Sophiology and the Concept of Femininity In Russian Symbolism and in Modern Hebrew Poetry

1.

Sexual love has a long tradition in Hebrew poetry, beginning from The Song of Songs through the poetry of the Middle Ages. However, in modern Hebrew poetry this theme was a taboo for about a hundred years, from the late 18^th to the late 19^th century.

Modern Hebrew literature was born in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, so German literature was at first the main source of models for writers in Hebrew, even when the centre of literary activity moved to Galicia and Lithuania during the first half of the nineteenth century. Russian influence on Hebrew literature became dominant from the mid-nineteenth century, when the centre of activity moved to Warsaw and Odessa, until the 1920s, when it moved to Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

During the nineteenth century, while Romanticism was flourishing in European poetry, Jewish poets, who were writing in Hebrew according to German and Russian models, were reluctant, however, to write personal romantic love peoms. The young poet Micha Yosef Lebenson (1828-1852), who lived in Vilna, was an exception. For the wide Jewish public, which was still leading a religious Orthodox life, the only legitimate relationship between a man and a woman was an arranged marriage. From the 1860s  to the mid -1890s the woman in Hebrew poetry could either be a Jewish historical character; or a representative  of the suffering, socially deprived Jewish woman (in the style of  Nikolay Nekrasov’s “civil poetry”); or  - from the 1880s -  an allegorical figure representing the fate of the suffering Jewish nation.

 In the mid-1890s, when Hebrew poets in Russia began writing personal love poems after the style of Heine, they were severely criticized. Moshe Lilienblum, a critic in the vein of Pisarev, angrily termed this phenomenon “a Heinesque epidemic”, and wrote that he could not understand why poets find it necessary to announce their private affairs in the press.[1]

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2.

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1894), a graduate of the rabbinical school in Volozhin, learned Russian at the age of eighteen, and it was the only non-Jewish  language he ever mastered completely. Bialik, the Hebrew meshorer le’umi (poet laureate) was the first Hebrew poet in the modern era to write personal poems dealing with  sexual drives.[2]

Bialik’s poetry is engaged with love and sexuality from its very beginning in the early 1890s. However, in his early personal love poems Bialik tends to depict romantic love in a light mood, à la Heine.[3]  In poems which were written from the mid-1890s to 1903   sexual drives are depicted as dangerous – unpure, demonic and sinful -  and therefore they are rejected by the poet.[4] In these poems, feminine sexuality is the enemy of the Jewish moral purity  and of the spirituality needed for the poet-prophet’s mission. In the poem “In Twilight” (1902) romantic love, which binds man to woman in body and soul, is presented as even more dangerous for man than mere sexual drive, because it creates illusions of false spiriutality and sacredness, and it disconnects him from social engagement.[5] Love which is not dangerous is sexless in Bialik early poems.[6]

However, in a series of poems written during 1903-1905[7] there is an interesting turn: love, even when it is extra marrital and sexual, appears to be sacred. Love or the beloved  is depicted  as  a divine feminine being, hiding in a secret abode, which is expected to bring redemption to the man-poet. The woman here is sometimes a Shechina and sometimes a queen or a princess whose dedicated knight is the man-poet.

Thus, for example, in “Where are You?” the poet calls to the beloved: "היגלי נא ומהרי בואי, בואי/ אלי מחבואי; / ובעוד יש גאולה לי  צאי וגאלי” (Please appear quickly and come, come to my hiding place; and as long as redemption is possible for me, come out and redeem me).[8] Later in this poem there is a parallelism between sexual experience and the sanctification of Isaiah to be a prophet (Isaiah 6 1-6). In “The scroll of Fire” the hero turns to the beloved, who is standing naked on a rock and calls her “Daughter of God” who “ in your right hand you hold the sceptre of happiness and on your forehead [blossoms] the fringe of redemption”.[9] In “Come Out”  the poet calls the beloved to appear “On a wing of light as Grace of God”  ("חסד אל בארץ/ על כנף אור")[10]     In contrast to “The Hungry Eyes”, where  sexual love is accused of “dirtying” the pure water of the poet’s soul, “Come Out” ends by the invitation of  the beloved to bathe together with the poet  in a fountain of freedom and inspiration: “With the wave and the freedom my song will also glitter and sound”.[11] Why has the dangerous woman turned into a daughter of God, and love became sacred and redeeming in Bilaik’s poetry?

One is tempted to answer that it was a result of Bialik’s extra marrital love affair with the Jewish painter and writer Ira Jan, whom he first met in spring 1903.[12]  However, this answer cannot explain the fact, that a few months before meeting Ira Jan, Bialik wrote the poem “Daughter of Israel” (written before January 22, 1903),[13] where love is also presented as a sacred spiritual ideal. In this poem the poet’s love is presented to the reader as a precious heritage from his mother, who taught him the ways of modest Jewish love. The same difficulty also arises when we examine the poem “If the Angel Asks” (written in September 1904), where the poet says that love is for him a gate which is closed forever.  In “Take me Under Your Wing” (written in 12 Adar 1905) the woman-angel’s motherly bosom is the only shelter for the poet’s head. The poet asks her: “Be a mother and sister to me”, and confesses that he does not know what is the meaning of love. There is no passion in this poem (compare to “Where are You?”), only fidelity to an unloved woman with a motherly  bosom (fidelity of son to mother is also the theme of “Alone”, written in July 1902), and that could be his wife, Mania, whose memoirs and letters testify to her love and care for her husband.[14] Bialik’s letters to her are replete with expressions of of love, trust and fidelity, an elementary family contact between allies.[15] From the Bialik-Jan correspondence it is clear that the affair completely changed Ira Jan’s life, where as Bialik never left his conservative marriage, which was for him a part of the Jewish moral imperative.[16]  Bialik’s affair with Ira Jan cannot, then be a full explanation for this turn in Bialik’s poetry.

