Under This Blazing Light (10 page)

Look, for the past three years, since the Yom Kippur War, this peculiar people has been tormenting itself with the question ‘What did we do wrong?’, on all sorts of levels, ranging from those who keep harping on the memory of our emergency arsenals, which were so badly neglected, to those who are preoccupied with the question of the historical, theological, symbolic, and metaphysical meaning of what happened to us. Other peoples do not keep picking at their sores so obsessively, so masochistically. Naturally, writers and thinkers and moralists of all kinds everywhere engage in soul-searching. But here everybody torments himself, with hardly an exception.

And after all, from what you could call the military point of view we were not defeated in the Yom Kippur War. On the contrary, we won a great victory. We recovered from a sudden invasion by armies not far off the total strength of the combined NATO forces, and in a few days we went from a position comparable to Dunkirk to a situation similar to that of the Allied landings in Normandy, on two separate fronts, and it is well known that our subsequent advance was halted not by exhaustion but by outside pressure. And yet, despite this remarkable military achievement, the Israeli people is sitting in the ashes like Job, groaning and mortifying itself. Any other people in our position would surely have mourned its dead, taken the lessons of the war to heart, and then gradually gone about its normal business.

You will not find, here in Israel, the gloomy, torpid fatalism which you can observe in London or other Western cities, where you have the impression that history has come to an end and everything is gently decaying among the monuments of bygone ages.

Not so in Israel. Here we scrabble, we quarrel, we alternate as usual between fire-and-brimstone sermons and euphoric proclamations of imminent salvation and magical formulas of various kinds which are capable of severing any knot at a stroke.

Perhaps the reason is that here we have set our sights on standards which have no parallel in any other nation. Many of our agonies spring from the fact that the Zionist enterprise was bom out of monumental visions and not from some piecemeal attempt at minor reforms. ‘Here, in the land our fathers loved,’ we used to sing, ‘all our hopes will be fulfilled.’ Notice: ‘all our hopes’. Not just a single hope or two.

You can still sense, beneath the surface, this demand: to be ‘the most’ or else to be damned. ‘The most’ moral, or socialist, or religious, or sophisticated, or strong, or clever or ‘creative’ -each strand making its own uncompromising demand. All these demands yearn for the ultimate, and are not prepared to settle for anything less. There is admittedly an element of collective hysteria in this fervour, and even a measure of secret national lunacy. But I prefer this lunacy to the state of mind of docile, conformist nations, or of sluggish nations which wallow in their own decadence. Our demands for the ultimate, the absolute, are mainly addressed to the government, or to our neighbours. And because of these demands we are constantly seizing each other by the throat, and our lives are full of aggression, rage and even raucous provocation. But even these manifestations conceal a constant source of intellectual tension which is capable of bearing fruit. The uneasiness which has been endemic here since the Yom Kippur War and the end of the Age of Arrogance, which is forever nagging and asking ‘What’s wrong with us?’ and ‘Where did we go wrong?’, appeals to me - perhaps one should say it suits my temperament - more than the mixture of wit and despair which you hear from educated people in the cities of the West, and certainly more than the strident slogan-shouting which you find in the oppressed countries as well as among young world-reformers in better-fed lands.

And this tribal feeling (we have barely emerged from being a tribe and not yet reached the level of being a nation) creates a perpetual intimate warmth which is sometimes necessary and comforting and sometimes sticky, irritating, and disgusting. It is the feeling that ‘we all depend on each other’. It is the feeling of ‘family shame’ that overtakes millions of people here every time some Jewish thief or embezzler is apprehended. And it is the pride (tinged with petty jealousy) that the whole tribe experiences on reading that some local cow or bridge-player has broken a world record and thereby ‘enhanced our national prestige’, as the President of the State will put it in the congratulatory telegram he will send them. Every failure is ‘a stain on the family honour’. Every achievement is entered on everybody’s personal record card. Such is the close intimacy which - why should I deny it? - I detest and depend on. I can’t live with it and I can’t live without it: the crush of the tribe, its soul-searching, its warmth, its shelter - and its body odour and bad breath.

