The Covenant with the desert – based on the volume Nof galui einayim by Yehuda Amichai

Abstract

The article „The Covenant with the desert – based on the volume Nof galui einayim [Open Eyed Land] by Yehuda Amichai” presents the image of the Judean  Desert conveyed in poems of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In this volume, the Judean Desert is not only a biological and geographical category, but above all a part of the poet's inner experience. It is a symbolic space, saturated with both personal memories and the collective memory of many generations of Jews, from the times of Masada till the 20th century. In this desert, Amichai, referring to the figure of the Absent God, in whom he had already lost his faith, conducts a dialogue with the Jewish religious tradition. However, what attracts him the most to the desert is its silence and emptiness, evoking openness to the Inexpressible, to the world of rocks and minerals, and the prehistory of the Earth, more powerful than anthropology.