Another possible explanation is that in these poems Bialik used Jewish mystical, and especially kabbalistic symbolism: Bialik’s image of the divine woman is inspired by the symbol of the Jewish Shechina, the personification of God’s presence in the world.[17]  This explanation has its difficulties as well. Between 1891 and 1901 Bialik, a former student of the misnagi (anti-Hassidic) Volozhin yeshiva, had no interest in Jewish mysticism. In 1890 he even wrote a satyric poem where he mocked hassidic beliefs,[18] and between 1984 and 1897 he wrote the long  poem “Business with Mysticism”, where he caricaturized the hassidic mystification of nature .[19] Kabbalistic and hassidic motifs and symbols began to appear in his poetry only in 1901-1902, in the poems “Light”, “Alone”, “In the Twilight” and “I have not taken an abndoned light”, together with the influence of literary Symbolism. In these poems (including “Daughter of Israel”) Shechina appears not as a symbol of sexual love, but  in the conventional national context;  in “Alone” motherly love appears as a Shechina whose wing is broken, an image which is closer to the image of woman in the poetry of hibat Tsion than to the image of the redeeming queenly divine woman in the 1903-1905 group of poems. The question arises, again: what turned the Shechina-mother, a symbol of the Jewish spirit, into a symbol of sacred sexual love?

Bilaik’s image of the beloved as a divine woman-angel created the impression of Bialik’s contemporary critics that his love poetry is not completely “Jewish”. In his review on Bialik’s poetry (published in the Russian-Jewish monthly Novy Voskhod) Mordechai Ginzburg writes, that in Bialik’s love poetry one finds “non-Jewish tones”, for “The divinisation of woman is alien to Judaism. Lilit – the empress (tsartisa) of sin and seduction – yes, but the cult of “The Beautiful Lady” (prekrasnaia dama)  is unknown to Jews”.[20] Here the words in brackets allude to a central motif in A. Blok’s early poetry and to the tradition of Sophiology in Russian literary symbolism. Bialik rejected this criticism, according to which the image of womam in his poetry reminds of a Christian madona, and said: “In Christianity the word Mother  has various conotations, but for the Jew it is different”.[21]

Comparing Bialik’s to Chernikhovsky’s love poetry the writer Y.H. Brenner wrote in 1912 that Bialik lacks “a healthy attitude to the element of elements in human life”, namely, to physical love.[22]  Later on Bialik’s attitude to love won a series of psychological interpretations trying to solve the riddle of his “unhealthy” attitude to sex.[23]   I propose to consider Bialik’s dialogue with Sophiology as an additional explanation to the image of woman and of love in his poems from 1903-1905.

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3.

At the turn of the twentieth century Sophiology, a new concept of femininity, apparently unique to Russian culture, was being created by the Symbolist writers and artists.[24] It was formulated by the philosopher, theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), the central source of inspiration for the writers of Russian literary Symbolism ,[25] and for the whole neo-mystical movement for “A Revolution of the Spirit” in pre-revolutioanry Russia.[26]  Sophiology underwent further developments in the poetry and prose of Valery Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Biely, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Boris Pasternak, and in non-fiction – philosophical and theological - writings of Georgy Chulkov, Vasily Rozanov, Elis-Kobylinsky,  Nikolay Minsky, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolay Berdiaev.[27]  Many of these writers were banned during the Soviet period, because or their neo-Christian anti-Marxist visions. Sophiology was part and parcel of the Russian intellectual and poetic atmosphere at the beginning of the twentieth century. Solovyov revived the ancient Jewish-Christian myth of Sophia as part of his effort to confront what he saw as the rampant positivism, materialism and atheism in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual thought. Solovyov transformed ancient Sophia into a rich, complex, and intentionally enigmatic symbol of unity, which transcends sexual and cultural tensions.

Sophia is originally a gnostic female mythologema, symbolizing the divine wisdom.[28] The gnostic narrative, where Sophia is a hero of a cosmogonic myth,  emphasizes the dual aspect of Sophia, who is both a virginal-motherly and a dangerous whore, a sinner and a redeemer. Christian and Jewish scholars differ regarding the ancient sources of the Sophia myth, as to whether they are to be found in the New Testament and early Christian Gnosticism (especially Valentinian), or in the more ancient Jewish traditions of hokhma (Wisdom; Sophia in Greek) formulated in Job chapter 28 and Proverbs chapter 8, or even in the biblical story of the fall, where Eve’s sin, like Sophia’s, is her wish for new experiences and for divine  knowledge/wisdom.[29]

Whatever the case, it is clear that these traditions of a divine feminine Wisdom survived both in Jewish mysticism  - the idea of a feminine aspect of God is a main pillar of the kabbalistic view - and in Christian traditions, especially in the Eastern Byzantine and Russian Pravoslavie, where Sophia and Maria were merged together.

Solovyov’s Sophiology is a utopian symbolic vision of mystic redemption, based on a systematic  anti-Nietzschean philosophy together with neo-mystical theology.[30] According to Solovyov, unity with Sophia is a mystic goal, which enables man to overcome his natural egotism and become a Godman. This is a unity with God, with “The world’s Soul”, with humanity and with the divine aspect in man himself. It is a self creative experience of spiritual, moral, social and sexual unity. In his philosophical writings (especially in The Meaning of Love 1892-1894) Solovyov endowed sex with sacred contents.  Following kabbalistic traditions, he taught that physical earthly love can effect a positive influence on the divine system of spheres.[31] Human syzygy reflects and operates divine syzygy. Sophia’s gnostic duality was transformed by Solovyov into a symbolist oxymoron, uniting the flesh and the spirit.