Of course, we are prey to those ancient Jewish diseases which Zionism set out to cure by a change of conditions and climate. One of them, perhaps the most repulsive, is the petit-bourgeois sickness which makes ‘upright Israelis’ force their offspring to take piano lessons and learn French and make a good marriage and settle down in a quality flat in a quality job and bring up quality children, clever but devoted to their family.

Who would be so naive as to imagine that this Jewish sickness, which infects us more than any other people, could have been cured within a single generation. But, after all, even this sickness has not made us subside into an overfed stupor. No. We have no rest. We have no rest from our troubled conscience and our soul-searching and our self-flagellation and our alternating fits of apocalyptic rage and visions of salvation: ‘We shall be a light to lighten the nations even though all the nations are threatening to close in on us tomorrow or the day after and annihilate us ...’

In what other country in the world does a noisy parliament assemble every morning at every bus-stop, in every queue, in every grocer’s shop, amid the violent crush and sweaty pushing and jostling, discussing and arguing and quarelling about politics, religion, history, ideology, metaphysics, the meaning of life, the true will of God, furiously, sarcastically, while all the time the participants in the debate elbow their way to the head of the queue or rush to grab a free seat.

There are now 157 or 162 independent states in the world, both new and old. The vast majority of them are under the sway of oppressive regimes, slavery, mass-brainwashing, ruler-worship: in one way or another the image of man is effaced in them. In the whole world there are only 25 or at most 30 countries where - even if in the big cities the image of man is effaced by loneliness and alienation - the citizens have a chance of thinking, changing, ‘breathing’. Let us never forget that Israel belongs to this small minority. We may not be very high up in the league, but at least we are in it. It’s not a simple matter, nor is it self-evident. Nor, incidentally, should we ever take it for granted: it’s easy to slide downhill.

There is, of course, a tension of contradictions and paradoxes. Take the question of our self-definition. This Jewish State, in the 29 years of its existence, has never come up with an answer to the legal-bureaucratic question ‘Who is a Jew in the eyes of the law?’ Not because of party politics, but because this is only the tip of the iceberg of the really tricky question: ‘What is the law in the eyes of the Jew?’ That is to say, are we inside religious law or outside it? For the time being we are both inside and outside. Apart from a militant minority at either extreme, most of us are both unwilling and unable to live according to religious law, but at the same time we are not prepared to give it up and to forfeit all the delicacies which go with it - festivals and songs and customs and all those things that most of the tribe considers not necessarily as commandments from God but rather as (agreeable) restraints without which (according to a widespread fear) the tribe would be in danger of disintegrating. Consequently many of us, from our various vantage-points, stand ‘over against’ the Jewish heritage: not quite inside it, not quite outside it, but simply ‘over against’ it. We speak and write a language whose roots are in the Bible and the rabbinic literature. Someone like me, therefore, who does not wish (and is unable) to live according to the religious law, stands in a special relationship to everything that comes to him through the umbilical cord of the Hebrew language: lullabies, folk-tales, Bible lessons and trips to the biblical sites, the city of Jerusalem, ancient ruins, scrolls, books, poetry and its echoes, and all the words without which you would not be who you are.

All this comes from within, from the ‘Jewish heritage’, and I choose to keep whatever I like without thereby accepting the ‘yoke of the commandments’ and without feeling guilty for, as it were, stealing synagogue property and bringing it into my home.

What else have we got, apart from all this? A few synthetic folk-songs from the Jewish Agency, a few hearty gestures from the Palmach, a few memories of pioneering days, the idea of the kibbutz, which is perhaps the only original thing to have been created here, and a strong, almost hysterical sense of justice (or, more precisely, sensitivity to injustice), as well as the tribal solidarity which I have already described. All the rest is imported (and often sub-standard) produce from various countries, in recent years mostly from English-speaking countries. That is all we have. And for the time being we must make do with it, and refrain from drawing comparisons with what we may have had in some ‘golden age’ in the past, or with what other cultures may possess. After all, the great desire of Zionism was to turn over a new leaf. Well, here is that new leaf: it is new and not so new. Continuity, but also revolution. Great achievements (by comparison with the sober prognoses of a couple of generations ago) and abject failure (by comparison with the glorious visions).

