REVOLT OF THE JEWS
AVITAL GEVA HAD a deep foreboding about this day. It was May 17, 1977, Israel’s ninth national election day, and the Labor Party, which had never lost an election, was fighting its toughest contest. Corruption charges against leading party figures were accumulating; under suspicion, the housing minister, Avraham Ofer, committed suicide. Then, weeks before the election, Prime Minister Rabin abruptly resigned, following the revelation that his wife, Leah, maintained an illegal dollar account—all of $20,000—in the United States. Shimon Peres, the unloved technocrat, was hastily nominated to replace him. Meanwhile a new reformist party, the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), was cutting into Labor’s middle-class Ashkenazi base, strengthening the right-wing Likud. Even Arik Achmon, son of Labor Zionism, was planning to vote for the DMC.
On Kibbutz Ein Shemer, the old-timers reassured each other: Of course we’ve made mistakes, maybe we even deserve to lose some of our power; but the country won’t commit suicide, the people of Israel know there is no Zionism without Labor at its head.
Avital spent the day with his young people, handing out Labor leaflets at polling stations. When the stations closed, he went to watch the election results with them at the high school dormitory, in the bomb shelter that also functioned as the TV room.
On the screen was Israel TV’s news anchor Haim Yavin, who wore a tie in a country where even the prime minister often didn’t. Israel Television, he announced, was making the following projection: the Likud—“not more and not less”—has won.
Impossible, thought Avital, though he’d anticipated precisely this result. Menachem Begin, that hysterical little man who despised socialism and spoke about the Holocaust as if it were still happening and who promised to fill the West Bank with Jews—prime minister of the state of Israel? Begin, Avital believed, would destroy Israeli democracy, drag the country into war.
The anxious young faces around Avital reflected his own fear. He tried to comfort them: “Hevreh, don’t worry, eventually the wheel will turn again.”
But to himself he said, This is the destruction of the Temple—
“THE COMMANDER OF HISTORY has spoken,” Yoel Bin-Nun declared to Esther, invoking his most cherished description of God. They were watching Haim Yavin in their tiny salon, which also functioned as their bedroom and Yoel’s study.
From outside Yoel heard cries of “Mazal tov!” Settlement building throughout Judea and Samaria would now become official policy. Labor, thought Yoel, deserved to be defeated, the arrogant humbled. This was historic justice for all those whose dignity Mapai had trampled.
But he felt no joy at Labor’s defeat. If not for Labor, there would be no Jewish state. Though most Labor leaders opposed the settlement efforts of Yoel and his friends, Labor knew what it meant to settle and build. They understood the settlers’ passion, even when they disagreed with them.
Yoel mistrusted the Likud. Begin had never been a pioneer, hadn’t worked the land, regarded settlements as abstract points on a security map. However paradoxical it seemed, Yoel could imagine the Likud withdrawing from settlements sooner than Labor.
One of the veteran ideologues of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, appeared on screen. The majority has spoken, Mr. Ben-Aharon, the interviewer said. “If this is the people’s decision,” replied Ben-Aharon, “I’m not prepared to respect it.” As if a law of nature had been violated.
So much for the left’s democratic values, thought Yoel. Tonight Israel has finally become a real democracy.
WEARING A KIPPAH, Menachem Begin went to the Western Wall, placed a note in a crack, and recited a blessing of gratitude.
Finally, thought Yisrael Harel: an Israeli prime minister who honors Judaism. Who could imagine Rabin, or for that matter Ben-Gurion, praying at the Wall? Labor leaders were ingrates toward the very force that had preserved the Jews as a people and inspired their return to Zion. Now the Jewish state would make its peace with Judaism.
Begin, the first Holocaust survivor to become prime minister, had been brought to power by a new coalition—a revolt of all those who saw themselves as Jews first, Israelis second, like Sephardim and religious Zionists.
This coalition of outcasts from the Labor Zionist ideal of “real Israeliness” was presided over by Zionism’s ultimate outcast. While most of the Labor movement had accepted the UN’s 1947 plan partitioning the land into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, Begin’s right-wing “Revisionists” had been bitterly opposed. As leader of the Irgun underground, Begin had been hunted not only by the British but by Labor Zionists, who feared that his anti-British violence would endanger the chances for a Jewish state.
In the most bitter accusation of all, Revisionists blamed Labor leaders for failing to seriously attempt to rescue the Jews of Europe. This much was unarguable: more than any Zionist leader, Begin’s revered precursor, Zeev Jabotinsky, had tried to warn them. Flee the coming storm, he pleaded through the 1930s in Warsaw and Riga. And learn to shoot. Don’t be the only people—you of all peoples!—that doesn’t know how to protect itself.
Jabotinsky died in 1940, of heart failure, unable to save his people. But now his disciple, Menachem Begin, would protect the remnant, give the Jews the gift of secure and defensible borders. The most bitter schism in Zionist history was about to merge with the schism over the future of the territories.
Pressing a Torah scroll to his chest, Begin danced with settlers living in the army camp near Sebastia. There will be many more settlements, he promised.
Prime Minister Begin’s first official act was to admit into Israel sixty-six Vietnamese boat people who had escaped the Communist regime and been denied entry across Asia. Their plight, he explained, reminded him of Jewish refugees from Nazism who had been turned away by every country, with only the sea to claim them.
THE ATMOSPHERE ON Ein Shemer seemed to Avital like a funeral—a funeral for the Israel they had helped create, and which, for all its flaws, had tried to keep faith with its highest aspirations. Some kibbutzniks could barely speak.
More than grief, more than fear, Avital felt anger—against his own camp, for ignoring the reasons for its electoral failure. He vented in Ein Shemer’s newsletter: “Several weeks have passed since the elections . . . but we haven’t heard one bit of self-criticism.” To our shame, he continued, it was successive Labor governments that presided over the destruction of Zionist ideals, allowing the pursuit of wealth to become the new Israeli ideal. “The spirit of pioneering and volunteering has disappeared. We need to change this reality.”
In the late afternoon, when his friends had finished work and patches of shade eased the late June sun, Avital paced in the orchards. Was he ready to detach from the art world and devote himself to renewing the kibbutz? Was he ready to help restore social justice to the Zionist dream? He had no clear vision, no plan, only the trust, almost religious, that his intuition would lead him to his place of truth.