Solovyov based his concept of Sophia  on various sources: Hellenistic Gnosticism, the idea of the “Ewige Weibliche” in German Romanticism, and also on the Jewish Kabbala, which he had read and admired in his youth.  Solovyov dedicated many years of his life for the study of Jewish sources, and from 1881 to his death he was active in defending Judaism and the Jews in Russia.[32]  In his writings Solovyov calls Sophia by the kabbalistic names “An-Sof” (Ein Sof= Infinity,  the Kabblistic name of the Godhead), “Hokhma”,  “Soph-Jah”,(Hebrew: end God), and also by the kabbalistic names of the Shechina, “Beginning” (“Reishit” in Hebrew) and “Kingdom“ (“Malhut” in Hebrew ) – other names of the tenth sefira in Kabbala.[33] 

In Solovyov’s poetry, inspired also by Dante’s Divina Comedia and La Vita Nuova, Sophia is a mythic figure, a madona and a queenly Lady Wrapped in Light, deserving of any sacrifice. She is the Empress of Light and the Eye of God and Nature (Sophia’s eyes are her main characteristic in the Gnostic myth), sometimes symbolized by a lake. She has golden curls and her eyes are azure, sometimes together with black, colours which are attrbuted to the Shechina in Kabbala.. She is a  symbol of virginal purity and moral idealism, and yet she is omnipotent and authoritative. Her gender, like the rest of her traits is a unity of contrasts; she is female and male at the same time. She is both a comforting bosom and a moral conscience. She is sometimes a unity of purity and evil.

Solovyov’s main innovation, in the context of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, was the mystic sacredness of human, physical love and sex, and the dual sexuality of the divine world. This is a conspicuous common denominator between his teachings and the Jewish kabbala, which was undoubtedly the source for this idea.[34] However, his idea of Sophia is different from the kabbalistic and hassidic traditions in many respects:

First, Sophia is described by Solovyov as a part of an autobiographical narrative, as an earthly real woman whose name is Sophia, with whom the writer had a  love affair in semi-realistic circumstances, while in Jewish mysticism there are no specific physical descriptions of the divine female.[35]  The word “Shechina” cannot be given as a name to a Jewish woman; Shechina means a dwelling place (of God), and as such it is an impersonal, abstract being, although the Hebrew language compels us to speak of her in the feminine case.

Second, in Solovyov’s writings Sophia is God-like. She is an omnipotent Empress (tsaritsa);[36] one can pray to her separately, without addressing God or Jesus; one should dedicate himself to her as part of one’s religious life. Shechina in Jewish mysticism does not appear as an independent power, but as a mediator between man and the Godhead. In hassidic tales Shechina can be symbolized by a princess, she is never a queen or an empress ;[37]

Third, in the Solovyovian symbolic narrative Sophia redeems the man-poet, while in Jewish mysticism the Shechina is the one who needs to be redeemed. Sometimes by redeeming the mystic she is also redeemed,  but she can never be the only redeeming power.[38]

 Fourth, love in Solovyov’s writings is described in romantic terms, while in all Jewish sources there is a positive attitude to sex only between husband and wife for the sake of procreation. Sex can have spiritual meaning or even talismanic function only within marital relationships.[39] Moderate asceticism was frequent in kabbalists and hassidic circles, but there was no cult of romantic love or of Woman as such.[40] Strict direction for “proper syzygy” oblige the Jewish man, even if he is a hassid.[41]

 Fifth, Solovyov uses medieval romance imagery: the poet is a knight dedicated to his belle Dame sans merci, and such imagery is naturally absent from Jewish sources. Even in Rabbi Nahman of Braslav stories, where the setting is far from Jewish contemporary reality, the hero of the mystical quest is never a knight or a warrior.

Sixth, the traditional national symbolic meaning of the Shechina in Jewish sources is absent from Solovyov’s writings. Solovyov did not reject nationality (in fact, he opposed cosmopolitanism). However, because of his liberal and even ecumenical views his Sophia is not a symbol of the Russian national spirit, but of divine humanity.[42]

Seventh, in Solovyov’s writings nature plays an important role as a mediator between humanity and divinity, parallel to erotic experience, while in Kabbala and Hassidism the main means to reach sacredness is by keeping the Jewish law with kavana or dveikut. Nature as a lonely place can prepare the conditions for mystic experience, but being in nature is not considered to be a mystic experience.  

Eighth, Solovyov sees close connection between mystic, erotic and artistic creativity. In Kabbalah and Hassidism we also find music and story telling as an important components of the mystic experience, but these, again, are a means to the extatic state  of mind or to the symbolic understanding of the world. In Jewish mysticism not the artist but the mystic is the carrier of sacredness into the world; his artistic activity is secondary.

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4.

How could Bialik get in touch with Sophiology? From the early 1880s Solovyov’s writings and personality drew the attention and sympathy of Jewish intellectuals and theologians in Russia. He is mentioned in the writings of Ahad Ha-am, Shimon Dubnov, Moshe Lilienblum, Rabbi Kook, and other prominent Jewish figures. Reviews of his talks and publications,  were published in the Russian-Jewish press. After his death in 1900 the Hebrew press published detailed reviews of his teachings and poetry.[43]  In Odessa H. N. Bialik had working and frienship connections with the Christian theologian and poet Aleksandr Gorskii-Gornostaev, who was a devout admirer of Solovyov.[44] Bialik’s library contains Solovyov’s collection of essays, Evreistvo I khristianskoi voproc  (The Jewish and Chirstian problem, Berlin, 1921),  as well as Dante’s Divina Comedia in Russian translation (Petersburg 1889) and the book Filosofia obshchego dela  (The philosophy of the common cause) by Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), Solovyov’s mentor and main source of influence. Bialik was in touch with the “Golgoftsy” group of Russian Solovyovian Neo-mystics, to whom Gorskii also belonged, and he even promised an article on “Rusurrection in the Talmud” to their journal Vselenskoe delo in 1914 (the publication of this journal was stopped because of the 1^st World War and the Revolution).[45] Bialik read Russian symbolist poetry, which in Russia was largely inspired by Solovyov.[46] Throughout the 1910s his poetry becomes closer and closer to Russian symbolism.  

