'A Walk to Caesarea' and 'Blessed is the Match' by Hannah Senesh
Part of 613 Great Works of Jewish Art
Although I always loved reading, I was never that keen on English Literature at school. I was suspicious of the idea that we were being told “what this poem really means” like it was a special code that you simply had to learn and then you knew the answer.
It was probably my misunderstanding, but had they properly explained that it was actually about analysis and interpretation, about there not being any definitively right or wrong meanings, I would have got along with it better.
Context and understanding of contemporaneous life and literature can obviously help unpick the references and allusions, but I still think that the real key is opening yourself up to the words, surrendering to them, and taking whatever you can, or whatever you want, from them.
So here are my thoughts about two poems that I feel are about surrender in very different ways, as well as the amazing woman who wrote them.
The blog is supposedly parts two and three of my “613 Great Works of Jewish Art” series. At the current rate it’ll take over a century to finish it off, and truthfully most of the energy for this idea is going into the Jew Credit podcast, but it’s good to have a never-ending project to fall back on so there’s always something to write about.
Hannah Senesh is probably best known for her short, remarkable life and the horrific and heroic circumstances of her death rather than her written work. It’s easy to understand why.
Like many European Jews then and now, the Senesh family was not particularly religious. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1921, Hannah was well assimilated into the broader culture before her life collided with rising wave of antisemitism sweeping Europe, making her Jewishness – her differentness – impossible to ignore. After a number of unpleasant incidents at school, Senesh turned to Zionism with the same zeal and strength that she did with all her passions.
Hannah emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1939. Rather than leaning on her education and literary talents, she threw herself into the more elemental need of the Zionist project – agriculture. She moved to Nahalal – the first moshav ovdim (workers’ cooperative agricultural settlement) in British Mandatory Palestine – and worked the land.
Then came a transfer to Kibbutz Sdot Yam to work in the kitchen and laundry. Life in the British Mandate was neither easy nor without its risks, but her decision to return to Europe feels incomprehensible. When she was approached by the Jewish Agency in 1943, Senesh sacrificed a life of relative safety to join the Haganah paramilitary group, swiftly becoming part of the elite Palmach. She joined the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, training first as a wireless operator, then as a paratrooper, and was recruited into the Special Operations Executive.
The rest of her story is the stuff of legend in modern Israel. Hannah was one of 32 volunteers selected from 250 candidates to be sent on active missions in occupied Europe. She was parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944 to help the anti-Nazi resistance. More than that, she also had the under-the-radar mission of attempting a return to Hungary to rescue its remaining Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. It was a mission that was brave, heroic, foolhardy, naive and utterly doomed.
Senesh was captured almost immediately after crossing the border into Hungary. Despite beatings and torture over her five-month imprisonment, she refused to give her Allied wireless codes to the authorities. She held fast, even after the arrest and imprisonment of her mother Katharine. In October 1944, Senesh was convicted of spying on Hungary and sentenced to death. With the war clearly edging towards its end, it was hoped that the sentence wouldn’t be carried out. Nevertheless, Hannah was executed by a firing squad on November 7, having refused a blindfold.
Less than two months later, Budapest was under siege by the Red Army and Romanian Army. The city was liberated on February 13, 1945. Having escaped the Budapest Death March, Hannah’s mother Katharine left the country for Palestine, and it was her tireless work in bringing her daughter’s work and life story to light that turned Hannah Senesh into a legend of the fledgling State of Israel.
Hana Senesh – Diaries, Songs, Testimonies was first published in 1946 and her writings have been republished several times over. Hannah’s remains were eventually brought to Israel in 1950 and she was buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In 1993, the Hungarian military supreme court repealed her conviction and sentence.
Putting her wartime heroics and tragic death completely to one side – impossible as that may be – Hannah’s letters and poems show she was a precociously talented and fierce writer from an incredibly young age, first in Hungarian, then in Hebrew.
Her diaries also show Senesh as a much more prickly, interesting and human character than the national myth would have you believe.
Hannah’s journalist/playwright father Béla died when he was only 33 and she was just six. Maybe that spurred her on to match and arguably surpass his literary achievements by the time she was killed aged 23.
Of all her poems, two have rightly become her literary legacy: ‘A Walk to Caesarea’ and ‘Blessed is the Match’.
הליכה לקיסריה
אֵלִי
שֶׁלֹּא יִגָּמֵר לְעוֹלָם
הַחוֹל וְהַיָּם
רִשְׁרוּשׁ שֶׁל הַמַּיִם
בְּרַק הַשָּׁמַיִם
תְּפִלַּת הָאָדָם
A Walk to Caesarea
My God,
May it never end,
The sand and the sea,
The ripple of the waters,
The lightning in the sky,
The prayer of man.
