He Raises the Weak from the Dust and Lifts the Poor Out of the Dirt
Oz, Amos
He raises the weak from the dust and lifts the poor out of the dirt I Samuel 2:8 and Psalm 113:7 AMOS 01 The Palestinian national movement is, in my opinion, one of the most impervious,...
...But that's another story...
...However, even the side that is less responsible is likely to become the victim of a tragedy...
...The question isn't "Look who's teaching us morality...
...For, in the end, Israel will get something that she could have perhaps already obtained on better terms 10 and even 20 years ago...
...This is the national movement that has drowned all of us, Jews and Arabs alike, in 65 years of blood and mire...
...They haven't heard celestial voices...
...When love talk sounds like this, it's a sign that the disease of violence and power has already penetrated the innermost depths of our being...
...If this is, in fact, the case, then we ought to mark the peace when it arrives with a huge monument in memory of blindness, stupidity and folly...
...and we shall die, if we behave like fanatics...
...but "Who are we...
...Almost the first rule of the profession is the need to ask oneself the question: Let's suppose that I'm not me, but him or her, the neighbor, the other person, the partner, the enemy...
...Contrary to the romantic or sentimental cliche, poets don't deal with words in the same way someone in love arranges a bunch of flowers...
...We lifted them out of the dirt," asserted the revered chief rabbi, but added sadly, "and they're not even grateful...
...For the truth of the matter is that vast sums of American money have improved the lot of Jews and Arabs here, even if this colossal amount of money has, from an ethical point of view, reduced us to garbage...
...Perhaps, if that were to happen, the archbishop's sin would be less than that of the revered rabbi...
...Several weeks ago the holy spirit suddenly rested upon the revered Chief Rabbi Eliyahu...
...He who thinks and talks this way about his loved one—I don't want to finish the sentence...
...He raises the weak from the dust and lifts the poor out of the dirt I Samuel 2:8 and Psalm 113:7 AMOS 01 The Palestinian national movement is, in my opinion, one of the most impervious, villainous and fanatical movements of the century...
...The real argument between us long ago ceased to be an argument about territories, political parties, security, ancestral rights and borders...
...However, the question isn't just who started it and who's responsible...
...The well-known defeatist, Elijah, continued in a similar vein in the tale about Naboth's vineyard...
...Perhaps we've come to the final convulsions of the Israeli-Palestinian war...
...Have we, in fact, descended to such a level that we sob self-righteously before a hypocritical world and complain that this hypocritical world lets Assad murder people in silence, allows Brezhnev to oppress all of his neighbors, lets Gadhafi behave as he wants and yet at the same time, cries out against us, and rebukes us, and doesn't let us go about silently doing a few things that are just a bit obscene and doesn't think of us as poor orphans who have lived through pogroms and survived concentration camps...
...Are Hebrew writers sticking a knife in our back and giving ammunition to Israel's enemies...
...The question isn't whether the Palestinians are really a people or perhaps just a mixed multitude of workers who hew trees and draw water by day and become terrorists and murderers by night...
...Writers—at least many of us—get up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee and begin to put themselves into other people's shoes, or get in under their skin...
...they're not prophets...
...The second thing that poets and writers perhaps understand just a little better than many others is what's happening to people...
...He fixed his own norm in the spirit of ancient Israel and in the best of Jewish tradition...
...But perhaps we ought to ask by what right these writers and poets speak...
...Are not the aims and methods of the Palestinian movement almost entirely the same as those of Kahane, if not worse...
...The first is language...
...Both sides are already bound together and entangled by thousands of threads...
...Because of their habit of putting themselves into other people's shoes and getting in under their skin, many of the best poets and authors do not see the Israel-Palestine war as a cheap western about enlightened, cultured people and wild, bloodthirsty natives, but rather as a Greek tragedy...
...Allow me to give you a small example...
...What gave them the right for the past 100 or 200 years to climb stubbornly onto upturned crates and preach to society...
...According to Rabbi Eliyahu, the Israelis have become the Holy One Blessed be He, who lifts the poor, ungrateful Arab out of the dirt...
...B1 This article is adapted from an address delivered on March 10, 1988, at the Hebrew Union College m Jerusalem on the occasion of the author's receiving an honorary doctorate...
...It's difficult for me to comprehend how so many people, including decent people from the moderate camp in Israeli politics, are capable of falling dotingly on the necks of Palestinian Kahanists and of planning jubilant receptions for a boatload of Palestinian Kahanists, while at the same time rightly denouncing Jewish Kahanism...
