Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

1. Representing Desert Wilderness in Jewish Narrative: Poetics and Politics

1 ฀ 1฀ Representing฀Desert฀Wilderness฀฀ in฀Jewish฀Narrative:฀฀ Poetics฀and฀Politics “Thus says, the Lord, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you Followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” —Jeremiah 2:2 My name is Solomon Levi, The desert is my home, My mother’s breast was thorny, And father I had none. The sands whispered, Be separate, The stones taught me, Be hard. I dance, for the joy of surviving, On the edge of the road. —Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree The Jewish textual and physical encounter with the desert is surely one of humanity’s most imaginative, spiritual, and in some ways mysterious adventures. The journey that began in Mesopotamia, traversed the Fertile Crescent, descended into the Nile, and culminated in a mysterious encounter with a demanding deity at the base of an unknown desert mountain would have expansive reverberations in humanity’s relation to the sacred throughout the centuries that followed. Site of priva01 .1-28_Omer.indd฀฀฀1 12/8/05฀฀฀3:04:10฀PM 2฀ israel฀in฀exile tion as well as inspiration, the desert was a formidable presence in the moral vision of the Jewish prophets, a paradigm that would later prove intrinsic to some of Jewish literature’s most imaginative approaches to the ethical dimensions of exile and homecoming, dispossession and occupation .1 Yet the present study is written out of a deep conviction that just as most of Western humanity is now oblivious to its nomadic origins, the vast majority of Jewish readers and critics have given little consideration to the immense relation between the stark, spare landscape of the desert and the most profound expressions of the Jewish ethical and literary imagination, beginning with the Hebrew Bible. Nevertheless, as a French scholar of ancient texts ironically notes, “the symbol of the desert is one of the most fertile in the Bible” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 187).2 Of late, there have been vital indicators that the field of Jewish Studies, joining disciplines such as critical anthropology, human geography , and political science, has begun to respond to the compelling need to intensify the exploration of the relationship between place and identity.3 This path offers exciting ways to transcend the well-worn binary opposition of Diaspora4 versus Israel that has often dominated discussions of contemporary Jewish identity.5 I welcome these efforts to consider the Jewish relation to crucial dimensions of spatial identity that transcend the neat antithesis between homeland and exile. Since undertaking my own project it has become clear to me that the desert experience carries its own permutations of wandering; the Jewish imagination never strays far from the threat and promise of peripatetic movement of one kind or another. In the chapters that follow, I undertake to illuminate how the universality of desert space serves as an urgent reminder to many Jewish writers that exile and alienation remain the essential human condition in spite of the ostensible transformations wrought by Zionism and other territorial nationalisms. Beginning with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964) and as recently as Susan Brind Morrow’s remarkable meditation on language and the desolate spaces of Egypt and the Sudan in The Names of Things (1997), contemporary philosophers and poets have proposed exciting paradigms of what in essence is a notion of non-human space as haunted by an imaginative process that converts the world into emotionally and figuratively endowed geographies often in mysterious ways that transcend empirical or positive forms of knowledge. Indebted in part to these and other nonJewish sources the reader will encounter in the chapters that follow, my work must also wrestle with the ways that nature is overwritten by the human. Similarly, though technically speaking a literary study, I adopt a flexible approach by referencing important non-literary sources. There01 .1-28_Omer.indd฀฀฀2 12/8/05฀฀฀3:04:11฀PM ฀ Representing฀Desert฀Wilderness฀ 3 fore I hope to complement some of the most innovative recent cultural and theoretical work being done in Israel Studies, including Oz Almog’s The Sabra, Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape, Ilan Troen’s Imagining Zion, and Yael Zerubavel’s Recovered Roots. The question of space, place, and identity in Jewish culture has lately received critical attention in these and other important works. My own theoretical point of departure is that ever since the composition of Exodus, many outstanding Jewish writers have “listened...