Culture, clearly, is multifarious, made up of millions of details of countless manifestations of life. Its destruction can, perhaps, be effected by planning but it is impossible to create through planning. It is also clear that a world lacking culture is worse, more humiliating and more cruel than the world of Cain and Abel, of Sodom and Gomorrah, or of Lot and his daughters. Beyond this is the indestructible bond between a nation and its culture. Culture is created through the interaction of the national spiritual principle with the nation’s ability, religious and moral values, customs and history. The national corpus greatly affects the development of culture, as accumulating culture greatly influences the national corpus.

Because of its deep national and religious roots, every culture has a comprehensive, usually irrational system of ׂsacred cows.׃ In times of cultural crisis, these are the first to come under attack by men of reason, by rationalism, and this approach leads inevitably to complete nihilism. Thus, the extreme tendency toward rationalism and post-modern attempts to dismiss the Jewish cultural system in its entirety pose a threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. The slaughtering of the sacred cows of religion and belief by the members of the Second Aliya and today’s militantly secular population—their attempts to undermine kashrut, Passover, religious marriage ceremonies, Yom Kippur and circumcision—is naturally leading to a corresponding slaughtering of secular Israel’s sacred cows (settling the land, kibbutzim, the work ethic in general and the primacy of agricultural work in particular, socialism, individual obligations, and so on). Today, even the IDF has lost its halo, Jewish immigration is little aspired to, and the secular judicial system, for decades considered the purest, most uncorrupted element in Israeli democracy, has lost the nation’s trust—something which perhaps is to be blamed on the atmosphere of slaughtering sacred cows, although the attitudes and behaviors of members of the judiciary have themselves contributed to this atmosphere.

What is clear is that the fragmenting of the Hebrew cultural personality is having an effect far greater than was originally intended. First, traditional beliefs and religion were undermined, followed by the weakening of secular social aims, leading to significant impairment of the nation’s political and judicial institutions. This has adversely affected the existence of Israel not only as the state of the Jewish nation, but as a democratic state as well. The worst part is that although it is impossible to build a new Israeli culture or absorb a foreign culture, which necessarily would be inconsistent with the nature of the people, it is certainly possible to destroy the old culture. What is left in the wake of this tiring process is the emptiness of a cultural void, which small-minded militia are already beginning to penetrate: Materialistic nihilism and primitive, violent barbarity.

I have presented a thoroughgoing explanation for what in the nineteenth century was called decadence. And now an additional development in decadence threatens our state, because of the distortion of democracy. Affirmative discrimination which prejudices the Jewish nature of Israel may bring about the elimination of Jewish interests, with the far-reaching result of bringing about a state in which Jews are a marginal demographic and political factor. By following this socio-political path, and not necessarily through the use of force, the face of the nation may be transformed into something like a diaspora country where Jews are a large minority who happen to have moved to Israel.

These predictions are, of course, pessimistic, but I think also realistic. Roman historians knew that cultural decadence had practical implications for national life, and those willing to take this chance can choose to do so. Yet we should not be surprised to find ourselves fulfilling the pessimistic predictions of the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg of another tragic end to an attempt at creating a Jewish polity.

Dov Landau
Petah Tikva

Canaanite Quandary

TO THE EDITORS:

I enjoyed the article “Zionism and the Myth of Motherland” (AZURE 5, Autumn 1998) by Assaf Sagiv, but would like to make the following comments:

The idea that exile “serves in the Bible as a basis for responsibility” is a rather negative one. How much more upbeat is the philosophy that conscience and responsibility are inbred Jewish traits (possibly the gevura trait of Isaac); they push us to fulfill responsibilities. Failure is thus the other, undesirable side of the coin.

Therefore the aim of the nation of Israel, to paraphrase Mizrahi philosophy, is: The nation, God, his Tora and his land are one—rather than Sagiv’s “otherness between man and the world.” Thus the aim is the positive goal of filling the land with Jews (see, for example, R. Zalman Sorotzkin, Oznaim Latora, Numbers 14:21, s.v. “Truly, as I live”). This idea has the additional advantage that if goals directed at the land itself are stymied, one can still push forward in developing the perfection of the people who are already here.

That this positive viewpoint is that of the Bible can be seen in the writings of R. Avigdor Neventzal. In his Talks on the Book of Genesis, he writes that the “flight from the East” (Genesis 11:2) was a general aliya of all mankind to the Source, the “Motherland,” the Land of Israel (only one man completed the journey, Abraham). The motives for this aliya are outlined in the Kli Yakar on Genesis 12:1: “Get thee gone” is a return to man’s source, of inestimable benefit both spiritually and materially (“and I will make you into a great nation, and bless you...”). Thus the Bible does not “reject autochthony as irrelevant” but rather sees man’s return to the “source from which soul and body were created” (Kli Yakar) as the central story of mankind.

Finally, the quote from Ben-Gurion is sad, in that it was entirely unnecessary for him to postulate that the “Hebrews dwelt in the land among the Canaanite peoples even prior to Abraham.” Rashi comments (Genesis 12:6) that “the Canaanites were in the land” and were “continually conquering the land of Israel from the children of Shem, for Noah gave the land to Shem when he divided the land,” and not to the usurper Canaan. So Ben-Gurion need not have been so apologetic.

Aryeh Hirsch
Beit El

Immigrant Art

TO THE EDITORS:

Avraham Levitt’s article “Israeli Art On Its Way to Somewhere Else” (AZURE 3, Winter 1998) was a readable, fascinating, illuminating and truly historic overview. I find its conclusions to be sad and probably quite correct, but I must ask: What about the artistic abilities and contributions of our Russian Jewish brethren who migrated here en masse in the last decade? Approximately one million Jews from the ex-Soviet Union have come here since 1988, of whom, apart from thousands of scientists, engineers and musicians, there must also be many artists.

Has this influx of foreign talent not affected the Israeli artistic landscape? Are those artists not employed as art teachers? Must they resort to floor-washing to scrape out a living? There are scientific incubators for immigrants (and their ingenuity); what about incubators, or better put, studios, for immigrant artists?

As Levitt’s overview seemed so thorough (and sincere) I was concerned to find out that not a word was said about Russian Jewish artistic talent now within our borders. I sure hope that all those artists did not get retrained as English teachers or as computer freaks. (We have a big enough supply of the above as it is.)

I recall an article in The Jerusalem Post within recent years that claimed the abundance and depth of musical talent that came with the Russian Jewish immigrants of the last decade raised music in Israel to a level that would not have been achieved in a full century of purely native talent. So, what about the artistic talent of those same Jews?

Sue Tourkin-Komet
Jerusalem

PDF Format

previous (page 2 of 2 - view all)