YOEL BIN-NUN IS WAITING FOR RABIN
July 13, 1992
The Prime Minister of Israel
Yitzhak Rabin
Shlomot, peace upon you!
All leaders of nations are appointed with God’s will, and especially a leader chosen by the people of Israel in its land. And so [I offer] this blessing: May God give you and your government wisdom and strength and wise counsel, to stand upright and represent the entire people of Israel.
That said, Yoel Bin-Nun proceeded to berate the newly elected prime minister for violating the very hopes expressed in his blessing. Rabin had deeply disappointed him: instead of forming a national unity government, drawing together the people of Israel, Rabin had created a narrow left-wing coalition, with the added insult of backing from the ultra-Orthodox party Shas. The National Religious Party (NRP), representing religious Zionism, had been willing, Yoel noted, to enter Rabin’s coalition and compromise on settlement building. Knesset member Hanan Porat, too, Yoel added, had been reasonable.
The religious Zionist community felt its two deepest values, education and settlement—“which are your values too”—under assault by the new government. Rabin had handed the education ministry, long the domain of the NRP, to the antireligious and far left party Meretz. And no less dangerous, he had appointed as deputy education minister a Knesset member from Shas, as if that were a reasonable balance—one ultra against another.
As for settlements, continued Yoel, one could negotiate political arrangements with our Arab neighbors and still protect the right of Jews to live in the land of Israel. Yet Rabin had declared a partial but far-reaching freeze on settlement building. If settlers felt “pushed into a corner,” they would fight back—“with respect, with observance of the law, but with determination, for our very existence.”
Hopefully, though, there was still a chance for dialogue, “to explore ways of cooperating to prevent confrontation, despite the deep disagreements between us.”
Respectful but firm: precisely the tone, Yoel believed, that a straight talker like Rabin would appreciate.
Yoel wrote his letter in longhand. It was easier for him to concentrate that way. Besides, he reasoned, everything Rabin read was printed; this way would be more memorable.
Yoel faxed his three-page letter to the prime minister’s office.
A few weeks later he received by mail a one-line note, in Rabin’s hand: “I am deeply grateful.”
The brevity was no surprise; the warmth was. Yoel saved the note and took it as encouragement to continue the connection.
THE ART WORLD REDISCOVERS AVITAL GEVA
GIDEON OFRAT, PREEMINENT CURATOR and art historian, walked through the plastic flaps of the Ein Shemer greenhouse, certain that Avital Geva would reject his proposal out of hand. It was a Shabbat afternoon in August 1992, and the humidity inside the greenhouse was stifling. Avital, wearing a tank top and shorts, greeted his guest, in round wire glasses and pressed white pants, with a hug. Twenty years earlier Ofrat had championed Avital’s artistic provocations, had considered him one of Israel’s most vital artists. When Avital withdrew to the greenhouse, Ofrat, distraught, had come to see him. You’ve rejected the art world but not art, Ofrat had said to him then. And the greenhouse, he’d insisted, was itself a work of art. Avital laughed: Who cares if it’s art or not?
Now Avital took Ofrat on a tour of the greenhouse. Barefoot teenagers were tending rows of giant cucumbers laid in plant pots on slanted trays, so that excess water from the pots drained down into pools below, providing nutrients to fish. And plastic tubes fed water from the pools back into the plants. It was, explained Avital, an experiment in conservation: trying to raise fish without changing the water. In a corner was an old bus, transformed into the greenhouse’s computer center. There were sculptures formed from discarded agricultural and industrial materials. A seamless flow, noted Ofrat, of nature-technology-humanity-art.
Over Turkish coffee, Ofrat explained why he was here. He had just been appointed curator for the Israeli exhibit at the Venice Biennale, the international art event. Each country selected an artist to represent it. And Ofrat wanted Avital and the greenhouse to represent the state of Israel.
Avital closed his eyes and said nothing. Ofrat waited for the rejection. “Amazing idea,” Avital finally said.
Then came the conditions. First of all, no artistic representation of the greenhouse, only the greenhouse itself. That meant shipping the whole structure and everything in it, from cucumbers to fish. “We’re not an exhibit,” said Avital.
“No metaphor,” agreed Ofrat. Art for life, not life for art.
“And we’ll need a dunam of land. And a team of ten young people to set up the greenhouse and run it.”
Ofrat nodded. But was any of this feasible? Would the Italians agree to expanding the Israeli pavilion to a dunam? How would Ofrat raise the money—for shipping, for expenses for a whole team?
“And it’s not about me, Avital Geva. The greenhouse is about group cooperation.”