HANAN PORAT INSTRUCTS THE PRIME MINISTER
FOR GUSH EMUNIM, it was the summer of extravagant dreams. Hanan presented Prime Minister Begin with a plan for the immediate creation of twelve new settlements, and spoke of settling the territories with a million, two million Jews. It felt to him like a kind of jubilee, a renewal of pioneering Zionism.
Begin declared Ofra a legal community, ending its limbo status. Several dozen families moved into mobile homes, and blueprints were drawn for permanent housing.
But as autumn approached, there was growing anxiety within Gush Emunim about Begin’s resolve. Under pressure from the Americans, he hadn’t actually founded any new settlements. What was he waiting for? “You can’t trust the Likud,” Yoel warned Hanan. “They would uproot settlements for a peace agreement.”
A few days before Rosh Hashanah, Begin invited Hanan for a talk.
Speaking in his formal Hebrew, Begin acknowledged that American pressure was preventing him from founding new settlements. But, he continued, there was nothing stopping Hanan and his friends from acting without government permission. And then, Begin added, he would simply tell the Americans that he was outmaneuvered.
Hanan was appalled. Menachem Begin, the hero who expelled the British and carried the hope of restoring the wholeness of the land through decades in the opposition—acting like a ghetto Jew trying to appease the prince?
“As a man of honor,” said Hanan, “you cannot agree to these kinds of tactics.”
At their next meeting Begin acknowledged that Hanan had been right: there was no way to build settlements except under the auspices of the state. Given current political realities, Begin concluded, settlements would have to wait.
Redemption will not come from here, thought Hanan. The problem wasn’t Labor Zionism but secular Zionism. Even Begin had lost his fire. It was now up to the camp of believers to lead the nation.
WHY NOT NOW?
BEN-GURION AIRPORT, 8:00 p.m., November 19, 1977.
The Boeing 737 landed, the door opened, and out stepped Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat. Slight, bald, mustached, he smiled and waved, pleased with the sensation he had caused. Prime Minister Begin stood at the foot of the stairs, erect as the soldiers in the honor guard. Behind him stood members of the Israeli cabinet.
How is this possible? wondered Avital Geva, watching the event live on TV. Begin—fascist, terrorist—had managed what no Labor leader had been able to do, bring an Arab leader to Israel on a public mission of peace. Did this mean that only the Likud, with its doctrine of strength, could reconcile with the Arab world? For the second time in recent months, Avital felt his most basic assumptions about Israel inverted.
Sadat passed the row of cabinet ministers and paused before Ariel Sharon. “Aha, here you are!” Sadat said in English. “I tried to chase you in the desert. If you try to cross my canal again I’ll have to lock you up.”
“No need for that,” said Sharon, laughing. “I am glad to have you here. I’m minister of agriculture now.”
So this is how it ends, thought Avital. He recalled that surreal moment when his men had mingled with Egyptian soldiers in Suez City, and enemies shook hands and even embraced. In this crazy Middle East, anything could happen, even a sudden outbreak of peace.
The next day, Sadat addressed a hushed Israeli parliament, its raucous debates deferred now to awe. He declared the words that Israelis had waited a generation to hear from an Arab leader: “In all sincerity I tell you: We welcome you among us with full security and safety.”
Sadat proceeded to insist that Israel withdraw from all the territories it had won in 1967. Sadat understood: for all of Israel’s power, the Arab world held the psychological advantage. To convince Israelis to yield territory, they had to first be convinced they would get real peace in return. The only pressure Israelis couldn’t resist was an embrace.
Wherever Sadat went, he was met by welcoming crowds. Peace songs played on the radio. An artist mounted billboards bearing the words Drishat shalom—the colloquial term for “regards” but literally meaning, “demand for peace.”
At a reception in the Knesset, former prime minister Golda Meir told Sadat in English, “It must go on, face-to-face between us and between you, so that even an old lady like I am will live to see the day—you always called me an old lady, Mr. President.” Sadat and Golda laughed together. It didn’t get any better than this: not merely a suspension of hostility but the embrace of enemies at the end of war.
HAVE THE JEWS GONE MAD? wondered Hanan Porat. Sadat attacks Israel on its holiest day, kills and wounds thousands of Jews, and the people of Israel treat his propaganda maneuver as if the Messiah has come. This was nothing more than an attempt to force Israel back to the 1967 borders so that the Arabs could try again to destroy it. What sane people would trade parts of its homeland like meat hanging in the market? And for what? Mere recognition of its right to exist, words that will evaporate when the last territories are evacuated.
“I warned you not to trust Begin,” Yoel said to Hanan.
In fact, it was not yet clear what Begin had committed to offering in exchange for Sadat’s visit. Some nine thousand Israelis lived in the farming communities of Sinai and in its new town, Yamit, built by the Rabin government. In Sinai’s emptiness Labor had seen the way to fulfill its policy of resisting a return to the vulnerable 1967 borders without incorporating large numbers of Arabs. Would a right-wing government really uproot settlements built by the left?
Begin reciprocated Sadat’s gesture with a visit to Ismailia, and an Egyptian honor guard welcomed the leader of the Israeli right. Israeli radio played a new hit song: “I was born into the dream / After thirty years I believe it’s coming.”
ARIK ACHMON HATED being taken for a fool. How could he have been so gullible? Everything the politicians and generals had claimed—that the Arabs only wanted to destroy Israel, that the conflict was insoluble: lies. Worse than lies: self-delusion. Even Arik had bought into the clichés. Sadat had reached out before the Yom Kippur War, there were hints of a truce that could have been expanded into negotiations, but Israeli leaders ignored his overtures. Now Sadat comes to Jerusalem, and the truth is exposed for all to see.
Arik’s conclusions were being debated by Israelis. Some said that if only Israel had withdrawn from the banks of the Suez Canal before the war—as Dayan had wanted to do but Golda did not—Sadat might have begun a peace process rather than a war process. Yet even some on the left acknowledged that Sadat had needed a military victory to bolster his credibility among Egyptians before his journey to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the war continued to claim its victims. The IDF’s chief of staff during the Yom Kippur War, David “Dado” Elazar, died of a heart attack at age fifty-one, broken by the commission of inquiry that had turned him into the scapegoat for the war’s failures. Arik joined a memorial service at Tel Aviv University for Dado, whose calm under fire had helped win the war.
Arik ran into Yisrael Harel at the entrance to the hall. “Shalom, Arik,” Yisrael said, reaching out his hand.
