An article that is ostensibly about the liturgical poem “Please with Force” by Hamama. But she uses her discussion of the poem as a backdrop to the essence of Jewish culture itself. She believes that Jewish culture is one of opposites that interact in a way that enables one to touch the transcendent.
The liturgical poem under discussion has deeply touched tens of thousands of people who have heard it because it arouses the deepest desire for the sublime. It presents an oxymoron, or in the language a Jew would use “Tartei Desitri” – the opposing and contradictory forces of human existence and how their interwoven-ness enables transcendence and the existence of the sublime. The joining of the superior with the inferior, the heavens and the earth, the holy and the secular, the female and the male, justice and compassion, the veiled and the visible, the body and the soul, the material and the spiritual are what stand as the foundation of the Jewish approach.
Jewish culture does not base human existence on one emotion – on compassion or love alone – but gives pride of place to all emotions by the joining of opposites.
