Days of Awe
Fein, Leonard
DAYS OF AWE LEONARD FEIN I. There are two kinds of Jews in the world. There is the kind of Jew who detests war and violence, who believes that fighting is not "the Jewish way," who willingly...
...Whether they are right or not, in any case, is now a matter of speculation...
...The members of this informal group were rather sophisticated people for their time, by which I mean they had some non-Jewish friends...
...But it is not the only precondition...
...Lord knows, the danger is here, alive, this very day...
...Which is to say, they sought to build a state that would not hunt...
...It will avail us little to prove that the damage in Tyre was minimal, in Si-don, selective...
...You people hunt, and we don't, and that makes us your moral betters...
...Behind those ramparts, some day, perhaps we shall dare to reach for the stars...
...On the other hand, the burden of tikun olam, of repairing the universe, is so very heavy that it is reasonable to want to lay that burden down...
...We have still not figured out which we want more, and haven't figured out how to be both at once, and the circumstances of our lives don't give us much freedom of choice...
...If it's normalcy we want, being Jewish is a very roundabout way to get there...
...one Jew asked...
...there are still, and every day, actions that follow from those words...
...I think you're nice and decent and all that, but I really don't think you're better than the rest of us, and it annoys me that you so plainly think you are our moral betters...
...You silly people, you trivial people...
...To his credit, he did not seek to deny the "accusation...
...Do we seek to protect and defend the Jewish body...
...We resent it when they demand of us that we live up to our advertisements for ourselves...
...The members of the group were taken aback...
...And the question, as always, is how urgently we mean the words we read...
...There are those who believe only in the Zionism of the soul, in a disembodied Zionism that floats in abstract space...
...We would like to believe that thirst is better than death—isn't it?—and that people who failed to condemn the slaughter in Hamma (where the Syrians last year killed between 5-10,000 of their own people) have not the right to condemn the killing in Beirut...
...Before you go, there's one question we'd like to ask...
...An abnormal people such as we should be prepared to earn its reputation anew each day...
...For there is no necessary connection between the safety of Kiryat Shmoneh and the suffering of Beirut...
...There's a story I sometimes tell, a true story even though it never happened...
...All the rest is just preliminary, the inevitable product of this summer's tragic obsession...
...One Tuesday evening, they invited one of these friends to join them, and together they sat until the wee hours, when, finally, their visitor excused himself...
...And it is plain that we ourselves have some doubts...
...We were and are a battered people...
...This did not start out to be about Lebanon...
...We may believe, and the evidence as it comes in may support the view, that we have remained redemptively abnormal...
...Most of us, not all of us...
...It depends on us...
...Why, of how it would be one day, of course, of Jerusalem...
...It is not enough, not nearly enough for us, that we do not behave like the Syrians...
...Standing on a hillside near Beirut, she watched the explosions in the distance for awhile...
...the Jews asked, responsive always to the hint of criticism rather than to the effusion of praise...
...And not just that we have them, but that those standards are our lifeblood, are what we are about...
...Like everything else, it's all been said before...
...There are daily reminders of that...
...A reservation...
...Yet there is not one of us who does not know that the most insidious enemy we face is the enemy within...
...If it's everything we expect, we'll stay...
...For it will not be so easy as it used to be for us to rest comfortably with our own sense of moral superiority...
...But we will be left, in the end, with those puffs of white smoke and our own questions—not those of others, but our own, and those of our children— regarding their necessity...
...I am touched by his words, and have to remind myself that an anecdote is not an analysis...
...The doves in our midst do not stand for suicide or martyrdom, for passivity in the face of evil, any more than the hawks stand for gratuitous violence...
...A day after (Sidon] was cleared of terrorists, the civilians returned...
...But inside, when we are talking amongst ourselves, it is a different standard we employ...
...All the townsfolk were watching us from the beach as we entered the city under a hail of fire and started the dangerous job of clearing it of terrorist snipers...
...What did Jews speak of...
