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Paper short abstract

This lecture examines Jewish liturgical poetry (piyyut) as folk narrative that creates mystical geographies. Transmitted orally across generations, piyyut conveys images of the Holy Land that shift collective memory between scriptural sacred space, the liminal present, and visions of redemption.

Paper long abstract

This lecture investigates how Jewish liturgical poetry (piyyut), transmitted orally and sung communally for centuries, functions as folk narrative that reimagines nature and place. Although rooted in sacred ritual, piyyut spread across diverse Jewish communities as a living oral tradition, linking it to the broader field of folklore.

I will examine how piyyut creates a distinctive relationship with landscape through absence rather than presence. Unlike secular Hebrew poetry that abounds in scenic description, piyyut rarely depicts natural views. Instead, it fills its verses with sacred toponyms—Jerusalem, Zion, the Temple, Hermon—that anchor memory and devotion without offering pictorial detail.

The lecture will highlight three interrelated phenomena: how these toponyms construct “mystical geographies” where biblical places resonate across the past, present, and future, how the lack of description paradoxically invites listeners to imagine their own landscapes of longing, and how natural imagery such as stars, lilies, vines and gazelles serves as metaphorical language for spiritual transformation rather than to depict nature itself.

By analyzing these strategies, I will show how piyyut transforms ordinary place-names into sites of collective imagination and memory. More broadly, this approach illustrates the ways oral traditions generate enchanted geographies that blur the boundaries between the earthly and the celestial, the cultural and the natural.