As mentioned before, in Bialik’s poems from 1903-1905 religious and sexual experiments are conjoined in a seemingly paradoxical oxymoron, characteristic of symbolist poetry and of Solovyov’s Sophiology. For example, in the poem “Where are you?” the beloved woman is called “shekhinat ma’avayai” (dwelling place/Shekhina of my passions); while in earlier poems (e.g. “Alone”, 1902) Bialik  had used “Shechina”   as a symbol of the Jewish spiriual life and described her as a deserted mother-bird , here he identifies sexual passion with divinity, using the sacred theological concept Shechina to describe  his earthly beloved.

Bialik’s image of woman in these poems is neither  of a faithful wife nor of a demonic Lilit; it is the image of extra marrital romantic and sexual love, which in the Jewish tradition cannot be sacred. She is the poet’s omnipotent, sometimes unattainable,  beloved or Love itself.

In “The Lake” Bialik stresses her eternal virginity, and in the “Scroll of fire” she is The Virgin (ha-alma).  The Woman’s portrait, especially in “Come Out”, “Take me Under Your Wing” and “The Scroll of Fire” are similar to Sophia’s portrait in the writings of Solovyov and his followers: she is a woman-angel with silvery eyelashes, wrapped in light (the Christian halo), smiling, surrounded with white, gold and azure, She is a bride and a queen, mysterious and abundant with divine grace.

The Woman in these poems is the sole redeemer. In “The Lake”  she is “The forest’s Sacred of Sacredness ”  and in “The Scroll of Fire” she is “Daughter of Heaven”.[47] Her Grace is the bright opposite of God’s destructive, dangerous, apocalyptic anger. The feminine figure is often identified with nature – a lake, a star, a cloud, a butterfly. The poet’s redemptive love is simultanously directed to these nature elements, which carry heavenly sacredness. She revitalizes the poet’s inner life and artistic inspiration (“Come Out”, “The Lake”). Bialik wrote to Ira Jan: “The lake, an open eye of the Forest , sees everything, reflects everything, and changes with everything (symbol of the spirit of creativity) and always remains her own with her beautiful, bright dream of wonders”. [48]  These words clearly connects Bialik’s lake with Solovyovian Sophia, the daughter and eye of God, spirit of Nature, mediator between heavenly sacredness and artistic creativity.

Bialik’s external characterization of the beloved woman, especially in “Where Are You?” and in “Come Out”, is reminiscent of Solovyov’s Sophia in many detalis: white, gold and pale blue are the colours of her features, clothes and surroundings; she is wrapped in light (a symbol of spirituality  and elemental purity in Bialik’s earlier poems); she is a celestial, mysterious woman, abounding in supreme grace and motherly understanding, while the poet is her devoted worshipper.

 The poet’s image, especially in the long poems “The Lake” and “The scroll of Fire” (see transaltions in the appendix) is an image of a knight who is wandering and fighting in Her service, including fights with rivals who choose the wrong way to Her. The poet promisses her complete devotion, even unto death.

Like Solovyov, Bialik also stresses woman’s duality – her motherly softness and her God-like power. However, more than Solovyov he stresses the high price of the man’s devotion to and worship of the beloved woman. In “Where are You?”  her heik (bosom, lap) is not only a place of redemption and consolation, but also a sweet death trap, and in “The Scroll of Fire” sexual love leads the hero to The River of Death . Bialik rejected the idea of man sacrificing himself to woman for the sake of love, as a non-Jewish idea. He found sacrifice acceptable only for national-moral ideals.

The parallels between Bialik’s “The Lake” (1904) and Solovyov’s poems “Saima” and “Na Saima zimoi” (both written in 1894) and “Son naiavu” (1895) are of interest (see translations in the appendix). In Solovyov’s poems the lake Saima becomes a symbol of Sophia  who is sleeping, wrapped in peace, pure and enlightening, seen only by the poet’s inner eye. She herself is the inner eye of nature and of God, a mysterious pale blue eye looking through the darkness of the world, promising happiness. This last image is associated with the gnostic myth of Sopia, the daughter of the creator, whose eyes symbolize her wisdom.

      The lake in Bialik’s long poem is a sleeping princess,[49] and the poet is her beloved knight who devotes his life to her. Bialik choice of the Hebrew word “Ha-breikha” (literally the pond or the pool) for his title, instead of the semantically more apt agam (lake), testifies to his preference for a feminine word, to be used throughout the long poem as a female image. Another reason for this choice is the accoustic closeness  between breikha and brakha (a blessing), thus alluding to her divine quality. In one place the poet says that the lake is “bat eino” (daughter-eye) of the forest, and in the ending of the poem he calls her “bavat eino ha-pkukha shel sar ha-ya’ar” (the open daughter apple-eye[50] of the forest’s Lord/spirit), an expression associated with the same gnostic idea of Sophia being the daughter  of God, whose eyes are symbol of her divine wisdom and omniscience. The refrain-like repetition on the words “and who knows” throughout the poem accentuates the motif of knowledge. The lake is not only the inner world of poetic creativity, but also a reflection of God’s wisdom. 

Bialik describes the lake as a sleeping princess, who lives peacefully in her private world of virginal dreams, disconnected from the noise of time and from its revolutions (the poem was written at the time of the 1905 Revolution). The trees around her are her eternal knights-suitors, and only to them, God’s chosen, does she reveal her secrets. But her most dedicated lover is the poet himself, for whom this place in nature is a temple of divine beauty where he can escape from all contacts with reality and from social duties to the individual realm of poetry.

However, Bialik did not receive Solovyov’s Sophiology without any reservations. In “Come Out” declarations of love involve promisses of feritility, in the JEwish tradition.[51]  In “Where are You?” Bialik emphasizes the destructive price the poet might  pay for his love. While for Solovyov Sophia is a moral ideal, enabling unity between man, nature, God, and society, for Bialik the lake symbolizes the personal world of the childish ego, where independent free imagination lives its own secret and sacred life, merely reflecting external reality, without really being touched by it. Bialik could not identify the sexual drive  with morality. For him as a Jew knightly romantic love – not to speak of sexual love between an unmarried couple – could not be anything other than a sweet sin, an escape from real life. Bialik could not see sexual love as a symbol of spirituality. Where feminine images appear in his poems as symbols of spirituality, they are the images of a mother and/or a sister.