Arik shook it without enthusiasm. “Generations to come will weep over what you are doing in the territories,” he said abruptly. “You will make peace impossible. You are bringing about the destruction of the Third Temple.”
Yisrael was silent. Finally he said, “Arik, I ask only one thing: that whatever disagreements exist between us won’t affect our friendship.”
“Of course, Srulik,” Arik replied, his tone softening. “What a question.”
AFTER THE LAST of Ein Shemer’s families had finished tending their tomato patches for the night, Avital Geva spread out a long strip of burlap and painted a slogan: “Peace Is Better Than the Complete Land of Israel.”
“Hevreh?” Avital said to the high school students assisting him, “we’re taking back the streets from Gush Emunim.”
They were preparing for a demonstration of a new peace movement that didn’t yet have a name. Avital was feeling desperate. The euphoria of the Sadat initiative had been replaced by mutual recrimination, prompted in part by renewed West Bank settlement building. Begin and Gush Emunim were working together again. However frustrated Hanan and his friends were by the slow pace of settlement—the settler population was growing by mere hundreds—embryonic communities were spreading. Some settlements were disguised as military outposts, implementing Begin’s initial suggestion to Hanan of settlement by subterfuge.
Avital and his kids had driven around the countryside, writing graffiti on walls and signposts announcing the coming demonstration. Only when two of his boys were arrested for vandalism did Avital stop.
On Saturday afternoon, April 1, 1978, Avital filled a kibbutz van with young people and drove to Tel Aviv, to the Square of the Kings of Israel, a concrete expanse ending in the ugly monolith that housed the municipality. They hung their banner from two lampposts and went to eat hummus.
Toward sundown, the square began to fill. Young couples with babies and dogs, three generations of kibbutzniks, teenagers in the blue work shirts of Labor Zionist youth movements—a gathering of the secular left-wing Ashkenazi tribe. Until May 1977, they had never thought of themselves as a tribe. The rest of the country was divided into tribes—religious Zionists and Sephardim and ultra-Orthodox and Arabs—while they were simply Israelis, the Israelis. But Begin’s rise had reduced them to one more tribe, reviled by other tribes as elitist and defeatist.
Now they were here to reclaim Zionism from the right. The slogans on their signs evoked the very elements championed by Gush Emunim—patriotism, security, resolve. “Zionist Values, Not Territory.” “Security, Not Settlements.” “Flexibility Requires Courage.” Onstage a banner read “Peace Now,” and that became the movement’s name.
“Forty thousand people!” an astonished voice announced from the podium. They had lost their national preeminence; they were losing their socialist passion. But there was a new cause to galvanize them. The camp that had built the state would bring it peace.
An elderly man across a police barricade shouted, “What do you want, to give everything away? The Jews don’t make war, the Arabs make war.” Many Israelis felt the same way: Did the Arabs have a peace movement pressing their leaders to compromise? Now, in addition to all the pressure directed against Israel, there would be pressure from within.
“We want peace more than we want Shilo,” a speaker said, referring to a new settlement near Ofra. A reservist in the army’s most elite commando unit told the crowd that soldiers had the right to fight for peace. There was no peace movement like this anywhere—led by those who had fought the last war and would, if necessary, fight the next one. A speaker appealed to Begin: “We know that no one is more concerned with achieving peace than you. All we ask is that you heed our voice, the voice that until now has been the silent majority, and that you not be captive of an extremist minority.” Who would have believed it, thought Avital. The left upholding Menachem Begin against the right.
Avital looked around and saw in this crowd his ideal Israel. Strangers smiled at each other’s children, said “Excuse me” when they wanted to pass rather than elbow their way through. Where else could you bring together so many Israelis, that edgy people always on the verge of annihilation or redemption, and produce such an orderly and good-natured crowd? The sane Israel that wanted nothing more than to live, that knew that historical rights were not absolute and that only security needs, not biblical longings, could justify occupation, and that Israel’s ability to win the next war depended on knowing it did everything it could to bring peace.
“SONG OF PAIN”
YOAV KUTNER, LATE-NIGHT DJ on Army Radio, was ecstatic. Finally: an Israeli album worthy of Dylan himself.
Meir Ariel’s new album—his first since Jerusalem of Iron a decade earlier—was called Shirei Hag u’Moed v’Nofel, Songs of Holidays and Festivals and Falling. Holiday and festival songs evoked the kibbutz tradition of group singing. But the seemingly incongruous word falling suggested another, darker meaning, revealing a typical Meir wordplay: Songs of Spinning, Losing Balance, and Falling.
There was nothing like it in Israeli music. The album was poetic and discordant, tender and mocking. Meir’s Hebrew combined the latest slang with rabbinic expressions, referenced the poems of Alterman and of the medieval Spanish Jewish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol, creating a language at once bawdy and exalted.
Kutner played the album incessantly for his small but devoted audience of insomniacs and soldiers on night duty. As DJ, Kutner was on a sacred mission: to educate the Israeli public in the intricacies of rock music. He did marathon sessions on Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and on such vexing questions as whether Paul McCartney was secretly dead. He saw this as his contribution to Zionism: bringing rock ’n’ roll joy to the Jews. Kutner knew the healing power of music. As a teenager, he’d fallen off a cliff during a hike and awakened an amnesiac. One of his first recollections was prompted by hearing Simon and Garfunkel sing “The Sound of Silence.”
Meir’s album opened with “Song of Pain,” perhaps the first Israeli song to frankly confront the Palestinian haunting of the Jewish return. “Song of Pain” tells a story—all the songs on the album tell stories—about a competition over a woman between Meir and a young man identified as an “educated Arab.” Meir repeatedly invokes that phrase to mock his own liberal conceits. The Educated Arab woos the young woman away from Meir, and the song becomes a metaphor for the struggle between Arabs and Jews over the land.
“Song of Pain” was based in part on Meir’s experiences among his neighbors in the Arab Israeli villages near Kibbutz Mishmarot. When tensions were unbearable at home, he would escape to friends there for days at a time.
Kutner felt no anxiety about playing “Song of Pain” and offending his superiors, because the IDF’s official station was remarkably unmilitary; right-wing politicians repeatedly called for shutting it down, accusing it of being a bastion of the left. Kutner was no aberration but in some sense the soul of Army Radio. Besides, no one really cared what that lunatic did at two in the morning.
