Abstract
In this paper I explore the biblical metaphor of the binding of Isaac (Akedah) in Hebrew women's poetry from the 1930s to the 1970s, namely, in the work of Rachel Bluwstein, Leah Goldberg, Esther Raab, and Rachel Halfi. My reading demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional account of this metaphor in women's poetry, which places the dramatic turning point in the poetic representation of the Akedah in the 1970s, female poets in fact had worked through the figure of the Akedah much earlier. By referring to theories of sacrifice and trauma, such as those of René Girard and Cathy Caruth, I examine early women's poetry for the subversive alternatives it offered to the conventional renditions of the Akedah typical of both popular and literary discourses in the Yishuv period and the early years of the state of Israel. Whereas the canonical (masculine) poetry uses the Akedah motif mainly as a metonymic representation of the national condition, women's poetry reveals both the national and the private traumatic experiences that accompanied the establishment of the new Zionist state. The paper also contextualizes this challenge to the hegemonic writing of the Akedah within the matrix of gender. Accordingly, I underscore the 'feminization' of the motif, and explore the poetic trends that empowered women to revise this narrative and enter a discursive scene hitherto associated primarily with male writers and patriarchal ideology. I wish to argue that this early feminine metaphorical subversion of the Akedah should modify our reading of the critical turning point of the 1970s, which marks the transformation and trans-valuation of the metaphor. In view of its precursors, this turning point must be understood not as an unprecedented, sudden rupture, but rather as a response to the alternative voices audible in the poetic space of the pre- and early state, which had been repressed and marginalized by mainstream Hebrew writers and readers. By exploring this literary corpus (largely neglected and overlooked by general Akedah scholarship), my paper uncovers and identifies the poetic ancestors, the 'founding mothers', to whom the poets of the 1970s are clearly indebted.