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Poetry || SubmissionsON RABBI KOOK'S STREETBy Yehuda Amichai On Rabbi Kook's Street I walk without this good man - A streiml he wore for prayer A silk top hat he wore to govern, fly in the wind of the dead above me, float on the water of my dreams. I come to the Street of Prophets - there are none. And the Street of Ethiopians - there are a few. I'm looking for a place for you to live after me padding your solitary nest for you, setting up the place of my pain with the sweat of my brow examining the road on which you'll return and the window of your room, the gaping wound, between closed and opened, between light and dark. There are smells of baking from inside the shanty, there's a shop where they distribute Bibles free, free, free. More than one prophet has left this tangle of lanes while everything topples above him and he becomes someone else. On Rabbi Kook's street I walk - your bed on my back like a cross - though it's hard to believe a woman's bed will become the symbol of a new religion. Yehuda Amichai is a poet long expected to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, certainly before Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat won it for peace.Some people think his poems deserve the Nobel Prize for Peace, if not for Literature. But it's like that with a lot of poets. In person he has the demeanor of a kindly grocery store owner, ready to give you a line of credit. This poem originally appeared in Massachusetts Review, in the 1980s, but considering recent events concerning the peace process, we found it particularly relevant nowadays. Use the hyperlink to RABBI KOOK for background to the poem Poem translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut An Ariga Explanation: Rabbi Kook was the first universally respected ultra-orthodox rabbi to accept Zionism. His son, also a rabbi, endorsed the messianic movement known as Gush Emunim. To this day there are people who wonder if the original rabbi Kook would have approved of what his son declared in May 1967, a few weeks before the Six Day War, when Kook Jr. said he could hear "the bells ringing of the approaching messiah." After the three hour air war that won the 1967 War, Kook's followers decided that the war was divinely destined. It is why they're so upset now that the Israeli government is finally negotiating what it declared it would do a few days after the 1967 war: return the land in exchange for peace. Rabbi Kook Street, BTW, refers to Kook senior. Kook junior passed away many years ago, but if he has a street named after him it's in one of the settlements. Today's Situation
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