Reviewers loved the album. At age thirty-seven Meir seemed finally about to begin his musical career. In one newspaper interview, he was asked how he felt about being compared to Dylan. “I prefer to be called by my name,” he replied, and if Dylan were Meir, he would have probably said the same. Asked about the “singing paratrooper” of the summer of ’67, Meir noted, “I never saw myself as a paratrooper, in the full meaning of the word. And to this day I don’t think I’m a great singer. The result was that I felt like a double fraud.”
Despite the reviews, the album sold poorly. Meir occasionally played in a small club in Jaffa, and those concerts now attracted a few dozen passionate fans. He soon recognized their faces.
By the standards of Israeli music in 1978, the album was an eccentric work. The singer’s voice, though compellingly earnest, was thin, the songs too long to be played on conventional radio, the lyrics so personal they were often incomprehensible, and the themes—infidelity, drugs, madness, the alienation of Arab Israelis—unsettling. The song that, musically at least, most approximated a conventional hit was “Terminal,” Meir’s fantasy about taking monthly trips to the airport to help him recover from mental collapse. But an ode to madness was hardly likely to find its way to the hit parade. Israelis wanted Hebrew song to remind them of what was best about themselves, a last repository of national innocence. Meir was trespassing on sacred ground.
Meir tried to accept his status with equanimity: he would never be Shalom Hanoch, revered by the crowds, but he would have a devoted audience, however small. The Meir Ariel of 1978 was less tormented, more self-confident. He was learning to regard his own flawed being with the same pity with which he regarded the inadequacies of others.
Meir mentioned to Tirza that his album had come out. But Tirza, afraid perhaps to discover in his songs a lover who wasn’t her, appeared indifferent. Meir didn’t mention the album again.
FACTS ON THE GROUND
EIN SHEMER’S JUBILEE YEAR ended. The greenhouse had succeeded beyond Avital’s hopes. Kibbutzniks spent their leisure hours cultivating tomatoes, offering each other agricultural advice while Avital brewed Turkish coffee. The kibbutz allowed him to spend most of his workday in the greenhouse, and Avital hadn’t felt so fulfilled since his early years in the orchards. He had no doubt that his life in the art world was over. He wanted to offer his creativity to the kibbutz. But what?
“You need to be silent for a few years,” said Ada. “Do something that no one will know about.”
The greenhouse: in its seething silence he could raise Ein Shemer’s next generation of farmers, teach high school students cooperation and love of labor and the land, the values of the kibbutz.
Avishai, Ein Shemer’s secretary general, was skeptical. Another year of the greenhouse? But we had agreed it would be a project for the jubilee, a way of bringing the kibbutz together. What was the point of extending it?
“Avishai, our young people know nothing about agriculture. It’s unbelievable! On Ein Shemer! Let me take hevreh from the high school and work with them. We’ll bring in the newest technology. It will be an amazing educational experience.”
He can’t say no to that, Avital thought. “Give me one more year.”
Well, why not? thought Avishai. Everyone loves the greenhouse. And the young people love Avital. Maybe this will calm him down.
AVITAL BROUGHT IN rusted fans and a hot plate and discarded couches and turned the greenhouse into a teenage hangout. They came to talk with him about the future of the kibbutz and their imminent army service and their girlfriends. But most of all they came to work. “Hevreh,” Avital exhorted, “let’s do something interesting here. We have the space, we have the energy—Yallah!” The lights in the greenhouse were on at all hours; young people slept on the dirt floor and sometimes forgot to get up the next day for classes.
Avital had been given one more year, but in fact he regarded the greenhouse as permanent. How did the hevreh from Gush Emunim call it? Establishing facts— He had no plan for the greenhouse, only an intuition that the loves of his life converged in this cavernous space beneath a plastic roof that tore in the wind and where community seemed to grow as effortlessly as tomatoes.
An Ein Shemer member who did reserve duty with a scientist from the Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research brought the scientist to the greenhouse. He sat with Avital on a pile of sand. “You have the best ideas about agriculture in the world,” Avital said. “We have the best young people. Tell us what to do.”
The scientist suggested creating a hydro-solar greenhouse that would retain heat in pools of water, over which a spraying system, to be activated on cold nights, would create the effect of a tropical waterfall and generate heat. Avital drew a sketch, and his kids scavenged the kibbutz’s garages and workshops for discarded pumps and motors. When the scientist returned the following week, he was amazed to see the system running.
The hydro-solar greenhouse was successful but, as it turned out, irrelevant. In Israel, with barely three months of winter, there was little need for a hothouse that would retain so much heat. Still, Avital considered the experiment a success because it had stimulated his young people.
The next project was growing vegetables on recycled water—the first hydroponic system in Israel. The greenhouse was also the first in Israel to grow vegetables in planters; for soil Avital used lava, culled from extinct volcanoes in the Golan Heights.
When teachers came looking for students cutting class, Avital helped them escape. “You’re creating anarchy,” the principal accused. “Listen,” replied Avital, not unsympathetic, “we’re giving students a chance to do things they couldn’t do anywhere else. Of course they’re going to want to come here.”
The principal implicitly agreed: he paid Avital’s water and electricity bills.
WHERE IS AVITAL GEVA?
The question was asked with increasing puzzlement in the Israeli art world. Was he suffering from artistic insecurity, a nervous breakdown? One newspaper critic wrote that Avital had gone off to the desert.
Old colleagues visited the greenhouse and left envious: Avital had managed to create a microcosm of his ideal world, the ultimate act of conceptual art.
“When are you returning to us?” one asked.
“Forget about me,” said Avital. “Now I grow tomatoes.”
SOME OF AVITAL’S friends on the kibbutz were leaving for the city. But the greenhouse—“my Garden of Eden,” Avital called it—reminded him of why the kibbutz was so special. “Where else,” he told a friend, “would a community give away its best real estate for free, in the central square, to a lunatic like me?”
Some kibbutzniks were beginning to ask that same question. When the second year of the greenhouse ended, without any sign that Avital intended to dismantle the big plastic structure in the middle of the kibbutz, the grumbling grew. Kol hakavod, it’s all well and good that Avital is working with youth and the youth are our future, but what exactly is this about? When we ask him to explain the project, the answer constantly changes. One time it’s about education, another time about new technology, yet another about renewing pioneering Zionism. Nu, really, we’re not an anarchists’ collective here. How much longer are we going to put up with this?
ON A HOT JULY AFTERNOON, with two gold-painted calves’ heads strapped to the roof of his van, Avital drove to Hebron.
