Re: Rank/The Shame of IT All
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Posted by HenryW on 18:54:35 2008/03/23
In Reply to:
Re: Rank posted by Mickey D
Subject: The Shame Of It All
A letter we should all read & think about deeply!!!
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I am not sure that this was posted before - but seeing the fuss about Feiglin's visit makes this article very appropriate reading, i.e. what was the original purpose of Israel? Should Israelis (and the world!) stand around while rockets keep coming aimed at civilians?
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The Shame Of It All
March 7, 2008
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There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was
about something different. Days when Zionists could articulate what
the purpose of Jewish Statehood was, days when Israelis understood
that having a state was about changing the existential condition of
the Jew. Not anymore.
Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in
Kishinev, understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to
change. What else could he possibly have been saying in his epic
poem, "The City of Slaughter" (scroll down to the two paragraphs that
begin with the lines "Descend then, to the cellars of the town"),
when he describes the mass rape scene in which Jewish women are
helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact,
for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks; rape and
murder are simply what Cossacks do. The problem with what happened
in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his bitter irony, rests with the
Jewish men. It's bad enough that they were too weak to intervene, to
defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters,
though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were
too frightened to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says,
is that when the slaughter and the butchery were over, these men
looked down at the broken bodies of the women that they had
supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of
telling them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them
that they would take care of them no matter what, they gazed at these
violated, half-dead women, and saw a halakhic question. "Is my
wife," the Kohanim in Bialik's poem want to know, "still permitted to
me?"
It makes no difference whether or not anyone in Kishinev really asked
that question, or thought to. Bialik is not a journalist in this
poem. He's a diagnostician, describing the human (or no longer
human) condition of the Jew. And what he wants us to know is that
what is wrong with the Jews is that they have come to accept their
victimization as part of nature. They're no longer shocked by what
is done to them, no longer infuriated by their own powerlessness.
These Jewish men, their humanity too eroded by years of religious
escapism and yeshiva study for them to see the broken women they
should have loved as anything other than halakhic questions, aren't
people anymore. Real people, Bialik suggests, simply don't stand by
and watch their family members get raped and slaughtered and do
nothing about it. Even if you'll get killed in the process, you try
to defend the people you love. When you no longer defend your
family, he intimates, you're not human, you're sick. The Jews are
sick, he says, their souls eroded by passivity, by weakness, by
fear. And the cure, we know not from this poem but from much of what
he writes, is a Jewish homeland.
Just over forty years later, with much water under the bridge and six
million Jewish men, women and children having been ushered heavenward
through smokestacks across Eastern Europe while the world either
conspired to assist in the murder or simply watched and pretended to
be aghast, the State of Israel was about to be born. And Natan
Alterman, who in some ways had replaced Bialik as the poet laureate
of the Zionist movement, wanted Jews to understand what was
unfolding. It wasn't just a country that they were getting; it was
purpose, salvation. The Jews would not simply have a State; the Jews
would be transformed.
And thus, in "The Silver Platter" (a translation one can quibble
with, but the best that I've found on the web), when the whole nation
assembles to receive the "unique miracle", they are assembled not at
Sinai, but in their homeland. And they are awaiting not Torah, but
Statehood. Independence, not religion, is what will save the Jews,
Alterman is effectively saying. It's a step beyond Bialik. In
Bialik's poem, the Jew in Europe is dying, but there's no clear
solution. Forty years later, after the UN had voted on the Partition
Plan and Israel was about to be created, Alterman believed that the
solution was at hand.
Alterman clearly shares Bialik's disdain for what they both see as
Judaism's religiously induced passivity. In his poem, as the people
awaits its transformative moment, State replaces Torah. And if you
look carefully, and compare the biblical account of the giving of the
Torah at Sinai (especially Exodus 19), you'll see other differences.
In the Biblical account, Moses tells the men not to approach a woman
(verse 15), but here, the boy and the girl are inseparable, and
virtually indistinguishable. In the Torah, the Israelites are
commanded to wash their clothes (verse 10); but in the poem, the boy
and the girls are caked with dirt, and they do not wash. Saving the
Jews, Alterman wants to suggest, requires that you get dirty. "You
prefer to stay clean?" he seems to say - "fine, but prepare to be
dead." We'll come back to that.
