Besides addressing all the traditional secular and religious themes of his day, he also developed, in his poems of Zion, an entirely new genre expressing both his own and his people's longing for renewal in their ancestral home. This longing was intensified by the upheavals and persecution suffered by Jews on both sides of the Mediterranean following the Almoravid invasion of Andalusia and the First Crusade. As ha-Levi observes,
Between the hosts of Seʿir [Christians] and Qedar [Muslims], My host is utterly lost. … When they wage their wars, we fall with their fall.
Dismayed by the upheavals within Spanish Jewish life and sensing its eventual dissolution, ha-Levi began to question the value of some of its main cultural pursuits, especially philosophic speculation about religion:
Let not the wisdom of the Greeks beguile you Which has no fruit, but only flowers. … Why should I seek out crooked ways And forsake the mother of paths?
While philosophy could produce a tantalizing array of opinions, it could not satisfy the spiritual hunger of men seeking concrete guidance for their actions. This required a return to the wellsprings of traditional Jewish piety, since one could approach God only by following "the mother of paths," the Torah.
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