Poems I–X: On the Death of His Brother

Samuel ha-Nagid

1041–1042

I

When his beloved brother Isaac fell ill in the year 4801 [1041], the poet thought in his distress:

Each muscle cramps with fear.
Tear-fed worry chokes the mind like creepers after rain.
Away, all pleasures! What man, his brother ill abed, would not deem them vain?
If harsh, Lord, You must be, be so with me
And with my miscreant ways, and let my brother be.
I am the sinner. Why take him?
Visit on me Your justice. I will be in.

II

And when his brother’s illness took a turn for the worse, he decided to visit with the doctor Abu-Madin. Yet on his way he met a bearer of ill tidings, who informed him of his brother’s death. He died on the fifth day of the week, the twenty-fifth day of the month of Iyyar, and the poet thought:

Hurrying to my brother
(Hearing he had fallen still more ill),
I met—stock still stood he!—a messenger of ill.
“Why speak you not?” I asked. “Tell me of Isaac. Well?”
“Ah, he is dead,”
Was all that that man said.
“Be still,” I cried, “and may dust fill your mouth!
Would every woe were your woe!
Might they bury her who bore you!
The doctor with me many like him healed has and made well,
And you say he is dead who led his age and people?
I tell you, he but sleeps!”
“Alas,” said he,
“Into such sleep
No man who woke thereafter ever fell.”

III

And when he entered the room and kissed his brother lying in his bed, he thought:

My mother’s first-born prince,
By—
Oh, ere the sun has set!—
The Prince of Darkness snatched away,
Who,
Between us two,
A curtain draws tonight as thick as earth,
As hard as stone.
Ah, fateful day!
What good on it could do your wealth and fame,
O out of pocket now, whose name
Was coin that sent the wine cups on their rounds?
There, I kiss you—
Yet you pay no mind,
Though you so lifelike are reclined
That I call out to you. You answer not.
What means this taciturnity
If not that He
Who brews the potion of eternal sleep
Has given you to drink?
Ah, soon, too soon will I too drain that draft deep!

IV

And when the members of the household helped him to tear and soil his clothes as is the mourner’s custom, he thought:

I rend my garment and my cloak, but why?
My heart’s in tatters more than any rag,
More mired than the mud you daub me with,
More shattered than the dishes that you smash.
My clothing can be stitched and laundered white,
But my torn heart can never be repaired,
Although its pangs are basted to my bones,
Like thorns in flesh or buttons in their holes.
  Gone is my brother, gone,
And gone for good all gaiety and balm!

V

After which, he thought:

Give up, my soul, all thought of seeing him again.
Learn to live without him—and if you
Find that unthinkable, die too!

VI

And when he wrapped his brother in his shrouds and brought him to his grave and buried him, he thought:

My tongue,
If you would do my bidding one more time,
Do it this once and weep:
For a brother
For a father
For the friend
Of every man by justice spurned
And every widow cozened or deceived;
O for the shepherd weep
Whose gate was open when all doors were closed,
For in his fold both wolf and sheep did feed,
And none did on another prey
Or do a foul deed.
Aye, when I had washed him,
And dressed him,
And laid him out on his bier
(Like a woman in travail I wailed,
My own dress torn and worn wrong),
And walked him on his last way,
And stepped forth from my circle of friends to lower him into the grave,
And they said,
“He has taken him to His place,”
Did you not, stricken, say:
“Would He had taken me in his place”?
And when they said,
“Time heals all wounds,”
You answered them:
“A curse on time and its cure!
Lord, you can have back this life,
Which, my brother dead,
Is too much to endure.”

