I hope to God, let the redeemer come

“I hope to God” is the only poem of the otherwise unknown Karaite Aaron Ḥazan. The poem asks for God’s redemption, for both the individual soul and the nation of Israel. The poet plays with the common Neoplatonic imagery of the soul, whose source is the divine, asking to return to God, but instead of seeing this as a reunification with the higher realm, here the soul’s desire is the restoration of the nation and its Temple in the land of Israel. The poem, therefore, deftly blends the individual and national experiences. The poem has an acrostic of the author’s name in the first letters of each stanza. The stanzas are rhymed aaab bbbc, and so on.