Under This Blazing Light (7 page)

Here is the whole sickness in a nutshell: hatred of our past (‘diaspora cleverness’), trying to repress feelings of inferiority by means of crude arrogance (‘Bourgiba, the freed slave’), and to strike a pose that will impress the gentiles as a non-Jewish one (‘a national emergency government that will speak plain common sense’).

This is the sickness that Ahad Ha‘am observed in his own day and called ‘slavery within freedom’. This is utter self-effacement before every gentile. This is the tormented desire to be more of a gentile than any gentile. This is assimilation that has found a new path: no longer a matter of individuals breaking out or being lured over the fence, but a whole sovereign state longing to eradicate every trace of the past of its inhabitants and to adopt the outward appearance of its mortal enemies. This is to see the Jewish State as an extended act of reprisal, not against the gentiles but against the gloomy past of the Jews in the diaspora. It is not for nothing that Uri Zvi Greenberg and his admirers are forging new ties with certain sectors across the political divide. Take away Uri Zvi Greenberg’s blazing hatred of those whom he mocks in his article as ‘the defenders of the chastity of democracy’ and you will understand which way he is turning to find allies willing to inflict a Cossack pogrom with a proper rape on democracy, and perhaps also to free the hands of ‘the people’s commander-in-chief, so that we can go forth and deliver a crushing blow on ‘the gentiles’.

The most decisive sign of the coming-of-age of the Israeli nation may be when it is able to look the Jewish past straight in the eye, not with hatred or denial, not with a sentimental show of affection or with a longing for vengeance and reprisal. The world of the diaspora Jews is a thing of the past. There is no point in trying to revive it, there is no point in trying to eradicate its traces, and there is no point in dressing up as Cossacks and giving the Arabs a taste of the same punishment that the Cossacks gave our ancestors. The world of the diaspora Jews is a thing of the past. Only in poetry will it live on in its greatness and its misery, and in poetry there is no disputing the mastery of Uri Zvi Greenberg.

(Adapted from an article published in 1962)

What is literature all about?

If one wished to give an extremely concise answer, which could serve as an entry in a short encyclopaedia, one could word it as follows:

Literature: A form of expression and communication by means of language, generally dealing with three set subjects in various contexts and combinations: 1. Sorrow or suffering. 2. Protest or complaint. 3. Consolation or semi-consolation or less, including submission. Full stop. It must also contain something new, either in the arrangement of the words and sentences, or in the arrangement of the subject-matter, or in some other way.

The following notes are intended for the reader who is not satisfied with this short description and requires further elucidation:

Sorrow: May be individual or collective, or both, interrelated, contrasted, one set against the other, etc., etc.

Protest or complaint: Either wistful, or irritable, or violent, or even rebellious.

Consolation or submission: Includes acceptance of punishment or suffering, willingness to be absorbed into the cosmic cycle, or resignation and subjugation of the will. Or reconciliation with one’s fellow man or with some force or other. Or seeing the whole situation in a new light. Also includes religious illumination and the faith that lies beyond despair.

What is encompassed within this description of literature as a circle of sorrow - protest - consolation? Almost everything. Homer and Oedipus, Dante and Don Quixote, John Donne and King Lear, Andrei Bolkonski and Raskolnikov and the Three Sisters, Kafka, Hans Castorp, and those involved in trials and experiments at the present time.

What is left outside the circle? Sermons of all kinds, especially those where the third subject (‘consolation’ or ‘submission’) is assumed from the start and the first two appear only as parables for fools and children.

Mere formal games are also excluded, however fascinating or impressive they may be.

The arrangement of the material is not important. One can start anywhere and finish anywhere. The scale is not important: it may be a trilogy or it may be the briefest of poems, like Goethe’s ‘Uber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh’. It may be a thunderstorm or it may be a still, small voice. There may be a plot or there may be none. Anything is possible.