Ofrat respected Avital’s emphasis on the collective, the opposite of the Western notion of the lone artist. Still, Ofrat explained, he would need to present an artist to the art world.
“Give me a week to decide,” Avital said. They compromised on three days.
“WHAT DO I NEED THIS FOR?” Avital said to his wife, Ada. He had managed to extricate himself from the media exposure, the marketing hype, the egos and the jealousies. Why subject himself to all that again?
“Do it,” urged Ada. Avital, she argued, was trying to save the spirit of the kibbutz movement; this was a chance to spread his message.
Ofrat was half hoping that Avital would say no. Who needed his wavering, his demands? Any normal person would have grabbed the opportunity. But Avital was responding as if Ofrat were suggesting a complicated medical procedure.
“Nu?” asked Ofrat.
“I need another twenty-four hours,” said Avital. “And another dunam.”
When Ofrat phoned the next night, Avital said, “I suggest you find someone else. Because the terms are tough.” He proceded to read a list of seven demands—including bringing over not ten but twenty young people. And at the end of the Biennale the entire greenhouse would be shipped back to Israel. “Nothing remains there but the grass.”
Ofrat calmed himself: There’s still time to find someone else.
In a fax to the director of the Biennale, Ofrat tried to explain his choice of an artist who no longer saw himself as an artist and an art project that many would no doubt deny was art. Avital, wrote Ofrat, had quit the art world because he saw museums and galleries as “a barrier to achieving a bridge between art values and life values.” The greenhouse, Ofrat argued, would challenge art’s isolation from reality. “We are showing a life-work both realistic and utopian, rather than an aesthetic object.”
There was no answer. Ofrat flew to Venice. Before meeting the director, he surveyed the grounds of the Biennale. The only possible space to accommodate Avital’s demands was at the fair ground’s very center. Israeli chutzpah: How dare he ask for it?
“There is no other place,” agreed the director.
Back in Israel, Ofrat excitedly reported to Avital: All your conditions will be met.
Avital listened grimly. “I need another forty-eight hours before giving you my final okay,” he said.
“If you withdraw now,” Ofrat replied, “my health will be on your conscience.”
Avital phoned Ofrat the next night. “I’m in,” he said. “But no media interviews.”
IN THE ISRAELI ART WORLD, some celebrated Ofrat’s choice as a sign of the establishment’s vitality. “You’ve brought Avital back to us,” a leading curator told Ofrat. Others, though, responded with contempt. One critic compared the greenhouse to a kindergarten. Another insisted that Avital owed the art world an explanation: Why did you leave, and why have you suddenly returned? Retorted Ofrat: Avital owes no explanation to anyone.
Ofrat brought a potential donor to Ein Shemer. They found Avital in the dining room, serving lunch: it was his turn for kitchen duty. They helped him clear the tables and then went across the dirt road to the greenhouse.
Ofrat offered his latest thoughts. The greenhouse, he said, was formed of “concentric circles”—the inner circle a space for meeting and conceptualizing, then a circle with computers and worktables, and finally an outer circle of plant and fish cultivation. “A Platonic construct, leading from pure idea to material and nature.”
“Too grandiose,” dismissed Avital. “I don’t want anything more in Venice than cultivation, maybe a computer.”
Ofrat was horrified. A shack with cucumbers? The whole point was to elevate the greenhouse from pure nature to culture, the interplay between science and society and art! The Israeli dream, Ofrat was calling it.
In barely ten months from now, in June 1993, the Biennale was to begin. Would Avital pull out over some unimagined pique, some violation of his ethos that even Ofrat hadn’t anticipated? Maybe I won’t be able to raise the money, Ofrat thought hopefully.
ARIK ACHMON RETURNS TO THE SKIES
THE PHONE CALL Arik had been expecting, in one form or another, came a few months after the elections of 1992.
Arik had volunteered for Rabin’s campaign, organizing a national network of parlor meetings. And now that Labor was finally back in power, he assumed there would be some expression of appreciation. Not that he was looking for a job: he was in increasing demand as a consultant, advising some of Israel’s biggest companies. What he was hoping for was another opportunity to serve, especially now that he was no longer on active reserve duty.
The phone call was from an official in the transportation ministry. The government was embarking on the largest building project in Israel’s history—a new international airport terminal, with a budget of close to $2 billion. Would Arik join the board of the Airports Authority? It was a public position, without salary. And it would take up at least one day a week of his time.
“You are returning me to aviation, my first love,” he said.
Then, warily, he asked, “Yisrael is okay with this?”
