Under This Blazing Light (12 page)

The kibbutz is developing an organic character: it is a new kind of village, containing a few inter-related families and a few principles that do not need to be carved on the lintels and recited day and night. The kibbutz is no longer an experiment. It is growing in accordance with its own inner legitimacy, not according to a rational ideological scheme. It is ramifying, taking on different forms, striking deeper roots, producing leaves, flowers and fruit in due season and occasionally shedding its leaves. The days when it was an ‘encampment’ or a ‘nucleus’ are over and gone. There is no more striking camp, no more moving from one site to another, starting afresh. The kibbutz lives in its own inner legitimacy, far from the domination of human legislators with their committees and conflicts. As with all inner legitimacy, so this too is mysterious, semi-visible, spurning all generalisations and definitions.

Let’s wait and see.

(Adapted from a 1974 publication)

Recently I have found myself reacting rather strangely to the word ‘socialism’. Whenever I meet an ardent socialist, or for that matter a keen anti-socialist, I immediately feel an urge to ask ironic questions. It would appear from this that my socialism lacks fervent enthusiasm. No doubt the reason is that I do not live in oppression or poverty, but more or less comfortably.

The origin and precondition of all socialism is sensitivity to injustice and hatred of villains. But sensitivity and hatred cannot flourish side by side. Hatred is a gut feeling, while sensitivity demands awareness, attentiveness, scepticism, a critical frame of mind, an inclination to probe and scrutinise, and, first and foremost, a sense of humour. Consequently the socialist psyche is fed at once on fire and ice. A difficult diet. A cosy, fireless socialism gradually develops into torpid liberalism. Hatred, on the other hand, breeds more hatred, and if it seizes the reins of power it discloses a fist of iron, arrogant, authoritarian, armed with formulas, slogans and shackles, hectoring and merciless.

To be a socialist means to fight for the right of individuals and societies to control their own destinies up to that point beyond which men are incorrigibly ruled by fate. It is helpful, however, not to lose sight of the fact that social injustice, political wrong and economic inequity are only one battlefield in the wider arena of human existence, and that we are hemmed in on at least three sides by our pitiful frailty, the pain of our mortality, sexual injustice and the misery of our fate. These cannot be overcome by any social system. An over-optimistic, militant socialist tends too easily to forget this supra-social, primeval anguish, and so becomes a narrow-minded, fanatical tyrant. Love and death are forcibly excluded from his calculations. And when they do appear, he reacts to them with extreme stupidity.

The fight for the right of individuals and societies to control their own destinies up to the point mentioned above is a fight which sometimes entails violence. But violence, as even its most devoted admirers will agree, is a last resort which should only be employed in extremis. We have seen that socialism which comes into being through violent struggles continues to nurture violence within itself even after its triumph, like a malignant growth.

The equal rights of all men to all natural resources is the living principle of socialism. Any retreat, whether partial or total, from this principle is a partial or total retreat from socialism itself.

The principle of equal rights invites oppressive, totalitarian interpretations, because it relates to phenomena common to all men, such as the need for food, clothing and shelter. It gives rise only too easily to a tendency to blur and minimise those things which make every individual into a world of his own. The difference between different people appears to the engineers of revolutions as an obstacle which needs to be flattened by the steamroller of re-education or by a shearing and trimming of private attitudes and inclinations. Such is the desire to create a just, symmetrical world, made up of equal little boxes, a strong structure which does not tolerate change, a sterile world. That is why it needs to be added that, side by side with the equal right of all men to the means of subsistence and the equal fight not to be subject to the arbitrary rule of any overlord, there must be preserved for all of us the equal right to be as different from one another as we wish.

To be as different from one another as we wish, without oppressing or exploiting or humiliating one another, is an ideal formula which can be aimed for but never fully realised, I know. Whoever tries to apply formulas completely ends up manipulating people. Any socialist system needs to aim at the flexibility, complexity, plurality, paradox and humour which are characteristic of human life, even at the expense of consistency or ‘speed of execution’, or both.

I have never fully understood those thinkers who link socialism to determinism, even though I have read all the right books. There is a little gremlin which sometimes scampers among the pages of the great theorists and tempts them to write things which eventually eat human flesh.

I do not know precisely where I stand among all the various strands and schools of socialism, to the left or to the right of whom, but all the theoreticians are equipped with well-tried gauges and they will quickly show me my proper place, among the deviationists or the misguided, and there I shall happily rest.

In the kibbutz I have found the way of life that is least far removed from the thoughts I have outlined here. Of all the places

I know, the kibbutz is the least bad. If any socialist comes along and says, ‘But the kibbutz is too small, it only benefits a handful, what of the general misery?’ I shall agree with him immediately. How to remedy the general misery I do not know, apart from the old idea of a change of heart, but that way is of course too slow. A faster way is often man-eating. The late Zalman Aranne used to say, so rumour has it, that anyone who has stopped being a villain is already more or less a socialist. If we take the terms villain and socialist in their widest meaning, as befits such monumental words, then perhaps we can say that this is indeed the way.

(Based on an essay published in 1968)

Eight days before he died I visited him in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to say goodbye. He was in great pain, but his conversation was still directed at the same subjects that had occupied him through the years: what is right and what is wrong, what one can be certain of and what ought to be done.

He refused to talk about his illness.

When I mumbled an embarrassed question about his health, about what the doctors had said, he shot me one of his shrewd, affectionate glances and said with a smile, ‘Come on, Amos.’ Then he started talking about current affairs.

Ever since I first met Munia in 1959,1 have called this language of his, made up of‘come on’, ‘no, seriously’, compounded with the shrewd, affectionate glance, ‘Galician’. I can’t define it.

