| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Jewish Social Studies 7.1 (2000) 141-166 The world is filled with remembering and forgetting like sea and dry land. Sometimes memory is the solid ground we stand on, sometimes memory is the sea that covers all things like the Flood. And forgetting is the dry land that saves, like Ararat. [ . . . ] And every person is a dam between past and future. When he dies the dam bursts, the past breaks into the future, And there is no before or after. All times becomes one time like our God: our time is one. Blessed be the memory of the dam. For Yehuda Amichai's devoted readers, these stanzas look very familiar in their unique combination of the profane and the celestial. Indeed, these verses draw an intriguing line by combining the ostensibly divided realms of the sacrilegious and the sanctified in a single gesture. The resemblance of the two stanzas is further highlighted by the similarity of their rhetorical structure -- supposition, elaboration, and simile: "The world is. . ."; "And every person is. . ."; "Like the Flood"; "Like our God." These pointed similes are notably echoed in the repetition of the water metaphoric, both the ancient symbol of chaos and renewal and the rather modern signifier of the luring unconscious. Amichai's ironic dialectic of memory and oblivion as well as the poem's oscillation between Lethe's charms and Mnemosyne's demanding voice lead finally to the setting of life as a single moment in eternity, a rather insignificant marker for these undividable entities -- God, Time -- for which there is neither "before" nor "after." The poem's figuration of "memory" and "time" bears no redemptive seed. Noticeably, the celestial tone of both stanzas is decisively broken by the parodic dictum "Blessed be the memory of the dam." Not only does the verse scorn the traditional Jewish saying after mentioning a dead person's name -- zikhrono livrakhah--but it also sheds a satirical light on the memory of the dead. In a godless world, it seems, only a metaphor is left from the highest form of divine creation. The poem's inverted quotation thus prevents the reader from being misled by its rather pretentious, protophilosophical, and theological assertions about the nature of "time." No firm concept of what life and death, past and present are, is being offered. Rather, the poem stages memory vis-à-vis the "time" of oblivion as it appears in the Jewish rhetoric of time. These stanzas concretely illustrate, reflect, and at the same time question the ways in which memory, especially the memory of the dead, is figured in Hebrew, and indeed in Jewish culture. Throughout the millennia, literature has provided a revealing prism for refracting the consciousness of time in different periods and different cultures. As Paul Ricoeur put it, the symbolic structures and cultural determinants of our temporal experience are reflected in the diversity of the symbolic systems in which this experience was organized through different languages and periods. By portraying "our God" and "our time" as an eternal unity, Amichai's prosaic-sounding rhyme poetically transforms -- not without a significant amount of irony -- Maimonides' fourth principle of faith: that God is eternal, having neither beginning nor end. This lyrical notion of Jewish time is hardly unusual. Gershom Scholem referred to the Jewish concept of time as the "eternal present" (ewige Gegenwart). Even such different thinkers as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Eliezer Schweid, and Alexander Barzel agree that the unity of all temporal modes in the realm of cultural memory -- often symbolized by God's eternity -- has always been of crucial significance to Jewish civilization. In addition, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein have shown how Jewish culture's highly developed awareness of time has always been close at hand in the daily experience of the yearly cycle that structures Jewish liturgy and ritual practice. The crisis of Jewish identity at the onset of modernity, the rise of Jewish national movements, and especially the Shoah seem to have only deepened the notion that every single event in the past remains a determining...
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