The dialogue between Bialik and Solovyov intensifies in the “The Scroll of Fire” (1905), whose main theme is the true way of redemption versus the false one. Can love be redemptive is a central question raised in this symbolist long poem. Bialik rejects the Solovyovian idea of redemption through love, as well as the idea of apocalyptic redemption achieved in catastrophe and evil, which was accepted by most Russian symbolists. Three seemingly parallel feminine figures appear in the long poem’s plot: the first is Ayelet ha-shahar (the female morning star, or Aurora, literally: the doe of dawn, a term with rich Kabbalistic overtones); the second is the beloved girl (who appears naked to the hero wandering in the desert), and the third is the collective image of naked girls. All three possess clear sophiological traits: they seem to be merciful, pure, and motherly. But while the protective and responsible Ayelet ha-shahar takes care of the sacred fire, the girls are sleepwalking, hands spread, with constant smiles fixed on their faces. They look as if they were suspended on the spider-web-like rays of the moon. Called Alamot (virgins), which carries Christian connotations, they symbolize the illusion of false redemption. The resemblance between them and Ayelet ha-shahar is specious: only she represents the Jewish spirit, while they symbolize the neo-Christian ideas of redemption through love and through total unity rejected by Bialik.

“The Scroll of fire” tells about personal and public destruction as a result of blindly following false visions of redemption, inspired by the new Solovyovian Christian ecumenism, to which Bilaik himself was formerly attracted. The poet uncovers the cruel, inevitable split between the fire of sexual passion and the clame of dedication to a mission. According to Bilaik, such dedication, which is the real poet’s way, demands uncompromising moral purity and a readiness for life of loneliness. While rejecting Solovyovian theosophy, Bialik adopts his feminine symbolism, albeit Judaizing it by the use of Kabbalistic terms.

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 5.

The tradition of Sophiology persisted in the works of major  Hebrew poets during the first half of the twentieth century in pre-State Israel, when Hebrew literature was still under Russian influence. The symbol of sacred femininity, whom the male poet worships and to whom he is ready to devote his life, often appears in various meanings in the poetry of Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973), Nathan Alterman (1910-1970), Pinhas Sadeh (1929-1997), Hayyim Guri (1922 -) and other poets and prose writers. Here I shall shortly discuss Sophiology in the poetry of Shlonsky and Alterman, as they were the most influential figures in pre-state Hebrew poetry.

Avraham Shlonsky dominated Hebrew poetry in pre-State Israel from the mid-1920s until the early 1940s. He translated Solovyov’s poetry and prose into Hebrew ,[52]  and continued to develop Sophiology, which he inherited also from Aleksandr Blok, his most admired Russian poet. In his poetry from the mid-1920s, a sacred anonymous female represents the land of Israel, while the hard physical work done by Jewish pioneers under the cruel sun is a redeeming cult, in which the men sacrifice themselves on the altar of the feminine land. The land is sometimes the poet’s bride, singing songs of fertility to him. Shlonsky calls the land “megilat brit hadasha” (a scroll of new testament), thus hinting at attaining freedom from Jewish tradition, creating a new religion based on the belief in the sanctity of physical work.

During the 1930s the sacred femininity in Shlonsky’s poetry turns into a symbol of either the renewed belief in the human spirit, or of poetic creativity,  or even of beauty for beauty’s sake.  For Shlonsky the belief in the human spirit and even in beauty does not mean abandoning social activity; on the contrary, this belief is necessary for its continuation. The sacred femininity in these poems sometimes represents the primeval world of sacredness and faith, before it became chaotic. Shlonsky is not sure whether the poet has the moral right to devote himself to such attractive spiritual ideals, detached from historical and national reality. In his cycle “Shevi” (captivity) published in his Avnei Bohu (1934),[53] spirit and art are represented by a symbolic princess living “between grass and stars”, “in the twilight of Gods and crime”, namely, in a mythic hinterland beyond good and evil. She is a fallen princess, whose crowns have dropped into the abyss. Because of the storm around him, the poet finds it difficult to see her, his attraction to her  fills him with fear, he knows that she is sin and madness, but he hears a voice ordering him to take the risk and to love her, in spite of the depressing situation around him. She, however, is ungrateful and merciless, naming him “Damned! Damned”, an allusion to the French symbolist poets who called themselves poètes maudits (damned poets). Shlonsky is also probably hinting  here to the devaluation of spiritual activity in pre-State Israel, a critical attitude he himself had adopted earlier, but  upon reaccepting the spiritual value of art, he felt he was an outcast  in the Zionist pioneer culture.

In the forties a further alternation in the symbolic meaning of Shlonsky’s sacred femininity took place: she became a symbol of archaic drives and elemental physical desires. She contrasts with the celestial spirituality  which demands self-sacrifice. She is not the source of spiritual redemption, but rather the fulfillment of elementary physical needs. For example, in the poem “Se’uda” (A meal)[54] the mother and the sister, who are in charge of cooking the food, are representations of Wisdom, while the father is a representative of Grace, together forming a sacred abstract entity bearing Sophiological traits.

Although Shlonsky alludes to rich Biblical, Midrashic and Kabbalistic sources, his Sophia, in contrast to Bialik’s, neither represents the spirit of Judaism, nor is it a symbol of spirituality versus materialism. Shlonsky applies sanctity to matter, the body, the senses, the land, work, physical vitality and sometimes – although with reservations and inner conflicts – also to the creative spirit and art.

In Shlonsky’s poetry feminine sacredness is often transformed into a masculine lyrical I, depicted with feminine traits such as pregnancy and breast-feeding. Thus the poet himself becomes Sophia, and redemption is conditioned by narcissistic love. Wisdom is almost totally absent from Shlonsky’s Sophiology, and in the rare cases  where it is present, it is identified with  physical survival and vitality.

