Bialik: The Rashi of Zionism

#whatireadovershabbat Avner Holtzman's Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew (Yale UP, 2017)

One hundred thousand people attended Hayim Nahman Bialik’s funeral in Tel Aviv in 1934. The crowd included a third of the Jewish population of pre-state Israel. Who was the 61-year-old poet who had touched all these lives? The question is not only historical, to be answered by consulting a Who’s Who of Jewish cultural icons. As Avner Holtzman demonstrates in his 2017 biography, who Bialik was is an existential question, bearing on the past and future of nations and peoplehood.

The Russian-American rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz, a friend of Bialik’s (1873–1934), called him the “Rashi of Zionism.” What did Rav Tchernowitz mean by comparing Bialik to the foremost Biblical commentator in the Jewish tradition? I think he was remarking on how Bialik forged an interpretive apparatus for Zionism, like Rashi did for the Hebrew Bible, that allows one to understand any moment in the unfolding of Jewish national consciousness in the context of the whole.

That is to say, Bialik created—in poetry and prose, through publishing ventures and cultural statesmanship—a massive gloss on the Jewish People’s resurrection from the rubble of the Second Temple nearly two millennia earlier. He explained this material and spiritual history not as a professor would, in expository fashion, but by way of allusion and citation, tracing soul-deep motifs and phrases across centuries and millennia. Like Rashi before him, Bialik forged himself into another link in the goldene keyt, the golden chain of tradition.

Yet therein lies a mystery...

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