He entered the narrow streets of the West Bank city, crowded with slow open-backed trucks and donkey carts. Cavelike shops sold live chickens, clay pots, harnesses, glass-blown vases. Some of the stone buildings seemed little more than ruins. Avital felt adrift in a foreign place whose claim to being home only deepened his disorientation. For settlers, Hebron, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, was the wellspring of Israel’s national life. But Avital felt the decrepit past trying, like a bitter old man, to stifle him. The anti-state of Israel.
He was on his way to Hadassah House, an abandoned building near the market that had been a Jewish-run clinic before the destruction of the Jewish community in 1929. A group of Jewish women and children had taken over the structure, demanding that the Likud government allow them to remain. After the initial settlement of Jews in Hebron in 1968, the government had moved them to a suburb of white stone apartment buildings called Kiryat Arba, on a hill overlooking the city. But the settlers had never abandoned their hope of returning to Hebron.
Avital’s old group of artist provocateurs had organized a counterprotest. Though Avital had resolved to keep away from protest art, this wouldn’t be some sterile exhibit in a museum. If Jews began moving into Palestinian neighborhoods, Avital felt, the result would be a bloodbath. Placing land before life seemed to him a kind of idolatry. A new golden calf. And so he’d bought two calves’ heads in an Arab village near Ein Shemer, painted them gold, and was now transporting them through downtown Hebron.
He came to Hadassah House. Kerchiefed Jewish women peered from the grilled windows at the small crowd of protesters. One artist sat in a cage, perhaps mocking the squatters barricaded in Beit Hadassah, perhaps implying that all of Israel was being imprisoned by the settlers’ vision of permanent siege. Avital was deeply moved by the presence of kibbutzniks in work clothes and muddy boots, who seemed to have come straight from the fields. The real Zionists—
Arab men in suit jackets over skirt-like pants and Arab women in gray housecoats and scarves tied under their chins stopped to watch.
Several men, settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba, approached the protesters. Nervous Israeli soldiers stood between the two groups. If Hebron doesn’t belong to the people of Israel, a settler called out, then neither does Tel Aviv. By coming to demonstrate here, another settler shouted, you’re telling the Arabs that it’s permitted to spill our blood.
Avital and his friends ignored the settlers’ taunts. Faith and memory versus art and peace: sacrament against sacrament. Avital laid his calves’ heads on the street and set them on fire.
NEW JOURNALISM, OFRA STYLE
MORNINGS, YISRAEL HAREL drove from his home near Ramallah to the Tel Aviv offices of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Professionally, personally, he had every reason to feel satisfied. He had fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a pioneer, and had managed to preserve his journalism career despite moving to Ofra.
The Harels’ cramped space was filled with the happy freneticism generated by four children and their friends, so unlike Yisrael’s childhood home. Eldad, at fifteen the oldest of the Harel children, was a beloved counselor in Ofra’s Bnei Akiva branch. Yisrael’s wife, Sarah, was embraced by her fellow mothers, Ofra’s strong young women, who appreciated her capacity for enduring hardship without complaint, though she sometimes offended them with her critical manner. Sarah still maintained certain ultra-Orthodox customs, like buying only meat slaughtered in an extra strict fashion. But in other ways she had broken with ultra-Orthodoxy. She had recently completed a master’s degree and was working as a social worker.
Still, Yisrael felt restless. He had recently turned forty, and life offered few new challenges. He could remain at Yediot Aharonot, one more editor who would never reach the top—and he suspected that being Orthodox, not to mention a settler, ensured that he wouldn’t. Or he could do what he really wanted: devote his life to settling Judea and Samaria, that urgent, fragile enterprise beset by enemies. He had none of the messianic certainty of Yoel Bin-Nun and Hanan Porat that settlement was irreversible. Yisrael was a Holocaust survivor; he knew that anything could happen.
Almost two years after the Likud upheaval, the settlement movement seemed stymied by a friendly but timid government, fearful of American opposition. For all the political and media tumult around the settlements, there were no more than 20,000 settlers in the West Bank, 500 in Gaza. Four years after its founding, Ofra barely numbered 400 residents.
Yisrael had a plan. First, create a magazine promoting the diversity of settler life and opinion to the Israeli public, break the media stereotype of settler as bearded fanatic.
Then create an umbrella council that would organize the settlers into a decision-making body, represent their needs to government ministries and their positions to the media, functioning at once as lobby, assembly and, when necessary, protest movement.
“Sarah, I’ve decided to quit Yediot and devote myself to public life.”
She replied with a calmness that failed to conceal anxiety: “After all these years we finally have a secure financial base.”
“I’ve been talking to heads of settlement councils,” Yisrael said, “and they’ve promised to fund a representative council, with proper salaries.”
“They won’t keep their word,” replied Sarah, and said no more.
In Yediot Aharonot they called it a leave of absence. But Yisrael knew as he cleared his desk that he was not coming back.
IN THE EMBRYONIC communities of Judea and Samaria, there was anguish and rage. On March 26, 1979, at a White House ceremony with Sadat and President Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin committed Israel to full withdrawal from Sinai. For the first time, an Israeli government—the most right-wing in the nation’s history—had agreed to uproot Jewish communities. And Begin had become the first Israeli prime minister to recognize the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” He didn’t mean statehood in the West Bank and Gaza but a vaguely defined “autonomy.” Still, settlers feared that Begin was opening the way to a terrorist state in the hills overlooking greater Tel Aviv.
Most Israelis, though, saw the peace with Egypt as a vindication of Zionism. In the coastal Sinai town of Rafiah, a ceremony was held transferring Israeli control back to the Egyptians, a stage in the phased withdrawal. Among those invited were handicapped Israeli and Egyptian war veterans; young men missing arms and legs embraced.
THE PREMIER ISSUE of Nekudah, the magazine of the settlements, appeared on December 28, 1979. Nekudah means “point” or “period”—and Yisrael Harel meant both a point on the map and an emphatic period at the end of a sentence. The cover of the first issue showed a crane moving a prefab house onto a West Bank hilltop, surrounded by emptiness. Building, transforming, defying, fulfilling: these were the themes of the articles crammed into the issue’s eighteen nonglossy pages, hardly adequate to contain such passion.
