It took me a long time to understand this basic truth, but I began to understand it on that morning in the Rome airport.
Soon it was time to board. This time, I got a seat next to some old woman who wasn’t going to Israel but to Greece. After a while, I had to go to the toilet. I looked around and saw Priscilla deeply engrossed in conversation with the same young man who showed her around. She was so absorbed that she didn’t even see me. She had already forgotten me and was concentrating on this other fellow. Had it been dark and had they been covered with a blanket, she would have tried to do the same with him as she had with me. This is the substance of the worldly woman. Not all of them go to such extremes, but their philosophy is the same: Snatch it all while you can!
I can’t say that my arrival in Israel had the same effect on me as it had had on Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, or on others of lesser stature. The airport in Israel had nothing particularly Jewish about it. True, the signs were in Hebrew and the announcements in that language, too, but modern Hebrew has lost much of the Jewish flavor, the Jewish uniqueness, the Jewish scorn for worldly illusions. Modern Hebrew is one hundred percent worldly. It’s Hebrew, but it’s no longer the Sacred Tongue. A language used to build ships and airplanes and to manufacture guns and bombs cannot be a Sacred Tongue. Modern Hebrew has swallowed up the old Sacred Tongue.
I stood in line and waited for the official to stamp my passport. Naturally he was a Jew, not a Gentile. His eyes reflected a trace of our heritage. But just a trace. The modern Jew’s yearning to be like a Gentile is directly contrary to the essence of Jewishness, which is to be as distant from the Gentile as it’s possible to get. I spoke with many of these Israelis and they nearly all said the same thing: The Diaspora has failed; the Diaspora has been one long mistake, and similar such talk. But what would have happened to the Jews if they hadn’t experienced the Diaspora? They would have blended in with the nations. We wouldn’t have been only dispersed physically but annihilated forever. A number of the Nazis undoubtedly stemmed from Jews who converted during the time of Mendelssohn and later. It’s just one step from assimilation to conversion, and sometimes no more than a generation or two from conversion to Nazism.
I know what you want to say: “Tell the story, don’t preach.” No, I’m not preaching. I don’t want to change you. But I can’t tell you this story if I don’t express my feelings to you.
I went up to the window, the official stamped my passport, and I went outside. A taxi came up and I told the driver to take me to Tel Aviv. When he asked what hotel I wanted, I told him to take me to the nearest one. I looked out of the taxi window at the land of the Pentateuch and of our ancestors. It was much warmer here than in New York. The day was mild, the sky was bluish, with just a few clouds. Neither the country nor its climate was a disappointment to me, but still it wasn’t the Israel of the spirit. The people were the exact replica of those I had seen fifteen hours before in New York. They were dressed in Gentile fashion and they looked like Gentiles. Their faces reflected the same impatience, the same sense of worldly rush and greed. Another taxi tried to outrace us and it was only by an eyelash that both cars didn’t turn over. My driver cursed the other driver in Hebrew and shook his fist at him. We drove into Tel Aviv. We passed a movie theater, and the signs displayed flashy actresses and wild-faced men with guns. They played the same trash here as in New York. When we passed a bookstore, I saw the same cheap novels as in New York. The driver had taken me to the Hotel Dan. I might just as well as have been in some hotel on Broadway.
I wasn’t then, and I’m still not, one to lay the blame on others. You cannot create a kingdom of priests and a holy nation these days. We couldn’t even build one in the days of Joshua, the son of Nun.
Those who say that the Exile was a failure don’t realize that from Moses’ standpoint, the Land of Israel was a failure, too. The people there began to mingle with the idol worshippers from the very first. The idols and the harlots emerged immediately. The Scriptures say about nearly every king: “And he did not what was right in the sight of the Lord.” Jews forgot the Torah so completely during the time of Josiah that it had to be rediscovered again.
It’s getting late and I must stop, but before I go, I want to say just one more thing to you: The Jew has attained his highest degree of spirituality only in the time of the Diaspora. The Scriptures were a great beginning, an enormous foundation, but the Jews of the Scriptures were, with few exceptions, still half Gentiles. The Mishnah represented a tremendous step forward and the Gemara went even further. It took many generations for an Isaac Luria, a Ball Shem Tov, a Vilna Gaon, a Kozhenitz Preacher, a Seer of Lublin, and in later times a Chofetz Chaim and others like them to evolve. Those who want to turn the Jews back to Scripture would wreck the Jewish building and leave only the foundation. That head of the yeshiva and his students whom I met in the Rome airport are Jewry’s greatest achievement. They have isolated themselves from the worldliness more than any other Jews in our history. They were exactly that which Moses demanded: a holy people, guarded by a thousand restraints, a people which “shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” True, they are no more than a small minority, but great ideals have never become mass movements.
