Free Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz

wait humbly for the Author of the promises to decide when the right moment has come for Him to keep it.) Happy are those who believe. Their Zionism is simple and carefree. Mine is hard and complicated. I also have no use for the hypocrites who suddenly remember the divine promise whenever their Zionism runs into an obstacle or an inner contradiction (and go charging off in their cars with their wives and children every Sabbath to cherish the dust of the holy places). In a nutshell, I am a Zionist in all that concerns the redemption of the Jews, but not when it comes to the ‘redemption of the Holy Land’. We have come here to live as a free nation, not ‘to liberate the land that groans under the desecration of a foreign yoke’, Samaria, Gilead, Aram and Hauran up to the great Euphrates River. The word ‘liberation’ applies to people, not to dust and stone. I was not born to blow rams’ horns or ‘purge a heritage that has been defiled by strangers’.
    Why here of all places? Because here and only here is where the Jews were capable of coming and establishing their independence. Because the establishment of the political independence of the Jews could not have come about in any other territory. Because here was the focus of their prayers and their longings.
    To tell the truth, those longings were organically linked with the belief in the promise and the Promiser, the Redeemer, and the Messiah. Is there a contradiction here? As I have already said, religious feelings helped a secular, political movement to achieve an aim that was historical, not miraculous or messianic. The ancient yearning for the Land of Israel was part of a total faith in the coming of the Redeemer. Faith, side by side with a common destiny, maintained the continuing unity of the Jewish people. But let us not forget, or allow others to forget, that it was not God or the Messiah or a miracle or an angel that achieved the independence of the Jews in their own land, but a secular, political movement with a modem ideology and modern tactics. Therefore the Zionism of a secularist may contain a structural fault. I do not intend to gloss over this fault with phrases and slogans. I accept this contradiction, if such it be, and I say: here I stand. In our social life, in love, in our attitude to others and to death, we the non-religious are condemned to live with inconsistencies and faults. And that goes for Zionism too.
    Consequendy, my Zionism may not be ‘whole’. For instance, I see nothing wrong with mixed marriage or with conversion, if it is successful. Only those Jews who choose to be Jews or who are compelled to be Jews belong, in my view, to this tribe. For them, and only for them, the State of Israel is a present possibility. I would like to make it an attractive and fascinating possibility.
    I do not regard myself as a Jew by virtue of ‘race’ or as a ‘Hebrew’ because I was bom in the Land of Canaan. I choose to be Jew, that is, to participate in the collective experience of my ancestors and fellow Jews down the ages. Albeit a selective participation: I do not approve of everything they approved of, nor am I prepared to continue obediently living the kind of life that they lived. As a Jew, I do not want to live among strangers who see in me some kind of symbol or stereotype, but in a State ofjews. Such a State could only have come into being in the Land of Israel. That is as far as my Zionism goes.
    Confronting the Jewish past
    I do not live here in order to renew the days of old or to restore the glory of the past. I live here because it is my wish to live as a free Jew.
    Admittedly, it would be foolish to deny the religious experience that lies at the root of Jewish independence. Even the first founders of the New Land of Israel, who broke out of the straitjacket of religion and revolted against it, brought to their Tolstoyan or Marxist or nationalist enthusiasm a religious temperament, whether Hasidic or messianic or reverential.