The main feature was a profile of the new agricultural settlements in the Gaza Strip. It was titled “500 Against 350,000”—the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the area. In the next issue, Yisrael published the protocols of a Knesset debate over the future of Gaza’s settlements. “The key to defending Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, is found in Gaza,” declared agriculture minister Sharon. “I want to send a warm blessing from this podium to the settlers of the Katif Bloc [in Gaza]: Your efforts today are significant for future generations.”
Left-wing Knesset member Meir Pa’il, a Palmach veteran and military historian, noted that since Sadat’s visit to Israel, the fate of Israeli settlements in Sinai was now uncertain, and that residents there knew they were likely to soon be evacuated. “The disappointed residents of [Sinai settlements] Yamit and Sadot should be enough for us, before we add to their number the disappointed residents of Katif [the Gaza settlement bloc]. I agree that . . . they are very good people. Someone who goes to settle there is, I think, by nature a fine person. He is doing it out of deep faith and is certain that he’s doing something positive. But those who send them—and it’s them I’m speaking about—in the end, they will have to look [the settlers] in the eye and explain to them how they will be evacuated and why they will be evacuated.” Added Pa’il: “I told Arik Sharon a hundred times: I weep when he builds Katif, and I’ll weep when he removes Katif.”
NEKUDAH FUNCTIONED LIKE a movement bulletin board. In Ofra, the foundations were being laid for the first fifty permanent houses. A Japanese convert to Judaism, a descendant of samurai warriors, had moved to Kedumim. In Kfar Etzion the chickens seemed to have a disease, but still, twenty thousand eggs were being laid every week.
Nekudah conveyed, too, the community’s resentments and fears. The Israeli media, Nekudah complained, routinely violated its own ethos of impartiality in covering the settlers. Reporting that government television Channel 1—still the sole TV channel—had broadcast an item about the settlements that quoted only opponents, Nekudah noted dryly: “Typical.” At times Nekudah combined question marks and exclamation points to convey its ire.
Yet Nekudah encouraged self-criticism and even published opponents of the settlements. It ran poetry with mildly erotic imagery. The Orthodox community had never experienced anything quite like it. Some were grateful to Yisrael; others accused him of pandering to the left. Among Nekudah’s minuscule staff they joked that some readers took out subscriptions only to be able to cancel in protest.
Sarah was right: the community didn’t ensure Yisrael’s livelihood. There was never enough money to actually pay Yisrael a salary.
Yisrael set up office in a prefab building in Ofra, with two desks and one telephone. When visitors came, the secretary, an Ofra resident, went home to prepare coffee. On the wall hung a photograph of Shimon Peres planting a sapling in Ofra, shortly after the settlement’s founding. Peres, now head of the Labor Party, had since become an opponent of the settlement movement, and the photograph expressed Ofra’s longing to be part of the consensus.
Yisrael recruited smart young people with no journalistic experience and taught them how to become reporters, hoping to raise a generation of Orthodox journalists who would portray their community fairly in the mainstream media. He paid minimal salaries and demanded long hours that sometimes went through the night. He bullied, mocked, demanded, cajoled. He phoned a reporter at five in the morning to berate her for some obscure offense. Employees had to make do with sarcastic jibes instead of compliments. “A truck load of medals is on its way to reward you,” he said to a staffer who had run the magazine in Yisrael’s absence.
Even those who weren’t intimidated by his insults submitted just the same. Yisrael wasn’t asking you to help him, but the Jewish people. Even small requests became tests of commitment: Fail me, and you fail Jewish history. As much as they resented him, the young people stayed, at least for a while, because they knew that Yisrael, for all his flaws, was who he claimed to be: a Jew so totally committed to the well-being of his people that he had merged with it. If Yisrael didn’t represent the highest aspirations of his people, he surely embodied their fears.
TO THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD
THE TEMPLE MOUNT gave Yoel Bin-Nun no peace. Its tantalizing proximity lured and accused: You liberated me and then abandoned me. The Mountain of God bereft of Jewish prayer—under Jewish sovereignty! As though the Exile, God forbid, hadn’t ended. “Har habayit b’yadeinu”—the Temple Mount is in our hands—Motta had said in his deceptively simple manner on that morning in June 1967. But then, the war barely over, Moshe Dayan had removed his shoes at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, sat cross-legged with Muslim authorities, and handed back exclusive authority on the Mount, surrendered the keys to the kingdom. As if he were the defeated party.
Yoel helped found an organization called El Har Hashem (To the Mountain of God), to lobby politicians and rabbis to change the ban on Jews praying on the Mount. Yoel understood the rabbis’ fear of violating the inner core of sanctity. But he had studied the talmudic texts describing the Temple layout and determined that the Holy of Holies was situated in the area of the Dome of the Rock. Several leading rabbis, including Chief Rabbi Goren, had reached the same conclusion.
Most rabbis, though, weren’t convinced—even Rabbi Zvi Yehudah opposed tampering with the Mount. El Har Hashem held a conference in Ofra to overturn the rabbinic ban; four hundred rabbis were invited, barely forty came.
Frustrated, Yoel said to a fellow activist, “We need to bring thousands of Jews to stand before the Temple Mount on the eve of Passover.”
“And what will we do?” asked his friend.
“We have to show God that we are ready for redemption.”
“If you have a realistic idea, Yoel, I’m ready to listen. But I’m not going to demonstrate against God.”
LATE AT NIGHT, when Ofra was in total stillness, broken only by the footsteps of the two men on security patrol and the distant cry of a coyote, Yoel paced in his cramped living room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were filled with the mystical writings of Rabbi Kook and Alterman’s poems and accounts of archaeological excavations and well-worn sets of the Bible whose margins were marked with Yoel’s notes—ancient and modern Israel absorbed into a seamless sacred canon.
Yoel was often joined by Ofra’s founder, Yehudah Etzion. The two friends were preparing a manuscript about how to adapt the laws of the Torah to a modern state. The Torah was a blueprint for God’s relationship with a holy nation living in a holy land. But in exile the Torah had lost its national dimension, and rabbis had dealt only with the needs of Jewish communities and individuals. Now the Torah had to be brought home, restored to itself.
For Yoel there was nothing theoretical about the relationship of the Torah to the collective. His most intense moments of prayer were requests for the nation, his moments of spiritual elevation and depression reflections of the nation’s condition. Authentic Jewish religious experience happened through the collective. Yet Yoel was also an intensely private person, who preferred to pray at home rather than in a congregation, and whose political and religious instincts were contrarian.
