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299 Chapter 17 Scripture and Israeli Secular Culture Yair Zakovitch “In the beginning was the word,” was the book—the Hebrew Bible, which provides the foundation of our being. On that foundation Jews built, layer upon layer, the cultural house of the people of Israel: translations of the Bible, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Jewish-Hellenistic literature, all the genres of rabbinic literature from all its periods both in aggadah and halacha, ancient liturgical poetry from the land of Israel (piyyut), each layer both feeding from the Bible and returning to illuminate it. Israel’s culture is like a many-branched tree, heavy with fruit, whose trunk is the Bible and whose roots reach immeasurable depths. And then one day an axe was raised and the branches lopped off, leaving only the tree’s trunk, the Bible. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, secular Jews in Europe came to associate rabbinic literature with narrow-minded orthodoxy. In particular, secular Zionists in the early twentieth century wished to disassociate themselves from the shtetl, from the life of traditional Jews in eastern Europe, which they identified with rabbinic Judaism and rabbinic texts. The Jewish library that had been written since the sealing of the Bible until the modern age was cast away, disregarded like an object of no value. Haim Nahman Bialik mourned the rejection of the Jewish library in his poem “Lifnei Aron Ha-sfarim” (In Front of the Bookcase): Do you still remember?—I have not forgotten In an attic, inside a deserted beit midrash I was the last of the last on my lips fluttered and died a prayer of the forefathers, before my eyes the eternal flame was extinguished.1 300 Yair Zakovitch The hand that severed the Jewish tree of knowledge left a void between the biblical period and our own and built an unsteady bridge across the vast abyss. What moved the axe bearers to forgo the writings of generations and to hold to the Bible alone? The beginnings of an answer can be traced to the time of the Enlightenment, to the aspiration of Jews to establish their culture on the component it shared with the surrounding Christian society ,2 to renounce the old image of the Jew, the world of the heder and the yeshiva, and to erect in its place a new Jew who jumped directly through time from the biblical period to the modern day. The Zionist movement was happy to assume the ideal of this new-old Jew who had returned to the ancestral land to live a healthy and ethical life and who drew sustenance from that land through the sweat of his or her brow. (The Zionist movement was dedicated to reestablishing a Jewish homeland in the biblical land of Israel, from which the Jews had been exiled almost two thousand years previously. It sought to transform Jews from a weak, bookish people and a community of petty merchants to a people who worked the soil and who would have their own national identity in their historical land.) This new-old Jew, who had embraced the Zionist ideology, no longer speaking the languages of other nations or living under foreign rule, had returned to the language of his people and would reclaim sovereignty over the land, unprecedented since biblical times.3 This Jewish Zionist aspiration coincided with the romantic Christian view of the Holy Land and its inhabitants and with its longing for the Orient and for days of old. Rabbinic law was viewed as a barrier that stood between the new Jew and his land and was therefore disregarded, its roots in biblical law failing to awaken feelings of affinity. The new Jew in the land of Israel preferred to identify with prophets preaching social justice rather than with Leviticus’s laws concerning sacrifices. Indeed, the relationship between the Zionist ideal and Protestant biblical criticism, which differentiated between Israelite and Jew (the Israelite being from the First Temple period, with roots deep in the land, the Jew an exile of a later and lesser era) is fascinating. Christian biblical criticism fed from Christian sources, which exalt prophecy over the Pentateuch’s laws. Socialist, secular Zionism in its extreme form went so far as to demand that the Bible conform to its beliefs and ideology. The confrontation between Saul and Samuel, for instance, was viewed by Moshe Sister of HaShomer HaTzair (an extreme left-wing, if not Marxist, Zionist youth movement) as a struggle between an ideologically progressive...

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