...Every now and again, Berl would become impatient with the conversation: "Really," he'd say, "there must be other things to talk about...
...There were other Zionisms, of course, but this Zionism was and remained, for many decades, the heart of the enterprise...
...The grimy facts of bodiness are terrifying to confront...
...But whether we can withstand this aimlessness and confusion we bring upon ourselves is a tougher question...
...Jews, you see, don't hunt...
...The visitor smiled warmly and replied, "I'm really glad you asked...
...And the second, of course, is "Uch'she'ani Vatzmi, mah anil"— "If I am only for myself, what am I?" It is not easy to live there, but save as we seek to, it is not easy to live...
...Such recklessness disgusts us—but it does not prevent us from feeling anguish at the severed limbs, the shattered bones, the bereavement, even, so simply, the thirst of a child...
...It does not matter—not on Yom Kippur —that others may have bloodier records than we, or that ours is not as bloody as it might have been, or that the world has mindlessly convicted us...
...For otherwise, will our children not be bound to ask why it is we care so much, what it is we seek so strenuously to preserve...
...Sorry I am going into all of this but I really feel slandered . . . ." Here is another story, so to speak, of a different Zionism: "The free...
...Judaism offers us more than a mirror...
...In Tyre the Red Cross representative asked for more time than the one and a half hours we gave them, and we halted everything for an additional two hours, risking getting stuck in the dark before the operation was completed...
...No, Jews live with the questions...
...We will not get off the moral hook by demonstrating that we killed with anguish, not with glee...
...The hawks believe that so long as the Arab commitment is to Israel's extinction, there is nothing to negotiate...
...There are simply too many of us who know how to respond only when the others attack, but who know nothing of what to do when we are left alone...
...uh...
...What they had in mind was actually something very different, something very abnormal: They sought to build the heavenly Jerusalem here on earth...
...Not as a Jew...
...Or was it just a conceit of the Jewish people...
...It is the author of that most popular song of the early immigrants, Anu Banu Amah— "We have come to the land to build it and to be rebuilt by it...
...But the decision to live as a Jew is an option for abnormalcy...
...These are the words of Eliyahu Ben-Elissar, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of Israel's Knesset...
...The first of these is, "/m ein ani li, mi...
...And the answer, of course, is that it depends...
...The doves believe simply that violence rarely accomplishes any good, that the solution to the continuing conflict between Israel and the Arabs requires greater political imagination than has yet been exercised by either side, that in the absence of such imagination, violence and war are always reckless and wrong, no matter how "cleanly" waged...
...we don't let you carry guns...
...On Yom Kippur, it is our own convictions that are the issue...
...By the end of the first week of the war in Lebanon, it had become clear that we were witnessing a major event in the history of the Middle East...
...Yes, most of all, the Israel Defense Forces still appear to be "abnormal...
...But we are the authors of those advertisements, and for us, the demands that follow from them are clear...
...My simple prayer for this New Year is that we not neglect those questions, that we not use our anger to blot them out...
...we have, indeed, "always been asked to behave otherwise...
...And neither the danger nor the glory are merely distant memories...
...What you say is true...
...And what's that...
...For now, to turn our eyes toward the heavens is to risk not seeing the enemy as he approaches...
...What's the reservation...
...It goes like this: Once upon a time, back in 1860 or 1861, in Minsk, or maybe it was Pinsk, or it could have been Shnipishok, there were a dozen Jews who used to get together of a Tuesday night to share a shnapps and good talk...
...The rest of it has to do with the heroic efforts of the Jewish people to create a refuge not merely for the Jewish body, but for the Jewish soul, to create a homeland for the human spirit...
...We had not, after all, done so well back in the days of the First Commonwealth, or the Second...
...Ben-Elissar's Zionism and Sharon's...
...No guns...
...We will show the nations that we are not that kind of Jew...
...And he is right, of course...
...Yes, we have a score to settle with the PLO, and yes, without the use of force the threat of force is empty, and without the threat of force the PLO would not leave Beirut, and yes, the Lebanese residents of West Beirut were given the chance to leave in peace...
