Golgotha and the Galilee Lake in the contemporary Israeli Poetry – on the example of the selected poems of Hezy Leskly and Amir Or

The article presents the motifs of Golgotha and the Galilee Lake in the modern Israeli poetry on the example of the selected poems of Hezy Leskly and Amir Or. Contrary to Christian tradition, Jesus is shown here as a man, an enlightened master who “can’t be called Jewish or Christian” and a brother rather than God. The description of the places of the Revelation of Jesus’s divinity is – in the poetry of Leskly and Or – a point of departure for the elucidation of the religious, metaphysical and aesthetic issues, most notably on the notions of truth and beauty in art. For Leskly, who was not a believer of any religion, Golgotha is an equivalent of the metaphysical emptiness and the lack of the eschatological hope. Whereas Leskly is interested mainly in the ontological status of the word that becomes – as in the Bible – a separate being-body and the exploration of his own “ego”, as well in an aesthetic dimension of the work of art, Or is absorbed mainly in a super-personal reality in which the unity of the opposites and the lack of dualism become synonyms for the harmony of being. In the light of the poet’s beliefs, Jesus becomes an exponent of the faith in an immanent unity of the universe.