Joseph Shapiro glanced at his watch. “Oh, it’s late! It’s time I went home. If you want to hear more of my story we can meet again tomorrow.”
“Yes, I do. Let’s meet tomorrow.”
THE SECOND DAY
* * *
10
I thought that those I’d left in New York would look for me and find me in Israel. I wasn’t traveling on a false passport and the police could easily have tracked me down. But apparently Celia had accepted the idea that everything was over between us. I assumed that she could collect alimony from me and who knows what else. That’s how the Gentile and the Jewish-Gentile laws are—they favor the guilty. The judge, the criminal, and the defense attorneys are often part and parcel of the same institution, They can easily exchange positions. They read the same books, they attend the same nightclubs, they often go out with the same kind of women. Few of them have regard for justice or faith in a higher power. But so far no one had bothered me and I was able to wander freely through Tel Aviv.
In the first days, I didn’t seek out any acquaintances. I wanted to be alone and to take stock—for perhaps the first time—of my life. I strolled along Ben Yehuda Street, went to Dizengoff Boulevard for a cup of coffee, and watched the other idlers who sat at the tables outside, chattered endlessly, read newspapers, and looked at the passersby. When a good-looking woman walked by, the men’s eyes lit up as if they were starved for sex and hadn’t been with a woman for ages. Their hungry gazes seemed to me to be asking: Maybe? … Maybe this is the one I’ve been dreaming of … Perhaps chance will bring us together and it will be the beginning of that great happiness that writers describe in books … This sudden-born hope would last until the woman turned the corner into Frishman Street or I. L. Gordon Street and then the potential Don Juans turned back to their wrinkled newspapers and their cigarette butts. The women who sat at the tables also looked at the passing women and made all kinds of snide remarks: this one had fat legs, that one’s hips were too wide, that one dressed in bad taste … The store windows displayed dresses, jackets, lingerie in the latest style. The Language Committee had already found Hebrew words for all the knickknacks sold here. Whatever else he may be, modern man isn’t ever at a loss for words. I was sitting near a bookstore and from time to time I glanced at the window. All the kitsch novels in the world had already been translated into the Holy Tongue. The kiosks displayed posters advertising cheap plays. If not for the Hebrew characters, I might have been in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, or Rome. Yes, the Enlightened have attained their goal. We are a people like all other peoples. We feed our souls the same dung as they do. We’re already raising our daughters to be depraved. We already publish Hebrew magazines that describe in detail which Hollywood harlot slept with what Hollywood pimp.
>
There was one café here where writers and maybe actors and actresses congregated. I occasionally looked in there. In my younger years I had entertained certain notions about writers and writing. I read their books. I was inspired by the way they could put into words so many thoughts and feelings, often the hiddenmost emotions of the human heart. But as they sat there, their faces expressed the same greed, shallowness, and vanity as the others. They became just as aroused when some female flounced by. Their wives uttered the same petty remarks, while they took sips of their lemonade or orange drink with their rouged lips. You didn’t need any special talent to note that the female intellectuals nursed the same illusions, the same unattainable urges, the same dreams about a happiness that doesn’t exist, as did the other, non-creative people. Between one fantasy and the other, they read some ridiculous story about a beauty pursued by millionaires, or an actress who got ten thousand dollars a night to sing in Las Vegas. From time to time they glanced at themselves in mirrors. Was their age showing? Had they managed to erase every trace of wrinkles? Was Helena Rubinstein’s cream really capable of halting the erosions wrought by time?
After several days of being alone, I began to look up acquaintances from Warsaw—friends, half friends, people I had met in Vilna, in Moscow, in Tashkent. I had no need to look for them, for as soon as one found out that I was here, he told the others. I met some of them sitting there in the cafés on Dizengoff Boulevard. The kissing began and the honeyed words, the questions, the reminiscences. Many of our mutual friends had perished under Hitler, or starved to death, or died in Stalin’s prisons, or been killed serving in the Red Army or in the Polish resistance. Some had died of cancer or a heart attack. Well, no matter how many had died, there were always some left. All Tel Aviv was one big survival camp. I constantly heard the words died, perished, shot, killed. The widowers had new wives, the widows new husbands. Those women who were young enough had borne new children.
