When do you know you truly love? When you learn to appreciate even your beloved’s thorns. Not merely to get used to them and say, fine, we’ll manage with that — but truly to see the beauty in them. To understand that things you may once have seen as flaws conceal layers of beauty behind them.
Learning to love the thorns of those you love is sometimes a life’s task. But it is a task which, when you go deep into it, leads to a love immeasurably richer and deeper than the love of the green, comfortable meadow.
And in loving the Land, too, I think you become a true child of this Land mainly when you learn to love the thorns of its blazing sun. There are travel books that make sure their photographs are always in winter green. A desperate attempt to turn our country into Europe. But there is another way. To recognize that the yellow of this Land is not merely the default of eight months a year — it is itself the beauty of this Land.
If you look deeply, you discover how much beauty there is in this yellow, made up largely of thorns. What a wealth of hues and gorgeous forms.
Try an experiment. Go out to the fields in the morning or evening hours and look at the thorns. The seemingly ordinary ones you have passed hundreds of times without noticing. Stop. Slowly you will begin to see the beauty held within them.
It doesn’t happen in a single moment, of course.
The poet Lea Goldberg was one of our country’s great lovers of thorns. But it was not love at first sight. In her first years in the country (1942) she wrote in her diary how hard the yellow landscape was for her:
“The exceedingly beautiful landscape is not endearing. Dry, scorched, sullen. I longed for forest, for real green, for a little softness and the scent of pine.”
But about ten years later she had already fallen in love with the yellow thorns:
“I draw every day, mostly thorns and thistles of every kind. How beautiful are the forms one can discover in these plants when one looks at them closely. The colors, too, are very beautiful. That supposedly monotonous yellowish-brown of our fields in summer — how many shades it holds! Every day I discover something new.”
In her poems she praises the thorn and the thistle, and even likens her own poems to the thorns of the Land:
“My poems are very much like the thorns of the Jerusalem landscape, and I love thorns, but I understand that many will recoil from their dryness.”
She expresses her love of thorns in the wonderful poem “Tammuz Blossoming”:
Indeed, the thistle of song, dry and proud,
naked, abandoned to the burning sun.
Now it rhymes with all the kinds
of knowledge that has given up on glory.
Is this our gaunt maturity?
This landscape — blazing and unmoving,
knows another secret of splendor,
crueler, but humbler too.
What wonderful words. The thistle of Tammuz sings a different song — a humble song, a song that knows a secret of beauty that winter does not possess.
Kayitz, the Hebrew word for summer, comes from ketz — an end. The end of the seasons. And kotz, a thorn, from katzeh — an edge — named for its sharp point.
The poet Yitzhak Shalev, too, prefers the thorns of our land over all the European green:
“I stroked the face of the grass as one strokes a neck
and suddenly I missed an old, familiar roughness…
There are many lawns here, many flowers, trees
and not one thorn among them, not one thorn of thorns…
A thorn of poor Canaan. Son of bitterness and son of refusal
a thorn running wild beside a fence (a snake’s rustle at evening)
a root banished from the garden and rooted out from its midst
it is what I longed for amid the fields of green
for the green there was full of satiety and ease…
and I yearned then for feverish Canaan…
it is the ancient thorn, and to my heart it is dearer
than all the world’s lush grasses — green, oily and cold”
When I was a boy, wandering the thorny, rocky hills of western Samaria, my toes would be cut until they bled. I wrote a poem about the Land back then, and from it I bring these lines:
And when I am wounded by the sharp edge of your stones
by the stubble of your thorns, by the fine veil of your hair
I will rejoice in my heart — your wounds are jewels
like a covenant they are between me and you
