Liberating Lyric
The Necessary Madness of Poetry
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song/poem to the LORD. They said: I will sing to the LORD, for God has triumphed gloriously; horse and driver God has hurled into the sea. (Exodus 15:1)
“I’ll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.”—Louis Zukofsky, “A”
Is it conceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous? …Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach?
—Plato, Republic, Book X
This week, in Beshalach (Exodus 13:17–17:16), the Israelites leave Egypt by walking through a parted sea. As the seawalls come crashing down upon the Egyptian army, the newly freed slaves break into song. The culmination of the Exodus story is poetry.
Why does the story of liberation find fulfillment in song? And how might the singing of newly freed slaves be connected to the image of parted waters?
Many linguists and philosophers of language believe that poetry is older than prose. The oldest extent works of the Greeks are all poetic. The pre-Socratics wrote in meter. Their work was likely sung and recited. Academics believe the poetic passages in the Bible to be the oldest parts.
One reason poetry may be older than prose is that poems and songs are easier to remember than unmetered sentences. In oral cultures, poetry functions as a mnemonic device (a memory technology). Another reason may have to do with the original simplicity of poetry. Listen to children speak, and you’ll hear their mellifluousness. With few words in their vocabulary, each word carries greater intensity. Typically, the more words a person or culture has, the less poetic they become. The return to poetry represents the return to childhood, a resurfacing of our primal selves.
Advanced societies have refined concepts, but are more alienated from the songful qualities of speech on which archaic cultures depend. The 20th century modernist poet, Louis Zukofsky, understood this when he defined the lower limit of poetry as meaning and the upper limit as music. What he means is that the best poetry sounds good. Meaning is a baseline requirement of poems, but not their distinguishing feature. If you want clear meaning, read a “How-to” book. In Hebrew, the same word—shira—means poem and song. Our word, “lyric,” derives from the Greek word for words which were to accompanied by a lyre.
The Torah is written in prose, but occasionally breaks into poetry. The Israelites’ song suspends the Biblical narrator’s decorum. It reminds us of language itself. Why remind us of language itself at this precise moment? The narrator could simply have told us that the Israelites rejoiced by singing. Do we need the transcript of their song? Yes. Our experience of Biblical poetry connects us more deeply to the story, and also gives us, at a formal level, a kind of linguistic miracle.
What do I mean by a linguistic miracle? I mean that in a world accustomed to easily digested information, poetry is a suspension of that natural order. Poems are not supernatural in the sense that they defy the laws of nature, but they are supernatural in the sense that they are out of the ordinary. We know an occasion is special when a poem is recited. The occurrence of a poem in the midst of prose is a kind of parting of the sea of language. Or rather, the poet knows how to walk through the sea—to see a way where others do not because the blinders of their prosaic minds prevent it.
The poet knows the nimbleness of language, that what appears solid is movable. The same knowledge is needed to take the risk of freedom. The same knowledge is needed to leave the known for the unknown. The same knowledge is needed to believe that the world can change, that empires can fall, new orders formed. The poet asks why this word is here, why this image is here, why this sound pattern is here, and thus, why this world is here—why am I here? The same care and curiosity is needed to upend inertia and break the holding pattern of societal decadence and complacency.
In ancient myths, the sea is a well known character, a god. Anthropologists and folklorists read the story as an archetypal tale about a sky god defeating a sea god. While I don’t share the polytheistic sentiment, it’s a helpful indicator. The sea recalls the tohu vavohu of Genesis 1, the “wild and waste” that God subdues when God creates the world. Nietzsche would call this—in The Birth of Tragedy—the triumph of the Apollonian (reason, daylight, enlightenment, sobriety, explanation) over the Dionysian (madness, night, primitivity, intoxication, myth).
If the point of the Torah were simply to get rid of disorder and madness and replace it with reason, there would be no poetry at all. Said more radically, there would be no narrative. The Torah would only be a legal document and/or a creedal treatise. The story of Creation and the story of Exodus involve not a war between sky and water, as we read in other ancient myths, but a dialectic, perhaps even a friendly, if antagonistic intimacy, between them. Poetry is the ezer k’negdo, the helpful adversary, of prose. The sea is both a harsh, scary, inhospitable, overwhelming place, and, the very element that comes to help the Israelites in their time of need. When society is insane, the sane appear insane. In a world where dry land is oppressive, the sea is a haven; tumult and volatility are friends.
Neither dry land nor sea are inherently virtuous or vicious. Dry land gives us stability, which comes with the liability of rigidity and corruption. The sea gives us a vantage point from which to challenge and critique existing institutions, but is no place to build new ones. The poem breaks up the tedium of prosaic life, but for most of us, is not a permanent home. There’s an obvious reason I’m writing this very d’var in prose and not poetry—I want you to understand the content of what I am saying more than I want you to enjoy the lyricism with which I say it.
Plato/Socrates is a well known critic of poets. His critique comes down to the fact that poets lack theoretical knowledge of the truth and practical knowledge about how to get people to live well. From a rationalistic point of view, poetry seems woefully deficient. It’s decorative. It’s imitative. It’s emotionally compelling, but it’s not “thought leadership.” It’s not going to find a cure for cancer. It’s not going to give us principles on which we can base our behavior. Poetry, like all art, for Plato (who was nonetheless deeply artful and poetic), is a kind of temptation, a distraction, an illusion. The Torah is not so strident. Poetry has a critical role in liberation. King David is a poet-psalmist.
There is a time to each season; a time for sentences and a time for stanzas; a time for referential precision and a time for music; a time for knowledge and a time for affect. The God who separates sky and earth, sacred and mundane, is a God who separates poetry and prose. The rationalists who look down on art are wrong. But an artistic utopia in which we never put down the timbrels is equally unsustainable. In Deuteronomy 31:19, at the end of the Torah, Moses refers to his last speech as “this poem.” Some commentaries take his phrase to refer to the entire Torah. If that is so, then every time we see a poem in the Torah, we get a microcosm of Torah itself. And yet, as mentioned, the Torah is not written entirely in verse. How can the entire Torah be a poem while not appearing to be a poem?
One answer is that it is a prose-poem, an exoteric document that doubles as a source of inexhaustible wisdom and interpretation. Another is that a life of Torah allows us to live poetically in a prosaic world, to play and build simultaneously. The Torah, experienced as poetry, is a command to live as if we are always walking through a parted sea.
Here is the Russian poet, Marina Tzvetaeva on poets:
“There was neither a hero nor a poet on Odysseus’ ship. A hero would withstand without being tied, without wax in the ears. A poet would jump overboard even when tied. A poet would hear even with wax in the ears.”
For Tzvetaeva, the poet’s strength is her capacity to hear, despite earwax, to feel excitement and compulsion when others tune out. The poet’s weakness is her inability to master this compulsion. There are times when the call to make art is inappropriate, when the sirens’ song turns the listener into a solipsist, trapped in private language.
But when the words of the prose speakers are unoriginal, deadening cliches, it’s good to risk some counterbalancing madness. A society without artists would be a robotic dystopia. It is therefore fitting that the Israelite escape from an oppressive society unleashes their poetic yearning. In their case, the siren call they followed was their compass.
To discover what is new, we must return to, and resurface, what is old.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Here’s a long thread I wrote about Leo Strauss.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
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