He meant the new transportation minister, Yisrael Kaisar—former Histadrut labor union leader and Arik’s nemesis from his Arkia days.
“He wasn’t enthusiastic,” the official acknowledged, “but I’ll get this through.”
The two old rivals met at a luncheon celebrating the launching of “Ben-Gurion [Airport] 2000.”
“Here is the kibbutznik who turned into an enemy of organized labor,” Kaisar greeted Arik with a small smile.
“Yisrael, I’m not certain that that’s what you really think of me,” Arik replied, smiling widely in return. “I remember you as a worthy adversary.”
“You saved Arkia,” said Kaisar.
Ben-Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv, was the country’s only international airport. Small and overcrowded, it was a holdover from an earlier, improvised Israel. Arriving passengers gathered on the tarmac and were driven by bus to the terminal; those waiting to greet them had to stand outside the building.
Arik was appointed head of the development committee for the new terminal. The terminal, the committee decided, must have easy access for planes, incorporate the most modern systems, and be more than a big hangar. “It needs to be inspirational,” Arik said. “Not bombastic, but worthy of the state of Israel.”
Backed by Airports Authority head Motti Debby, Arik and his colleagues resisted government pressure to hire retired air force officers as project managers. But that’s how it’s always done, Arik was told. Not this time, he retorted. This project would be run by professionals. That, after all, was the symbolic message of the new terminal: Israel was joining the globalizing world.
Arik wanted to hire architectural and consulting firms from abroad; Kaisar wanted only Israelis. “You’re screwing with me again?” he said.
“Yisrael, we don’t have the expertise. This is a chance to do things the right way, not the way we usually do.”
They compromised: for every firm hired from abroad, an Israeli firm would be hired to work with it.
They argued about location. Kaisar wanted to move the airport to the Negev desert, to encourage development of Israel’s most neglected region.
“Why drag everyone to the south?” said Arik. “You can’t impose ideology on practical need.”
Kaisar yielded to the vision of a new, normal Israel.
URI BEN-NOON, CEO of the Dead Sea Works, was an unlikely friend for Arik Achmon. Paunchy, gray bearded, with an extra-large knitted kippah, Uri was a devout Jew who liked to quote the Talmud and his father, a Chabad Hasid who had been exiled by the Communists to Siberia. Uri offered Arik insights into the weekly Torah portion; Arik didn’t know what he was talking about.
They had met in the early 1960s, when Uri joined Company A, 28th Battalion, then under Arik’s command. Uri, Arik quickly realized, wasn’t the kind of soldier likely to charge into machine gun fire; Uri, who didn’t like to run at all, once claimed to be a radio operator to avoid a training exercise. But Uri had social skills, so Arik appointed him company clerk, in charge of manpower. Uri never forgot that it was Arik who had insisted the unit’s kitchen become kosher, allowing religious soldiers to feel at home.
Years later, when Arik resigned from Arkia, Uri had been one of the very few in the business community to stand by him, finding him a job. After Arkia, Arik liked to say, I learned that I could fit all my real friends into one taxi and still have room. Uri Ben-Noon was one of those friends.
And now, having recently become CEO of the Dead Sea Works—one of Israel’s most profitable companies, producing fertilizer from the Dead Sea—Uri hired Arik as his consultant.
In Uri the CEO, Arik recognized a soul mate. They shared a fierce commitment to truth: if Arik found anything wrong with my conduct, Uri said appreciatively, he wouldn’t cover for me. And they shared a respect for employees: Uri came to work at 6:00 a.m., to greet the morning shift.
Uri intended a major company expansion. The Dead Sea was rich in magnesium, the lightest metal in industrial use; yet the company was only producing potash. “My managers don’t think big,” Uri explained to Arik. “Each of them is in his own separate world. I need you to get them to act like a team.”
Arik met with each of the two dozen managers separately. He began by introducing himself, though that was hardly necessary: everyone knew that Arik had been Uri’s commander.
“Tell me about yourself,” Arik said, and proceeded to listen. Just as Yehudit had admonished him: Pay attention to people. It wasn’t easy. How can I sit here for two hours listening to this nudnik? But slowly he began to understand: a company isn’t an abstract system, it’s a living organism. People like to talk about themselves; if you appear interested, it helps build trust. Sometimes Arik found himself genuinely interested. What the managers revealed about their lives and thoughts helped him understand the company’s weaknesses and strengths. He had always focused on accomplishing the mission, even if that meant ignoring the emotional needs of others. Now the mission required paying attention to those needs.
