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2 2 5 17 anat zanger Beaufort and My Father, My Lord Traces of the Binding Myth and the Mother’s Voice It looks almost festive, excited, a huge procession, colorful and lively in its way: parents and brothers and friends, even grandparents, bringing their loved ones to the event of the season, she thinks, a closing down sale and in every car there is a young lad, the first fruits, a spring carnival with a human sacrifice at the end. And what about you, she digs at herself, look at you, how pretty and put together you are to bring your son, almost your only one, whom you loved so much, with Ishmael driving you in his taxi. David Grossman, Until the End of the Land introduction David Grossman uses indirect speech in order to describe the thoughts of his protagonist, Ora, as she accompanies her son to the meeting point before a military operation. Two levels of significance intertwine here. On one level, the narrative describes a common Israeli practice of parents driving their sons back to the army after a weekend at home. On another level, the father’s name, Avrʾam, and that of his son, Offer (“faun” in Hebrew), clearly allude to the mythical story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis. Like most texts, Until the End of the Land employs what Gérard Genette calls “double writing” in his discussion of intertextuality and palimpsests.1 I would like to subject two recent Israeli films to the same analysis: Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, 2007) and My Father, My Lord (Khufshat Kayitz, David Volach, 2007). At first glance, the two films have little in common. Beaufort takes place in a military outpost in southern Lebanon, Beaufort fortress, 2 2 6 Jewish Orthodoxy Revisited during the final days of Israel’s eighteen-year occupation of the area. My Father, My Lord describes a short and fateful summer break that an ultraOrthodox Jerusalem child takes with his parents at the Dead Sea. Yet both refer to the biblical myth of the binding of Isaac as well as to other Israeli films that deal with this myth directly or indirectly. The story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) has been transformed and transcribed in Jewish culture for centuries. Modern Israeli culture has made especially frequent use of it. Gidon Ofrat and Hillel Weiss both observe that it is rare to find Israeli literary texts or works of plastic art in which fatherson relationships are not directly or indirectly related to the model of the biblical story.2 The texts I analyze here, which were created just before or immediately after the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, are no different. What is noteworthy about them, however, is that all of them, including David Grossman’s novel, deal with indifference in the face of society’s ongoing demands for what appears to be futile and endless sacrifice. Furthermore, these texts express another voice that joins those of the father and the son in a new triangle: the desperate, sometimes protesting voice of the mother. Unlike Sarah, the biblical mother, who remained silent but died right after the event, in contemporary Israel of the 2000s the figure of the mother is present, either in the foreground (Grossman’s text and My Father, My Lord) or in the background (Beaufort). Transforming the Binding The binding of Isaac in Jewish history is the myth of the sacrifice of the son told in conjunction with a theological account that elevates the son to the status of victim through an act of substitution. The sacrifice is thus transformed from being merely an arbitrary event into a religious trial, an intentional act of faith. Secular approaches, however, as noted by literary researcher Ruth Kerton-Bloom, replace “God, who commanded the trial of binding with another less clearly defined essence, whose beginning lies in what may be termed Jewish history, and whose end lies in total emptiness, as if the binding was never a commandment at all, but a wholly purposeless and meaningless existential act.”3 Zionism, which, like God, promised the Land to the people, has also in a way demanded the sacrifice of its sons. But there is a salient dissymmetry between the biblical binding myth and its analogues in modern Jewish history; from the pre-state Israel pogroms to the Holocaust and the Israeli-Arab wars, modern Isaacs are not always [18.224.0.25] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 22...

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