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Merciful God,
Choose another people,
Elect another.
We are tired of death and dying,
We have no more prayers.
Choose another people,
Elect another.
We have no more blood
To be a sacrifice.
Our house has become a desert.
The earth is insufficient for our graves,
No more laments for us,
No more dirges
In the old, holy books.
EDWARD HIRSCH: “100 Poems to Break Your Heart”
The Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky was born in 1894 in Bereza Kartuska, a shted in White Russia. She participated fully in Jewish literary life, first in Warsaw, Poland, where she lived from 1921 to 1935, teaching Yiddish and Hebrew and publishing four collections of poems. After a move to New York City, she supported herself by writing for the Yiddish press. She was a rebellious modernist who showed great sympathy for "all impoverished women who scour burnt pots" ("Poor Women") and a feminist who defied traditional roles and considered herself an exiled outsider.
Because she was living in the United States, Molodowsky was not caught directly in the maelstrom of the Holocaust, as were the Jewish poets Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, or Avrom Sutzkever, for example. However, because of her close identification with the Jews and the Jewish culture of eastern Europe, she felt a deep personal anguish about the events unfolding in the fall of 1944. "The bitter news about “khurbm poyln” [the destruction of Poland] began to arrive," she wrote in her autobiography. "In agitation, I began to tear at the fingers of my hands. One finger became so badly infected that it required surgery."
The unthinkable hatred that was fueling the mass destruction of people and cities altered the very lens through which Jews viewed the world. Molodowsky describes this sweeping shift in perspective in her introduction to a book of Yiddish Holocaust poetry: "All our concepts changed: concepts of earth and heaven, and of the human being; we even perceived nature differently. The foundations of the world changed their forms." The poet responded to the Holocaust and its devastating aftermath with a singular book of poems, Only King David Remained (“Der meylek Dvid akleyn iz geblibn”), which Molodowsky called "a tombstone for a life that had vanished." As she explained in her collection of “khurbm-lider” (poems lamenting the destruction), "I saw in succession before my eyes a Jewish world that had been destroyed, Jewish cities, destruction and pain. I gave this book the name Only King David Remained, in order to say that the Jewish people was no more, all that remained was King David alone with his sorrow-crown on his head."
The book sets a defiant and sardonic tone by beginning with the poem "Merciful God" ("El khanun").
Merciful God,
Choose another people,
Elect another.
We are tired of death and dying,
We have no more prayers.
Choose another people,
Elect another.
We have no more blood
To be a sacrifice.
Our house has become a desert.
The earth is insufficient for our graves,
No more laments for us,
No more dirges
In the old, holy books.
Merciful God,
Sanctify another country,
Another mountain.
We have strewn all the fields and every stone
With ash, with holy ash.
With the aged,
With the youthful,
And with babies, we have paid
For every letter of your Ten Commandments.
Merciful God,
Raise your fiery brow,
And see the peoples of the world —
Give them the prophecies and the Days of Awe.
Your word is babbled in every language —
Teach them the deeds,
The ways of temptation.
Merciful God,
Give us simple garments
Of shepherds with their sheep,
Blacksmiths at their hammers,
Laundry-washers, skin-flayers,
And even the base.
And do us one more favor:
Merciful God,
Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius.
(Translated by Kathryn Hellerstein)
The poem's title comes from the term “El khanun” ("Merciful God" or "God of Mercy"), which most notably appears in Exodus 34:6-7. After God has made a covenant with Moses, the people violate it by worshiping a golden calf, a betrayal known in rabbinic literature as "that deed." In his rage for this act of rebellion God destroys the original tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. However, when Moses intervenes on the people's behalf, God allows him to carve a second set of tablets; God then descends to him in a cloud and addresses him, describing Himself as merciful:
And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD,
The LORD God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, and abundant
in goodness and truth,
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression
and sin...
This passage became known as the "Shlosh-esrei Middot" ("Thirteen Attributes of God"), which are recited or chanted on many Jewish holidays, as well as while the Torah is being taken from the ark for that day's procession and reading, to enable Jews of any era to renew their covenant with God.
Each stanza in Molodowsky’s poem begins with the apostrophe "Merciful God." An apostrophe is a mode of direct address; the poet turns to address a God or gods, the muse, a dead or absent person, a natural object, a thing, an imaginary quality or concept. Starting the poem with "Merciful God" sets up the expectation that, as in a typical prayer, the speaker will be asking God for something uplifting, like compassion, patience, peace, or strength. However, in the second and third lines, Molodowsky upends this expectation by asking God to "Choose another people, / Elect another." She makes this startling re- quest on behalf of Jews because "We are tired of death and dying." The rest of the poem is an argument against, and a rejection of, the covenant of Exodus, which has brought unthinkable misery to the Jewish people. To be chosen, to be sanctified or made holy, is to be cursed, and she beseeches God to choose someone else.
The entire poem overflows with the language of diminishment, annihilation, and exhaustion. It is also filled with references to the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. After the horrors of World War II, the Jews have been utterly depleted, in body and in spirit. "We have no more prayers"; "We have no more blood / To be a sacrifice." In an implicit reference to the House of Israel, which in Exodus represents God's covenant with the chosen people, she declares, "Our house has become a desert." So many people have died, "The earth is insufficient for our graves." The speaker wants nothing more from God, "No more laments," "No more dirges?" Sacred elements of Jewish tradition that God granted the Jews following their covenant — "the old, holy books," "the prophecies and the Days of Awe?' "the deeds / The ways of temptation" — she wants God to give to "another country, / Another mountain," "the peoples of the world."
Alluding to the crematoria of the Holocaust, the speaker declares, "We have strewn all the fields and every stone / With ash, with holy ash." The purposeful addition here of "holy ash" emphasizes the poet's conclusion that God’s sanctification of the Jewish people has brought them to ruin. She points out the unacceptable price of having accepted this covenant, whose very language ironically includes the command not to kill: "With the aged, / With the youthful, / And with babies, we have paid / For every letter of your Ten Commandments."
In the concluding stanza, Molodowsky’s speaker rejects the tradition in Jewish culture of a special calling to scholarly pursuits and the life of the mind; instead, she asks God to let the so-called Chosen People become un-chosen, ordinary people who work with their hands as "shepherds with their sheep, / Blacksmiths at their hammers, / Laundry-washers, skin-flayers." The poem ends, like Alfonsina Storni's "I'm Going to Sleep," with the speaker making a last request: "And do us one more favor: / Merciful God, / Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius." Rather than ask God to bless her people, she requests deprivation, her final renunciation of that special, chosen status, which was seen as the "genius" of the Jewish people.
Molodowsky's poem, which she deliberately dated 1945, is a prayer to end all prayers, since her last request asks God to withdraw, thus negating any need for additional prayer. Oddly, even somewhat wittily, in all her bitter weariness she never seems to doubt the existence of God, an irony that places her in a long counter-tradition of Jewish lamentations that curse God while continuing to evoke Him. Her poem thus becomes what the scholar David Roskies Labels "a sacred parody." As the translator and critic Kathryn Hellerstein puts it, "Molodowsky thus responds to the destruction of European Jewry with her own act of annihilation." If God's power is to offer a holy covenant to the Jewish people, Molodowsky uses her power in "Merciful God" to break that covenant, not by worshiping a false idol, but by refusing the covenant itself.
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