An Arab shepherd is looking for…
Arab shepherds are looking for goats on Mount Zion,
On the other side of the hill I’m looking for my little boy.
Arab Shepherd and Jewish Father
Both in temporary failures.
Our two voices met above
Sultan’s pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us nor boys want a goat
Get caught in the wheel
“Hasgadia” machine.
After that we found them in the bushes,
And our voices have returned to us
I’m laughing and crying.
I’m always looking for goats and kids
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
We’re the right place
From the right place
Flowers never grow
In spring.
We’re the right place
It’s difficult and I’m trampled
Like a garden.
But doubt and love
I’ll dig the world
Like a mole, I love it.
And there’s a whisper in that place
A ruined place
The house used to be standing.
Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is widely regarded as Israel’s biggest modern poet. His works have been translated into over 20 languages. A soldier in his youth, he spent most of his life in Jerusalem. It was not only a city of holiness and sorrow, but also a city of everyday life. Jerusalem was never abstract. It was the sidewalks and stones, the food and memories, and the place where Jews and Arabs passed each other every day.
These two poems show the breadth of his vision. Arab shepherds searching for goats on Mount Zion It’s story and visual. On the hillside, goat, son’s goat – Becombe’s ratio phors for sadness and fragile relatives. The poem suggests that sadness can connect people across boundaries.
in contrast, We’re the right place It’s almost adageous. It opposes the hard soil of certainty on the fertile ground of doubt and love. Nothing grows from just righteousness alone. Flowers only root when their beliefs are softened. Written in the shadow of Israel’s war, the poem speaks not only to Israelites and Palestinians, but also to those who have been caught up in ideological rigidity.
The two poems arranged side by side reveal complementary visions. One finds hope in shared grief, and the other in the surrender of certainty. Both turn the land itself into a metaphor. Zion hardened the soil to the right as a basis for the loss.
Images are not only phoric, but also geographical. The “valley between us” is the Hinnom Valley, with the Sultan’s pool below Mount Zion, and the ancient reservoir was later restored as a public place. We’re the right place It has become one of the most cited poems in Amichii, and is often called in inter-civil and pagan environments as a warning to certainty and pleas for humility.
Amichii’s poem refuses victory. There is no “win.” Instead, they argue that human longing and sadness outweighs slogans and dogmas. Jerusalem in his work is literally and symbolic, both the market and the phenomenal, the battlefield and the garden.
Amichii, even practical Jews in the traditional sense, did not believe in doctrinal methods. But God never lacked his imagination. God was the figure he argued, joked, mourned, rethinked. He once said, “God was good for me. He gave me two things: the ability to poetry and laugh.” As theologian David Bentley Hart put it, “There is no better chance (and perhaps less) that God is found in theology than in poetry or fiction.”
Like faith, the peace of Amichii’s vision is by no means grand. It is fragile, rooted in sorrow and doubt, and echoing in a voice reverberating in the same valley. He suggests that even contested stones can become soil due to the humility of the flowers being rooted.
“Unshakable love and faithfulness will meet… faithfulness will jump from the ground, and justice will look down from the sky” (Psalm 85:10–11).
In this post, the notes below provide a way to read along with Amichai.
Yehuda Amichai, Selected poems of Yehuda Amichai (1996). Essential poem; see also “Yehuda Amichai and God.” Amichai Windows (2016).
Bernard le Bovia de Fontener, Conversations about multiple worlds (1686). Fontenel, a French enlightenment writer, said that the mind cannot withstand “naked,” but it must be wrapped in a story. Even David Hume, a model of rationality of Enlightenment, evaluated the sense of imagination in Fontenel’s reasoning (A survey of moral principles1751). – (Reference I borrowed Helen de Cruz. )
David Bentley Hart, The Devil and Pierre Gelnett (2012). Hart, an orthodox theologian, writes in his preface that God is less likely (and perhaps less) to be found in theology than in poetry or fiction. Critics of Hart’s “universalism” should read his story the most recent Prism, Veil: A book about story f– Myths and parables give philosophy and theology a fresh look.
Isaac Bashevis singer, “The Unseen” (1963). Short stories by Nobel Prize winners were adapted as later Play for the devil (1984), exploring memory, identity, and conflict.
Mahmouddarwish, Unfortunately, it was paradise: Selected poems (2003) – Palestinian national poet gives voice to refuge and the Arab-Israel conflict.
Yahia Lababidi, Palestinian Cry (2024); Where epics fail (2028). The Palestinian-American poet, he wrote: “Darwish and Amichai write on their slogans from both sides of deep wounds. They restore the language of the soul within the ruins of ideology.”
Nadia Asparrowhova, Antibody: Why some ideas resist spreading (2025). Expand the “antibody” idea. It is when you actively resist being remembered or shared. What is not said can define conflict as much as what screams.
Ursula K. Le Gin, “The One Who Leaves Omras,” Wind 12 quarters (2004). In Omras, peace depends on the suffering of the child. The choice is to leave or accept it as a price.
fyodor dostoevsky, Karamazov Brothers (1880). In Dostoevsky’s world, competition cannot be overcome by justice alone. Only mercy breaks the cycle. Alyosha’s compassion shows how mercy interrupts transmission, like the division from the Middle East to our nation.
Democracy without discussion,
Leisure work
Approx. 2 + 2 = 5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