‘A Walk to Caesarea’, more commonly known by its (adapted) opening phrase “Eli, Eli”, was written by Senesh on November 24, 1942, when she was 21 years old. It was inspired by the walk from Kibbut Sdot Yam to Caesarea, then a small Muslim fishing village, but as the name suggests, one built on an ancient Roman city.
Haaretz contrasts the sheer elation of this poem with the less-known ‘Loneliness’ on the opposite page in Hannah’s notebook. It also picks apart what feels like the poem’s nakedly religious overtones.
In Hannah’s original 13-word text she opens her poem with אֵלִי (Eli or My God). This suggests the start of a prayer, but could also be simply exclamatory (as in, “My god that was exciting!”).
It was the poem’s interpreter David Zehavi, when setting the poem to music, who chose to double that phrase to אֵלִי אֵלִי (Eli, Eli), likely both for musical scansion and the conscious nod to Psalm 22:2 ( אֵלִי אֵלִי, לָמָה עֲזַבְתָּנִי or “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), a phrase supposedly invoked by Jesus on the Cross.
Even in its unadapted form there’s a spiritual and theological weight that’s impossible to ignore. There’s the fact that the poem is exactly 13 words. 13 is one of the most important numbers in Jewish mysticism and tradition. It’s the number of attributes of God, the number of principles of faith, the number Jacob’s children (his 12 tribal sons and one daughter, Dinah) and, of course, the age of Bar Mitzvah. In Jewish numerology (Gematria), 13 is the sum of אהבה (Ahavah/Love) and אחד (Echad/Unity).
And for all the evocative beauty of the natural phenomena simply stated on the preceding lines, the poem ends with “the prayer of man”. Prayer of course doesn’t require the existence of god or gods, but it absolutely needs belief, faith and most importantly surrender.
In its elegant sparseness, ‘A Walk to Caesarea’ conveys that sense of joyous surrender to god, to nature, and ultimately to existing in the present moment.
אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר
אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת
אַשְׁרֵי הַלְּהָבָה שֶׁבָּעֲרָה בְּסִתְרֵי לְבָבוֹת
אַשְׁרֵי הַלְבָבוֹת שֶׁיָדְעוּ לַחְדוֹל בְּכָבוֹד
אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת
Blessed is the Match
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
‘Blessed is the Match’, or אַשְׁרֵי (‘Ashrei’) is no less beautiful than ‘ A Walk to Caesarea’ and shares a similar – simplicity is the wrong word – gracefulness, but it’s a very different piece.
Where ‘Eli, Eli’ is all soothing beauty, there’s a wordy denseness and almost suffocating darkness to ‘Ashrei’. Only two years had passed, but everything had completely changed, and would change irrevocably soon after. ‘Blessed is the Match’ is one of the last poems Hannah ever wrote, being put to paper on May 2, 1944, not long after she parachuted into Yugoslavia.
She gave the poem to fellow Yishuv paratrooper Reuven Dafni the day before she crossed the border into Hungary, telling him, “If I don’t come back, give this to my friends in Sdot Yam”.
‘Blessed is the Match’ is about self-sacrifice, in the most biblical sense of that word. Like ‘A Walk to Caesarea’ it’s about surrender, but here it’s about surrendering to the point of consumption. The match, in giving light, is necessarily consumed by the flame it created. It’s not the grandiose idea of leaving a mark (Neil Young claiming it’s better to burn out than fade away), but the offering yourself up to light the way for others.
Jews are supposed to do this. Isiah 60:3 talks of us being a light unto the nations (וְהָֽלְכ֥וּ גוֹיִ֖ם לְאוֹרֵ֑ךְ וּמְלָכִ֖ים לְנֹ֥גַהּ זַרְחֵֽךְ or “Nations will walk to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn”). More specifically though, Hannah was acting as a self-immolating light for other Jews.
“I wanted to convince Hannah not to go with those papers, I was scared,” said Dafni, who realised that her forged documents would be spotted by any experienced authorities.
“We had a very heated argument. She was altogether extremely obstinate… Until she suddenly said, ‘Even if they catch me – the Jews will be notified. They will know that at least one person tried to reach them’.”
When there’s talk of flames and consumption, it’s also impossible not to bring to mind the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But rather than a tearful lament, the six million are being blessed. When Jews die, we say of the departed זיכרונה לברכה (“May their memory be a blessing”).
Our primary prayer remembrance is not a prayer of literal mourning, but instead the קדיש, the Kaddish, a prayer of sanctification (יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא / “Exalted and sanctified be His great name”).
The middle two lines between the repeated bookends are the most impenetrable. The flame burning in the secret fastness of the heart. The heart with its strength to stop beating for the sake of honour. Perhaps the unimaginable braveness of Hannah’s actions and power of her words was proof of that secret fastness, that ability to stop one’s heart.