Yehuda Amichai - Wisdom among Clashing Peoples

 

Yehuda Amichai was a 20th century Jewish poet who was of the first generation of Israelis to write in the revived Hebrew language. Living in Israel, the hostility between Jews and the Islamic Arabs in the areas surrounding Jerusalem were a prominent part of Amichai’s life. However, Amichai didn’t
take sides in a traditional way. Instead, many of Amichai’s poems, including specifically his An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion and his Jerusalem, emphasize this theme: that empathy between these clashing cultures can lead to a mutual understanding of the humanity on both sides.

            In An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion, this is the most prominent theme of the work. This first poem is about an Arab and a Jew on opposing sides of a mountain, and by drawing parallels between the struggles of the two it shows how they are both human, how they both are just trying to live, regardless of the conflicts between cultures. As Amichai puts it: “An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father both in their temporary failure.” (Puchner 1622) By seeing his struggle as similar to the Arab’s, the Jewish narrator of the poem shows an empathy for the Arab that leads him to recognize that, like himself, the Arab is a human going through the struggles of life.

            Jerusalem paints a similar picture. In Jerusalem, the primary theme is more how unhappy it is to live in a tense environment where your neighbors are your enemies, but Amichai still portrays the humanity of both sides and stresses how both peoples are equally unhappy. By emphasizing the enemy’s hanging laundry and the kite being flown over the wall, Amichai depicts a humanity that would be easy to overlook, since the two sides are focused more on animosity with each other. Amichai ends the poem by portraying how the flags of each conflicting group, their patriotic emblems, are merely a bluff of happiness on both sides. Both groups are human, and Amichai uses his own empathy to show us, his readers, to empathize.

            One modern work I encountered recently that explores this theme in a unique way is the 2019 video game Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In Three Houses, you are asked to form an allegiance early on in the game between three neighboring countries which are living in piece. For the first half of the game, you live allied with the one people, but interact often with all 3 groups. You get to know many people from each, and get to see their humanity first hand. Then, in the second half, you play through a war that breaks out between the three groups and have to watch the animosity and sometimes even the deaths of the characters you’ve come to know. By showing who each character is before the war, this game creates a vivid portrayal of a conflicting human peoples who you can empathize with even as they become your enemies.

            This portrayal of humanity on opposing sides of a conflict is common to many of the most classic works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Homer’s The Iliad. This is likely because of how easy it is to forget the humanity of one’s own enemies when you enter one of these kinds of conflicts. As a writer and a person, it is important to remember that there is humanity in most or all of our fellow men. While Amichai referred specifically to Arabs and Jews in his works, we can apply it to the conflicts closest to us. By empathizing with our enemies, even if we can’t end our conflicts with them, we can act better by remembering to treat them as people. Especially being a writer myself, it seems extremely important to remind people in my works to treat antagonists as humans, lest we become more inhuman ourselves.

           

Works Cited

Puchner, M. (2013). The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Volume 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Retrieved from https://digital.wwnorton.com/worldlit3v2

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