...S. Yitzhar in his generation is like Brenner was in his...
...Right against right...
...We shall live, if we are able to compromise...
...Our language, and therefore our world, is full of dense smoke...
...All the rest is commentary...
...How shall we save Israel from the danger of physical destruction and from the threat of spiritual and moral disintegration...
...and then sends her up on a rocket—as long as he doesn't get torpedoed on the way...
...There are two things that writers are perhaps allowed to be pretentious about, in which they have acquired a certain degree of expertise as a result of their profession...
...And the Palestinians will finally get only part of what they could have achieved peacefully and honorably more than 40 years ago, but for their fanaticism and wickedness...
...Who would have believed it if he hadn't said it...
...We're shackled together like a prisoner and his guard...
...The first and essential question is the most supreme and most urgent question of all: How shall we remain alive and not die...
...Only the thousands of dead will get nothing...
...Who appointed them as the watchdogs over the House of Israel to stand pretentiously at the crossroads and direct the traffic, or even stop it...
...Many poets and authors see the Israel-Palestine war not as a cheap western about enlightened, cultured people and wild, bloodthirsty natives, but as a Greek tragedy...
...In that sense, perhaps an author is similar to an ingenious intelligence agent...
...The question isn't "Who are the Palestinians...
...A leftist called Nathan the Prophet started off that way...
...In their wake, in our time, have come all kinds of people who have caused Israel trouble, from Chaim Nachman Bialik, Mendele Mokher Seforim and Joseph Chaim Brenner to more recent writers...
...What can I do...
...The question isn't how we compare with all those who are trying to teach Israel morality...
...It is they who are keeping the fires burning and sustaining the spirit of Judaism, rather than those who are presently stoning them...
...For a number of years now, one has been able to discern in colloquial Hebrew that the love life of the Israeli male is conducted in something like the following fashion: He meets a bombshell...
...Already for some time now, one has been able to speak not of two separate tragedies—Israeli and Palestinian— but of one tragedy in which all of us are caught up...
...Picture in your mind how the earth would shake were an anti-Semitic cardinal or bishop in the United States to suggest that "We Americans lifted the Jews out of the dirt and they're not even grateful...
...He insulted the name of King David and filmed him in all his ugliness, without considering that the shameful episode involving Uriah the Hittite would be shown on every television screen, reaching every home in the world for the next 3,000 years and giving anti-Semites cause to celebrate...
...It is not, however, an example from the territories...
...Either we get out of it together as a result of a sensible but painful compromise, or we'll die together because of it...
...They deal with words in the way that a bacteriologist deals with bacteria...
...But let me just emphasize that I'm not talking about the corruption of language, but about blindness...
...It's a sign that the war has already stormed through and assaulted and conquered our beds...
...There are even elements of intimacy in the hostile relationship between us, including some strange, frightening and sometimes even ridiculous points of resemblance...
...We shall have to lift Judaism and Zionism out of the dirt, for they've nearly fallen into the hands of those who are destroying them...
...but with the reservation that right against right does not imply an equal distribution of the burden of responsibility...
...It's an argument about the nature of Judaism and man's image...
...Tell me whom you're looking to for ethical approval and I'll tell you who you are—or, more correctly, who we are...
...And all manner of publicity-seeking and self-hating prophets followed after him...
...Let's leave it half said...
...Most of the blame lies, as I He raises the weak...
...continued from page 27 have said, with the Palestinian national movement...
...And perhaps the spittle of those who have died will be on all of our faces when the day of peace comes...
...As a result of their occupation and as a consequence of their microscopic and intimate contact with language, they are sometimes able to detect a sickness or the onset of a plague before others...
...puts her into a state of4readiness to absorb...
...After all, can't we be violent just like those disgusting people...
...Go and study...
...Are pitiful people like us not allowed to run wild now and again...
...Except wreaths...
...But I tell you, before there'll be peace and especially after there'll be peace, we'll have to raise the humanity within us from the dirt...
...What basis is there for suggesting that writers understand what's happening better than shoemakers or glaziers or bakers or doctors or even Knesset members...
...Translated from the Hebrew by Michael Boyden for Arzenu, The International Federation of Reform and Progressive Jewish Zionists, 13 King David Street, Jerusalem 94101, Israel...
Vol. 13 • May 1988 • No. 3