For Alterman, like Bialik, like many of the Zionists of their day,
Zionism was about changing the condition of the Jew, by changing the
nature of the Jew. And for them, the nature of the Jew would be
changed by moving away from the religious tradition that made us
weak, that offered us a "spiritual refuge" in which we could pretend
that things were not as they are, that was an opiate guaranteed to
prevent the Jews' confronting the utter intolerability of their
condition.
Bialik and Alterman were, of course, quite right. And dead wrong.
Bialik was right that the condition of the Jew in Europe was
untenable (though as he died in 1934, he never got to know exactly
how right he was), and Alterman was right that new boys and new
girls, caked in dirt and blood, would help redeem what was left of
the Jewish people. But they were sadly wrong about the advisability
of leaving Jewish religious discourse in the dust, for they failed to
predict how quickly Israelis - bereft of any substantive Jewish
discourse - would find themselves unable to say, or to remember, why
they needed this State in the first place.
When you've lost the sense that Jewish statehood is about changing
the condition of the Jew, and when you can no longer recall that
independence was designed (inter alia) to end the era of hunting
seasons in which the Jews are the ducks, just because they're Jews,
when any semblance of a Jewish conversation is thoroughly absent from
your worldview, it's hard to say much about why the Jews need a
State. It's hard to say why the high cost of living here (and I
don't mean financial) is worth it. How do you explain to your
friends, and to yourself, why you should drive your eighteen year old
son to the base where he'll be inducted, and hope and pray for three
long years (or more) that he'll be OK, if you have no idea why a
Jewish State matters?
When you can't articulate why you need this State, you fret. You
worry mostly about what the world thinks of you, because more than
anything else, you simply want to be "normal," indistinguishable,
just like everyone else. So, just like the "men" in Bialik's poem,
you don't allow yourself to be horrified by the fact that almost
8,000 rockets have been fired at Sederot, that life there has been
transformed into hell. You don't allow yourself to remember that for
years, yes seven years, kids (and old kids, sometimes in their teens)
have been sleeping in their parents' rooms, making any kind of normal
family life utterly impossible, elementary school kids have been
wetting their beds, half the businesses are vacated, more than half
the town is empty, the economy doesn't exist and everyone is scared
to death, all the time.
You don't allow yourself to focus on the fact that this is exactly
what Zionism was supposed to prevent. You get so used to it that you
don't see that Jews sitting like ducks, simply waiting to be hit by
homemade missiles while the region's most powerful army sits on the
side and polishes its boots, is a bastardization of what Zionism was
supposed to be.
When you can't say anything anymore about why the Jews need a state,
about what Statehood was supposed to do to the condition of the Jew,
you don't allow yourself to stare reality squarely in the face and to
wonder what will happen when they get Grads, and then Katyushas, and
hit Ashkelon and then Ashdod - until they start. And then, when they
do (which they did, this week), you tell yourself that it's "not so
bad." After all, in yesterday's attacks on Sederot, "only" one woman
was killed. "Only" one house (not her house, but a different one)
was burnt to the ground. And in the roadside bombing of an army
patrol, which isn't even on the news anymore, because last night got
a lot worse, they "only" killed one soldier, and "only" one soldier
was in extremely critical condition. "Only" a few families forever
destroyed - we're going to get worked up about that?
When a country's leadership can't express a single coherent thought
about why the Jews need a State, when its Prime Minister can
articulate no agenda for the Jewish State beyond the hope that it
will be "a fun place to live" (and look who gleefully cites that
interview), you know we're bankrupt. You're bankrupt because Bialik
and Alterman were too successful. They were part of a movement that
so utterly disconnected the Jews from the discourse that had nurtured
them for centuries that now, aside from being a marginally
Hebrew-speaking version of some benign and characterless country, we
can't remember why we wanted this State to begin with. So we don't
defend it, because we don't want to hurt their civilians (even though
they openly target ours). We don't want to earn the world's
opprobrium, because our Prime Minister loves being welcomed in
foreign capitals. We don't defend ourselves because we're no longer
sure that it's really worth the casualties on our side that
preventing these attacks on our sovereignty would require.