Nathan Alterman, the most influential Hebrew poet  of the late 1940s and 1950s, who was born in Warsaw, spoke Hebrew from early childhood with his father, and Russian with his mother. He was sent to Palestine for his high school studies, and after attended university in France for several years. He immigrated to Israel in the early 1930s. Alterman was well-read in Russian symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, but he was exposed to Russian influences only from the mid-1930s on, under Shlonsky’s dominant sway.

Sophiology is prominent in Alterman’s three most famous collections, Kokhavin Bakhuts (Stars outside, 1938), which will occupy our discussion of Alterman here; Simhat Anyyim (The joy of the poor, 1941); and Shirei Makot Mittsrayyim (Poems of the ten plagues, 1944). In Alterman’s early poems, most of them written in France, woman – always worshipped by the poet – is either his own sacred mother or a decadent femme fatale whom he met in the French city.[55] In Stars Outside the worshipped woman is a dominant leitmotif, but here she is an anonymous, abstract being, and – unlike in his earlier poems or in the poetry of Bialik and Shlonsky – wisdom is one of her main qualities. This is a supra-intellectual wisdom which transcends the knowledge acquired from books: “You are the only sin and judge of books.”[56] Alterman’s sacred female appears sometimes as the poet’s beloved, sometimes as his sacred mother, and sometimes as his daughter. In many poems she is called alma (virgin), as in Bialik’s “Scroll of Fire”, or even “Almat ha-shamayyim” (virgin of heaven) stressing her divine essence. Some poems allude to a resemblance between her and Jesus. She is a mythic being, whose presence saves man and recreates both the world and the human spirit. In “Levadekh” (You alone) stars and white bears alike worship and desire her, while the fields, trees and the night   carry the edge of her gown[57]  Thus heaven and earth are united in her unique mythological image.

Like Sophia she is wrapped in light or has a halo (certainly not a Jewish image), and is often compared to the moon or the stars. In fact, the title Stars Outside refers to the poet’s longing for her as a lost sacred reality, which is out of his inner reach. In many ways she resembles Sophia: her face and her eyes are lit by her sad smile; she is “white and eternal”; her face and her whole figure seem  sculpted  in stone  or marble; she is “bat-ayyin” (daughter-eye) looking through the symbolic landscape. She is a mixture of a Christian Madonna and pagan  goddess: bestowing grace and mercy, she also possesses mysterious powers, by which she can recreate, revive, and fertilize the spirit of man. Thus she changes role with man, becoming the  masculine fertilizer, whereas the male poet assumes the passive, feminine  qualities.

The poet longs for a meeting with her, and this meeting is described as a miracle of redemption. It is a mythic event, accompanied by biblical allusions to the last judgement. During this redemption the woman gives birth to the poet, who now  resembles her. The meeting between them takes him out of the mundane world into a world of sacred holiday. It enables him to have intimate contact with the world (Alterman uses “tevel”, the feminine word for world, not the masculine olam), which is she herself. At the same time this meeting unites the poet with life, with the land of Israel, with celestial spirituality and with aesthetic beauty. Such a meeting gives the poet both an ecstatic experience and a feeling of purity and clarity of thought. Alterman’s woman in Stars Outside is then the spirit of the world, life itself, beauty, poetry, purity and transrational wisdom combined.

Alterman’s external characterization of the woman highlights her anonymity and strengthens the symbolic, dream-like impression. She has no name and her identity and dwelling place are a secret which the poet refuses to reveal. Her external image is vague. She appears as a shadow or a reflection trembling in the water. Her trembling eyelashes (resembling Aurora’s in Bialik’s “The Scroll of Fire”) are her most outstanding physical characteristic. The poet  - like Blok in his Prekrasnaia Dama poems - is not even sure of her presence, he only guesses at her appearance and only sometimes hears her voice.

Alterman’s woman, like Sophia, is an intermediary and uniting principle, that enables mutual encounter between earth and heaven, between the high abode of the spirit and the lower abode of matter and body. It is a movement of descent and creation from above, on the one hand, and of human ascension, on the other. Alterman describes her appearance as a momentary flash of lightning descending to the street of the city (not wild nature) in a storm. Her ability to make contact between contrasting poles is the source of her redemptive power.

Paradoxes and oxymora, characteristic of mystic discourse and of literary Symbolism, dominate Alterman’s style in general. His image of woman is, like Solovyov’s Sophia and like Blok’s prekrasnaia dama, an identity of contrasts. She is both terrestial and celestial, merciful and cruel, Jewish and all-European, divine and vulgar.

The cult of this woman-goddess demands sacrifice from the poet. In fact, her divine dimensions and powers are the justification of the price he is ready to pay for her love. Like Solovyov’s Sophia, Alterman’s woman is a queen or an empress. She is a ruler of countries, she dwells in a tower encircled with a garden, walls and double gates. The poet in his turn plays the role of the knight errant, who prays for her, endangers himself, gives up his desires for her, he is even ready to cut himself to pieces or to offer his head at her feet. In Alterman’s Stars Outside, like in Bialik’s “The Lake”, the woman is worshipped not only by the poet, but also by other knights, with whom he competes. But it is only he who is ready to utterly devote himself to her and to suffer for her sake more than the others, and that is why only he receives the grace of her appearance. It is clear that without sacrifice there can be no meeting between her and him, or with any  other man. Such identity of erotic love with sacredness and with the sacrifice of life is far removed from traditional Jewish beliefs, and even from Jewish mysticism.

Alterman’s woman differs from Bialik’s and from Shlonsky’s in many respects. At the same time, she also differs from Sophia in Solovyov’s writing and from her development in Blok’s and Biely’s poetry. In Alterman’s work, one can see the influence of later poets, such as Mayakovsky and Pasternak, as well as his own version of Sophiology.

