Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

Notes

177 notes Preface 1. The passage continues: “and if the force of the human world’s attraction remains great enough to draw him back to the border and keep him there as crushed, no less great is the pull of his own world, the one where he is free, where he has the liberty he speaks of with a tremor, a tone of prophetic authority which contrasts with his habitual modesty.” See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , 71. 2. Canaanism perceived Zionism as a mere outgrowth of exilic Judaism. Renouncing the “moribund” religion (as well as Christianity and Islam), it sought a return to the ancient, mythic roots of the ancient Israelites; rather than choose between exilic Judaism or Zionist ideology, its proponents sought an authentically organic role model for the present. The Canaanites were a small but very dynamic group of modernist artists and writers who argued that the Jews of Israel needed to see themselves sharing with the Arab occupants of the land a common descent from the people who lived there prior to the founding of the ancient “Israeli” commonwealth. Their political program proved utterly ineffectual (an unwieldy blend of the militant Right’s territorial expansionism with the militant Left’s rejection of Zionism for its ethnic exclusionism). But the Canaanites left a lasting impact on Israeli art and literature. At various moments, the lingering effects of their influence on the writers I consider will be apparent in this study. 3. The Arava constitutes more than a hundred miles of the Jordan rift valley between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Eilat (Aqaba). In the Bible, the term “Arava” is often used as a synonym for “desert.” Separating the hills of the Negev from the loftier summits of the Edom Mountains in Jordan, it has a hot climate with little annual rainfall. The road to Eilat passes through this dry expanse and in ancient times copper ore was mined from the Nubian sandstone at Wadi Timna. Today its agricultural communes raise dairy cattle and sheep, grow winter vegetables (melons, onions, peppers, tomatoes), cultivate date, mango, and other hot-climate orchards, and even farm fish in desert ponds. Desert eco-tourism is also an important growing enterprise in the region. 4. Sadly, though, I now look back on those years through the prism of my colleague Mike Comin’s admonishment that “the desert does not indulge those who cannot tell reality from a mirage. Take your rationalizations to the desert and they will lead you to your death. Pretense is not an option.” 5. There is a similar passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Erubin 54a, in the name of Rav Mattena: “Im mesim adam atsmo kedmidbar zeh shehakol dashin bo, 07.177-192.Omer.indd฀฀฀177 12/8/05฀฀฀3:06:18฀PM talmudo mitqayyen beyado, veim lav, eyn talmudo mitqayyem beyado” (If a man makes himself like this wilderness which everybody treads on, his learning stays with him, and if not, his learning does not stay with him). In the rabbinic imagination, the humility required of making one’s self like the wilderness enlarged one’s consciousness and agility with what one learned. I am grateful to Alan D. Cosse for these references. Chapter 1: Representing Desert Wilderness in Jewish Narrative 1. The term for “desert” in biblical Hebrew is “midbār,” which originally alluded to all agriculturally unexploited areas or even the desolated sites of onceinhabited settlements. For an excellent discussion of the etymology of the term, see Shemaryahu Talmon’s comprehensive essay “The Desert Motif in the Bible and in Qumran Literature.” 2. As Gordon Brubacher in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible puts it in his judicious reading of a range of biblical accounts, “life in the desert teaches important lessons about faith and ethics. Surviving in this unforgiving environment requires both specialized knowledge and the discipline to apply it. Yet no amount of skill and discipline will guarantee survival, so desert life requires that people help each other, and it also generates more direct trust in God. The desert seems to facilitate revelation. People hear the voice of God more clearly, unimpeded by civilization or their own rationalizations” (340). 3. For example, at a May 18–19, 2003, interdisciplinary conference, “Cultural Cartography and Constructions of Identity,” held at Stanford University, an exciting range of Jewish scholars from the social sciences and the humanities traced the ethical and ethnic significance of space in presentations ranging from rabbinic urbanism in the Diaspora...