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.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/195955/amichai-israels-national-poet