...Here are some excerpts from a letter by an Israeli physician who was part of the main invasion force in the first days of the war: "Before we started the fight for either [Tyre or Sidon], airplanes dropped leaflets, and powerful loudspeakers instructed everybody to go to the beach in order not to get hurt...
...No nation would allow its citizens to be killed with impunity...
...An(j Berl would be quiet for a few more months...
...They are nasty and brutish circumstances, and they require of us—or seem to— that we set aside our dreams of the heavenly Jerusalem, insure instead that the ramparts of the earthly Jerusalem are impregnable...
...But it is plain that others do not see it that way...
...they live with the clear and present danger—and with the clear and possible glory...
...there, instead, it begins...
...Muscle and conscience, body and soul...
...A body without a soul...
...We slept on roofs or in deserted service stations or on the pavements, and we allowed and encouraged the civilians to return to normal as soon as possible...
...The prophets spoke their words very many years ago, and it is not enough for us today to be proud of what they said back then...
...if you . . . uh . . . could kind of . . . uh . . . tell us what, what you think of us...
...Clear, and present...
...It is not enough for us to be convinced that the end was worthy...
...A people cannot live exclusively on its reactions...
...There are two kinds of Zionists in the world...
...The New Republic, August 2) Succinctly: If it was argued that the removal of the PLO was a necessary prior condition for a pacific resolution to the conflict, it must now be recognized that Israeli readiness for territorial compromise is not less necessary a subsequent condition...
...The most senior, a Jew named Yossel, at last responded...
...at some level, even the most hawkish Jews, the most belligerent, want to know that when you give us guns, we are not like everybody else...
...VIII...
...Christian world has still a long way to go to get used to a new type of Jew...
...And we...
...X. The question is, is that little story about how Zionism began, about Berl and Yossel and hunting, a story that is over or a story that is still beginning...
...Thank God for that...
...I want," he answered, "to go to law school...
...Call it assimilation, call it apathy, call it atrophy—by whatever name, it is our devastating enemy, it lays us waste...
...Woe betide us if we pull the shades, become transfixed before the mirror...
...Whether the present Israeli government can move to create these remains to be seen...
...No, a people must stand for something, for something beyond its own survival...
...They may be right, but none has yet adequately explained why, if that is so, the Palestinians did not take advantage of the Camp David process...
...It may be that there are no new words to be added...
...We have withstood the worst that history has offered, worse than anyone had faced, and mir zenen do—we are here, still, always...
...It's late," he said, "and my wife will be worried...
...On Yom Kippur, it is not the world before whom we stand and to whom we give account...
...We need to believe, for example, that the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces in the course of their movement through Lebanon was exemplary...
...And then, after a lengthy pause, "But I'm from Kiryat Shmoneh, and I want to tell you that I will stop at nothing—nothing—to insure that my brothers and my sisters and my parents do not spend one more night, not even one, sleeping in shelters...
...We are not yet so normal as to have forgotten that those white puffs of smoke off in the distance are blowing up more than ammunition dumps...
...We are furious with those who spell Zionism with a swastika, and we would like to replace our anguish with our fury...
...There are those who argue, often brilliantly, that Israel had no choice, that what it has done it was forced to do...
...I have friends who insist that had such readiness for compromise been expressed in timely fashion, the war in Lebanon could have been avoided...
...We are furious, these days, with the press, with all those—and there are many—who spell Zionism with a swastika, who write and speak so fa-cilely of "genocide" and "blitzkrieg...
...We want the world to know that when Jews go to war, they do not do what Syrians do, or Iraqis, or the PLO, and we bitterly resent the apparent incapacity of the world to grasp that simple truth...
...And there are those who believe only in the Zionism of the body, who have long since wearied of all this talk of "soul," who want us to be not an or la goyim, a light unto the nations, but a goy k'chol hagoyim, a nation like all the others...
...If I am not for myself, who will be for me...
...I tell it to explain about Zionism...
...III...
