MOSHE ZEMER
He arrived in the port of Acco and then in Jerusalem on September 1, 1267. He was overjoyed to be in the Holy City and yet crushed by the sight of the ruins where once the Temple stood. He composed an ecstatic elegy to Jerusalem and its stones in which he expressed his joy to be in Zion and mourning for its sad state. His ambivalence reached its height with his expression of longing for his family. He celebrated his homesickness in these verses that sound as if the great champion of Zion were in exile!
[ am the man, who has seen affliction/ exiled from my household/ distanced from both beloved and friend/ because the journey is so prolonged,/ I am isolated from brothers/ in a wayfarer's lodging in the desert./ [ left my home/ abandoned my inheritance/ there I left my spirit and my soul/ with sons and daughters who are as my own/ are the beginning of my way/ my beloved and pleasant ones/ who are ceaselessly with my eye and my heart./ The honor of friends may bite like a viper,/ my companions in darkness,/ This appears trifling/ and everything precious appears despicable.”
This sad longing for his family and friends in Gerona is suddenly interrupted by a love song and elegy to Jerusalem . His halakhic affinity to Zion found expression in love poetry to the Land. Perhaps he was bolstering himself in his loneliness by recalling the realization of his great dream of witnessing the sites of the Holy City, about which he had written most of his life. So he sings to the rubble of Jerusalem :
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