A country of intersections ...
To appreciate the miracle that is Israel, one must notice the meeting of things one would never expect to intersect
A few weeks ago, when our newest grandchild was just a few weeks old, his mother (our daughter-in-law) was scheduled to take an important exam with a government ministry one morning. The baby was awake all night in those early days. As our son was still clerking at the Supreme Court, and he, too, needed to be functional during the day, we told the kids to stay with us and I’d take the baby for the night. They could sleep, and the baby and I would have good bonding time.
The little guy and I had about six hours together, in the dark of the night, with the rest of the house asleep. For hour after hour, as I held him in the rocking chair or paced the house with him asleep in my arms, I sang to him. For some strange reason, one song that seemed to calm him particularly was Meir Ariel’s “Modeh Ani.” So I must have sung it to him fifty times that night.
As the sun began to rise (relevant to that song, as we’ll see), I wondered: when he’s older, will he appreciate the miracle that that little song is, how it’s an embodiment of the very essence of what this country is supposed to be? I hope so.
Outside Israel, conversations about Israel after quite often conversations about the conflict. Inside Israel (hence, Israel from the Inside), they hardly ever are. Micha Goodman, one of Israel’s most important public intellectuals, explained it this way, in a very recent interview in Haaretz:
Most Israelis, including on the right, don’t want to rule over the Palestinians. They’re deeply uncomfortable with enforcing a military occupation over a civilian population. And most Israelis are very worried about a pullback that will allow [the Palestinians] to threaten us. … Faced with the need to reconcile both those feelings, Israelis have become paralyzed and indifferent, which is why for a decade now you haven’t seen the big demonstrations for peace of for building new settlements, which once drew tens of thousands of people. Instead, we’ve had big protests for social justice and over the price of cottage cheese and affordable housing. Not because we’ve solved the conflict, but because we’ve become indifferent to it.
He’s exactly right. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they have no expectation that anything on that front is going to change anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean that Israeli life is suspended as we wait; quite the contrary. The miracle that is this place unfolds daily, often seen most powerfully in unexpected intersections.
Two of the great early leaders of Zionism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am. Herzl, whose seminal book, The Jewish State, launched political Zionism, believed that what the Jews needed more than anything was a state of their own. Ahad Ha’am (a pen name which means “one of the people”; he was born Asher Ginzburg) disagreed, though. Statehood, he thought, would sully the Jews. They would do better to focus not on politics or statecraft, but on culture. What he thought the Jews should create in Palestine was not a country, but an oasis of Jewish cultural depth, a place where the richness of Jewish intellectual and artistic life could be reborn.
Herzl and Ahad Ha’am were thus two of Zionism’s early titans, fundamentally opposed to each other’s worldview. Herzl believed that without a state, the Jews would not survive Europe’s venom. Ahad Ha’am believed that having a state would do them in, sully them. Herzl knew virtually nothing about Jewish texts and culture, while Ahad Ha’am was deeply learned, the quintessential Zionist renaissance man of letters.
That’s what I love about the intersection of Herzl and Ahad Ha’am Streets in Tel Aviv (see photograph above). In the end, both Herzl and Ahad Ha’am got their way. The Jews got the state Herzl wanted, and in that state, they created the cultural renaissance that Ahad Ha’am sought. Without Herzl’s state, Ahad Ha’am’s oasis would never survive. And without Ahad Ha’am’s cultural rebirth, Herzl’s state would have little substance or purpose.
Bitterly at odds during their lifetime, they both got their dreams realized in the Jewish State. At that little intersection in Tel Aviv, the two interlocutors are locked in figurative eternal embrace in a country the grandeur of which neither could have foreseen.
A century and a quarter ago, one could have taken every person on the planet who spoke Hebrew and put them all in one building. Today, some ten million people speak Hebrew as their first language, and a few million more as their second. That’s why, whenever I go into an Israeli bookstore (the photos below were taken the morning after Yom Kippur), I cannot help feeling that I’m staring at a miracle. The mere piles of books and the hundreds of linear feet of shelves laden with books in a language that not long ago, very few people spoke, are signs of a Jewish rebirth that could not have happened without Herzl, Ahad Ha’am and Eliezer ben Yehudah, the father of modern Hebrew. (Though I do grant that the translation of a Danielle Steel novel at the very bottom left corner of the photo may not be the epitome of Jewish culture ….)
The same with the sidewalk scene just outside the bookstore. People buying and selling “four species” for Sukkot, not in an Orthodox neighborhood but on a regular old Jerusalem main street, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. What Herzl believed would never happen in Europe. What Ahad Ha’am hoped would happen here.
Those are the misleadingly simple scenes of a people restored to life, of a nation reborn.
But (back to the theme of intersections raised by the photograph above), the most powerful signs of Jewish cultural rebirth in Israel are usually hidden below the surface. Therefore, today, in this season of rebirth and new beginnings, this period of reflecting on the past and imaging a better future, a quick look at that Meir Ariel song mentioned above, and at how a popular Israeli song by a secular artist is actually a riff on a traditional, fairly-well-known Jewish prayer. More Ahad Ha’am.
The prayer is called “Modeh Ani,” traditionally recited when one first wakes up in the morning:
Now, we add Meir Ariel to the mix. Ariel (1942-1998) was first publicly noticed for a song he wrote after serving in the Paratroopers Brigade of the IDF and participating in the battle for Jerusalem in the Six-Day War. At that time, Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” had become an informal national anthem.
Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” was a passionate celebration of the reunification of Jerusalem (she wrote that stanza after the war), but Ariel was disturbed by what he saw as the rabid hyper-nationalism the victory had unleashed. In response, he penned wrote a sobering “reply” to her song, and called it “Jerusalem of Iron.”
The album cover showed Ariel in military fatigues, and with time, Israelis began to refer to him as the “singing paratrooper.” But Ariel, who fought in the Yom Kippur War, as well, had an only moderately successful career as a musician until his death in 1999 as a result of a tick bite.
During his career, though, he wrote still other songs that were plays on earlier Jewish texts, including one that is in dialogue with that prayer, “Modeh Ani”, above. (In a previous column in this series, we spoke about a different Naomi Shemer song, “Over the Honey, Over the Sting,” and saw many of the classic sources that she wove into that song.)
Here are Meir Ariel’s lyrics:
That Ariel’s song is a response to the traditional “Modeh Ani” is obvious from the opening words of both. But notice what he does to the traditional prayer. Instead of thanking God for having “restored his soul” (there are traditions that the soul leaves the body when we’re sleeping, so it’s “returned” in the morning when we wake up), Ariel’s “Modeh Ani” thanks God for good, then for evil, and for good again.
And is it really God to whom Ariel is speaking? We don’t know. God gets no mention in the first paragraph. What we do know is that Ariel thanks some “presence” not for restoring a soul, but for many things, and for things that have happened not only to him, but to his family, his nation, his land—and all humanity.
That intersection between the fiercely particular and the embracingly universal is ubiquitous in Israeli life.
By the second paragraph, though, Ariel isn’t speaking to God, or to some “presence.” He’s speaking to a woman (the “you” in Hebrew is the female form). He’s awake, but she’s not. He’s presumably looking at her, watching her sleep, and she smiles at him even as she sleeps. The future, he promises her as she sleeps, will bring them goodness, much goodness. She laughs. At him? With him? To him? (The Hebrew says “to.”)
An ancient prayer has become a modern love song. Thanks to God have become transformed into something just shy of pillow chat. Liturgy expressing relief for having survived the night becomes a promise of a future filled with goodness.
Without the original “Modeh Ani,” Ariel’s song would be “nice.” What gives it its power, though, is its being in dialogue with the liturgy. In other words, what gives it its power is the realization of Ahad Ha’am’s dream.
Ariel was hardly the most talented performer in Israel’s history. Much like Leonard Cohen (and Noami Shemer, for that matter), the quality of his voice didn’t match the genius of his lyrics. But here he is, performing his own song (make sure that you have English subtitles turned on by clicking on CC if necessary).
Yet Meir Ariel’s song, itself a play on an ancient text, inspired further interplays between texts, and with other artists, too.
Here’s a performance of the same song, this time by Maya Belsitzman and (her husband) Matan Ephrat. Belsitzman has a simply exquisite voice, so the song comes alive in her rendition in a way that, for me at least, it doesn’t in Ariel’s performance.
But there’s more to this performance: listen carefully beginning at 3:58 and you’ll hear her pulling in the above-mentioned Leonard Cohen’s Halleluya, which is, itself, a play on an ancient text. (No subtitles on this one, but you can follow along with the words above.)
Modern text echoes ancient text, classic prayer becomes modern love song. Appreciation for souls returned become thanks for the good we’ve experienced, and for the evil. (What could be more Israeli?) That is classic Ahad Ha’am.
The Belsitzman/Ephrat performance, incidentally, was over Zoom, for Independence Day 2020—the celebration of the state. That’s Theodor Herzl.
At this start of a new year, perhaps now is the moment to recall that as passionately opposed to each other as they were in their lifetimes, not only did Herzl and Ahad Ha’am both “win,” but without both of their visions, we wouldn’t have here what we have today. David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin detested each other for decades and there’s evidence that Ben-Gurion tried to have Begin turned over to the British and in a different incident, killed.
But in retrospect, it’s clear—without both of them, we wouldn’t have what we have. It was Ben-Gurion who laid the foundation of the State and later ran it. It was Begin who got the British to leave. Who won?
We won. Got got Herzl, and Ahad Ha’am. We got Ben-Gurion, and Begin. We’ve curated the past, and transformed it into modern culture. We’e turned prayer into love songs, one melody weaving its way into another. We’ve come alive.
As intersections of all sorts illustrate around here, we’ve actually done precisely what this country was meant to do.
Last month, Israel and Poland came close to the precipice in their diplomatic relations when Israel's Yair Lapid reacted strongly to a new Polish law. The law sets a 30-year limit on legal challenges to property confiscations that had taken place decades ago.
While the law affects Polish, Jewish and other contested property claims, many people felt the law was particularly unfair to Jews, especially since Jews were often late in filing petitions for property after the war, given how dislocated they'd been. The World Jewish Restitution Organization, for example, said that the law marked “a sad day for justice and the rule of law.”
Given the vociferousness of Israel's response to the law, it might seem that its anti-Jewish nature is beyond debate. That's not the case, however. In this conversation with David Bernstein, one of the truly great guides of Israelis and others to Poland, we hear much about the complexity of that law, and about the relationship of Jews to the Polish story in general.
This excerpt is available to everyone; the entire conversation will be available to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside shortly.
We’re making an excerpt of that conversation available to everyone here, and on Thursday (due to the Jewish holidays this week), we’ll post the entire podcast for paid subscribers.
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