...We want to be normal, we want to be special...
...There the story does not end...
...The fact is, I think the Jews are a wonderful people...
...I've known Jews most of my life, and I've only got one reservation, really, about them, and by and large, I can't get over how well they've managed in such adversity...
...Such things matter to us...
...Chutzpah, of course...
...We would like to forget all that, to replace our anguish with our fury...
...it is Bed, and Yossel, and some of their children and grandchildren...
...At the very least, we have lost our ability blithely to assert the moral advantages of the Jews and to expect people to know what we are talking about...
...And not just, or even principally, because of our desire to look good in the eyes of others...
...Those who prefer "normalcy" will be deaf to that prayer...
...A Jew is, after all, a person who lives at the intersection, specifically the intersection of two questions that do not sit easily together...
...And the trouble is, most of us are both kinds of Jew...
...It started to be about the two kinds of Jews most of us are, and the two Zionisms most of us believe in...
...we want to be a light unto the nations, we want to be a nation like all the others...
...Either way, the liturgy instructs, we must seek forgiveness, unless, of course, we have come so far towards normalcy that we no longer recognize in the death of a man, the maiming of a woman, the thirst of a child, a sin...
...this surely is a precondition for peace...
...Clearing the city, we had to break into apartments and check them for terrorists, and we had a city's wealth at our hands, but there wasn't a single case of looting I know of...
...The stuff we will read together in our houses of assembly as we greet the New Year in just a few days' time...
...A soul that has no body, no substance, is called a dybbuk, and is recognized as an untenable estate...
...Well, it's a bit embarrassing, and we don't quite know how to put it...
...We live in a real world, and we cannot get by on dreams alone— but we cannot get by without dreams...
...We didn't take any apartments for our lodging...
...You see, we don't often have the chance for this kind of informal conversation, and we were wondering...
...But I vastly prefer a people that chooses to risk a collective nervous breakdown, as we do, by endorsing both visions, both versions...
...We have always been asked to behave otherwise...
...The war has happened, and attention must now turn to the necessary compromise, lest the war come to be seen not as an "extension of diplomacy by other means," but as a substitute for diplomacy...
...it offers us a window, to look out upon the world...
...Normal...
...Then finally at 15:30 we started fighting for the city, which used to have 50,000 people, with only four hours till dark...
...It, too, must face reality...
...The rebuilding the singers of that song had in mind was not in the direction of becoming "very normal...
...there are those who argue, brilliantly, that what Israel has done it could safely have avoided doing, that its actions were of its own free will...
...I've yet to meet a Jew who's satisfied with "normal...
...I believe their analysis is dangerously flawed, but I recognize and appreciate that it contains the words "so long as...
...absent those words, it becomes a blind declaration that means death to the body as surely as to the soul...
...So the question is: If such things make us feel pretty good, reassure us that the dream is still intact, the soul still alive, how do the pictures of Beirut make us feel...
...To this, the visitor burst into laughter...
...And if, for a time, we cannot tell it with quite that sense of self-congratulation we would like, perhaps that's not so bad...
...But I've enjoyed myself immensely, and I thank you for inviting me...
...That is why virtually every article one reads these days, including those most sympathetic to Israel, ends with one version or another of the statement with which Martin Peretz ends his widely praised defense of Israel's action: "The Israelis have won their military victory...
...Why do you laugh...
...We are a people with many enemies...
...And maybe we are not...
...V. They make us feel sick...
...We will only feed our own conceits if we focus on the literature of sorrow that is now certain to be produced in Israel...
...One of their number was an apikores, a skeptic, named Berl...
...I mean, if we're so fascinated by Jerusalem, why don't we pick up and go there...
...instead, he sought to explain it...
...Unchallenged by those facts, we can revel in our conceits, imagine that if we were in charge, we'd do it right...
...Nothing in the history of the nations gave rise to confidence that we could pull it off—nor anything in our own history...
...So, to the "outside" world, we pretend that all's well...
