Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

6. Wilderness as Experience and Metaphor

159 ฀ 6฀ Wilderness฀as฀Experience฀฀ and฀Metaphor Hmēd [a Bedouin member of the Sinai Mzeina tribe]: In the beginning, when all these tawatı̄t (turkeys) started coming, I said, “They must be looking for manganese or oil, even gold, maybe.” But after a while, I wasn’t so sure. They didn’t change anything, they just took a little of this, a little of that, maybe a souvenir for their government . But they continue, each time taking just a bit. Who knows, maybe this desert has some things hidden in it. —quoted in Smadar Lavie (Poetics of Military Occupation 101) We invited him to sit with us and drink Turkish coffee from the pot he had prepared for us, hoping to hear from him authentic stories about opium fields in the mountains , not about history, from which we, as Israelis, had fled south. —Oz Shelach (Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments 3) In the early 1960s the Knesset member Yizhar Smilansky (b. 1916), better known as S. Yizhar, one of Israel’s most highly regarded literary figures, issued this impassioned call for the nation to preserve its deserts and other natural areas: It is impossible for man to remain without vistas that have not been mended by his own hand. It is impossible to exist in a place where everything is organized and planned unto the last detail, until all remnants of the original image, the natural and organic signs of the earth’s creation, 06.159-176.Omer.indd฀฀฀159 12/8/05฀฀฀3:06:03฀PM 160฀ israel฀in฀exile are erased. It is a necessity for man to have a place to go to shake himself off and refresh himself from the city, from the built, from the enclosed, from the delivered and to absorb the refreshing contact with the primal, with the open, with the “before the coming of mankind”—if there ever was such a time. A land without wildflowers through which winds can blow is a place of suffocation. A land where winds cannot blow without obstruction will be a hotel, not a homeland. (Tal 163)1 What now seems most noteworthy about Yizhar’s unprecedented plea for an authentic “homeland” rather than a tourist site (which was subsequently quoted by an approving David Ben-Gurion) is his emphatic valuation of Israel’s most hostile spaces as essential assets that were to be cherished as if somehow key to a healthy nation’s cultural future. Or as one young starry-eyed Sabra of the same period wrote in a letter describing a school trip meant to strengthen a sense of connection between the new Zionist generation and the rural landscape: “How we rambled and roamed among the ruins . . . and everything around full of faint hints and fragments of echoes of distant and early days that have passed over this wonderful land of ours” (quoted in Almog 168). The Israeli literature we have examined seems to be vital, if in some ways surprising, outcomes of Yizhar’s intuition that the young nation’s desolate places would somehow prove critical to Israel’s critical consciousness and identity. And from a more distant perspective, the imaginations of Jabès and Zelitch too seem dependent on an enduring relation to the ethical imperatives that are bound up in Judaism’s understanding of such space. If the Jewish experience in antiquity (some might say its mythic time), may be defined by the limitless expanses that gave rise to the simplicity of the oneness of the divine, it is equally true that subsequent Jewish history inhibited intercourse between the Jewish life contained and protected and the world beyond. As the psychoanalyst Shmuel Erlich observes: “Walls and fences are symbolically and poignantly an intrinsic part of Jewish experience and history—from the walls of Jericho to the destruction of the Temple walls, from ghetto walls to the barbwire electric fences of concentration and extermination camps. It is hard, with the exception of a few isolated instances, to find stretches of Jewish history in which walls and fences did not figure prominently into the Jewish landscape.”2 Hence we arrive at the moment of the highly successful television show Northern Exposure, in which the New Yorker Dr. Joel Fleischman plunges unhappily into the rustic setting of Cicely, Alaska; viewers were amused by the show’s comic premise that the modern Jew is fated to be ill at ease at best outside the urban environment. Of course this was but...