Beginning with the first poem of Stars Outside Alterman declares his ambition to desert his predecessors’ model of woman and to create a new one: “And a sheep and a doe will witness/ that you caressed them and went on”. [58] Instead of loving the docile sheep (an allusion to Shlonsky ) or the gentle doe (an allusion to Bialik’s ayelet), the poet wishes to worship a woman of another  type: she must be joyous, laughing, vital, and dynamic – a Dionysian being. For Alterman, joy is the quintessence of redemption, thus he combines the Jewish Hassidic tradition with Nietzschean elements and with motifs from Pasternak’s poetry. He suggests this ideal as an alternative to the heavy and dark idea of redemption in Russian symbolist poetry. This idea of joy as redemption also expresses Alterman’s hope for a new, happy Jew to be created in the land of Israel, as well as his criticism of the unhappy Jewish character as it was stereotyped in Eastern European culture (for example, “the eternal sour expression typical of the race” which Sviridgailov reads on the face of an anonymous Jew before his suicide in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pubishment), Saving the lost joy which belonged to himself and to the Jewish character – this is the poet’s sacred mission. The sacred woman personifies this ideal.

In contrast to his predecessors, for whom Sophia was an ontological ideal,  Alterman emphasizes the psychological aspect of the Sophia symbol. Her qualities are a reflection of the poet’s inner world, and redemption is an internal therapeutic process. The poet identifies his own soul with the sacred “virgin”: “For here   is/my soul the virgin/perfumed with fields and myrrh/ is coming out naked/ to fall on the breast of light.”[59]  Alterman’s lyrical I, like Shlonsky’s, has feminine traits and qualities: It is the poet who wanders in the world with a dead child in his hands, it is even he whose heart is “pregnant” after meeting the woman. Solovyovian altruistic  love  turns here into self-love, the I becoming a sacred mission pursued for its own sake. And in fact, for Alterman redemption is not conditioned by ascetic devotion. He strongly rejects any kind of asceticism, glorifying whatever enables man to experience excitement and joy. The source of redemption is potentially in the man himself, and the woman is necessary only as a temporary therapeutic helper.

Having admitted that the woman’s duality dwels within himself, Alterman describes a cruel fight aimed at killing the sad part in himself in order to gain the love of the woman-joy. Sometimes it is an impossible mission, like reviving a dead person hanged long ago. Speaking in the plural, Alterman hints at the  psychopathological situation of the Jewish people  as a whole.

Alterman also intensifies and dramtizes the sophiological paradox between spiritual purity and sexual physicality. His woman might be seen as a synthesis of Bialik’s spiritual, pure-white Aurora with her trembling  silvery eye-lashes, and Shlonsky’s blatant and extravagant physical woman. On the one hand, she is the living, ecstatic, joyous, joking, even clown-like woman-artist (Alterman’s wife was an actress); on the other, she is pale, dark, poor, sad, and old. The poet’s worship of woman oscillates between these two sanctities. This dramatic quality finds  emphasis in the woman’s own paradoxical quality: she is “pit’omit la-ad” (eternally sudden-surprising), quick and ready to play or to fight.[60] 

Alterman, like Pasternak and Mayakovsky, finds the beloved woman not in dark churches, not even in nature, but mostly in the modern city. Unlike Bialik and Shlonsky, he does not find her in the fields and mountains of the new land nor in symbolic gardens, lakes and deserts, but in the everyday humdrum world of Tel-Aviv, the young commercial city. There, among the iron and the glass of the new buildings, on the boulevard, among the cries of sellers in the market, she appears. It is on the main street of the city that the sky comes down and touches the sidewalks, in a miraculous gesture. Here the city itself becomes the hero of the Sophia narrative: she is wrapped in light, she is a queen and a goddess. The poet’s knightly fight for her takes place within urban space. The knight is sometimes the poet himself, sometimes the street or even the iron of the saws used by the builders of the young city. Their aggressive acts inseminate her: “For with pain and with power her street is born.” The whole narrative is much more dynamic and modern than in Solovyov, Blok or even Biely, in the vein of Russian Futurism.

Alterman’s modernism is also evident in the debased image of the woman: she is not only a sheep, but also a cow; she is sometimes a vulgar inn-keeper, sometimes a homely woman drinking her cup of tea or fluffing pillows. The wanderer is ready to leave his sack at the threshold of the market instead of the threshold of her tower. He is not a poet-prophet but often a poet-clown, in the late style of Blok, and of Biely. The world of art becomes the only possible redemption, and in this sense redemption is to be found beyond good and evil, outside morality, very much different from Bialik and Shlonsky, not to speak of Solovyov’s moral mission.

Taking an existential stance, Alterman endows the everyday “here and now” with mystic value: a market, house buiders, an old olive tree, a city street after the rain – each of them takes part in a Dionysian fight and festival. For Alterman vitality is the most important quality of the sacred woman (as of human life itself), and he welcomes her  even when  she  is aggressive or estranged.

The traditional symbolist narrative of Sophia is a romance: the knight sets out on his way, aiming to meet his beloved at the end. Alterman’s narrative, however,  expresses many doubts as to the possibility of achieving the goal. The poet is sceptical about doing it safely, without being devoured by beasts, and hints at the dangers of utter romantic devotion. Surprisingly enough, the meeting between the poet and the woman never takes place: in “Song at the forest inn” the poet-wanderer is split into three brothers who are carriage-drivers, destined for “the virgin”, but the “good brother” becomes ill half way  and the other two brothers desert him, blind and dying.[61] 

Is the meeting part of a sacred mission at all? Alterman’s  poet sanctifies the farewell no less than the meeting. “The hour of  farewell, how holy you are!”, he says in “Zimra” (singing).[62]  It becomes clear that the poet can also remain happy without the expected meeting, if only he can guard his eternal freedom: “And the world remained with (…) wise fields and with ruakh (wind/spirit)”.[63] Even more than Bialik and Shlonsky, Alterman refuses to adopt the idea of man’s sacrifice to woman’s love. Only his joy deserves devotion. Moreover, in contrast to the belief  in knightly loyalty in the sophiological tradition, Alterman praises temporal relationships between man and woman, and in a more general sense, between  the poet and anything in the world. At this point, Alterman is  closest to the Nietzschean trend in Russian symbolism.

