Under This Blazing Light (11 page)

However unpopular it may be with us today, it should be recalled that Gordon did not believe in politics. He even refused to get excited about the Balfour Declaration, and had some reservations about the setting up of the Hebrew battalions in the First World War. (He may have been mistaken in both cases, but

I am fascinated by the spirit of his message, not the details.) What comes through these reservations (and others) is a profound distrust of the power of instruments to improve the world, and he considered as instruments all organisations, political parties, and states. He believed in the gradual improvement of human nature through a purification that must come through intimacy between individuals, through a renewal of links with the old elements: the soil, the cycle of the seasons, tilling the soil, ‘mother nature’, inner rest. These are what most of his writings are about.

(Address delivered in 1973)

In the beginning there were some impassioned souls who lifted up their eyes to the reform of the world. The blazing faith of religious men, the sons and grandsons of religious men, generations upon generations of passion and persistence. These sons had lost their religious faith and abandoned the religious commandments, but they had not given up their devotion and drive and their thirst for the absolute: to be attached to a single, great, final and decisive truth, that found detailed expression in innumerable rules and regulations, both great and small, in everyday life. They had ceased to be religious according to the religious law, but in a new way they continued to be pious and even messianic. And when they came to the Land of Israel and set up the first kibbutzim, their ideals were like a fire in their bones.

They found a hard and alien land, very remote from the ‘land our fathers loved’ portrayed in sentimental songs, the opposite of the ‘land of eternal springtime’ of which Bialik’s bird sang, a parched contrast with the fairytale land they had imagined from the stories of their childhood in the snow-bound shtetl, that land of sunshine, of almonds and raisins, of the seven biblical species, the land of Mapu’s ‘Love of Zion’ and the verses of the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement, of the olivewood camels of the Bezalel Art School and the pictures of the Jewish National Fund.

They came to a bare and baring land, where the harsh climate and the grinding toil and the loneliness of the whispering nights stripped a man naked of every possible disguise. And each and every one of them was revealed in the nakedness of his soul, without mercy or shade.

Many were broken. They fled from the bleak encampment, or from the Land, or from life. The first generations experienced waves of suicides and scandalous defections of the ‘misled’ and quiet defections by the dejected and depressed. Some went home to the shtetl to mummy and daddy. Others went to ‘seek their fortune’ in America or elsewhere.

And those who remained? They seemed to be the product of a Darwinian natural selection: big, strong, powerful, logical, hard as stone statues, tough with themselves and with others. Some became celibate; here and there a disguised fanaticism emerged; you view them with mixed feelings, now they are old.

They were devotedly attached to an idea, the essence of which was a wonderful yet terrible straining towards a superhuman ‘purity’. To leap free from the shackles of flesh and blood and to resemble gods or giants of yore. To set up in these bleak places communes of equal partners that would be not only a spearhead of the Zionist enterprise and the Jewish people but also the vanguard of a worldwide transformation, a reform of the world and the individual by means of a radical change in the conditions of life that appeared to be entirely natural and essential for human existence: property, competition, hierarchy, material rewards and punishments. All these were consigned to extinction, so that a new chapter could open.

But even these founding fathers were secretly prey to the dark urges of the psyche. Behind their devotion lurked hatred and even misanthropy. Behind their celibacy lurked feelings of depression and despondent urges, and behind their dedication there was sometimes a lust for power. And suppressed humiliations accumulated like pus in a boil. At night when there was no one to hear they sobbed at the thought of everything they had left behind and abandoned for ever: home, a career, fame, playing the piano and other artistic accomplishments, European vistas of forest, river, and snow, the attractions of big cities, of travel to faraway places and the temptations of‘real life’.

And so, after many years of austerity endured with gritted teeth, many of them developed a fixed expression of pursed lips.

Until possessions came, and as is the way of possessions they began to touch people and whisper to them behind their backs: an electric kettle, an overcoat, an armchair, a paraffin heater, a ‘normal’ flat, a gramophone, and so on and so forth, and they began to quarrel as only those who have solemnly sworn to live together in brotherhood and honesty can quarrel. The cat was out of the bag. Many thumped on the table and thundered ‘All or nothing!’ This too is the world’s eternal vengeance on those who attempt to reform it, the ancient vengeance of the human psyche on all who endeavour its reform. The necessary distance between words, slogans, doctrines, and deeds was stripped away. ‘Life’ burst through with its infinite complexity that shatters the most acute and rounded and all-encompassing of ideologies. The ramification of life’s adventures, the irony of genetics operating from one generation to another.

So there was disappointment. There was disillusionment and depression. And there was an attempt to undertake a renewed struggle. It was precisely when social reform was working well and reaching a kind of ‘exemplary non-failure’ (the phrase is Martin Buber’s) that it revealed and even accentuated the unreformable deformities of the human condition: it was only when the hills of ‘social ill’ had been scaled that the towering peaks of cosmic, metaphysical ill became visible; it was precisely when the barriers of injustice between a rich girl and a poor girl had been broken down that the unfair discrimination between a pretty one and an ugly one became apparent.

If this happens in a society bom out of a totally optimistic vision, ‘the fulfilment of all our hopes’, ‘turning a new page’, ‘setting the world to rights’, then it is smitten with a kind of panic, and there occurs what we call ‘crisis’. So, when urges and weaknesses, forces of destiny and sexual humiliation, death and loneliness are manifested again and again, then the kibbutz is subjected to a final test: is it to be adventure or exemplary life, youth camp or family home?

I think that the kibbutz is standing up to this final test well, even though there cannot be any kind of‘once and for all’ here. That is why I say: it is the least bad place I have ever seen. And the most daring effort.

