In a review of a recent collection of Yehuda Amichai’s work in English translation, Adam Kirsch examines the famous Israeli poet’s idiosyncratic faith, and his use of the Jewish tradition:

Amichai grew up [in Germany] in religious home—he was able to adjust easily to life in Palestine, he said, because he learned Hebrew so well at school—and his verse draws constantly on the Bible and the prayer book. Indeed, this is one of the challenges of reading Amichai in English translation. . . .

The Jewish vocabulary of Amichai’s poetry doesn’t mean that he is a believer. On the contrary, the deep pathos of his religious verse is that he has achieved a kind of sublime intimacy with a God who does not exist, at least not as the tradition conceives Him. What interests Amichai, writing in a post-Holocaust world, is not God’s power but His absence, or indifference, or simple debility. . . .

After the Holocaust, Amichai imagines God as a father who has lost his children; this paradoxically compels us to feel compassion for God, to pity Him rather than to blame Him. And pity is a way of maintaining a relationship with God, rather than rejecting Him altogether. “Prayer created God,/ God created human beings,/ human beings create prayers,” Amichai writes. We are responsible for the God who is responsible for us.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.