A Cultural Journey to Israel@70 March 7, 2018 | Vayakhel - Perkudei 5778

Listen to a YouTube presentation of the song here.

Take Me Under Your Wing by Hayim Nachman Bialik

Hayim Nahman Bialik (January 9, 1873 –July 4, 1934) is and was ubiquitous. Nearly every Jewish locale in Israel has a street named after him and there is even a town called Kiryat Bialik north of Haifa.

Born in a shtetl and raised from the age of 7 in Zhitomir in the Pale of Settlement, he went AWOL from the Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania to Odessa, where he became an active Zionist and began publishing his poetry. To avoid his strict grandfather’s deathbed wrath, he returned to the Pale, where he married. Subsequently, in Odessa again, he founded the Dvir publishing house with some friends, then went on to Warsaw and Berlin before coming to settle in Tel Aviv in 1924, where he was already a celebrity and had a powerful presence in the cultural scene of Palestine.

His Hebrew works (though not his writings in Yiddish) are everywhere, from pre- kindergartens to the high school curriculum to celebrations, ceremonies and the radio, as many of the poems have been set to music. He has been called Israel’s national poet, though this is not an official title.

Take Me Under Your Wing is commonly read and taught in one or more of at least three ways: as a love poem; as a poem of longing for Zion; and as a poem about his ambivalent relationship to religion, in which case the you of the poem would be the Shekhina, the winged female manifestation of divinity in Jewish mysticism.