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PDF FormatThere were, however, those among the sages who wished to restrain displays of unbridled joy at weddings. R. Ashi was enraged by the extreme delight expressed by the guests at his son’s wedding, and pointedly shattered a glass before them. The adoption of this strange act into the Jewish wedding tradition should give us pause.
R. Ashi understood that in joy, there is also sorrow, and that joy itself is a type of sorrow. It is little wonder, then, that his insight was incorporated into the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, and that it acquired national significance: The remembrance of the destroyed Temple. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” as it is written. The Jewish wedding, then, is a ceremony predicated on opposites. Shattering a glass takes on two meanings at once: A couple is formed, and also broken, as in the creation myth of the Kabbalists.
It is this moment of shattering that the Zionist pioneers sought to avoid.
The Zionist slogan, “A people without a land for a land without a people,” was, needless to say, callous in its disregard for the country’s Arab inhabitants. And yet, despite a goodly portion of self-absorbed, nationalistic myopia, the catch phrase expressed, in a fairly straightforward manner, what the pioneers of the early twentieth century saw upon their arrival: Not a land empty of people, but a land devoid of love—a neglected, mostly unsettled and unworked land, a land that—especially when compared to the landscapes of Europe—was quite simply a wilderness.
And it was precisely this wilderness that so moved them. It was not the beauty of the land that stirred their imaginations, but quite the opposite: Its sun-bleached nakedness, its rash of rocky fields, its deserts of thorns and shrubs and bramble. The romantics among them fell to their knees, besotted, at the feet of this primeval nude; the modernists attempted to dress her in a cloak of cement. Either way, the land’s suitors were inflamed as a lover at the first sight of his beloved’s body—not as a husband, whose wife’s body is familiar territory.
In the 1920s, poets as disparate in their political outlook as Abraham Shlonsky and Uri Tzvi Greenberg wrote ecstatic poetry praising the bare and sweltering landscape they discovered between the Jordan Valley and Beit She’an, in the tents of the “Labor Corps.” Ardent Zionists from the philosopher A.D. Gordon to the painter Mordechai Ardon were also stricken upon their arrival with “a harsh clarity that stabs you in the eye,” as Gordon described in his “Letter from the land of Israel”: An almost unbearable amount of light, for which Europeans such as they—Europeans who had longed for Zion from within the dark, cold landscapes of home—were wholly unprepared.
It was under cover of night, not by the light of Kibbutz Degania’s scalding sun, that Gordon’s pen bore its best fruit. Ardon, who upon his arrival was entranced by the glare of scorched earth and baking desert, dropped the subject matter soon after in favor of the mystical, symbolic forest, rendered in a dark palate of deep blues, hunter greens, and burgundy, from which emanated, as if through darkened glass, a hidden, supernatural light. The Jew in Ardon prevailed over the Zionist in him. If there were no actual trees in the parched, arid land, he would simply paint imaginary trees, as they might appear in mystical, Kabbalistic spheres. Instead of painting the land of Israel as it was, Ardon gathered his vision back into the safe, dimly lit folds of its exilic imagination.
“Bird on my window perching / Returned from the land of the sun,” wrote the eighteen-year-old Haim Nahman Bialik. When he authored “Land of the Sun,” he had no idea what Israeli heat was. “In the sun-land,” he wrote, “spring never dies.”
Spring, not summer. The warm caress of May on the boulevards of Odessa: That’s what young Bialik knew of heat. When he moved to Palestine thirty-three years later, it quickly became clear that combining the adjectives “lovely” and “hot” needed qualification. “That is no country for old men,” wrote William Butler Yeats of another fantasy land, and there was many a young Zionist pioneer who wondered the same about his own.
“My hearth and home, poor land of beauty—the queen has no home, the king no crown, seven days in the year, Spring, and all the rest, rain and storm,” wrote the poet Leah Goldberg in an ode to her beloved land. But if it is indeed the land of Israel to which she addresses her love song, then the land of Israel bears a striking resemblance to Lithuania: The spring “never dies.” Like in Bialik’s fantasy, Goldberg’s spring merely scatters the clouds for one measly week a year; the rest is an endless rainy season. Clearly, Goldberg longed for rainstorms. The encounter with the light and the heat of the land of Israel was, for her, an experience much like jumping into a frying pan. The Zionists of Europe dreamed of the hot, lovely land of Israel—then stumbled into a summer meant only for the likes of snakes, goats, and scorpions.
In this beloved land of hers, there is no house, and no crown, for crowns are for brides and grooms, and a house is for a man and his wife. There is only a betrothed couple, whose marriage has not yet been consummated. It is a couple on paper alone—the paper of the marriage contract, and the paper of the poem, in which stanzas, not houses, are built.
“In my beloved land, the almond tree blossoms, in my beloved land, a guest is awaited, seven maidens, seven mothers, seven brides at the gate.” Goldberg’s almond tree blossoms in winter, first among the flowers. It is for this, its wintriness, that she chose it: The act of blooming, for her, always occurred against a blustery backdrop. And who is the guest in her poem? Not Elijah, not the messiah, or some ambiguous, abstract national savior; rather, the young women, the mothers, and the brides (in groups of seven, like the seven days of warmth in the previous poem) await a young man, a groom.
But do they really want the groom to arrive? Are they ready for a wedding? The poem closes with a quote from Song of Songs: “I was asleep, but my heart was awake, the guest passes by my house. In the light of morning, in the courtyard, a single stone rolls.” In the Song of Songs, the young woman tells of her lover come to see her:
I was asleep, but my heart was awake. It is the voice of my beloved who knocks: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; for my head is filled with dew, and my hair with the dampness of the night.”
And how does she answer? “I have taken off my robe. Indeed, must I put it on? I have washed my feet. Indeed, must I soil them?” In other words, sorry, dear, but I’m too tired to get out of bed, get dressed, put on my shoes, and open the door for you. Our young suitor must no doubt be praised for trying again: “My beloved thrust his hand in through the latch opening. My heart pounded for him.” Finally, then, he succeeds in arousing her desire: “I rose up to open for my beloved. My hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, on the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had turned away, and was gone. My soul failed me when he spoke. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.” When he wanted her, she rejected him with frivolous excuses; now she yearns for him, and it is his turn to be evasive. Is this not exactly as she preferred? Lovesickness to love, longing to marriage?
If there is one basic fact regarding the return to Zion that must be borne in mind before and after any metaphysical, poetic, or ideological-nationalistic discussion of the matter, it is this: The return to Zion occurred prior to the invention of air conditioning.
The air conditioner, which marks its seventy-fifth birthday this year, arrived in the Israeli household only forty years later, and even then, and for some time, was still very much a luxury. Yet summer in Israel without air conditioning is hell. And so it was in this hell that Metulla and Gadera, Afula and Hadera, Tel Aviv and Tel Yosef were all founded. The true heroism of the builders of the state is not to be found in the events showcased in history books, but rather in the day-to-day, year-to-year existence in a subtropical climate radically different than any they had experienced before. We, the heirs to their legacy, cannot possibly fathom the hardships of such an existence, as we’ve never had to experience a summer without air conditioning.