Except what can be resolved without recourse to literature. If you have no sorrows and no complaints - go out and enjoy yourself. If you have sorrows, or sorrows and complaints but nothing more - go and talk to your friends, or a psychiatrist, or the relevant authorities. If you’ve had an idea how to improve the situation - why not write an article, or start a political party or organisation.

And if you have everything - sorrows, complaints and consolations or salvations - then wait a moment: have you got anything new to offer? In the plot? In the arrangement of words? In the overtones? In the details of the suffering or the note of the complaint or the nature of the consolation or the flavour of the resignation? And if not, then ‘grit your teeth and suffer’, as the poet says. If you have, sit down and write. ‘Friends are waiting to hear from you.’ Only beware of the gremlins: they are everywhere.

(First published in 1978)

Let me begin with a few things that seem to me to be self-evident. I shall have to reformulate some accepted phrases about identity and identification, because there has been a massive upheaval recently, an erosion of words and their meanings: ‘Jewishness’, ‘Zionism’, ‘homeland’, ‘national right’, ‘peace’ - these words are being dragged into new spaces, and laden with interpretations that we could not have imagined previously. And anyone who stands up and speaks out these days risks being stoned in the marketplace and suspected of Jewish self-hate or betraying the nation or desecrating the memory of the fallen, whose very rest is being disturbed so that they may be used as ammunition in our domestic quarrels.

To be a Jew

I am a Jew and a Zionist. In saying this, I am not basing myself on religion. I have never learned to resort to verbal compromises like ‘the spirit of our Jewish past’ or ‘the values of Jewish tradition’, because values and tradition alike derive directly from religious tenets in which I cannot believe. It is impossible to sever Jewish values and Jewish tradition from their source, which is revelation, faith and commandments. Consequently nouns like ‘mission’, ‘destiny’ and ‘election’, when used with the adjective ‘Jewish’, only cause me embarrassment or worse.

A Jew, in my vocabulary, is someone who regards himself as a Jew, or someone who is forced to be a Jew. A Jew is someone who acknowledges his Jewishness. If he acknowledges it publicly, he is a Jew by choice. If he acknowledges it only to his inner self, he is a Jew by the force of his destiny. If he does not acknowledge any connection with the Jewish people either in public or in his tormented inner being he is not a Jew, even if religious law defines him as such because his mother is Jewish. A Jew, in my unhalakhic opinion, is someone who chooses to share the fate of other Jews, or who is condemned to do so.

Moreover: to be a Jew almost always means to relate mentally to the Jewish past, whether the relation is one of pride or gloom or both together, whether it consists of shame or rebellion or pride or nostalgia.

Moreover: to be a Jew almost always means to relate to the Jewish present, whether the relation is one of fear or confidence, pride in the achievement of Jews or shame for their actions, an urge to deflect them from their path or a compulsion to join them.

And finally: to be a Jew means to feel that wherever a Jew is persecuted for being a Jew - that means you.

To be a Zionist

Anyone who believes in the power of words must be careful how he uses them. I never use the word
shoah
(‘catastrophe’) when I want to refer to the murder of the Jews of Europe. The word shoah falsifies the true nature of what happened. A shoah is a natural event, an outbreak of forces beyond human control. An earthquake, a flood, a typhoon, an epidemic is a shoah. The murder of the European Jews was no shoah. It was the ultimate logical outcome of the ancient status of the Jew in Western civilisation. The Jew in Europe, in Christendom, in the paganism within Christendom is not a ‘national minority’, ‘a religious minority’, or ‘a problem of status’. For thousands of years the Jew has been perceived as the symbol of something inhuman. Like the steeple and the cross, like the devil, like the Messiah, so the Jew is part of the infrastructure of the Western mind. Even if all the Jews had been assimilated among the peoples of Europe the Jew would have continued to be present. Someone had to fill his role to exist as an archetype in the dungeons of the Christian soul. To shine and repel, to suffer and swindle, to be fated to be a genius and an abomination. Therefore, being a Jew in the diaspora means that Auschwitz is meant for you. It is meant for you because you are a symbol, not an individual. The symbol of the justly persecuted vampire, or the symbol of the unjustly persecuted innocent victim - but always and everywhere, you are not an individual, not yourself, but a fragment of a symbol.