Strained with lack of sleep, Yoel explained to Yehudah that it wasn’t enough to long for the days of old, as a Shabbat hymn put it; the old needed to be renewed. Consider the biblical injunction to leave the land fallow every seven years. How to give those who work in a modern economy the experience of participating in a cycle of work and rest? “One part of the nation is involved in minute halachic questions, and the other part ignores it completely,” Yoel said. “We need to take the concept of the sabbatical year in agriculture and extend it to other areas. Everyone should be entitled to a sabbatical.”
“And how do we prevent the collapse of the economy?” asked Yehudah.
“A committee will decide which workers are needed to maintain essential services,” said Yoel.
He could almost see it: just as Friday became Shabbat, so would the secular state of Israel evolve into the messianic Kingdom.
Evolve, Yoel emphasized: that was the crucial movement. Classic Kookian theology: the secular state as indispensable precursor, first flowering of redemption.
“Secular Zionism has outlived its usefulness,” Yehudah retorted. “It performed an essential historical purpose, but it has lost its way. Now it is up to us create the next phase of Zionism and lead the people.”
“There will be no redemption for Israel,” said Yoel, “without working together with our secular partners.”
YEHUDAH’S DESPAIR ABOUT secular Zionism was encouraged by a new mentor, an obscure far-right ideologue named Shabbtai Ben-Dov. A veteran of the most extreme anti-British underground, the Stern Group, Ben-Dov was a self-taught philosopher who knew thirteen languages. When Yehudah was in high school, Ben-Dov, a family friend, had given him a copy of his book The Crisis of the State and Israel’s Redemption. With its too-long sentences and references to political philosophy, the book had meant little to Yehudah then. But he read it now with the intensity of someone encountering revelation.
The sin of secular Zionism, wrote Ben-Dov, was in trying to replace Jewish chosenness with the mediocrity of normalization. The secular state was stripping the Jews of the faith that had once sustained them. Ben-Dov proposed replacing the secular state with a theocracy governed by updated laws of the Torah—just as Yoel and Yehudah envisioned. But unlike Yoel, who felt gratitude for the state, Ben-Dov despised it. This is what Jews had dreamed of and suffered for, one more little nation-state with petty politicians and a second-rate copy of Western culture? Where was the grandeur that Jews had imagined would result from their return home?
Yehudah marveled at the ability of Ben-Dov, writing in the 1950s, to anticipate the current crisis of secular Zionism. It was as if Ben-Dov had written directly to him.
Yehudah showed Ben-Dov’s book to Yoel. “If we follow his path,” Yoel told his student, “we will be left with no state and no kingdom.”
“He shows a way forward,” countered Yehudah. “Rabbi Kook doesn’t give us a program.”
“There are no shortcuts, Yehudah. Even an avant-garde has to look backward and make sure the nation is following.”
Yoel, thought Yehudah, has the emotional dependency on secular Zionism that an abused child has on his parents.
THE LEAN, RED-BEARDED young man in jeans and knitted kippah and work boots stood on a roof overlooking the Temple Mount. Peering through binoculars, he observed the changing of the guard of Israeli police at the Mughrabi Gate and the patrols of Muslim officials in the plaza around the Dome of the Rock. He jotted down their schedules.
Yehudah Etzion had a plan, the ultimate plan: to cleanse the Mount of the abomination of its spiritual occupier. And he had potential partners. A terrorist underground was forming to stop the withdrawal from Sinai. The group included two dozen settlers and their supporters, among them combat veterans with knowledge of explosives. The only way to stop the withdrawal, some concluded, was through an act so drastic that it would convulse the Middle East and make it impossible for Egypt to offer even its pretend-peace to the Jews. An act, say, like blowing up the Dome of the Rock.
For Yehudah, it wasn’t a great conceptual leap from airbrushing the Dome of the Rock out of the photograph of the Temple Mount in the poster he and Yoel had conceived to the decision to actually remove the Dome. But the purpose of removing the Dome, he told his friends, shouldn’t be merely to stop the withdrawal, but something far more grand: this would be the founding act for the redemption movement envisioned by Shabbtai Ben-Dov.
Underground members stole explosives from an army base, and Yehudah dug a pit for the cache in a friend’s farm in the Golan Heights. They debated scenarios, including bombing the Dome of the Rock from the air. But an air force pilot who had joined the group refused to steal a plane from his base, and the group searched for an alternative plan.
In fact, most members were ambivalent about blowing up the Dome of the Rock. Won’t Muslims attack Jews around the world in retaliation? What right do we have to endanger them? And what if we cause an Arab invasion of Israel?
“Our enemies are already doing everything they can to hurt us,” Yehudah reassured them.
Yehudah didn’t let on that he too had qualms. To bring dynamite into the Holy of Holies, center of divine peace—how dare they? He knew all the arguments Yoel was likely to make if he learned of Yehudah’s plans: King David wasn’t allowed to build the Temple because he was a warrior; the altar had to be made of stone uncut by blade, an implement of war. There was, Yehudah readily admitted, an element of sin in his plan.
Yehudah was soft-spoken, without hatred for Arabs. He admired their rootedness in the land, wished the Jews could be more like them. But someone had to take responsibility for this pivotal moment. And how to cut the umbilical cord of the new world being born without blood?
SEPARATIONS
WEARING HIS UNIFORM brown shirt and pants, Udi Adiv was led by a guard to the concrete table divided by a metal net. Sylvia, elegant as always, was waiting on the other side. She looks great, thought Udi ruefully. They pressed fingers through a hole in the net.
“Listen, Sylvia,” Udi said, looking away. “This can’t continue. I want a divorce.”
Sylvia was silent.
“Don’t you love me?” she said finally.
“Of course I love you.”
“So why?”
“Why?” said Udi, suddenly angry. “I’m a symbol. You can’t undermine me by taking a different political position.”
Sylvia was part of a Trotskyite faction, and Udi was a disciple of Che Guevara. The Trotskyites believed in a revolutionary working class, the Guevarists in a Third World uprising against the West.
“But that’s my belief,” she said quietly. “We don’t have to agree completely. I don’t tell you what to think, and you can’t tell me what to think.”
It wasn’t only the politics, Udi continued. She had let him down in other ways, like when she’d ignored his request to bring books and underwear for one of the prisoners. “You behaved selfishly,” he said.
“I want to stay connected with you,” Sylvia said.
“It’s over.”
Back in his cell, several hours passed before he restored himself to emotional equilibrium.
