Chapter 5 - Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet’s Cup of Sorrows

Summary

Reluctantly crowned the national poet of the nascent Jewish state at the beginning of the twentieth century, Haim Nahman Bialik – a poet, essayist, and editor who spent most of his life on the margins of the Russian Empire – wrote a series of influential poems of wrath in the prophetic mode famously read as the expression of a crisis of secularism. In Bialik’s most affecting prophetic poetry, the almost imperceptible “wobble” in his teacher Ahad Ha’am’s style turns into a great storm of doubt, rage, sorrow, fragmentation, and loss. If Ahad Ha’am tried to construct a strong prophetic spirit as an educational tool, Bialik paradoxically uses prophetic failure and weakness to summon and goad his audience into a new kind of subjectivity. Reading Bialik’s crisis of secularism in a new light, I argue for a weak prophecy common to both Bialik’s poems and the biblical text.