A Note On Yehuda Amichai’s Poem The Resurrection Of The Dead

The Resurrection of the Dead

Yehuda Amichai (2004)

translated from Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier

We are buried with everything we did,

with our tears and our laughs.

We have made storerooms of history out of it all,

galleries of the past, and treasure houses,

buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble

in the cellars of time.

We will not take anything with us.

Even plundering kings, they all left something here.

Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad,

they all left something here, a sign, a house,

like a man who seeks to return to a beloved place

and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,

so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.

In the same way we leave things here.

In the same way the dead leave us.

Online 

“Some Jews believe that in the Messianic Age, the temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem, the Jewish people ingathered from the 

corners of the earth and bodies of the dead will be brought back to life and reunited with their souls.”

Me:

The initial idea in the poem is that when we die we take nothing with us and leave much of ourselves behind. We’ve in fact institutionalized the latter. 

That leaving much of ourselves behind is analogized to someone who purposefully leaves items behind at some beloved place just to have an excuse to return to to and gather what he left. 

But how can that analogy work?

The last lines resolve the question. When under the resurrection doctrine the dead come back to reunite soul and body, it means the dead leave the signs and indications of themselves behind—their bodies, consistent with the initial idea of the poem. 

And they come back to the place they have always loved, even if never physically there, Israel, by way of ingathering. 

Therefore, the second last line, fuses:

 (1) our temporal leaving things behind only to be able to come back to a beloved place to retrieve them; and 

 (2) our leaving much of ourselves behind when we die. 

By the last line, the dead leave us, the living, left behind so that their souls can come back to reunite with their bodies and ingather in their beloved place.