The Love Song of Akiva ben Yosef

(Akiva)

How shall we hear that sacred utterance

Made as the iron tore away his life

Strip by fleshy strip? Excruciance

Sufficient to deny all breath to speech;

Even to curse, too high for mortal reach.

No curse, no base surrender, was his cry;

At minimum, a testament of faith!

Refusal to acknowledge victory

Of chaos over purpose, though no trace

Of purpose pierced the evil with its grace.

But surely more was borne on that last breath?

Of martyrdom he taught that love of God

With all one’s soul subsumed it, such a death

A cleanse for sin, atonement for transgression.

Did not his words foreshadow his redemption?

More still! As mystic, he dared breach the dark

That shielded from the lethal countenance,

To glimpse God’s essence, unobstructed, stark!

Could that obsession, craving for such bliss,

Be sated by a single, fleeting kiss?

And so, as he rehearsed his fated end:

Did he await with yearning or with dread?

Dared he hope, through death, to apprehend

Some fuller union, unremitting state

Of seamless mergence, wholly intimate?

Perhaps the very density of pain

Provoked a fusion, forged new elements

Of sense, new perceptions; bared domains

Of unity unknowable to all

But those suspended in death’s deepest thrall?

A unity of joy and suffering,

Of love and fear, passivity and power,

Dread and yearning, ignorance and knowing.

A singularity of being, life-and-death,

Finite-and-eternal, dust-and-breath.

Imagining it so, now hear his cry: -

Kol Chatan! The groan of consummation,

Self-obliteration! Stupefied

Amazement! Dissolution into light!

His love song, voiced with all his soul and might!

And I, who nurse discretionary pains

Just to the edge of true ordeal, rehearse

Heroics that I shudder to attain!

For what right mind would court catastrophe

On the chance that such an end might be?