Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture

Conclusion: Writing against the Text

Conclusion Writing against the Text This book chronicles the role of the quest for “authentic dialogue” in the Israeli dream of communal solidarity, as well as the souring of such dialogue in the shifting context of Israeli society through the twentieth century. My focus has been on the role played by culturally focal ways of speaking and speech occasions in shaping and reflecting this process . While I tried to recapture some past moments, my account was obviously written from the standpoint of the present—the standpoint of a participant-observer of the culture. My particular position within the field of study has inevitably colored my account with the blend of nostalgia and disillusionment that have shaped so much of the contemporary Israeli cultural scene. Whether it was interpreted as a quest for a transcendent communion of souls, as a direct and confrontational style that facilitates collective action, or as a public, mass-mediated display and elaboration of personal problems and feelings, the search for genuine dialogue has been a central dimension of the production and negotiation of Israeli identity over the years. The utopian promise of a harmony-filled communal solidarity generated by enactments of “authentic dialogue” has been a powerful force in the dynamics of Israeli culture and provides a particularly rich site in which to explore the interplay of culture and speech. Thus, taking speech to be a profoundly cultural activity, these studies attend to the cultural dynamics of the Israeli scene from the perspective of its verbal-expressive repertoire, offering an extended exploration of the fluctuations of culturally focal speech styles, speech events, and speech ideologies over time. Throughout the book, I have addressed speech-related activities in terms of the meanings and values in which they are grounded. In conclusion, therefore, let me address the larger story suggested by the three “case studies” that make up this book by revisiting the central thematic and conceptual threads that have figured in the foregoing account such as the shifting cultural conceptions 325 326 Conclusion of “community” and “authentic dialogue”; the cultural negotiations attending locally shaped binaries such as “words” and “deeds”; the cultural construction of face-to-face as well as mass-mediated social relations; and the tensions entailed by the twin processes of social affinity and solidarity-building as against social differentiation, boundary maintenance, and exclusion. While all three case studies are centrally concerned with the role played by the quest for authentic dialogue in the production of community , their exploration has revealed subtle shifts in the cultural con- figurations associated with the notions of “community” and “authentic dialogue” alike. It has also revealed shifting conceptions of the notion of the individual and its position in relation to communal life. All three studies indicate that in Israeli ethno-sociology, which draws on Jewish conceptions of the individual/community dialectic, the underlying relationship is one of mutual actualization of self and society rather than of opposition and struggle (as in the case of modern Western culture). This localized interpretation of personhood and sociality has been affected by Western modernity in a variety of ways, and has given different inflections to the construction of Israeli identity over the years. As I have tried to show, some version of the search for authentic dialogue has been a major discursive tool in this cultural project. In the case of the early pioneers’ soul talks of the 1920s, community building, as a central social goal, was anchored in a vision of the face-to-face context of the small, “intimate group” of like-minded individuals whose shared quest for authenticity involved an interpretation of dialogue as a “communion of souls.” Communal life within the “intimate group was a total, all-encompassing experience, yet it was largely constituted through the interplay of group-oriented individual voices. The notion of authenticity that informed these gatherings combined self-discovery and self-creation in confessional encounters in which individuals probed their innermost hearts and lay them open before the group. Self and community were thus mutually constituted, merging personal feelings and public concerns, giving as much weight to “words” as to “deeds.” The high value placed by these groups on speech as a vehicle of personal exploration and communal expression endowed them with a rarified “spiritual” aura in a social climate that privileged productive labor and pragmatically oriented deeds. Later reenactments of the soul talk format, such as the fighters’ talks following the 1967 war, replicated this overall cultural configuration , yet...