The Broken Vessel: How an Alcoholic Poet Revived a Nation
BY RABBI ELIE MISCHEL
Five days after liberation, survivors at Bergen-Belsen sang Hatikvah during a Kabbalat Shabbat service. The BBC recorded their haunting voices. None could have guessed that these words – which would later become Israel’s national anthem – were penned by a bohemian alcoholic poet who died broke on New York’s Lower East Side.
Naftali Herz Imber, born in 1856 in Zloczov, Galicia, was an oddity from the start. As a child prodigy, he amazed rabbis with his Talmudic knowledge while simultaneously frustrating them with his rebellious streak. Stories tell of him inviting all the town’s beggars to Shabbat meals funded by his father’s money. When not “borrowing” from his poor father, Imber would spend Shabbat afternoons with a wealthy neighbor’s daughter, studying German literature instead of learning Torah.
By age 10, Imber was studying the Zohar and writing Hebrew poetry. His first poems weren’t about Jewish nationhood or longing but about the Austro-Prussian War and Jewish civil rights. At 12, he sent Emperor Franz Joseph a Hebrew poem and received twenty-five guilders in return. “The Emperor,” Imber quipped, “always gives twenty-five, guilders or lashes.”
At 15, Imber left home, cut off his peyot, and began wandering Eastern Europe. A medieval-style minstrel, he paid his way with poems and wit. In 1878, while tutoring the children of Baron Waldberg in Romania, he scribbled what would later become Hatikvah on a scrap of paper.
His path to the Holy Land came through an unlikely source: British diplomat Sir Laurence Oliphant, a Christian messianic mystic on a quest to establish a Jewish state in its ancient borders to “fulfill prophecy and bring on the end of the world.” Imber became his secretary, arriving in pre-state Israel in 1882 during the First Aliyah. While East European Zionist pioneers worked the land, Imber spent his days writing poetry and his nights reciting it in the new settlements, often after raiding their wine cellars.
It was Imber who first called these pioneers “chalutzim,” forever changing Zionist vocabulary. His 1886 Jerusalem-published volume Barkai (“Morning Star”) contained not just Hatikvah (then called “Tikvatenu”) but also “Mishmar HaYarden” (“Watch on the Jordan”), which also became a beloved classic.
Imber’s years in the Holy Land ended when his beloved patron Alice Oliphant suddenly died of a fever in Teveriah. The woman he called “noble” and treated as a surrogate mother was gone, and with her, his stability. What followed were decades of wandering: England, America, the Midwest, California, back east. He posed as “Mahatma Imber” in small towns, feuded with Theosophists, attempted to teach Kabbalah, married briefly, and drank constantly.
Meanwhile, his song took flight without him. As Zionism grew, “Hatikvah” became its unofficial anthem. At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, delegates sang it – without mentioning the author. While Jews worldwide embraced his words, Imber stumbled through America’s cities, asking: “Many people enjoy my ‘Hatikvah,’ many booksellers got rich on it – and what do I have after fifty years of work?”
On New York’s Lower East Side, he lived in a dark room at 113 Forsyth Street, burning candles at noon to read his own writing. By evening, he held court in cafes, paying for drinks with improvised verses until friends would help him home. Judge Mayer Sulzberger eventually became his patron, but limited him to one dollar a day, fearing what he’d spend on alcohol.
When Imber collapsed on Forsyth Street in October 1909, the Rivington Street Synagogue refused to host the funeral. Yet thousands turned out for his funeral at the Attorney Street Synagogue, where Galician and Romanian Jews fought over the right to bury Imber in their cemeteries. Despite the poet’s irreligiosity, Rabbi Joseph Scheff declared: “Good, kind, noble Imber was infinitely a holier, better, and more godly man than ever a synagogue congregation was.” The procession moved through streets lined with mourners singing Hatikvah.
G-d’s work often unfolds in unexpected ways. As Rav Kook taught, even the secular chalutzim were agents of divine will, whether they acknowledged it or not. Similarly, Imber became an instrument for national redemption.
Imber’s original version of Hatikvah was steeped in biblical language and allusions. The poem contained references to “the city where David encamped” (Yishayahu 29:1) and included the line “Our hope is not yet lost,” echoing but inverting Yechezkel 37:11 where the people lament, “our hope is lost.”
When asked about his work, Imber explained: “For two thousand years Hebrew poetry has been nothing but lamentations… Now what I did was to do away with lamentations.” His most enduring achievement was giving voice to Jewish hope rather than Jewish suffering, helping shift the national narrative from mourning to return. Though he could barely manage his own life, Imber articulated a vision that helped revive an entire nation.
This essay draws from Gerard H. Wilk’s “The Bohemian Who Wrote ‘Hatikvah’: The Career of Naphtali Herz Imber” (Commentary, January 1951), Shlomo Maital’s “Hatikvah – The real story behind Israel’s anthem” (Jerusalem Report, July 2018) and Dalia Marx’s “Tikvatenu: The Poem that Inspired Israel’s National Anthem, Hatikva.”
Rabbi Elie Mischel is the Editor of HaMizrachi magazine and the author of The War Against the Bible: Ishmael, Esau and Israel at the End Times (2024).