VII

And upon returning to the cemetery the next day, he thought:

Ah, God bless you, brother,
For my sorrow would not let me stay away!
I buried you last night with bitter heart
And bitter-hearted I return today
To visit you.
  Are you all right?
  Shall I speak louder?
And will you hear me if I raise a voice
That’s cracked with grief?
Why don’t you answer me?
Say how you passed the night in your new home!
Did you begin to feel your skin peel from your bones,
Your jaw unsocketed?
Did life’s last sap run slowly out of you
As my tears trickle from me, one by one?
O eldest of my father’s sons,
What can I do but leave you in the hands
Of Him who is my hope, and hope
That as He birthed you from our mother’s womb
He will unearth you from a brother’s tomb—
And go in peace!

VIII

And when his friends came to pay their condolences during the week of mourning, he thought:

Ah, you would comfort me, would you?
As if any comfort there could be,
Or any life,
Or sanity,
After putting Isaac in the grave!
Stand back, then,
Save your breath—
Or better yet,
Find me a fitter friend,
Such as a jackal that has lost its young,
And let it howl, and me weep, and see
Which one of us will be grief’s champion.
My friends,
Don’t think that you have known loss like mine,
Or that my Isaac’s death is like all men’s.

IX

And at the end of the week of mourning, he thought:

Over now are mourning’s days,
But over not each morning’s daze,
The days of pain,
The stomach-churning nights.
Oh, no woe worse than this, woe most bitter for a brother,
My mother’s son,
My one and only
Paragon!
Why did this happen to me,
How can it be that he
Who was my crown and cavalier
Is now my keen and cry?
Had he been captured by a foe,
I’d fight to set him free;
Did pirates him for ransom hold,
I would withhold no fee;
But what avails when my Lord’s will
Is law on land and sea?

X

And when it was time to return to his place of service [Granada] and some of his brother’s friends offered to accompany him, he thought:

My best, my most beloved friend, adieu!
I go my way,
And with me goes a heart that’s split in two,
Half consumed in ashes
And half lived in by you.
In half your constant image I behold,
In half my anguish smolders uncontrolled,
So that I list like a maimed boat at sea,
And thinking of you, cry in my distress
To those who escort me to my home port:
“Where is your flagship, he
Who in all things was your sole admiralty?”
Translated by Hillel Halkin.

Notes

Word in brackets appears in the original translation.

Credits

Samuel ha-Nagid, “The Death of Isaac,” trans. Hillel Halkin, from Hillel Halkin, Grand Things to Write a Poem On: A Verse Autobiography of Shmuel Hanagid (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2000), 64–72 [poems I–X]. Used with permission of the publisher.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3: Encountering Christianity and Islam.

Engage with this Source

In the year 1041, at the age of forty-eight, Samuel ha-Nagid lost his older brother Isaac, who died after a brief illness. Samuel had been very close to Isaac, an important figure in his own right, and in the year after Isaac’s death, ha-Nagid composed nineteen poems of mourning that express his feelings of despair, loss, and eventual consolation. As is the case throughout ha-Nagid’s dīwān (collection of poetry), his son Yehosef provided superscriptions that offer the context for each of the poems. In ha-Nagid’s retelling, he was initially so distraught that he repeatedly refused to accept consolation. He was then forced to confront the world without his beloved brother.

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Related Guide

Early Medieval Poetry

9th to 12th Century

Creator Bio

Samuel ha-Nagid

993–1056

Born in Córdoba, in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) into a leading Jewish family, Samuel ben Joseph ha-Levi ha-Nagid became the prototypical Andalusi Jewish courtier, poet, talmudic scholar, and communal leader, and an important patron of Jewish learning. Samuel was educated in Hebrew and Arabic literature and, although his family suffered during political upheavals at the outset of the eleventh century, he became a secretary, chief minister, and even a military commander for the Berber Zirid ruler of Granada. More than 1,700 of Samuel ha-Nagid’s poems survive, including war poems, ethical verses, and panegyrics. Later scholars write of his prolific contributions to Hebrew linguistics, but his treatises on this topic are largely lost. There is some evidence that he engaged in a religious polemic with the Muslim polymath Abū Muḥammad Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064), although the precise contours of this exchange remain uncertain. He also composed an influential legal compendium. This, too, survives only in fragments.

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