He closed his eyes for a moment, probably fighting the pain, and made some witty comment on my involvement with the Moked Party. Then he talked a lot about literature and books, and in this last conversation as always his words were directed at what is right and what is wrong, and what ought to be done.

He believed, eight days before his death, that I ought to write something about young people between wars. He wanted, as he put it, ‘to understand what really happens to them’, and he ‘needed a piece of writing that would explain to him at long last what they really want’. I couldn’t think of any reply. Then the pain got the better of him again. We said goodbye. In the lift I cried.

Munia died a few days later. War suddenly broke out, and this discussion was almost forgotten. However, I occasionally recalled the phrase ‘young people between wars’.

I was fond of Munia because I found him a man with strongly held opinions and a warm heart, but who for all his obstinacy had eyes and ears like sensitive antennae: what is going on, what is changing, what is new, in the Histadrut, in Hebrew literature, in hippy communes in America, in modern British drama, the Timna copper mines, the younger generation, fashion, French socialism. (See his dozens of articles on many different topics in the kibbutz movement newsletters.)

I liked Munia because his beliefs and principles and obstinacy never made him a fanatic. His wry humour protected him. He was capable of loving and loathing, but he was incapable of hating, and this made him virtually unique among the revolutionary pioneers of his generation and social group. And how he was forever defining, reviewing, with no ‘once and for all’, defining people and ideas and books and events, all in his careful, precise language, which was full of longing for the absolute but which avoided at all costs the absolute of hackneyed phrases. He would say, ‘Sometimes things are actually quite different from what they seem.’ Or, ‘A move like that is actually bound to produce the opposite effect.’ Or, ‘Maybe the time has come to try something completely different.’ And when Munia uttered the words ‘sometimes’, ‘actually’, ‘maybe the time has come’, and so on, that impish spark of shrewd, cautious affection lit up his eyes, as if to say, ‘Or perhaps it’s actually not like that.’ This implied tension between his look and what he was saying was what I secretly termed ‘Galician’.

I do not claim to have mastered the grammar of this clever language. Nor am I writing about Munia’s career or his views: others, members of his own generation and social group, can do that better than I can. I considered him to be a serious social democrat, and many of the ideas he professed - about the kibbutz, the Labour movement, humanistic socialism, realistic Zionism - passed through the filters of his mind and emerged without a trace of hatred or fanaticism, perhaps because he always harboured a deeply rooted scepticism about everything concerning the human personality and its frailties.

He translated ideals and ideas into his own Galician language, and the translation always came out circumscribed, ironic, sceptical, a long way from glib slogans, always hedged around with ‘perhaps’, ‘actually’ and ‘now’.

And yet, what a long way his shrewdness was from that of the opportunists, or of those who are always checking which side their bread is buttered on. For all his shrewdness, Munia always managed to find himself, at least in all the years I knew him, on the unsuccessful side of every barricade. He did not seek power, and he did not find it. He did not steer a delicate course through the troubled waters of the Party and the movement so as to end up having a quiet life or landing a plum job. Nor did he wander off to shout in the wilderness and denounce the defilement of the Land and those that dwell therein, either because he was too familiar with human weakness or because he had read too many books and shrewdly observed the trends and tendencies and always studied what was right and what was wrong and what ought to be done. To his last days he never landed once and for all on the shore of the final answer. Or was it just his own ‘Galician’ language, that does not like exclamation marks but does like people and their vicissitudes? With Munia we have lost one of the finest speakers of that beautiful language.

We shall miss his voice.

(First published in 1974)

1

The position of the Eshkol government (late 1967): no withdrawal without peace agreements; everything is open to negotiation.

(An address delivered at a memorial meeting in Herzl House, Kibbutz Huld
a)

One damp and foggy evening in London, some seven years ago, Pinchas Lavon explained to a certain young man why it was better for him to give up practical politics and devote himself to education or art or ideology. Politics, Pinchas said, is a business that ‘nobody comes out of unscathed’.

The younger man, for his part, put one or two questions to Pinchas to elucidate whether this was not an excessively general conclusion to draw from what was, after all, an individual case.

‘Are you saying that because politics is a dirty business, because anyone who gets involved with it ends up sooner or later getting his hands dirty?’ the young man asked, among other things.

‘On the contrary’, Pinchas replied with his quizzical, impish smile; ‘politics is a very clean business. Too clean. Sterile, in fact. Eventually you stop seeing people, you stop tackling human misery, and you deal only in “factors”, “data” and “problems”. Real objects are replaced by silhouettes. The word “factor” is a key symptom: when a politician stops saying “man”, “comrade”, and starts talking about positive and negative factors, that is a sign that he has reached the sterile phase.’

This is, more or less, what Pinchas Lavon said one cold, rainy night in London, and he went on to explain that a politician who dealt with factors instead of talking about people would soon start seeing ‘phenomena’ instead of shapes and colours, from which it was only a short step to using expressions like ‘human material’, ‘human debris’, and so on, until eventually his whole world is divided into two: the world of means and the world of ends. And the latter justify the former.

From here Pinchas went on (his young interlocutor, as usual, waiving his right to speak) to A.D .Gordon’s famous remark that the individual is the world in its entirety and the purpose of everything. Pinchas also spoke, with a kind of didactic enthusiasm, about the paradoxes that line the route from the particular to the general, from the idea to the instruments of realisation and from the vision to the ruling power.

The tone of his discourse was ironical, sceptical, sober, almost anarchistic: Pinchas spoke about power as if it were a game. He cited Huizinga (Homo Ludens), an author he was particularly fond of. He quoted from Ecclesiastes about the inclination of man’s heart and the way of the spirit.