Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

Preface

฀ ฀ Preface Then Abram journeyed by stages through the Negeb. —Genesis:12:9 Wilderness is a necessary condition for every revelation, for every internalization of the Torah’s teaching: “Whoever would wish to acquire Torah, must make himself ownerless like the wilderness.” —Midrash Rabba The experience of the desert is both the place of the Word—where it is supremely word—and the non-place where it loses itself in the infinite. —Edmond Jabès The spirit of this project is much indebted to my first encounter many years ago with lines written by Maurice Blanchot observing Kafka’s strange attraction and repulsion toward Zionism: “his wandering does not consist in nearing Canaan, but in nearing the desert, the truth of the desert—in going always further in that direction.”1 Challenged by the prospect of testing that notion in relation to other prophetic Jewish writers, my excitement grew as I encountered the vivid ways that strange paradigm manifests itself in contemporary Israeli narratives as well as literature from the Diaspora. This book was in part inspired by and written for a new generation of Jews, including a growing number of young rabbis, striving to reinvigorate Judaism, in its myriad communal and individual forms, by exploring the neglected close spiritual and political relationship between Judaism’s sacred texts and nature and the wilderness. My book describes how, in Jewish narratives, the desert becomes a metaphysical 00.i-xx.Omer.indd฀฀฀9 12/8/05฀฀฀3:03:53฀PM x฀ Preface idea that is both a process and a place that raises compelling questions about justice and national identity. Contemporary Jewish writing often tries to validate the grumblings and rebellions in the wilderness of Exodus , finding that subversive spirit as important as the official trajectory toward liberation and homecoming. In this regard, my literary/cultural study builds on Walter Brueggemann’s insightful analysis of how the Mosaic tradition born in the desert experience “tends to be a movement of protest . . . situated among the disinherited and which articulates its theological vision in terms of a God who decisively intrudes, even against seemingly impenetrable institutions.” In contrast, “the Davidic tradition tends to be a movement of consolidation . . . situated among the established and secure, and which articulates its theological vision in terms of a God who faithfully abides and sustains on behalf of the present order” (202). In my study, I examine the ancient tension between these clashing paradigms as a healthy dynamic that still reverberates in secular Jewish literature. I suppose that the true origins of this book must be traced to my first encounter with the desert as a perhaps excessively fervent sixteenyear -old. In the relatively halcyon era of the 1970s it was easy to have a guiltless, non-critical stance toward Israel simply because the conflict with the Palestinians was not yet something that most Jewish Americans were aware of (let alone those of my age). Raised on the relatively sentimental and morally uncomplicated narratives of Israel’s struggle for survival that were and still are woefully typical of Jewish American pedagogy, I was altogether uncritically caught up in the essential justness of the Jewish national cause. In 1975, the year I made my monumental decision not only to immigrate but to help establish a kibbutz in Israel’s southern borderlands, I had been in Israel only on one previous occasion. But even then, on a youth program that toured borders, army bases, and kibbutzim not long after the traumatic Yom Kippur War, I had already begun to weave Israel into my own personal fantasy of fulfillment. As a young and sometimes lonely teenager suddenly numbed by the overwhelming spatial and cultural distance I had traveled from an indolent California adolescence to the unknown perils of the three years of military service which loomed just ahead, I was still baffled by the Hebrew language and not fully at ease in the noisy congestion, tense undercurrents , and frenetic pace of life in Israel’s cities. It was with profound relief and even a sense of revelation that I first became acquainted with the isolated southern settlements of the Negev, Arava, and the even greater expanses of the Sinai Peninsula (in those years still in Israel’s control). In contrast to the dizzying cultural commotion of Israel’s urban life, I 00.i-xx.Omer.indd฀฀฀10 12/8/05฀฀฀3:03:53฀PM ฀ Preface฀ xi...