So we allow ourselves to grow comfortable being sitting ducks, and
find ourselves exactly where we were a century ago. Kishinev morphs
into Sederot, and very few people see the irony, or the utter shame,
and shamefulness, of what's transpiring here.
Almost as if he foresaw the stalemate that now has us in its grips,
Alterman writes in his poem that the boy and the girl are dirty,
caked with the dirt of the fields and the fire-line. Unlike the
Torah, which suggests that preparation for the revelation requires
that everyone wash their garments, Alterman suggests that if the Jews
insist on being clean, or insist on purity, there's no hope. It's a
dirty world we live in, he understands, and in this world, we have to
decide how badly we want to stay alive.
But we haven't decided that we want to stay alive. We don't want Ban
Ki-Moon to chastise us. We want George Bush to love us. We don't
want the BBC or CNN to broadcast pictures of Palestinian children
wounded or killed by Jewish soldiers. We don't want more protests
like we had this week, with Israeli Arabs rioting in opposition to
the minor incursion into Gaza and voicing their support for Hamas.
It's all just too complicated and unpleasant; we'd much rather
pretend that we live in America, that we can ignore the dormant
volcano of Israel's Arabs, too.
So we sit. And civilians keep getting targeted, and keep dying. And
soldiers die. And Israeli towns become ghost towns. But George Bush
most supports us, so we feel better. And the charade with Abu Mazen
permits us to continue hallucinating about the possibility of peace,
to pretend that the Palestinians aren't simply an utterly failed
people that will never make peace in our lifetimes or those of our
children, so we feel even better.
Bialik would recognize us. And he would weep.
And then, at the end of the day, you're sitting in a friend's living
room, a few dozen people gathered together to congratulate him on a
new book contract. Everyone's happy for him. Everyone's forgotten
the funerals (of the woman from Sederot, of the soldier who was
killed at Kissufim, and God forbid, of the soldier whose condition
wasn't terribly clear) that will soon take place. Everyone's put out
of their minds the mindless abdication of sovereignty unfolding in
front of our very eyes. Everyone's pretending that we live in a
normal country, and that Zionism's not failing even as we prepare for
the sixtieth anniversary of independence.
So he's speaking modestly about what the book is about, why he's
excited about writing it, who's publishing it. There's wine, and
food, and good humor all around. And then someone's phone rings, and
then someone else's. And before you know it, before your friend has
even had five minutes to say anything about his book, all of the
Blackberry's are out, and all the cell phones are being used, because
the news has reached us - it's starting again. There's been an
attack at a yeshiva at the entrance to the city. We know the drill,
the invariable climb in the numbers. At first, it's one dead, scores
wounded. Then it's seven dead. Then eight, and lots of wounded.
Some of them might die, too.
In the morning, the papers report the attack, but there's not a
single mention of a response, or even a contemplated response. Of
course one will come, but not yet. It will have to get worse first,
because a few people killed in Sederot, and a couple of soldiers, and
even eight kids from a yeshiva - well, it's sad, but just for that
we're actually going to start a war?
No, probably not, at least not yet. Because to go to war (or more
accurately, to respond to the war that's been unleashed against you)
to defend your citizens, you'd have to be able to articulate why this
country still makes any difference. You've have to be able to say
something about why it was created in the first place. You'd have to
have a sense of Jewish history. You'd have to have a vision for the
Jews, an agenda for your country. You'd have to be able to see
yourself as part of a several thousand year old conversation You'd
have to have some courage. And yes, you'd -have to love your people
more than you love your office.
There were days when this land was filled with that. There were days
when we remembered, and we knew. And we fought. And even if we died
in the process, we figured it was worth it, because life here was
about something, for something. And so was dying here.
But those days are gone. Our Prime Minister doesn't want to defend
Sederot. Or Ashkelon. He doesn't want to tell Bush that the charade
with Abu Mazen is bound to explode, and that when it does, more of us
will die. He just wants a country that's "fun to live in."
Well, he's a lucky guy. Because tonight, the month of Adar begins.
And the Talmud tells us (see the very last words of the page) that
"when Adar begins, we increase our joy." So let's be happy. Let's
have some fun. Why not? It's not as if our enemies have actually
won. Not yet, at least.
It almost makes you grateful that Bialik's not around to see what's
happened.
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