finally I am translating in lieu of getting perhaps to the meat of my paper and I come across this ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND RADICAL QUOTE by the dude I am writing about, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, called by some the Hebrew Nietzsche, a guy who was forced to divorce his first wife at the age of nineteen for reading forbidden books,
a guy who learned german and french and hebrew et alius and produced a troubling and magnificent corpus largely untranslated into english,
and here i am just working away at him like a devil on a handsaw for my obscure reasons
and here is this marvelous countermyth against all those stagnant narratives of rabbinic judaism
this argument for strength that was to closely prefigure some of the ideals surrounding the early pioneers of Israel, obviously somewhat derived from Nietzsche whom he read a lot of but just INTERESTING AND AWESOME especially for people familiar with biblical narratives as i have been lucky or strange enough to have my head soaked in CHECK THIS OUT especially jews especially:
We had two kings. One ruled over all of Israel, and the other began his command as king of Judah: David and Saul! Saul was head and shoulders taller than the rest of the nation, a man of sentiment, great and brave of spirit. …when he fell upon his sword before the Philistines could abuse his body, then all in us was silent, astonished at his fortitude of spirit. And David, a small youth, ruddy, was not fated to be chosen as king by the people. He was taken from his flock of sheep and rolled in the filth of rebellion, until he rose to greatness; he brought down the tribe of Saul in blood, ousting one and burying another. He made promises and broke them, bloodshed was in his house, malice and separation between him and the people. … And hark to this: Saul did not sing a song to God, on the day God saved him from his enemy David; and when the spirit of God was upon him, he commanded another to take the lyre in his hands and play before him. –But David the king was the sweet singer of Israel, and the creator of prayers for innumerable generations. Who understands this contradiction—perhaps the greatest sinner is also the most prayerful. Prayer comes to man for his mistakes! He who kills the shepherd and takes the flock—it is his heart that strikes at him and he who pours out his heart.
I see before me Saul the King of Israel, sitting and leaning upon his spear, and his eyes gazing at the hills of Israel. Many great thoughts are in his heart, of his throne, of his kingdom and of the future of the nation, which differs from that which secures its path by the ways of the histories of our people, and he sees the shadow coming from a distance, the shadow of David. –What a song would have remained of his divulgence, had the king opened his mouth and given us from his soul a song of his terrible strength. And David inherits him in life, and after his death is our mouthpiece… God, what I have loved and what I have hated! The lyric of the sinner and he who causes others to sin comes to cleanse our lives. The songs of our man became our prayers. Instead of the song of expansion and conquest of life in strength, the song of outpouring and the fracture of life. We shall not sing, unless we pray; we shall not live in trumpet-blasts of strength, but in lament… … Our weeping, our entreaties, are abundant; but of the songs of expansion, that which does not come out of the suffering of life, but conquers life—we have not one of its attributes. We cannot live; but how quick and resourceful we are at blessing and cursing…
haunting.
amazing.
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