The Shame Of It All

There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was about something different. Days when Zionists could articulate what the purpose of Jewish Statehood was, days when Israelis understood that having a state was about changing the existential condition of the Jew. Not anymore.

Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in Kishinev, understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to change. What else could he possibly have been saying in his epic poem, "The City of Slaughter" (scroll down to the two paragraphs that begin with the lines "Descend then, to the cellars of the town"), when he describes the mass rape scene in which Jewish women are helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact, for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks rape and murder are simply what Cossacks do. The problem with what happened in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his bitter irony, rests with the Jewish men. It's bad enough that they were too weak to intervene, to defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters, though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were too frightened to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says, is that when the slaughter and the butchery were over, these men looked down at the broken bodies of the women that they had supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of telling them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them that they would take care of them no matter what, they gazed at these violated, half-dead women, and saw a halakhic question. "Is my wife," the Kohanim in Bialik's poem want to know, "still permitted to me?"

Chaim Nahman Bialik is the national poet of the Jewish people. In his famous poem, he sought to tell Jews that being powerless is an unnatural condition and being sitting ducks for the enemy flies in the face of human nature. Its natural to want to be alive and remember why you're fighting the enemy. All of that has been forgotten today in Israel. In a strange sort of transmogrification, the Jews have been transformed into the type of people Bialik lamented about the Jews. A century after he wrote his famous poem, one thing is clear: you can take the Jew out of the Galut but you can't easily take the Galut out of the Jew. Centuries old habits learned as a minority are going to be hard to erase. Above all, until Jews figure out who they are and why they live in Israel and why they should defend it, the truth is more Jews are going to die. As all of that is happening, its not going to be a fun country to live in as a country is founded for a serious purpose. Bialik and Nathan Alterman knew why the Jewish people had to have a homeland. The question can be answered only when the Jews in Israel will awaken from their national amnesia and recall why they are there.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

Thank you so much for posting this. I was absolutely spellbound as I read it. I have also signed up for his dispatches and e-mailed him about my reaction to his writing. I had never heard of him before, and so I appreciate your introducing me to his writing.

Carolyn

“Know what you fight for and love what you know.”

Brings to mind one of my favorite Chesterton quotes:

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

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