(Adaptation of a 1968 publication)

No, I do not believe there is any such thing as a ‘kibbutz literature’. There are poems and books that have a kibbutz setting, and there are poets and writers who live in a kibbutz, but the kibbutz has not inspired any ‘mutation’ of Hebrew literature.

For myself, I am better off, for various reasons, living in a kibbutz than I could be elsewhere, even if kibbutz life exacts its price from me.

If I lived in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, it is very doubtful whether I would manage to elude the grip of the ‘literary world’, in which writers and academics and critics and poets sit around discussing each other.

Not that this phenomenon is without a certain attraction, it is just that life (as they say) is too short, and if you shut yourself away in ‘literary circles’ you miss something.

People sometimes ask me, both here in Israel and abroad, if Hulda isn’t too small for me, and so on. They quiz me about parochial atmosphere, etcetera. They wonder how I cope with wanderlust and the urge for adventure that they imagine writers feel more keenly than other people. But the urge does not necessarily put on its travelling clothes; it can be satisfied by local gossip, by peering obliquely at the lives of different people.

Here I know a very large number of people, about three hundred. I know them at close range, in the way that you can know someone after twenty years in the same place. I can see genetics at work: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins, combinations of chromosomes and the vagaries of fate. If I lived in London, Tel Aviv, Paris, I could never get to know three hundred people so intimately. Not the ‘literary milieu’, not intellectual or academic or artistic circles, but different people: women, men, old folk, toddlers.

Of course I am not forgetting the price. The price is that a lot of different people also know me, perhaps rather better than I could wish.

However, I limit this nuisance by- means of a number of stratagems (not too clever or improper) that I shall not go into here. (Or anywhere else for that matter.)

I look around and I see a social system that, for all its disadvantages, is the least bad, the least unkind, that I have seen anywhere. And I have seen a few, because I was born and grew up in Jerusalem, in different surroundings from those of the kibbutz people, and I have spent several periods of time in other places. The kibbutz is the only attempt in modem times to separate labour from material reward, and this attempt is, in Martin Buber’s phrase, ‘an exemplary non-failure’. In my opinion this is an accurate definition. The kibbutz is the only attempt to establish a collective society, without compulsion, without repression, and without bloodshed or brainwashing. It is also, in retrospect, a unique attempt, for better or for worse, to reconstruct or revive the extended family - that clan where brothers and nephews, grandmothers and aunts, in-laws, distant relations, relations of relations, all live close together - the loss of which may turn out to be the greatest loss in modern life. It is a phenomenon that carries its own price-tag: suffocation, inquisitiveness, depression, petty jealousies, the various pressures of convention, and so forth. But at times of great personal distress, at times of bereavement, illness or old age, loneliness in the kibbutz turns out to be less harsh than the loneliness of big cities, surrounded by crowds of strangers, where your actions and feelings have no worth and your joys have no meaning and sometimes even your life and death leave no trace.

In a kibbutz, when you are hurt the whole community reacts like a single organism. It is hurt with you. When you hurt someone else, the whole kibbutz can feel hurt. Of course, within this intimacy bad characteristics also thrive, whether in disguise or out in the open: self-righteousness, insensitivity, enviousness, jealousy, and narrow-mindedness. And yet, they are all part of you and you are part of the kibbutz. Flesh of its flesh. And this is all before we have even begun to talk about values, principles, beliefs, everything that I believe in and that the kibbutz offers a certain chance of achieving.

It is a good thing that the kibbutz did not have a founding father, a prophet or bearded guru who could be made into a wall-poster or whose teaching could be blindly quoted. And it is a good thing that there has never been any sacred text that the kibbutz has had to live by. If the kibbutz had had a founding prophet or a law code like the Shulhan Arukh, then it would surely not have survived beyond a single generation. Because the human condition in its continuity and its perversity is complex enough to shatter any scheme and to confound any ‘systematic’ system.

The secret of the survival of the kibbutz into a second and third and now a fourth generation, as against the collapse of all modem communes by the end of the first generation if not sooner, lies in its secret adaptability. I say ‘secret adaptability’, because the kibbutz likes to pretend that it is not adaptable but consistent, and that all the changes are nothing but legitimate interpretations of rigid fundamental principles. Which is true and at the same time false. It is true that there are some fundamental principles, or it would be more accurate to say ‘fundamental feelings’, that are absolutely non-negotiable. But there is a growing realistic recognition, especially in recent years, that not everything can be explained, that the world is not composed of pairs of problems and solutions that social order can join together in appropriate couples like a matchmaker. There are more problems in the world than solutions. I must stress that I do not mean that there are many unsolved problems at the moment, but that in the nature of things there are more problems in the world than solutions. Conflict, generally speaking, is not resolved, it gradually subsides, or it doesn’t, and you live with it, and the flesh that has been pierced by a painful splinter grows back over it and covers it up. This truth the kibbutz has begun to learn in recent years. It is becoming less fanatical, less dogmatic, it is society that is learning the wisdom, indulgence and patience of age. It is not that I am untroubled or happy at the sight of such developments, I am simply pleased to see how the kibbutz has learned to react calmly, patiently, almost shrewdly, to exceptions and oddities, to changing times and tastes, as if it has whispered to itself: ‘So be it for the time being; now let’s wait and see.’

If I had to choose between kibbutz life as it was in the twenties, thirties, and forties and as it is now I would choose the present. Indeed, I would run for my life from the spirit of those days, despite all the much-debated ‘erosion’ and ‘decline’. Not because of the material comfort (which has blessed psychological and social consequences, apart from the well-known damage that resulted from it), but particularly on account of the increased wisdom and tolerance. Some of the veterans have been sounding alarm bells for years and decades about imminent collapse, whereas I sense in fact a certain increase of self-confidence and inner strength from which come the tolerance and indulgence and also, not least, the ability to laugh at oneself.