I was inundated with invitations. I was constantly buying flowers and candy and taking cabs. Some of the people I met told me that they had already considered me among the dead. I had reappeared like a resurrected corpse. From the way I was dressed and from the presents I brought, they presumed that I wasn’t a pauper back home in New York. Some even began to hint or ask openly that I help bring them to America. Certainly, Israel was our country and our hope, but it was hard to digest so much of the Holy Tongue, so much Jewishness. You couldn’t work your way up here—it was whispered—you couldn’t get anywhere without “pull” or protection. You had to belong to the right party and know people in power. Like everywhere else, here, too, might was right. Could it be otherwise? Jews are people, after all.
One of the women I met spoke to me of intimate matters. She said that the climate here cooled a man’s ardor during the heat waves and worked exactly opposite on women, who became consumed with passion.
“What do you do about it?”
“Oh, we manage.”
And she smiled a sly smile. I saw that she herself was ready to “manage,” actually with me. Why not? I was a tourist, an American, I wouldn’t spread any gossip about her. I lived in a good hotel, I wasn’t stingy or poor. She volunteered a lot of information. She knew all about my acquaintances, their comings and goings, their family life, even their secret desires. She kept repeating that even here in the Holy Land people didn’t behave any more circumspectly than they did in Paris or New York. I realized that not everything she told me was necessarily so, but I later heard the same things from others. No, Hebrew characters and Jewish leaders did not serve as barriers against iniquity.
Between one meeting and another, between one invitation and the next, I would steal into a synagogue. True, many Jews do pray in Tel Aviv. Many lead pure and decent lives. The schools teach the children the Scripture, Jewish history, the Mishnah, and an occasional bit of the Gemara. Many observe the Sabbath and eat kosher food. But the more closely I watched these Jews, the more clearly I felt that they lacked the power to keep their children from the worldliness that ruled the land. This was not, in most cases, a Jewishness born of great faith, but a routine, and occasionally an obligation based on party membership. It was a cold or lukewarm Jewishness. In the synagogues I spoke to the worshippers. None of them possessed the kind of faith that can overcome the fires of the Evil Spirit. They concluded their prayers and the beadle locked the doors. I found no study houses here where boys sat chanting the Talmud as they once did in Warsaw or Lublin. The boys with tiny skullcaps perched on the tips of their heads, the fathers with trimmed beards (or clean-shaven with depilatory), the mothers without wigs were fine enough people, but not fighters against Satan. They belonged to the religious party. Both their sons and their daughters served in the army. They generally read the same newspapers as did the non-observers and attended the same movies. Day in, day out, they absorbed more and more worldliness into themselves, along with all the world’s ambitions. Many of the men prayed only on the Sabbaths and holidays. I came to the conclusion that they had barely enough strength to maintain this observance through a few generations.
But I wasn’t concerned about them, only about myself. I had fled from Celia and Liza but I was again surrounded by countless Celias and Lizas, real ones and potential ones. I knew that from all these invitations and meetings with female friends would come the sort of life that I was trying to escape. I already had offers of an affair from a few married women. The faith that had been ignited within me during the worst crisis of my life began to cool and grow extinguished. I stood in the synagogue ostensibly praying, but the words had ceased to comfort and convince me. I mumbled the Eighteen Benedictions and each benediction seemed a lie. Not even the slightest proof existed that God would resurrect the dead, heal the sick, punish the wicked, reward the just. Six million Jews had been burned, tortured, obliterated. Tens of millions of enemies lurked over the State of Israel ready to lay waste that which Hitler had left untouched. Former Nazis in Germany drank beer and spoke openly about new massacres. In Russia and in America, there grew a generation that had forgotten Jewishness and had become fully or partly atheistic. Many Jews throughout the world served the leftist idolatries, followed all the foolish fads and false theories. They had become more worldly than the worldliest, often more pagan than the pagans. Even if there was a God who could send a Messiah, there were few for whom to send him …
With such thoughts in my mind, I prayed. With such thoughts in my mind, I went to sleep and I got up again.
11
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.
The Penitent Page 6