The managers suspected him of being a spy for Uri. Some shared sensitive information with Arik, to see whether it leaked. “You don’t know me yet,” Arik said, “but you’ll learn that what you say to me in confidence stays with me.” Gradually he won their trust and became a channel of communication between Uri and his staff.
Even as he protected confidences, Arik tried to protect Uri. When a manager whom Arik felt was disloyal to Uri was up for promotion, Arik protested. “Don’t be so hard, Arik,” Uri admonished. “Sometimes even you have to learn to forgive and forget.”
IN MAY 1993, Arik turned sixty. He gave himself a present: a renewed subscription for skydiving. Leaping from the plane, stretched out toward earth, he felt an old vigor and self-confidence, a man astride his world.
FIRST FRUITS IN VENICE
THE METAL OUTLINES of a greenhouse were already visible when Avital, laughing and running toward his friends, appeared in the Venice fair grounds. In three weeks, the Biennale would open, and with it a fully functioning replica of the Ein Shemer greenhouse. An advance team of kibbutzniks had been working for nearly a week, clearing and measuring and fastening. “You’re amazing, amazing!” Avital exclaimed, grabbing his friends and kissing them.
And then Avital got to work. Kneeling, he screwed metal arches together. Someone in a cherry picker sawed off branches extending into the greenhouse space. Wooden planks were hammered into chairs. Avital had agreed in the end to build a new greenhouse rather than dismantle the one in Ein Shemer, and that meant more work against a pressing deadline.
They were middle-aged men in blue work shirts, young people in T-shirts. There was no boss; the collective trusted itself.
ON THE EVE OF SHAVUOT, the harvest holiday of first fruits, they completed the basic structure. As they unrolled the plastic roof, church bells were ringing.
Exhausted and energized, Avital’s team gathered around a long wood table for a celebratory meal of vegetables and white cheese. Rafi baked pitot in a small clay oven. On a gas burner, Turkish coffee was brewing in a blackened tin pot, just like in Ein Shemer.
Rafi offered a kibbutznik’s version of blessing: “Okay, so let’s bless the fruit of the vine, of the field.” He quoted the Bible: “‘A holiday of Shavuot shall you make for yourself.’ A time to plant, a time to sow . . . and to eat.” Laughter. “At this hour, as the final preparations on the kibbutz are being made for the ceremony of the first fruits, as Comrade Hankeh has made her peace with the Yemenite dance for the ceremony—” Laughter. “At this very hour we are eating a dairy holiday meal with bread the work of our hands. Happy holiday!”
Gideon Ofrat appeared, as relieved as he was joyful. “Hevreh, really, what amazing work,” he said. “In whatever name I speak for—art, the state of Israel, whatever—thank you.”
THE FORTY-FIFTH BIENNALE opened on June 9, 1993. There were acrobats on stilts trailing streamers, women with shaved heads wearing wings. An empty frame hanging from a tree turned passersby into momentary portraits. In the Russian pavilion, conceptual artist Andrei Monastyrsky celebrated Soviet kitsch. In the German pavilion, Hans Haacke tore up the floor; a sign on the wall read “Germania,” Hitler’s name for Berlin. The American pavilion exhibited new works by the eighty-one-year-old sculptress Louise Bourgeois; her name was engraved over the Greek-pillared entrance.
In the midst of this celebration of the artist, of pure art, Avital and the hevreh grew cucumbers. There was much curiosity about the Israeli exhibit. It was undeniably beautiful: a three-meter-high domed plastic structure overflowing with greenery, at its center a long fish tank with sheets of water pouring from showers above and turning the air into mist; at once moist with new life and ethereal, shimmering and transparent. But what exactly was it doing here?
The very presence of the greenhouse challenged the other exhibits, just as Ofrat had hoped: is there a purpose for art beyond its own expression? It was, in its way, an echo of the ancient argument between Athens and Jerusalem: was the highest human achievement aesthetics or divine service?
Avital, of course, would not have put it that way. And yet as the greenhouse evolved into a holistic model, Avital’s idea of existence had become holistic too. Nothing was extraneous. It was a vision of a purposeful universe.
Avital loathed being turned into the center of attention, becoming part of the show. When an Israeli TV crew filmed him watering plants, he said testily, “Leave me alone.”
Unfazed, the reporter turned to the camera: “The message here is that the greenhouse is the work of a team.”
Finally Avital relented and gave a brief interview to the Israeli crew, but only to emphasize the centrality of the hevreh: “This is what defines us: a group of young people, all of them army graduates, all of them serious— And the fact that we can work together for years— And we’re not alone. In Israel there are hundreds of places where hevreh work together, doing great things. Thanks to”—he clasped his hands—“being together.”