      In poems where the meeting seems to be sacred, the poet does not set out on a new path; his course is an old one, which he once deserted. The meeting with the woman is then a return to a woman whom he had known in the past and deserted, to whom he now wants to return. This narrative is characteristic of romantic thought and literature, where returning to sources (childhood, homeland, national past, etc.) is a recipe for inner revival. Alterman’s narrative is different, however, more clearly resembling the apocalyptic myth. In “Hadleika” (The fire) the return will take place only after a terrible catastrophe  from which the woman is  miraculously saved and revived, but it is not the poet who saves her from the destruction; he is too powerless to do so.

      Alterman’s transformations of the Sophia myth take him far away from symbolist Christian and Jewish neo-mysticism to modernist trends of thought, such as Nietzscheanism, vitalism, and existentialism, planted in the soil of the Zionist pioneers’ land.

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6.

During the last decade interest in the gnostic Sophia and the Biblical tradition of the divine “Lady Wisdom” has been greatly heightened by feminist research.[64] Some feminists classify it as one of those myths created by males that view woman as one of two extremes: either angelic or demonic, and thus expect impossible missions of earthly woman. Others claim that the informal, family-based authority of wise women in the ancient East had no public outlet, although it may be considered as a transformation of real memory into an idealized form of Woman Wisdom.[65] The gnostic tradition as well as Solovyovian Sophiology were criticized for their over estimation of spiritual life and their disrespect for physical sex for its own sake.[66] It was also argued that the gnostic Sophia, who is the active feminine hero of the ancient story, was turned by Solovyov into a perfect but static element in a narrative where the male is the main hero of the dramatic plot.

On a similar basis Alterman’s attitude to woman was criticized by Israeli feminist literary research.Alterman’s “unrealistic” expectations of woman was considerec to testify to his male chauvinism.[67]

Feminist theological research has also offered an affitmative answer to the question: does Sophia’s role as counselling woman offer guidelines for feminist Jewish and Christian spirituality? According to S. Schorer “They [women] could find empowering and encouraging ideals in the wise women of ancient Israel and in the counselling hokhma who, to an amazing degree, raise issues relevant to contemporary women.” Hokhma, she argues, is a creative figure, highly self-sonscous, not too shy to praise herself. She can insist on teaching her rules. [68]

In agreement to this point of view I would like to add two points for consideration: first, that against the background of Western tradition that identifies  woman with nature/emotion and man with culture/intellect, I see here an outstanding case of a feminine figure who symbolizes the human drive for knowledge and wisdom. Second, that in contrast to the split between sex and wisdom/intellect in contemporary beliefs, the Biblical and gnostic tradition, and even earlier Near Eastern traditions see Woman as a hypostase of both sexual attraction and responsibility for knowledge and culture.[69] Such a view can supply encouragement and support to contemporary femninst women. 

Does it express esteem for the wisdom of earthly women? How do we know when literary sources are giving a reasonably accurate picture of historical reality, and when for reasons ideological or esthetic, this picture has been distorted? Literature is often an expression of idealized reality, which does not and cannot exist. 

Sophiology, variously transformed, was a main theme  in Hebrew poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, namely, when Zionist culture was being created. Sophiology in the poetry of Bialik, Shlonsky and Alterman – the most important and influential Hebrew poets in the first half of the twentieth century – represents a trend in contemporary Zionist high culture. It testifies to the Zionist poets’ orientation toward the spiritual quests of Russian symbolism and post-symbolism, to its tendency to mythologize personal and national reality. Sophia is a symbol of this quest and of this self-mythologization. The sacred woman in this poetry is a symbol of various ideals and hopes for which the contemporary generation believed it was necessary to fight even unto death. Womanhood in this context is a modern semi-mystical symbol of spiritual ideal.

Not much can be learned from the sanctification of woman in Hebrew (or in Russian) poetry about the real attitude of men to living women. In contrast to Russian poets who developed the sophiological tradition, Hebrew poets did not even pretend  to believe in the knighly duty to sacrifice one’s life for love. Their Sophiology may seem to us more realistic, if also more egoistical, or the other way round. Ira Jan’s correspondence with Bialik testifies to a lot of male egoism, as it is also a disappointing document of female’s pettiness.

In young Alterman’s letters to Ivria, his beloved girl, he describes her as “adina ve-atsilit me’od” (very gentle and noble”).[70] “You seem to me so white and calm and good for me that I cannot see you differently”, he writes in another letter.[71] And also “You are standing like a lunatic [“saharurit”, the same word Bialik uses for the group of maidens in “The Scroll of Fire”] inside the rush of the day and the dust here. You always appear to me thus with calmness and astonishment, maybe because I have mostly (almost always) seen you under moonlight”.[72] We can see how Sophiological terminlolgy was absorbed in Alterman’s love discourse and how it formed his ideal of the beloved woman. However, there are no hints of intentions of self sacrifice or of serious relationships. “You are so good for me” is the key for the real man’s attraction to his lover. 

Indeed, if we insist on looking from the femininst point of view at the relations between man and woman in the poetry of Bialik, Shlonsky and Alterman, seeing it as a documentation of biographical and sociological facts – we might come to the conclusion that the woman in sophiological poetry – no matter if Russain or Hebrew -  is no more than a symbol of masculine  infantile wishful thinking. To my mind,  such a partial and reductive point of view misses more than it reveals. These poets chose woman as a symbol to their innermost dreams, ideals and missions, to which they wished to dedicate their life more than to earthly love and bourgeois family life. We can criticize or admire their idealism, but it will be a mistake to understand the woman in their oeuvre as a reflection of any real woman partner in their life.

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Appendices