UDI PRIDED HIMSELF on being the good Jew, proving to Arab prisoners that not all Jews were racists. Yet the distance between Udi and his fellow prisoners only grew. Even the Marxists among them, he was shocked to realize, weren’t entirely free of religious faith. Secular and fundamentalist alike dreamed of a return of the golden age of Arab rule. Udi tried to reason with them. “The revolution will be class-based, not ethnic-based,” he said. “The workers of all nations will bring the revolution.” To no avail. He didn’t even bother trying to counter the Holocaust denial most of them took for granted.
Udi was friendly with all his fellow prisoners, even with the Muslim fundamentalists who in their long beards and white skullcaps repulsed him because they reminded him of Gush Emunim settlers. When a cellmate needed help in writing a Hebrew appeal to the Supreme Court, or tutoring in English, Udi didn’t hesitate. But he was close to no one, and spent almost all of his time reading. Days would pass without a real conversation.
IN THE PRISON LIBRARY Udi found a collection of Freud’s writings. He came to a conclusion that disturbed him: there were areas of reality that Marxism couldn’t explain. Of course Marxism remained true in its understanding of history, the collective movement of humanity; but the individual had an inner life beyond the reach of ideology. It’s not that Udi hadn’t realized this before, but somehow its moral significance had eluded him. How much importance should a revolutionary give to individual needs? What happens when those needs conflict with the collective good?
Udi had a new visitor with whom to explore these ideas: Leah Leshem, who had been in his apartment the night of his arrest and who’d left after the trial to study in Paris. Leah had never stopped loving Udi. In Paris she would obsessively seek out political films about violence and torture, which gave her nightmares but which also linked her to Udi. When she felt lonely in a strange city, she thought of Udi, stoic in his cell, and resolved to be strong too.
Now that Udi had divorced Sylvia, Leah was hoping to take her place.
Though she shared Udi’s radical politics, Leah was not an activist. In a letter to Leah after a visit, Udi warned, “The relationship between us cannot be compartmentalized: a warm, ideal, individualist relationship on the one hand and a practical political relationship on the other.”
Still, Udi didn’t reject Leah’s overtures, and she became a regular visitor to Ramle Prison.
THE LETTUCE WAR
FROM THE EIN SHEMER NEWSLETTER: “A query: To whom? I don’t know! Maybe to Avital? But I know he couldn’t care less about anything that touches, bothers and worries [his fellow] comrade. . . . How much longer will we have to suffer the total freedom of [Avital’s] donkeys, whether in our neighborhood, and in the gardens, but not in the greenhouse?”
Fair enough, thought Avital. His three donkeys—Ferdinand and Isabella, named for the Spanish monarchs who expelled the Jews in 1492, and Shulem, Yiddish for shalom—did on occasion trample the neighbors’ flower beds. And sometimes his kids got a little rowdy, singing into the night around the campfires they built outside the greenhouse; and sometimes they got carried away and tossed plastic into the flames, and the smell wasn’t so pleasant. And then there was that unfortunate incident when Avital loaded the donkeys into a new kibbutz van, and they’d chewed the upholstery and relieved themselves in the back. Okay, sorry. But tell me, hevreh, are we going to become bourgeois farmers and worry about our rose beds?
Avital had his supporters, including the editor of the newsletter: the letter complaining about the donkeys was accompanied by a drawing of three adorable donkeys smiling mischievously as they chew the neighbors’ flowers.
Still the complaints were having an effect—especially since maintaining the greenhouse was expensive, and the economy was worsening. Inflation had hit triple digits, and agricultural exports were suffering. The situation had become so difficult that the kibbutz had reverted to the old practice of group weddings, to save on expenses (though reasonable requests for changes on the menu would be accommodated, the newsletter promised).
The kibbutz planning committee determined that a new sports center should be built on the prime spot where the greenhouse sat. As for the greenhouse, it would be either moved to a peripheral location or else dismantled. Avital was informed after the fact; he hadn’t even been given a chance to defend himself.
“I see this as a personal affront,” he wrote to the newsletter. “But I have objective arguments, which I will briefly cite.” He went on for two pages, hitting at Ein Shemer’s most sensitive point: its fear of losing its youth to the city. “We’re not talking about buying a tractor,” he wrote mockingly. “I believe that the goal of keeping connected with the boys and girls [of the kibbutz] and giving them challenges and opportunities to create—in our midst—is the central problem and main goal of the entire kibbutz movement, and of Ein Shemer especially, given the high percentage of young people who leave. . . . Have we completely lost our identity? Are boys who work in agriculture and grow vegetables for our kitchen and love this place and this land—is that less important than muscle-building?”
Avital’s supporters forced the committee to bring its plan for a sports center to a vote among the comrades.
After dinner, when the kibbutzniks returned to the dining room for the weekly meeting, they found affixed to the walls lettuces grown in the greenhouse. Some were hanging from the rafters.
“It’s not fair,” complained an opponent of the greenhouse. “Avital is trying to manipulate us.”
Avital knew his people: How could they oppose encouraging young people to grow such beautiful lettuce?
The kibbutzniks voted to retain the greenhouse. “For now,” noted the resolution.
MEIR ARIEL ENCOUNTERS LIGHT
MEIR RETURNED HOME from the cotton fields, removed his muddied boots and the kaffiyeh wrapped around his head.
“Tirza,” he began. “Something happened in the fields today.”
“Nu?”
“I was crying out to the heavens. And I got an answer.”
“What do you mean, you got an answer?”
“I encountered God.”
“Are you on drugs, Meir?”
“No. Tirza, listen. I don’t know what happened to me, but it was real.”
What had he experienced? Fields transformed to light, all forms dissolving back into their common essence? Had the universe revealed to him that there is no death, only changing forms of oneness?
Meir didn’t say. But whatever it was he’d experienced that day, Meir’s faith in God was confirmed.
“TIRZA,” SAID MEIR, “there’s just one thing. Please, no more nonkosher meat in the house.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t care what you eat outside the house. Eat, enjoy. But I want the house to be kosher.”
Tirza was quiet. Then she said, “My father has just given us a pail of meat.” Her father hunted wild boar. “What do you want me to do, just throw it out?”
“Finish the meat, but then no more.”
“All right, Meir. We’ll do it your way. All I ask is that you don’t start surprising me with all that religious nonsense.”
“I promise you,” said Meir, “no surprises.”