Free Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz Page A

‘Restoring the glory of the past’, ‘renewing the days of old’, ‘bringing redemption to the Land’, - such common expressions testify to a powerful religious current flowing beneath the crust of the various secular Zionist ideologies. Actually, there is often an unpleasant deception at work in this masked ball of phrases arbitrarily plucked from their religious context to serve as faded garlands for an essentially national ideology. The false note becomes particularly disturbing when the State of Israel is adorned with messianic attributes and we are told that the coming of the Messiah is evident in every Jewish goat, every Jewish acre, every Jewish gun and every act of Jewish villainy. You can read some powerful words on this subject in the writings of Brenner.
    But the experience that has taken shape and grown in the Land of Israel in the last two or three generations has already begun to develop a new appearance of its own: the main thing is neither the liberation of the ancestral heritage nor the restoration of old-time Judaism, but the liberation of the Jews.
    The new Israel is not a reconstruction of the kingdom of David and Solomon or of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, or the shtetl borne to the hills of Canaan on the wings of Chagall. On the other hand, one cannot regard it as merely a synthetic Australian-type land of immigration on biblical soil. Neither chained nor unchained, neither continuation nor revolution, neither resurrection nor reincarnation, this State is in the curious and fascinating situation of being ‘over against’. The Law and the Prophets, the Talmud and the Midrash, the prayers and the hymns are all present and visible here, but we are neither entirely within them nor entirely outside them.
    Over against: neither uninterrupted continuity, nor a new start, but a continual reference to the Jewish heritage and traditions. The Hebrew language, law and justice, table manners, old wives’ tales, lullabies, superstitions, literature - all refer continually to the Jewish past. We relate nostalgically, defiandy, sardonically, calculatingly, resentfully, penitently, desperately, savagely, in a thousand and one ways - but we relate. It is not merely a new interpretation of an ancient culture, as the disciples of Ahad Ha'am would have it, but nor is it a leap across the past to link up with ancient pre-Judaic Hebrew strata, as the school of Berdyczewski claims. It is a powerful yet complex love-hate relationship, burdened with conflicts and tensions, oscillating between revolt and nostalgia, between anger and shame. Perhaps this is what Brenner meant when he spoke of ‘a thorny existence’.
    I, for one, am among those who believe that the conflicts and contradictions, the love-hate relationships with the Jewish heritage, are not a curse but contain a blessing: a prospect of profound fruitfulness, of that creative suffering and cultural flowering which is always and everywhere the outcome of souls divided against themselves. A great richness lies hidden in this experience of existing neither within Judaism nor outside it but incessantly and insolubly over against it.
    Facing the Arab population
    ‘A people without land for a land without people’ - this formula offered those who propounded it a simple, smooth and comfortable Zionism. Their way is not my way.
    It seems that the enchantment of ‘renewing the days of old’ is what gave Zionism its deep-seated hope of discovering a country without inhabitants. Any movement that has a melody of return, revival, reconstruction, tends to long for a symmetrical coordination between the past and the present. How pleasant and fitting it would have been for the Return to Zion to have taken the land from the Roman legions who subjugated our land and drove us into exile. How pleasant and fitting it would have been to come back to an empty land, with only the ruins of our towns and villages waiting for us to bring them back to life. From here it is only a