Dear Colleagues and Friends,
In this post-Passover period, I was reflecting on the time after the Israelites left Egypt. With the joyous liberation from slavery in Egypt accomplished, the Israelites entered not the Promised Land but rather days, weeks, months, and then years of wandering in the desert. The account from the book of Exodus can be read in long-form narrative on the Posen Digital Library. The narrative of these years of wandering, a liminal time in the story of the ancient Israelites, inspired Jewish writers, poets, and political thinkers whose works also abound in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
Given that manna sustained the Israelites for 40 years, I went hunting in the Posen Digital Library to explore how it stimulated Jewish creativity over the past century. (Log in or register to go directly to the cited selections to read more.)
Consider the American poet Samuel Menashe’s short poem, “Manna” that begins:
“Open your mouth
To feed that flesh
Your teeth have bled.”1
Manna, the miraculous substance that rained down from the sky, prompts Menashe to call on all not to live by bread alone. The Soviet poet Yuli Daniel, who was punished with five-years hard labor after poking fun at the government, embraced a similar theme in his poem, “To My Friends.” Written in the Gulag, it begins:
“God’s grace has surely been overabundant.
Riches were mine. Hardly a day would pass
When human sympathy did not alight on me
Like manna from the sky.”2
Exodus 16:31 explains, “it was like coriander seed, white, and it tasted like wafers in honey.” Rather than try to imagine its flavor, the cookbook author Joan Nathan riffs on the double portion of manna the Israelites received on the Sabbath, symbolized in six humps on loaves of challah. She notes how in the 18th century, when twisted loaves of bread came into vogue in Central and Eastern Europe, Jews responded by transforming the twelve round loaves of bread in Leviticus into two loaves of challah with six humps from the braids in each. It’s not quite like eating manna, but it does let one imaginatively merge one taste experience with another.
A very different interpretation appears in a piece by Israeli fiction writer and essayist Amalia Kahana-Carmon. She turned to the metaphor of manna to explain what the War of Independence did to its writers: “they all chewed the same strong weed: the War of Independence. That was manna falling upon the earth.” As someone who joined the Palmach in 1948 and served as a radio operator during the war, she acknowledged, “Then, we all ate only manna. For a writer,” she explained, “this meant a period of uniform diet, and . . . the times did not nourish” these writers of those years, rather the War of Independence “actually mistreated them, conspired against their innate best, their poetic soul, . . . .”3
Esther Seligson, born in Mexico City, became a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. She limns yet another take on manna, writing in Dreams Older Than Memory: “Today we must go further back than our own past, beyond all personal memory, all the way back to . . . the first exodus, we must wander the desert, thirsty starving people waiting for manna and the Rock of life, dragging that true solitude of ours through the sands and burning bushes without asking who we are or where we’re going, just chanting psalms, singing as evening falls around the column of smoke and fire.”4
These examples from the Posen Digital Library can fill the days of counting until the Israelites’ arrival at Mount Sinai, celebrated on the holiday of Shavuot. To help us count, here is a beautiful Omer Calendar from the 18th century, still used by Philadelphia’s Congregation Mikveh Israel, a Sephardic synagogue founded in 1782. The letter H stands for Homer (Omer in Ladino), S stands for Semana (week), and D stands for Dia (day).
Omer Calendar (1800) Courtesy Congregation Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia.
Enjoy these liminal moments and the reflections they inspire.
You may also be interested in learning about three upcoming talks The Posen Library will be co-hosting with the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. These will all be free Zoom sessions, although registration is required. Register just once for all three events.
The Emergence of Holocaust Consciousness and Its Permutations
May 31, 2022 @ 7:00 PM SAST (1:00 pm EDT)
The Rise of Open & Hidden Nazism: Polish Jewish Reckonings with Danger and Powerlessness in the 1930s
June 7, 2022 @ 7:00 PM SAST / 1:00 pm EDT
Jewish Writing during the Holocaust
June 16, 2022 @ 7:00 PM SAST (1:00 pm EDT)
You can find more information about these sessions on our Events page. These events draw on material from The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 9: Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973, edited by Samuel D. Kassow and David G. Roskies, which recently received a starred Kirkus Review, describing the book as “a weighty collection, to be sure, but one that’s consistently engaging.”
Be well.
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
What is The Posen Library? (video)
Credits
1 Samuel Menashe, "Manna," from New and Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: The Library of America, 2005), p. 70. First appeared in Harper's Magazine (December 1973). Copyright © 1973 by Harper's magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the December issue by special permission. Passage from Deuteronomy 8:3 from The King James translation of the Bible.
2 Yuli Daniel, “To My Friends,” from Prison Poems, trans. David Burg and Arthur Boyars (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, Calder and Boyars, 1971), p. 43. Used with permission of the publisher.
3 Amalia Kahana-Carmon, “Ma asta tashach lesofreiya" [What Did the War of Independence Do to Its Writers?], Yediot Aharonot (May 4, 1973).
4 Esther Seligson, from Otros son los sueños [Dreams Older than Memory] (México: Organización Editorial Novaro, 1973), pp. 36–37. Used with permission of the author's estate.
