A Path in the Heart of the Sea
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It only takes a little turbulence on a trans-Atlantic flight or a sudden roll of billows on a ship to bring back, with a start, all those Psalms I had to read and learn by heart as a child. I look around the cabin and see others with nervously moving lips and realize I’m not the only one who remembers his prayers when trouble threatens. The catastrophe unfolding in New Orleans, which seems only to get worse as the reports come in, causes shivers of mingled dread and compassion, even at a safe distance. We tend to forget, until disaster strikes, that mankind has always nourished a healthy horror of the ocean, and for good reason.
When the author of the Psalms wants to describe his sore distress, he exclaims, “I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.” Our innate sense of security is predicated on the feel of solid earth beneath our feet; where “there is no standing,” as in flood or earthquake, we are lost. The psalmist invokes this dizzying sense of powerlessness again and again: “all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me,” he says in another passage. He’s describing a real sea in flood, but his sea is figurative, too: We’re all floodswept, whether we know it or not; this is our fundamental human predicament, however securely we burrow into some snug foothold. Actual cataclysms only lay that fact bare.
Even as I write this, I rebel against it. Not the undeniable fact that, as Andre Gide once put it, in human life “there is no safe shelter” but rather, the deep-seated impulse to draw lessons and morals from the misery of others. That we do it despite ourselves suggests that the specter of senselessness bothers us more than flood or fire. I have no doubt that right now, all over the country, preachers of all persuasions are drafting homilies on the spiritual lessons to be taken from New Orleans. I hate senselessness but somehow I hate this more.
By coincidence I was reading a recent translation of the medieval Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi when Katrina deluged the Gulf Coast, and I recalled that he had written several poems about a dangerous voyage and that age-old dread of the sea. The translations are by Gabriel Levin, himself a brilliant poet, and are the best I’ve found of this intricate and difficult poet (“Yehuda Halevi: Poems from the Diwan,” Anvil Press, 175 pages, $14.95).
Almost 900 years ago this summer, Halevi sailed from Spain, where he was born and had gained great fame, to Egypt, then the most cosmopolitan center of Jewish and Muslim cultural and intellectual life in the Mediterranean world. (Slightly later, the great Maimonides himself would follow the same route, settling in Cairo for life.) Here’s how Yehuda Halevi evokes the incessant disorientation of the voyage:
Has a flood washed the world to waste?
Not a scrap of land in sight;
Man, beast and fowl, have they gone
Under, wrung on the seabed’s rack?
What comfort to catch sight
Of bluff or shifting sands –
Even the Libyan desert would please.
Stalking fore-and-aft
I peer in all directions at nothing
But water, ark and sky.
Born in Tudela sometime around 1075, Halevi had become celebrated among Andalusian Jews not only for his poetry but for his impassioned prose work “The Book of the Kuzari,” a series of imaginary dialogues between a Jewish sage and the King of the Khazars (who had converted to Judaism in the eighth century). Halevi wrote his poems in Hebrew but used Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew letters) for “The Book of the Kuzari,” since that was the intellectual lingua franca of the time, in Spain as well as in Egypt.
Halevi’s voyage is at once wincingly real and grandly biblical; allusions abound, not only to the Psalms and Job but to Noah’s flood:
Leviathan
Whitens the surf with age in its churning.
Drenched in spray, the ship’s
Snatched by the hands of the thieving sea.
The sea boils, the waves are “anguished, like a woman in labor” but the poet “stands firm.” His only possible response to the pitching ocean is to view it as God’s spirit made palpable. He takes refuge in God from God. The terrors of the deep represent the ordeal he must undergo, the ransom he must post, to complete his pilgrimage to the east. Hadn’t he once written, while still in Spain, “My heart is in the east and I’m at the far end of the west”?
A highly versatile poet, Halevi had composed not only liturgical hymns (still heard in synagogues) but delicate, erotic lyrics, teasing riddles, and sharp satires, all following Arabic models and an Andalusian manner he repudiated even while he drew on it. Now his style becomes frankly biblical. Natural phenomena are animated from within; they aren’t merely forces but manifestations:
Tell the heart in the heart of the sea
Shaken by the pounding waves:“Rest assured,
Trust in God who made the sea,His name endures an eternity.
Your fears will subside –
Even though the billows swell.He who curbs the high seas is with you.”
At first glance, this seems a form of tough-mindedness no longer available to us. But I’m not so sure. Halevi accepts the dreadfulness of events as they are but views them as embodiments of something even more formidable and more dread. He doesn’t seek to explain them, nor does he consign them to meaninglessness. He made it to Alexandria, where he was greeted by an enthusiastic throng of admirers, and he died there, probably in 1141. In a way I can’t quite grasp but still think worth remembering, he had discovered, in his own words, “a path in the heart of the sea.”