Because he wrote so much, they said that what he wrote could not be good.
I am referring to the baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann.
Thus also\u00a0the multiplicity of lies told about the Jewish state of Israel ,
the world obsessed as by the \u00a0whale in Melville\u2019s\u00a0Moby Dick\u00a0great tale.\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not baroque. The style that I prefer is Judeo-classic,
which draws me to the great Judeo-Spanish poet, Yehudah HaLevi.
My detractors might prefer another term, like Jew-Jurassic:
the line by which these terms are separated isn\u2019t red, but trayfy.\n<\/p>\n
Just like Yehudah HaLevi,\u00a0I regard Jews\u2019 exile from Israel as an\u00a0aporia,
in my LA diaspora dissenting with opponents of the return of Jews to Zion,
fighting against them with my poetic words, peace-loving warrior
less literate than the great rabbinic poet, whose name the Bible links to praise and to a lion.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cAporia\u201d denotes an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.\n<\/p>\n
In \u00a0\u201cScattered Seeds: The Origins of Diaspora,\u201d Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2025, Malka Z. Simkovich points out that the Bible\u2019s first reference to the diaspora of the Jews is made by the Septuagint\u2019s translation of Deut. 25:28. She writes:\n<\/p>\n
When the Septuagint\u2019s translators arrived at a verse in which Moses predicts that the Israelites would become a horror (za\u2019ava) before the foreign nations if the terms of God\u2019s covenant were violated, they searched for the right Greek word to describe the Israelites\u2019 condition. Although they were not emissaries of the high priest of Jerusalem, the translators seem to have had personal ties to the Land of Israel, which influenced the word they chose. In fact, it was one that didn\u2019t yet exist in that form: \u201cdiaspora,\u201d from dia-, meaning over or through, and -sperein, meaning to scatter like seeds (the modern word \u201cspore\u201d is also derived from the verb).\n<\/p>\n
In \u2018The Unbearable Lightness of Exile,\u2019 Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2026, Shai Secunda, reviewing Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora by David Kraemer, writes:\n<\/p>\n
When \u201cOyfn Pripetchik\u201d was composed at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had been living on the European continent for more than a thousand years, yet many of them still considered themselves to be in exile. The religious prayed for God to ingather the exiles and restore them to Jerusalem, visionaries dreamed up utopias where Jews would finally belong, and people sang songs like \u201cOyfn Pripetchik\u201d and \u201cDi Shoyfer shel Moshiach\u201d (\u201cIf but David would hear the sound of the Messiah\u2019s shofar . . . the great waters would be calmed, the leaves of the forest trees would be stilled, while David plays his fiddle and sings his song, oh his song: \u2018Israel is not yet lost; Israel will be reborn!\u2019\u201d). Exile was something to be borne\u2014golus shlepn in the evocative Yiddish\u2014to be forgotten when the times allowed for it; to be overcome, as Zionists and Communists heatedly argued; but not really to be embraced. In his new book, Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, David Kraemer whistles a more cheerful tune\u2026\u2026\n<\/p>\n
Speaking of embracing exile, perhaps the group of Jews that came closest to literally doing so were the sixteenth-century mystics who arrived in the town of Safed after the Spanish Expulsion. As Kraemer correctly notes, these kabbalists understood exile as a metaphysical state, not a geographical location. Indeed, they left us a considerable trove of exilic writings composed from the very heart of the Galilee, including remarkable descriptions of \u201c(self-)exiling,\u201d a peculiar practice in which one wanders across the countryside in imitation of the Shekhina\u2014the feminine aspect of God who was, like the people of Israel, exiled from the Temple.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tGershon 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.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Because he wrote so much, they said that what he wrote could not be good.I am referring to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-529250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}