יהודה עמיחי

פייטן של היומיום

תקציר

This essay is an attempt to revisit the poetry of Yehuda Amichai at a distance of nearly 15 years after his death and in the context of the messianic fervor addressed nearly a century ago by Gershom Scholem and enacted daily in the streets of post-1967 Jerusalem. Against the backdrop of contemporary events and cultural theories - from Scholem to Derrida— and primary Hebrew sources from Song of Songs and Psalms through Shmuel Hanagid to H.N. Bialik and his successors, Amichai, in this reading, offers a “poetics of return” to sacred space and language that is mediated and inclusive. Replacing the dialectical claims of the modern Hebrew imagination with dialogical forms, Amichai’s poetics also transcends other binaries, between “secular” and “religious” and between territorialized, centripetal and diasporic, centrifugal forces. The rather anachronistic term “metaphysical” is invoked here to replace prevailing ironic readings of Amichai’s poetry, stretching from his early “conceits” to late poems that recognize the toxic potential of the language of comparison in a time of literalized claims to the sacred. Finally, the ethical force behind Amichai’s ultimate address, the children (the next generation), is pitted against the ultimate address to the Divine or mortality itself in the poetry of his metaphysical predecessors.