After searching for a theme for six long weeks in vain,
which broke the poet’s heart and led to its deep grief,
William Butler Yeats repaired it when he realized he should be satisfied
to use as ladder something he’d apparently ignored: his heart.
This organ unified all Israelites when they were not apart
on Sinai, because, after they for seven weeks on God and Moses had relied,
their united hearts became their leitmotif,
of course inspired by the Lord’s legerdemain.
The middle name of Yeats reminds me of the butler who
forgot his cellmate, slave who had interpreted his dream,
no soulmate until — reunited with the still jailed Jew —
he divined by coincidence this poem’s theme.
Not all coincidences are divine, but more than a few,
when recognized as such, can change a person’s life,
as did a butler Joseph’s, and as marriages can do.
coincidenting unity between a man and wife.
Easter, date when Jesus left his tomb, is also when Jews start to count
the Omer on Passover, which Jews always celebrate
seven weeks before the Festival of Weeks, the same amount
of time he needed till his comeback on a Pentecostal date.
We Jews don’t leave a tomb to celebrate the festival
of Shavuot, but leave behind the counting of the days of every week,
remembering that God thought Mount Sinai to be the best of all
the mountains, giving us the Torah from a height that humbly did not claim it had
the highest peak.
Introducing the narrative of the Sinai theophany, Exod.19:2 states:
וַיִּסְעוּ מֵרְפִידִים, וַיָּבֹאוּ מִדְבַּר סִינַי, וַיַּחֲנוּ, בַּמִּדְבָּר; וַיִּחַן-שָׁם יִשְׂרָאֵל, נֶגֶד הָהָר. And when they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the wilderness of Sinai, they encamped in the wilderness; and there Israel encamped before the mount.
Rashi explains:
ם ישראל. כְּאִישׁ אֶחָד בְּלֵב אֶחָד, אֲבָל שְׁאָר כָּל הַחֲנִיּוֹת בְּתַרְעוֹמוֹת וּבְמַחֲלֹקֶת: ויחן שם ישראל And there Israel encamped as one man and with one mind — but all their other encampments were made in a murmuring spirit and in a spirit of dissension (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael 19:2:10).
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
