How might a poem acquire divine forgiveness? Ariel Zinder’s book Arise and Sing follows medieval Jewish poets from Iraq and al-Andalus as they seek answers to this pressing question. The book presents close readings of liturgical poems (piyyutim) written in the 10th and 11th centuries, and brings them into contact with contemporary literary theory as well as modern philosophical discussions of the possibility of forgiveness.

This book is based on an M.A. dissertation done under the supervision of Prof. Shulamit Elizur in the department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book is dedicated to the investigation of some of the central attributes of the liturgical poems of redemption (Piyyutei Geʾulah) written by Solomon Ibn-Gabirol (1021–1054 CE). In this reading, these poems are seen as a central arena ringed and crisscrossed by swirling, often conflicting voices – a poetic model that did not exist in Hebrew liturgical poetry until the advent of Ibn Gabirol. My central argument is that Ibn Gabirol’s principal innovations are in the fields of rhetoric and textual composition. The rhetorical innovation in these poems is contained mainly in the short, stanza-long speeches which the poet uses to introduce the various participants of the Hebrew drama of redemption. The compositional innovation evolved out of the diverse ways these speeches were interwoven in the poems, each of which contains 4–5 stanzas and thus 4–5 points of view. This dramatic shift in the form and content of the piyyutim of redemption resulted in the creation of a group of poems characterized by a highly charged discourse on suffering, longing, anger, and faith.