Isaac rebound: The Aqedah as a paradigm in modern Hebrew poetry

Twentieth-century Jewish history has confronted the Hebrew literary imagination with an astonishing repetition of the biblical drama. The ingathering of the Jews in the modern state of Israel recalls the Biblical exodus from Egypt and the return to Zion of the Babylonian exiles; Israel’s war of independence echoes the conquest of the land by Joshua and the Judges; the story of Hagar and Ishmael seems to anticipate the conflict with the Arabs; the revolt of Absalom against David might be seen as presaging some of the tensions between the founding fathers of Israel and the sons who carne after; the present-day consolidation of the Jewish State has obvious analogies to the Solomonic Kingdom of Israel. Even the most tragic event of this century, the Holocaust, has been related to the story of the Aqedah (the binding of Isaac). Clearly the dialogue with the Bible is not the sole preserve of modern Hebrew literature - and from this point of view every Hebrew text is polyphonic - but what is distinctive to it is the inexorable feeling that history is repeating itself in a new guise, like a film that is being rerun. For this there is no true parallel in any other literature. Modern Greek, for example, makes use of its historical and mythological sources, as in the poetry of Cavafi and Seferis, but is not an actual witness to events which so vividly echo ancient events and which unfold in the very same physical and geographical settings. Mount Moriah, for example, is a real place and not merely a sacred notion and that in itself permits the modern poet to view the Aqedah in a light quite different from that of the mediaeval liturgical poet who composed his hymns in the Rhine valley. The modern Jew is reviving a text.