Op/Ed
May 9, 2008
Hard To Breathe
Jerusalem
Stuart Schoffman
Special to the Jewish Times
Not too far from my home, there’s a street named for German poet Heinrich Heine, a baptized Jew and metaphorical Marrano. Sometimes on Shabbat afternoons, I take a long Jerusalem walk with my son, soon to be a soldier, and Lizzie, our German shepherd.
We walk past the Heine Street sign by the Montefiore Windmill and gaze at the Ottoman walls of the Old City and the Tower of David, a Crusader structure made over into a mosque. Behind us is the King David Hotel, blown up by Jewish fighters in 1946, occupied by George W. Bush in 2008. Beyond us are picturesque Arab villages and the biblical landscape of the Judean desert.
My son and I look around each time with renewed wonder and gratitude, and say to one another, “Can you believe we live here?” Israel is a place you never take for granted, even if you were, as my son was, born here. All else is commentary.
Heine called the Bible the “portable fatherland” of the Jews. Even today after we have returned to the Land of Israel and built a modern democracy on the rocky foundations of antiquity, the notion of a virtual homeland remains an attractive concept, particularly for Jews dismayed by Israeli militarism. As the French-born Anglo-Jewish literary critic George Steiner put it in 1985 in an essay titled “Our Homeland, The Text,” “The man or woman at home in the text is, by definition, a conscientious objector: to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims ‘my country, right or wrong.’”
Twenty years later, I sat politely in a Jerusalem auditorium and heard Mr. Steiner expand on this lofty notion. Two millennia of powerlessness, he said, had conferred a “moral aristocracy” upon the Jews.
“It made us the princes of life like no others,” he declared. “We did not torture another human being.” The Israelis, he noted, can make no such claim. Jews and all other people, Mr. Steiner said, “must learn to be each other’s guests,” to be “tossed into life.”
“The homeland of the Jew,” he told a hall full of unimpressed Israelis, “may be that of exile.”
Often, when I speak about Israel to American Jews, I’m asked why Israel’s “message” in the media is less clear-cut and effective than that of its adversaries. Why, after 60 years, is it so hard to sell Israel to the world? Why do so many intelligent people wonder if the “Israel Lobby” has too much power in Washington? How can we combat a former American president who warns of “apartheid” in the Holy Land and chats cozily with Israeli’s sworn enemies?
Jews are never content with pat ideologies or party lines or simple interpretations. For 2,000 years, we’ve banged on the table in the beit midrash, protesting each other’s readings of the Bible and Jewish law. Today, the homeland — the Jewish state — has become the living text, wrapped in ancient parchments, buzzing with digital data, that Jews argue about most.
Israel at 60 is not the safest place for Jews, but it is surely the most interesting. Here, secular intellectuals and traditionalists alike reinvent Judaism as a guide to daily life. Here, the leader of the Orthodox Shas party can meet with Jimmy Carter, while the prime minister shuns him. Here, a Jewish pundit can speak the word “apartheid” as cautionary metaphor and not lose his seat in the synagogue.
I’ve lived in Israel since the country was 40, and so was I. For many years, I’ve tried to convey in words a sense of what it’s like to live a rich Jewish life — and life of the mind — in a land that sometimes seems a bit too historical and holy for its own good.
As the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, “The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams/ like the air over industrial cities./ It’s hard to breathe.”
I’ve walked the hills and beautiful beaches, marveled at the myriad achievements of a Hebrew culture reborn, explored the ruined fortresses of the Negev and Galilee. What it comes down to, as I look down the long road, is what Rabbi Yose told Rabbi Hiyya, as they traveled from Usha to Lydda (or so we are told in the Zohar, the medieval masterpiece of Jewish mysticism): “I was contemplating in my mind that the world endures only because of the leaders of the people. If the people’s leaders are worthy, it is good for the people and good for the world. If they are unworthy, woe to the people, woe to the world!”
Let us all choose our leaders wisely, and wish them well.