...But somehow, people take it for granted that Jews have always been killed throughout their history, while Americans or French or others would never let it happen...
...By now, nine weeks later, it is clear that we have witnessed as well a major event in the modern history of the Jewish people...
...VII...
...what right have they to tell us how we should behave...
...That is what makes it an analysis...
...Then she turned to the Israeli soldier who happened to be nearby, and asked him, "Which do you prefer—a political solution, or an attack on West Beirut...
...At which point the eleven turned to Berl, the twelfth, and said, "Berl, tomorrow we pack and go up to the Land, there to set out to prove that even with guns, the Jews will not become a hunting people...
...The standard we set ourselves is to behave like Jews...
...You are so charitable, and so literate, and so loyal, it's truly impressive...
...That is what I want to write about on the eve of this New Year...
...For though there is assuredly no genocide in Lebanon, there is much death, and each death is a new sorrow, a new pity, a new reminder of how very far we are from where we want to be...
...They prefer the Zionism of yearning, the rich imagining, from Pinsk or from Boston, of what it might be like...
...It's very late, and this is no time to offer an elaborate explanation, so I will speak in metaphor...
...Since you've asked," said the visitor, "I kind of resent the attitude of moral superiority you people affect...
...And if it's not what we expect, why we'll stay and make it into what it's supposed to be...
...There is the kind of Jew who detests war and violence, who believes that fighting is not "the Jewish way," who willingly accepts that Jews have their own and higher standards of behavior...
...Why should the Third be any' different...
...Of course you don't hunt, dummies...
...We do think we have a more refined, a more developed moral sensibility...
...And there is the kind of Jew who thinks we have been passive long enough, who is convinced that it is time for us to strike back at our enemies, to reject once and for all the role of victim, who willingly accepts that Jews cannot afford to depend on favors, that we must be tough and strong...
...Berl, Berl," his friends would answer him, "don't you realize that it's ever so much safer to sit in Pinsk and talk about what it might be like than to go and confront the reality...
...Yes, too, television, looking for the dramatic shot, distorts, and yes, much of what we have read is misinformation and disinformation, and yes, Lebanese civilians have been flown to hospitals in Israel for urgent medical care when Lebanese facilities have been inadequate...
...we have the justifications and the explanations down pat, and we argue them well...
...On Yom Kippur, the very first sin we acknowledge in our confessional litany is "the sin we have committed under compulsion or of our own free will...
...I have a friend who was in Lebanon last week...
...It's easy to be virtuous if you're impotent...
...We may protest the unfairness of the condemnation, rail against its excess, condemn the double standard...
...But we are not the Jews of the Diaspora...
...But it is not the Americans and the French and the others, not at least in the first instance, who have asked that of us...
...most of us are both...
...We took care to shoot only at sources of fire which meant that we were always shot at before we shot, wr ich is a costly deal...
...We are a very normal people...
...How in the world could they have imagined that we would be immune from the "normal" ways of man, from war and pettiness and corruption, from anger and jealousy and gossip, from murder and untruth...
...Yet the vision persists...
...Still, we shall never know what might have been had that early Zionism been given half a chance...
...And who would dispute that it is time, and then some, that Jews stop being killed...
...The story may be told as a description, or it may be told as a reminder and rebuke...
...The best defense we have—not the only defense, but the best defense—is to look to the health of the Jewish soul...
...we need as well to know that the means were proper...
...there are others, political ones...
...In the event, the unremitting hostility of the Arab world blurred the Utopian vision, gave birth to a different Zionism, to Makes you feel good to be a Jew, no...
...I can't say that I blame either of them...
...If it's normalcy we want, being Jewish is a very roundabout way to get there...
...I mean, what do you think of the Jews...
...so, too, if we will it, the other stuff—the stuff of our dream, of our songs, of our questions, of our hopes, of our soul...
...To hear us talk, you would not know that we are choking—not on our words, which are true so far as they go, but on those puffs of white smoke off in the distance...
...How do you see us...
Vol. 7 • September 1982 • No. 8
