Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Jerusalem Bound

By Liel Leibovitz

When we think of aliya, the earliest images that come to mind are of young pioneers in the early Twentieth Century, arriving from Russia or Poland with empty pockets and hearts brimming with passion to settle the ancient Jewish homeland. And yet, nearly 800 years earlier, one of the world’s better-known men made the same journey, giving up a life of fame and fortune in Spain, to fulfill his firm belief that only in Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, can a Jew live a life that’s spiritually complete.

Yehuda Halevi—physician, philosopher, poet—is the subject of the new biography by Hillel Halkin, a writer and translator who himself made aliya, moving to Zikhron Ya’akov in the 1970s. I spoke to Halkin about Halevi, his poetry, and the lasting influence of his ideas.

LL: Tell us a little bit about Yehuda Halevi. Who was he?

HH: Yehuda Halevi was born in Spain some time between 1070 and 1075. During his lifetime, Spain was divided into two fairly equal halves, a Christian north and a Muslim south, and though born in the north, he lived most of his life in the south, in Andalusia. Poetry was a highly valued medium of expression and communication among educated Muslims of his time, and thus among Andalusian Jews too, and Halevi, who began to write Hebrew poetry at a young age, was recognized as a major talent while still in his teens and went on to become one of the great all-time Hebrew poets. He was also the author of The Kuzari, a philosophical defense of Judaism written in dialogue form that became one of the major texts of Jewish tradition.

One group of Halevi’s poems, called his “Songs of Zion,” express his love and longing for the Land of Israel. The shortest and best-known of them goes:

My heart in the East

But the rest of me far in the West –

How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?

How, in the bonds of the Moor,

Zion chained to the Cross,

Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?

Yet gladly I’d leave

All the best of grand Spain

For one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust.

In 1140, already an old man, he left a comfortable life in Spain, in which he was a lionized figure, and set out for Palestine with the intention of settling there. This was an unheard-of thing to do at his age, when the country was largely in the hands of the Crusaders, who had brutally decimated its small Jewish community, and Halevi’s friends, thinking it reckless folly, pleaded with him to reconsider. Yet he was adamant. From his point of view, the entire logic of being Jewish as expounded in The Kuzari pointed to the necessity of a Jew’s living in the Land of Israel. This does not make him the first Zionist in the modern sense of the word – he had no practical plan for settling Jews in Palestine or turning them into a majority there – but it does make him the first Diaspora Jew to insist that life in Exile was so psychologically and morally intolerable that it had to be abandoned at all costs.

LL: Did he ever make it to the land of Israel? I understand there’s somewhat of a mystery surrounding his death.

HH: Until the 1950s, Halevi’s traces disappeared in Egypt, through which the sea route from Spain to Palestine took him. Despite a legend first recorded in the 16th century that he had died at the gates of Jerusalem, trampled to death by a Muslim horseman, some historians therefor thought that he had died in Egypt and had never reached Palestine at all.

Today, because of the Cairo Geniza, a medieval archive of Jewish documents discovered in the sealed loft of an old synagogue, we know that Halevi did reach Palestine. We even know the date he set sail for it from Egypt—May 14, 1141. Yet then his traces vanish again, though letters found in the Geniza tell us that he died that same summer. One letter even hints that the legend about his death may be factual, but key parts of it are illegible and the exact truth will probably never be known.

LL: You yourself decided to leave the United States behind and make aliya. Were you influenced by Halevi?

HH: My and my wife’s decision to move to Israel from America in 1970 certainly wasn’t inspired by Halevi directly. When we made it, I was only superficially acquainted with Halevi’s poetry and had never read The Kuzari. I only got to know Halevi well when already living in Israel.

And yet this decision was very much a Halevian one. For Halevi, living in the Land of Israel was a matter of inner necessity. It was something he had to do for his own integrity, and the failure to do it left him feeling incomplete and inconsistent. Judaism was for him above all a religion of action – and living in the Land of Israel was the ultimate act, the abstention from which undermined the meaning of all else.

When I decided to move to Israel, I felt very much the same way. A Jewish life lived elsewhere not only made no sense to me, it struck me as fundamentally dishonest. I could imagine a life in America as an American and a life in Israel as a Jew, but I could not imagine, when for the first time in two thousand years there was a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland, a life as a Jew in America that would not be a lie. Unlike Halevi, whose aliya in 1140 was truly heroic, my own aliya did not really involve giving up many of “the comforts of the West.” Israel is, and already was then, a pretty comfortable country. What it meant was choosing to be what I already was – a Jew – completely and unreservedly, and Halevi will always be for me the great model of such a choice.

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To see Hillel Halkin talk about Yehuda Halevi in person, check out his upcoming book tour.

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Liel Leibovitz is an editor and writer for Tablet Magazine, an online magazine of Jewish life and culture.

Read more posts from Issue 12: Aliyah – Going Home

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