One Moment, Silence

The Epistemological Quest and (Im)Possibility of Prophecy in the Early Poetry of Natan Zach

Abstract

The poem “One Moment” opens Natan Zach’s most important anthology Different Poems with prosaic and awkward, anti-poetic lines. Their incongruousness reflects the agony of oedipal guilt in a psychoanalytical reading, or the incompetence of mauvaise foi in an existential one. However, the biblical overtones of the poem open the way to a third reading, which transcends the first two and puts the contrast between an epistemological “knowing” (possible only in the biblical era of prophecy and revelation) and its absence or impossibility at the philosophical, intellectual and thematic heart of the poem. The opening lines thus emerge as an appeal to the reader, and despite their declared unaestheticism they do in fact contain the nutshell of the anthology’s poetic and philosophical message: the lack of true and prophetic knowledge as the key characteristic of modern life. The poet’s mission is to expose humanity to its unaware state, and he thus becomes an antithetical prophet. This poetic stand has grown out of the complex tensions between poetry and prophecy and between representation and knowledge in Zach’s early, formative work, and allows him to famously criticize the sublime and anagogical in Israeli poetry prior to and during the first years of independence. Therefore, though Zach is the quintessential Israeli secular poet, his work centers around a missing, yet still traceable and faintly gleaming, anagogical realm at the infrastructure of Israeli culture.