerusalem would feel biblical might be no surprise, and even though I never met the man, I can’t imagine that Amichai would have been in favor of an expensive real estate development in his name. But as I said, I don’t know what happened, and why the lot sits there the way it does, and why the sign proclaiming the failed intention was never taken down – at least not until I last walked there three years ago.

The irony is that the poem about the mayor seems to be speaking to all that went wrong with the Yehuda Amichai Neighborhood:

Mayor

(Translated by Assia Gutmann)

It is sad to be the mayor of Jerusalem.

It is terrible.

How can any man be the mayor of a city like that?

What can he do with her?

He will build, and build, and build.

And at night the stones of the hills round about

will crawl down

toward the houses

like wolves coming

to howl at the dogs

who have become men’s slaves.

I always wanted to write about my feelings and thoughts that were stirred up when I walked past this lot. I never really got around to it, except for including a reference to it in my poem Emek Refaim, Kislev 5783. Only now, hiking through the hills surrounding Camp Newman – hills that are still vividly marked by the devastating fire nine years ago – and contemplating what to write for this week’s newsletter during Parashat Korach, did things begin to line up.

I remembered how I often imagined some Korach-style falling out when I walked past the green rusting fence and the inscrutable wasteland behind it; how I thought about how our hearts and souls are marked with cuts like landscapes are marked by fault lines, craters, petrified redwoods – or blackened trunks reaching into a blue sky like smokestacks from a Bruce Springsteen song. I thought about how the sons of Korach did not join their father’s rebellion and were not swallowed up by the earth but became Temple musicians and psalmists instead. And I thought of another Amichai poem that could be affixed to that green rusting fence in the shadowland of Emek Refaim, and that fits this week’s parsha as well:

The Place Where We Are Right

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

From the place where we are right

flowers will never grow

in the spring.

The place where we are right

is hard and trampled

like a yard.

But doubts and loves

dig up the world

like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place

where the ruined

house once stood.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch