Israel
“History may be servitude, /
History may be freedom.”
“Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot
I went to Hebrew school and Sunday school until my Bar Mitzvah. I studied Hebrew and have retained a few words. I learned some Old Testament history and some recent history, a good deal about the founding of Israel, the “miracle in the desert,” though not so much about the Shoah. Most of my desk-bound hours I daydreamed about girls and baseball. My parents were non-devout Jews who were more interested in being Americans than planting trees in a small Mediterranean nation-state. I don’t recall any discussions about God in my home or, for that matter, in the places of Jewish education I attended. Seemingly, there was not much to talk about, as in—God was a done deal. The crucial stories happened long ago and we, as Jews, were the fortunate inheritors of whatever it was we were inheriting. I can hear my Hebrew school teachers talking about Israel and being proud. It seemed a long way from Baltimore but most of life seemed a long way from Baltimore.
Recent events in Israel have not surprised me. Much blood is spilled in the Old Testament amid much vengeance. The recent events have, however, appalled me deeply. I am hardly alone in this feeling, which for me is compounded of anguish, dread, hopelessness, and a primal, formless darkness for which I have no word. One irony that assails me is that the world of the Old Testament is very much with us, that we are living with a species of the terror that those people in the desert experienced in coming to terms with God. This terror has been smoothed over in the eventful course of time, yet terror in the twentieth century and this next century has remained very much with us—what I have called in this series of essays, a “nightmare.”
Amid the casual mores of this electronic century, terror feels out of place. Perhaps this is what strikes us all the stronger. Why isn’t everyone just drinking lattes, checking their phones, and going along to get along? How is it that material progress has meant so little? How can such atavistic acts occur? I realize ready answers offer themselves, not the least of which is that if you continually humiliate people, some of them may respond in a dire fashion. In that sense, what is occurring is one more act in the human drama called “Historical Karma,” in which one set of actions influences another set of actions. What goes around comes around. This simple fact contains much terror since it makes us, as human beings, seem more like puppets than rational creatures possessed of what we are pleased to call “free will.” To never forget is to experience an ineluctable terror. No waters of oblivion can save us. Time cannot heal us. Will and memory are incontrovertible yet terribly selective.
My Hebrew-school mind wonders where Jehovah, the omniscient, male God, is in all this. His absence is the overriding presence of Judaism, as the Torah and countless commentaries confirm—a bracing tale of moral imagination, piety, persecution, and concerted justification as well as a feat of remarkable perseverance. My Hebrew school teachers endlessly stressed that other peoples (and their gods) had disappeared but not the Jews, a special people who, for good measure, birthed two other religions. My baseball mind must have thought “two for two, a perfect batting average.” And not just prophets at the plate but messiahs as the ultimate clean-up hitters. You couldn’t top that. Yet I felt, as an instinctive poet, how monotheism got on my empathetic nerves; how its fierce reductionism, the genius of One and One only, excluded the myriad forms of life on earth; how in rejecting the frenzy of Eros, it made war on the body and alienated people from the physical sources of life. Later, when I encountered various writers and artists, such as William Blake, D. H Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Georgia O’Keeffe, I realized my intimations were shared by others. Oneness was a form of tyranny.
However much we wish to dismiss them, the polytheistic pagans knew something. Though the gods that the Greeks (to choose a crucial group) worshiped may seem outlandish if not ridiculous, they spoke to a deep core of feeling that found expression in poetry, theater, architecture, ceramics, sculpture, and civic life, a core that is very much still with us. The various gods demanding propitiation spoke to the richly various (and often incompatible) avenues of life, while the hubris of the Greek heroes stood in fraught relation to the earth-bound, days-and-works dependence all people experienced. The sweet, predictable arrival of spring was paired with the chaos that lurked around any mortal life. The specter of tragedy, a feeling that the Judaeo-Christian outlook abandoned or swept aside (however you prefer to designate it) informed the Greek perspective. We don’t know in the end. That is the fate of mortals. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in a form of exalted conceit. Our purblind drama is our sustenance. Our striving and misapprehension are, accordingly, both cautionary and enlightening. If we are willing to look at them. If we are willing to avow and respect our transience.
The female, non-Jehovah dimension was not only admitted by the pagans but was celebrated in art, ritual, and myth. That dimension is tied to cycles and is not linear. The progress that, over eras, monotheism unleashed, the belief in science, ever-advancing technology, and knowledge as goods in themselves, along with the dogmas of the so-called great religions has made for a telltale certainty about human doings. God is on our side. To be sure, the side may vary since nation-states that have their own agendas are involved in the equation. To be sure, the gap between humankind and God has been filled in, again and again, with the most appalling violence, as if humankind were saying, “See, this is who we are. Even if we do it in your name, couldn’t you at least show us some disgust?” But no, a silence has reigned that has been filled in with the continuous holiness of the sanctified stories and their arbiters. Revelation is dispensed yet exists unto itself. After thousands of years, the prayers may almost seem permanent. History is a long echo.
None of this offers any practical political solution to what is occurring in what may be considered one the oldest hells on earth. (Though it is hard to imagine what “practical” could be and similarly hard not to feel that politics precludes wisdom.) With murder upon murder, the slaughter of innocents mocks my considered words. As in Greek tragedy, the Furies have been set loose. Once more, our somewhere turns out to be nowhere, showing, amid our glowing screens, that we are more bereft than we want to acknowledge. The tribal impulse means that if one group is special, other groups are not special. What—amid the brutal turns of the karmic wheel—are they then?
You have put words to my stewing emotions. And this ending? Spot on. Thank you for this on very many levels.
The Old Testament is indeed with us.
Excellent essay. Has given me new perspectives. Thank you.