I am a Zionist because I do not want to exist as a fragment of a symbol in the consciousness of others. Neither the symbol of the shrewd, gifted, repulsive vampire, nor the symbol of the sympathetic victim who deserves compensation and atonement.

That is why my place is in the land of the Jews. This does not make me circumvent my responsibilities as a Jew, but it saves me from the nightmare of being a symbol in the mind of strangers day and night.

The land of the Jews, I said. The land of the Jews could not have come into being and could not have existed anywhere but here. Not in Uganda, not in Ararat and not in Birobidjan. Because this is the place the Jews have always looked to throughout their history. Because there is no other territory to which the Jews would have come in their masses to establish a Jewish homeland. On this point I commit myself to a severe, remorseless distinction between the inner motives of the return to Zion and its justification to others. The age-old longings are a motive, but not a justification. Political Zionism has made political, national use of religious, messianic yearnings. And rightly so. But our justification vis-a-vis the Arab inhabitants of the country cannot be based on our age-old longings. What are our longings to them? The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him. And that is justification enough. (Here I must anticipate something I shall return to later: there is a vast moral difference between the drowning man who grasps a plank and makes room for himself by pushing the others who are sitting on it to one side, even by force, and the drowning man who grabs the whole plank for himself and pushes the others into the sea. This is the moral argument that lies behind our repeated agreement in principle to the partition of the Land. This is the difference between making Jaffa and Nazareth Jewish, and making Ramallah and Nablus Jewish.)

I cannot use such words as ‘the promised land’ or ‘the promised borders’. Happy are those who believe, for theirs is the Land. Why should they trouble themselves with questions of morality or the rights of others? (Although perhaps those who believe in the promise ought to wait humbly for the Author of the promises to decide when the right moment has come for Him to keep it.) Happy are those who believe. Their Zionism is simple and carefree. Mine is hard and complicated. I also have no use for the hypocrites who suddenly remember the divine promise whenever their Zionism runs into an obstacle or an inner contradiction (and go charging off in their cars with their wives and children every Sabbath to cherish the dust of the holy places). In a nutshell, I am a Zionist in all that concerns the redemption of the Jews, but not when it comes to the ‘redemption of the Holy Land’. We have come here to live as a free nation, not ‘to liberate the land that groans under the desecration of a foreign yoke’, Samaria, Gilead, Aram and Hauran up to the great Euphrates River. The word ‘liberation’ applies to people, not to dust and stone. I was not born to blow rams’ horns or ‘purge a heritage that has been defiled by strangers’.

Why here of all places? Because here and only here is where the Jews were capable of coming and establishing their independence. Because the establishment of the political independence of the Jews could not have come about in any other territory. Because here was the focus of their prayers and their longings.

To tell the truth, those longings were organically linked with the belief in the promise and the Promiser, the Redeemer, and the Messiah. Is there a contradiction here? As I have already said, religious feelings helped a secular, political movement to achieve an aim that was historical, not miraculous or messianic. The ancient yearning for the Land of Israel was part of a total faith in the coming of the Redeemer. Faith, side by side with a common destiny, maintained the continuing unity of the Jewish people. But let us not forget, or allow others to forget, that it was not God or the Messiah or a miracle or an angel that achieved the independence of the Jews in their own land, but a secular, political movement with a modem ideology and modern tactics. Therefore the Zionism of a secularist may contain a structural fault. I do not intend to gloss over this fault with phrases and slogans. I accept this contradiction, if such it be, and I say: here I stand. In our social life, in love, in our attitude to others and to death, we the non-religious are condemned to live with inconsistencies and faults. And that goes for Zionism too.