The Free Press: Things Worth Remembering: The Poem That Outlived the Holocaust, by Douglas Century:
As a young woman, [Hannah Senesh] wrote poems inspired by the beauty of her new home [Caesarea, the ancient Roman capital of Judaea—today, a stunning national park in Israel.]. Her most famous poem, written in 1942 when she was 21, is called “Halicha L’Keisarya” in Hebrew—or, in English, “A Walk to Caesarea.” Here it is in English:
My God, my God, I pray that these things never end,
The sand and the sea,
The rush of the water,
The crash of the heavens
The prayer of Man.The poem is now almost universally known as “Eli, Eli,” or “My God, My God.” That’s largely attributable to the work of composer David Zehavi, who set it to music in 1945. Today, it is considered an unofficial second Israeli national anthem and the song most associated with Yom HaShoah, the nation’s Holocaust remembrance day. Virtually all Israelis—and many Jews in America—know it by heart, and myriad artists have recorded and performed it, ranging from Israel’s first pop superstar, Ofra Haza, to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, to Canadian jazz singer Sophie Milman. …
Yet, reading her words, it’s clear the poem is neither a liturgical lament nor the apotheosis for some vast collective Jewish suffering. It’s simply a celebration of the natural world’s awe-inspiring and ever-changing beauty; of one 21-year-old woman’s fleeting instant of happiness; and primarily a reminder—to herself—to live in the present moment.
How then did “Eli, Eli” become the song most synonymous with Holocaust Remembrance Day?
The answer is intimately tied to Hannah’s story. Born in Hungary in 1921, Hannah immigrated to Israel—then the British Mandate for Palestine—at 18 and lived on a kibbutz near the Mediterranean Sea. When World War II broke out, Hannah, alongside many other Jews in Mandatory Palestine, volunteered to fight in Europe. She was trained as a paratrooper, and on the moonlit night of March 13, 1944, she parachuted into the mountains of Yugoslavia as part of a top-secret rescue mission. For three months, she fought alongside the anti-Axis resistance movement in Yugoslavia, then crossed into Nazi-occupied Hungary in June 1944, where she was almost immediately captured. After months of torture by the Gestapo and Hungarian police, during which she refused to divulge Allied information, she was convicted of treason by a Hungarian military tribunal, and executed on the frigid morning of November 7, 1944.
She could have saved herself. All she had to do was ask the military prosecutor for a pardon. Instead, she said: “I won’t beg from hangmen and murderers.” She then refused the customary blindfold, forcing the three rifle-toting Hungarian soldiers to look her squarely in the eyes as they fired. …
The most ironic aspect about the poem’s afterlife, however, is surely its religious resonance. The musical adaptation of “Eli, Eli” has become a part of modern liturgy, included in the Shabbat prayer book of Reform Judaism and sung regularly in hundreds of synagogues across the world.
And yet Hannah was a secular Jew, raised in a culturally Jewish but not particularly observant home in Budapest. And when she wrote the poem at 21, marveling at the beautiful seascape at Caesarea, she used the phrase “my God” only once, and in the same way that we would conversationally say “Wow!”—or the same way my Gen-Z daughter might text OMG!!!
When Zehavi set her lines to music, he not only corrected Hannah’s spelling but chose to double her opening word, changing both the poem’s meter and its meaning. “Eli, Eli” is, after all, an allusion to the opening of Psalm 22: Eli, Eli, lama azavtani? (My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?)
That lament, originally attributed to King David, is famously repeated by Jesus Christ in the ninth hour from the cross. Which is why, for millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world, this duplicative use of “My God” is precisely what gives Hannah’s poem such power—striking a deep subconscious chord in anyone familiar with the Book of Psalms and Gospels of Matthew and Mark. …
The kind of moral clarity that Hannah Senesh exhibited—the courage to risk her life for a righteous cause—is the primary reason her legacy and words are so revered today.
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