Avital Geva, age fifty-two. The camera showed a man with bright blue eyes, short graying hair, spare long face, stubborn chin, bashful yet mischievous smile. In his tank top and baggy blue kibbutz pants, he looked like one more worker in the greenhouse, just as he intended.
Yet Avital was acutely aware that, for many Israelis, his egalitarian vision wasn’t the future but the past. At the Biennale, the state of Israel was celebrating its collectivist heritage just as the kibbutz was beginning to concede defeat. Even Ein Shemer had recently shut down its children’s house, returning its young people to the nuclear family. And most kibbutzim were deeply in debt to the banks. Ein Shemer had avoided bankruptcy only by selling ninety dunams of orchards to a developer, who was building a shopping mall on land that Avital and his friends had cultivated.
BACK HOME, AVITAL received an invitation to participate in an art exhibition in Japan. He wrote, “If you want to see me, come to Ein Shemer. I’m busy working on the roof of the greenhouse with the children.”
Government officials, potential donors, and old friends came to congratulate him. One of them was Arik Achmon.
“Avital, I’m deeply impressed by what you’ve accomplished,” said Arik. “You’ve come a long way from harnessing my daughter to a plow.”
Avital laughed and gave Arik a pot of mint.
A PRECIOUS INHERITANCE
MEIR ARIEL WAS walking past a synagogue in Tel Aviv early one evening when a man standing at the entrance waved him over. We need a tenth man to complete the minyan, the prayer quorum, he said. Meir readily agreed. After prayers—too fast for Meir, who lingered over the words—he was invited to return for the synagogue’s afternoon Talmud class.
The next day Meir joined the men around a long table, listening to them argue with the ancient rabbis. Meir had long since become expert in Bible, quoting from memory long passages from the Prophets and the Song of Songs. But here was Jewish knowledge that had been denied him on the kibbutz.
Meir became a regular in the synagogue’s study circle. His parents’ generation of Jews had been the first in three thousand years to sever the continuity of religious faith, a necessary rebellion, perhaps, to create a new life in the land of Israel. But now the son was restoring the Jewish millennia to the Israeli decades.
Every morning he withdrew to his study and prayed in phylacteries. Sometimes he would spend as long as two hours reading from the prayer book, savoring the sacred Hebrew, talking to God in his own lyrical Hebrew. Then he would work on a song.
Tirza couldn’t understand why Meir was wasting his time in prayer. When a friend called, asking for Meir, Tirza said, “He can’t talk now, he’s swaying.”
Prayer calms me, Meir explained to her. To a friend, he said, “If not for the Torah, I’d be in an institution.”
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, in the hours before sunset, Meir swept the yard of his house near the sea, paid his tab at the grocer so as not to carry debt into Shabbat, then took an especially long shower, purifying the body and washing away the week. As a favor to him, Tirza lit Shabbat candles. Meir stopped smoking for twenty-four hours and tried not to violate Shabbat by driving. He preferred to perform, he said, during the “six days of creation.” But when he had a performance on Friday evening that he felt compelled to play, he would circle his car in a ritual of his own making and declare the vehicle his temporary home—honoring the spirit of Shabbat if not quite its strict observance. Then, with Tirza driving, he would fill a silver goblet with wine and bless it. If his Judaism was to be authentic, it had to be an expression of his being, not an imposed set of rules.
Word got around that Meir Ariel—of all people!—was becoming an observant Jew, and a journalist for the newspaper Ma’ariv came by to interview him.
Her questions were about the technicalities of observance, which she read off like a shopping list. Do you light a fire on Shabbat? Separate meat and milk dishes? How much time do you spend studying Torah? The questions revealed her anxiety: Was Meir Ariel, the bohemian whose songs broke all the taboos of Hebrew music and who championed marijuana and spoke openly of his open marriage, about to be lost to secular Israel?
Meir answered patiently, trying to expand the conversation to ideas, avoid being labeled.
“So that’s it?” asked the journalist. “Now you’re Orthodox?”
“I’m not exactly secular and not exactly Orthodox,” Meir replied. “I’m pareve. . . . [I haven’t] gone all the way in observing the commandments.”
He felt, he said, like someone who’d been given a precious inheritance and was now assessing its worth.
“How can you as a religious person perform in a pub?”
“It is an honorable place where people gather, like a synagogue. . . . We are in the land of Israel, in clubs where people allow themselves to be happy.”
And why didn’t he wear a kippah?
“I’m waiting for the moment of love. One should take that on with love and feeling. Maybe I’m postponing many [other observances] so as not to frighten my environment.”