Elthbeths room
On June 7th, I wrote a short piece for PolimecOnline, about an article from Hebrew University titled “God Created All Humans With Two Sides, One Is Most Crucial”, which presented a poetic image of the genesis of the human soul as involving the act of creating a space in which humans could temporarily reside in order to save their souls.
I have just learned that the entire thesis, or at least the first part of it, has now been published in a book called The Hebrew Year, 1942-1945, Vol. VIII: Ecology and Social Welfare. The book’s author, Professor David Hamecha, is a member of the Science Committee of the Institute for Archaeological Studies of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and a professor of the Department of Human Sciences at Tel Aviv University.
Professor Hamecha claims, of course, that the Hebrew spirit, as he defines it, does not exist, and that God created humans “solely from the soil,” but does not think there is any need to take on the role of making the Hebrew spirit real.
He describes the Hebrew spirit as “the eternal poet,” but one who has nothing to write about. Instead, “he has a sharp poetic mind, but no poetic sensibility.” I am sure, of course, that there is an equally sharp linguistic sensibility to be found in the Hebrew language, as well as an infinite depth of intellectual diversity. I have often noticed, in my writing, that my words cannot ever sound exactly as I intended them. That is the nature of the Hebrew language, where spelling and grammatical structure can always be taken into account.
But the Hebrew spirit is not something to be tried to create. It is, rather, like God, and like God’s ability to give life, the natural outcome of the universe. The Hebrew spirit is not a curiosity or an imaginary construct, or a fashionable notion of the left-wing intelligentsia; it is an ancient phenomenon of the human condition, whose basic laws do not change, regardless of culture or time.
As I said, I have written about the Israeli spirit and God’s relationship with it many times, and I always find it extremely amusing that on that very blog, some people insist that, to be a genuine Jew, you must belong to an institute called the Hebrew Cultural Center, or, to be really Jewish, you must choose Hebrew as your primary language. Perhaps one can argue that, for most people, Hebrew is not their primary language, or, even if it is, it is usually not spoken outside the home, or, at least, not spoken very often to people outside the home. And while Hebrew is a fine language, the fact is that the Hebrew language’s environment is only a partial environment.
This is true of Hebrew in general, and of Hebrew in the country of Israel, where the Hebrew language occupies a strange territory that resembles nothing so much as the distant future. To be a native speaker of Hebrew in Israel is to inhabit a different world than the rest of the world. One is living in a room that is not fully realized and can never be fully realized. The room is a room of poetry, of a kind that is understood by poets but not by everyone. One sits in a room where there are many walls with exquisite hand-painted paintings of picturesque villages, and there are windows that are always shut so that the room is always dark. One has little to look out at in front of the windows. There are many lamps, but not many windows that open to the outside.
One’s room may not, in fact, be a room at all. One may be an Elthbeths-room, or an Elthbeths-room-room-room, and one’s room may be filled with colors, patterns, and artistic pieces that only the most refined soul can understand. The walls may be completely covered in colored paper, and there may be paintings on the wall. One may have something hanging on the walls, or a standing lamp. There may be pictures painted on the ground, and small spaces covered with fabrics of any color or pattern one can imagine. One may spend hours sitting at a desk, and writing, or, if the desk has an open area, sitting at a small table. If one sits at a tiny table, one has to rest a pencil and some paper on a tiny piece of paper, and one does not get to be sure that the paper will be even close to perfectly straight. If the desk has a cup, one may even put some coffee or tea there. The room may be so filled with such wonders that one can not leave it, or perhaps one wants to remain in that room, forever, if one has a very, very deep, very mature, and blessed spirit.
If one is to be a Christian, one can still be a part of a culture of profound spirituality and spiritual beauty, and also of great love and compassion. One can, indeed, become a full person, despite this environment, and even flourish in it, perhaps, because of this environment. A Christian who does not belong to an Elthbeths-room, or to an Elthbeths-room-room-room is like an abstract painter who wants to paint a picture with colors, shapes, and textures, but does not paint a realistic picture.
The Hebrew language is a pure language, at least relative to the other languages. Because it is a pure language, in Hebrew, there is an enormous depth to it and a very deep profundity. An abstract painter can paint beautiful pictures with colors, shapes, and textures, and, even if his works are abstract, they may still represent people and places of the world. But one cannot paint an abstract landscape in Hebrew.
In Israel, Hebrew speaks to its subjects without words, and so in Hebrew, one sees beauty in the visual arts, in nature, and in nature in the human form. There is a purity in this respect, and perhaps this purity is a good way of expressing how Elthbeths-room-rooms may contribute to Israel’s creative life.
It is only in this realm that I find the work of Elthbeth Stevens so fascinating. In her poetic work, she uses the Hebrew language, so many times, to paint the world around her, in an entirely different way than the Hebrew language does.
