Page 21 - Core Beliefs For Intentional Community
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great and small, women and children, youths and maidens, in all the matters of daily
life, at all hours of the day and night, like all the nations, each nation in its own
language.
That was the greatest, the most crucial moment in my life. Now I had found what I
needed to do, right away. I saw that one of the two things without which the Jews
could not be a nation, the land and the language, the return to the land was not in our
own hands but rather dependent upon those ruling it at the present. However, the
return to the language of the fathers was in our own hands, and no one could stop us
from doing it if only we wanted to…
A Voice Called and I Went Hannah Senesh (1921-1944)
The Voice of Prophecy in the Literature of the Israeli Pioneering movement by
Yariv Ben-Aharon
On the way…
A voice called and I went, I shut my ears in the cold whiteness
I went, for the voice called. And I cried,
I went so as not to fall. For something I had lost
But on the crossroads [Caesarea, 1942]
One year and a half before her death, Hannah Senesh
gave expression to the voice that propelled her from
home and friends in her native Hungary to a quest for a
Jewish identity through a life of pioneering in Eretz
Israel.
What is this voice that called Hannah Senesh? From
where did it originate and evolve into her fateful
summons? Her poem informs us that the voice beckoned
her to go, in order that she should not “fall”. To go that
way, she had to shut her ears “in the cold whiteness”
with that same wax with which Odysseus plugged his
ears against the seductive voices tempting him on his
journey home. Hannah Senesh (1921-1944)
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