I almost remained in Tel Aviv with a new sweetheart, or maybe with two. But some force kept reminding me about the reason I was here and about that from which I had fled. The Jewish spark, or the voice from Mount Horeb, wouldn’t let me sink again into the illusions of the material world. The voice would suddenly ask me: “Is this why you fled, to rise from one dungheap and fall into another?” The voice also argued: “If you, Joseph Shapiro, heir of scholars and saintly women, are ready to break the Ten Commandments, what can you expect from the sons and daughters of generations of evildoers and idol worshippers?” The men with whose wives I was contemplating affairs had been victims of Hitler. They had lost families in Poland. They had remarried in Israel and were anxious to begin new lives. Did I really want to steal their wives, to buy them with money and presents? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I committed such a crime. I would consider myself a Nazi.
I had heard a lot about the kibbutzim. One day I took a trip to a kibbutz where a distant relative of mine lived. It was a leftist kibbutz. I brought a gift for my relative and he was delighted to get it. He showed me everything: the school, the cowshed, the barn, the lake where carp were hatching. There was a handsome building there called the Culture House. I was supposed to spend the night at the kibbutz, and my relative, an old member, gave me his room. There was voting that night, and all the members attended a meeting after dinner. I saw that the lights were on in the Culture House and I went inside. I was told that there was a library with newspapers from Israel and other countries. When I stepped inside I found it empty. The lights were on but there was no one there. I glanced up at the wall and saw a picture of Lenin and one of Stalin. What Stalin had done, how many Jews he had exterminated, and what a terrible enemy of Israel he was were well-known facts, but there hung his portrait anyway. The leftist Jews of that kibbutz weren’t yet ready to divorce themselves from this architect of “progress,” this prophet of a “bright tomorrow” and a “better future.” I felt like tearing the picture off the wall, trampling and spitting on it. Newspapers lay on the table, among them Soviet ones, as well as Communist and leftist newspapers and magazines in a number of languages, including Yiddish.
As I sat there rummaging through the papers, a girl came in, apparently a member of the kibbutz. She glanced at me with some surprise. I wasn’t in any mood to converse and I kept reading some article in a Red sheet that tried to prove that the only salvation for the world was Communism. The girl began to leaf through a leftist magazine, too, a Hebrew one. I had the feeling that she was waiting for someone. From time to time she glanced toward the door.
Yes, a young man did come in presently. He had black, curly hair and shining black eyes. They were apparently both convinced that I, an American, couldn’t understand a word of Hebrew. First, they talked about me. The young man asked who I was and she said, “The devil knows—some American tourist who happened by.”
After a while, they began discussing more intimate matters, and although it wasn’t easy for me to decipher all the words spoken in the Sephardic pronunciation, I gathered the gist of what they were saying. She had a husband who had gone to Jerusalem but she didn’t know if he would be back this night or in the morning. The young man proposed that she come to his place, but she said that this was too risky. Yes, here in this Culture House in this kibbutz you could establish the same cheating contacts that you could in all other such houses among both Jews and Gentiles. Stalin’s portrait on the wall and the conversation of these two young people convinced me once and for all that you couldn’t find any more feeling for Jewishness among the worldly Jews of Israel than you could among the worldly Jews in other countries. The modern Jew harbored all the lies and delusions of his time. What he called culture was actually a lack of culture, the law of the jungle. True, in the other kibbutzim they had already removed Stalin’s portrait, or maybe they hadn’t hung it up in the first place, but even there they placed their hopes on flimsy sociology, on false psychology, on fatuous poetry, on the interpretations of Karl Marx, Freud, this professor or that professor. They always dragged down old idols and replaced them with new ones. They placed all their hopes on officials whose convictions, politics, and concepts of justice changed with every passing breeze. One day these leaders were the warmest of friends; the next, deadly enemies. One day they cut each other up, and the next they gave each other banquets, drank toasts, and bedecked each other with medals.
Although the Jewish political leaders strove to be exactly as diplomatic and dialectical as the Gentile—this didn’t diminish the age-old hatred of the Jews. No matter how much the Jew has tried to imitate the Gentile, he has remained alien and despised. He still could not be forgiven the sin of not cutting himself off completely from his old heritage, his “arrogance” at refusing to integrate fully with those who burned his holy books and murdered his children. In their hatred of the Jews, there was no difference between the Hitlers and the Stalins.
That night, I slept in the kibbutz. I had passed by the building where the meeting was being held and I overheard an old comrade accuse the audience of having cooled on the socialist ideals and of leaning toward nationalism. He spoke with fervor, he ranted, he slammed his fist against the table. He called the rabbis in Israel reactionary clericals, black crows who wanted to turn back the wheels of history. I wanted to ask him, “Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won’t get bogged down in blood and marrow again?” But I went to sleep instead.
Sleep—that’s a joke. Actually I hardly slept that night. I seemed to see Jews digging their own graves while the Nazis stood around and drove them on with whips: “Faster! Deeper!” I saw them lead Jewish men and women to the ovens. I saw drunken Germans torturing Jews with every possible method devised by that “distinguished author,” the Marquis de Sade, and by other such “greats.” They were all integral parts of the worldly culture—Hitler and Stalin, Napoleon and Bismarck, all the whores, pimps, pornographers, all those who threw bombs, carried out raids, sent whole peoples to Siberia or to the gas chambers. Even Al Capone and Jack the Ripper were part of this culture. There isn’t a scoundrel about whom the professors don’t write books, do research into his psychological makeup, provide countless excuses for his deeds …
That night, I came to the final conclusion that not only must I abandon the culture that had spawned and justified all this evil and falseness but I must also turn to the very opposite of it. I must become someone as far removed from this kind of culture as our grandfathers had been. I must become that which they had been: Talmud Jews, Jews of the Gemara, of the Midrash, of Rashi, of the Zohar, of The Beginning of Wisdom, of The Two Tablets of the Covenant. Only such a Jew is separated from the wicked. The slightest compromise that you make with the pagan culture of our time is a gesture toward evil, a nod to a world of murder, idolatry, and adultery.
I must confess that at the time that I made this resolve, my faith wasn’t yet that strong. I was still completely riddled with doubt and with what I might even call heresy. I went away from evil, you might say, not so much out of love for Mordecai as out of hate for Haman. I was filled with a raging disgust against the world and against the civilization of which I was a part. I ran like a beast runs from a forest fire, like a man fleeing from a pursuing enemy.
The very first thing the next morning I took the bus to Jerusalem.