This ambiguity, the perpetual question-mark, is what I would call ‘the discreet charm of Zionism’.

We have to our credit certain achievements which have hardly a parallel in history. Not only a piece of territory defended by soldiers and aeroplanes and tanks, but two other aspirations which have been realised, more or less: we have attained a greater degree of responsibility for our own fate, and we have begun the process of curing the Jewish sickness. If we really have.

Anyone who expected us to achieve more than that in the course of three or four generations would be the victim of messianic expectations. Not that any of us is entirely free from messianic expectations.

True, even now we might well bring disaster on ourselves and lose everything we have achieved. But there is all the difference in the world between this and the disasters which have struck in the past. Now, if (heaven forbid!) disaster strikes, we shall have brought it on our own heads. We ourselves - not the church, not the tsar, not the Cossacks, not Hitler. We ourselves, through our own blindness or arrogance or stupidity. True, it does not depend entirely on us, but at least it does depend partly on us, and that is the meaning in a nutshell of political independence.

Independence does not mean that ‘nobody will tell us what to do’ (but we, ‘with God’s help’, will finally tell others what to do). No, independence means that we are capable of achieving, and in danger of losing, that we risk bringing disaster on our own heads if we do not make proper use of our independence. And that is the real difference. That is the thing which the Jewish people has never possessed in all its wanderings, even in its most agreeable and secure interludes. And here it does possess it. We have to hold on to it carefully, lovingly, and also somewhat wisely.

(Adapted from a radio talk broadcast in 1977)

Sometimes, as you wander among ‘rounded’ philosophical systems, ‘waterproof ideological constructs, novel schemes for the improvement of society and the State, you find yourself taking down a volume of Gordon from the shelf, and occasionally you discover that he can be more nourishing than even the most ‘up-to-date’ and ‘sophisticated’ thinkers. It is a good question why young people today do not find him interesting. Is it really only his style that is against him? Or is there something in my gut feeling that in a few years from now, when the wheel has come full circle, Aharon David Gordon may become a kind of trendy guide for enquiring youngsters?

Gordon distances himself with a certain irony from ‘scientific socialism’, because he fights shy of any tendency to mechanical, schematic formulation. The root of evil, he says, lies not in the structure of society but in the deformations of the individual psyche. For example, if all the trouble in the world flowed from the contrast between exploiters and exploited, it would have been resolved long ago, because the exploited would have risen up against the exploiters and put an end to all exploitation. But the enslaved do not dream in their hearts of hearts of being liberated: no, they dream of becoming exploiters and enslavers, and doing to others what was done to them.

Between us and the teaching of A.D. Gordon stands the barrier of the ‘romanticism of the hoe’, which is what is responsible for the view that the whole of his thought is passe: what is the point of hoes in an age of sophisticated computers? But we need to distinguish between what is essential in Gordon and what is merely incidental. This needs to be said particularly to veteran Gordonians who have erred in the direction of an excess of piety, and failed to distinguish between what was good in its time, and what is still valid today: they are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Gordon’s essential message is distinctly valid and relevant in today’s Israel: that old worker’s suspiciousness, his ironic reservations about the various ‘tools of sovereignty’, his wise Jewish shrug of the shoulders about all the power and might of political organisations, the machinery of power, and rulers’ schemes. Gordon treats all forms of power and of political organisation with a certain irony: ‘power’, ‘Party’, ‘movements’ etc. he regards as mere toys, as a modern form of idolatry. He abhorred all the ‘games of the nations’ in which bloodshed, slavery, oppression, and fraud reign supreme, men’s minds are corrupted, and all means are permitted for the sake of some end encapsulated in a slogan.