Partial Victories
A Discussion into English of
Hayyim Nahman Bialik's "Tehezaknah"
By Joseph Lowin

There it is in Shiron Massad, the songbook that was central to the Massad experience, right alongside Hatikvah. "It" is stanzas 1 and 4 of Birkat Am ("The People's Blessing"), a poem written by Jewish National Poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). His aim was to give encouragement to the pioneers of the First Aliyah who were going through a period of self-doubt and needed moral support.

Ask Israelis of a certain age and they will tell you that at one time both Hatikvah and Tehezakna had the status of "official" Zionist hymn and were sung together at ceremonial occasions. Merely mention the word tehezakna to one of these old-timers and it is like pushing a button: he or she will stand at attention and begin to sing.

Just as only two stanzas of Naftali Herz Imber's nine-stanza poem Tikvateinu became the Hatikva, only the first stanza of Bialik's eight-stanza Birkat Am was sung as a Zionist hymn.

How stanzas 1 and 4 of Birkat Am became Tehezakna, the Massad hymn, and therefore the hymn of thousands of American Zionists, is a story worth telling, through a discussion of the poem itself.

Readers of Bialik's poetry will not be surprised to find biblical echoes throughout the song. Virtually every phrase, from the first word, tehezakna, to the last expression, im natui ha-kav, reverberates and shimmies with scriptural allusions.

The first two lines of the poem, taken from Zekhariah 8:9,13, link the modern day pioneers to the prophecy of the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the turning of the curse of exile into the blessing of homecoming. Written in the third person plural, they speak, in a liturgical mode, about the pioneers, not to them. (1) May they grow strong, the hands of our brothers and sisters who see beauty, (2) even in the dust of the land, [as in the famous poem by Yehuda Ha-Levi, "My Heart is in the East"] wherever they may be. The poet, using the expression ba'asher hem sham, gives a new spin to a similar expression in Genesis 21:17. He insists that the present status of the pioneers, even though their efforts have not yet been crowned with success, are worthy of praise.

In the next two verses, Bialik turns from the liturgical and descriptive to address the pioneers directly. (3) Do not let your spirits fall √[rather], joyful and lustily bursting into song, (4) Come≈with one voice and shoulder to shoulder≈to the aid of your nation! These verses are an invitation to adopt the poem's first stanza as a hymn.

When Shlomo Shulsinger, the founder of Massad and pioneer of Hebrew camping in America, was looking for a hymn for his Hebrew movement, he scanned down to the poem's fourth stanza, saw the word massad, foundation, and knew right away that it had to be included in Massad's hymn.

Bialik, in this stanza, uses the vocabulary of the building contractor as a way to talk metaphorically about the building of a nation. (5) If you have not raised the roof but built only the foundation (6) You have come far indeed, my brothers and sisters, your toil has not been in vain! Bialik uses the term rav lakhem, in verse 6 and rav lanu, in verse 8, to link the pioneers of his day not to the heroes of old but to the rest of the Jewish nation of his own day.

In Russia, Bialik had been involved in the printing trades and knew therefore how to appreciate labor and laborers. He was grateful to those who had come to the Land to build and be built by it because they were doing a service for all Jews of his own day, and for generations to come. (7) You have come≈to build, and plaster, and whitewash, (8) and now [because of your labors] we also have come far, even if only the surveyor's line be stretched out. This line alludes to a passage in the Book of Job 38:5, with an important emendation. There, God himself uses builder's imagery to make an argument against Job's complaints. Here, Bialik praises the pioneers for taking a hand in God's work, for a partial victory.

Bialik first published his poem in 1894. Around 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution, it was set to the music of an anonymous composer. When the song prospered, it became the anthem of a Jewish Revolution that is still ongoing.

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