Non Fiction Authors From Israel

"The ways of the world began to turn upside down about one hour after sunrise. (first line of "Prophet")"

"They kept leaving all the time. One from a town, two from a family, they fled the settled districts of the land of Egypt to join those who had left before them. They did not go far: no further than the nearest oasis or the first gully that had a spring. They sought only to put the sand between themselves and Egypt, to get away from its lords and officials. No more than that. (first lines)"

"An immense freedom, vast beyond human measure, hung over everything. The days had no rules and the laws of nature themselves seemed suspended. There was no longer any need to rise for work in the morning. There were no masters and no slaves. There was only the desert, which held no threat, and the gullies among the rocks. And the fresh, boundless mornings with the thinnest of mists rising from the thorn trees and from the flowering star thistles in the plain. The silence was palpable. There was no end of sky. (p 16)"

"And yet, thought many of the camp dwellers without saying it, and yet we should have had a god to show them. So as not to be shamed. (p 32)"

"In a small stone hut, not far from the Valley of Zin, lived a young man whose father had sought to kill him. Ever since then his eyes blinked rapidly, as if fending off a strong light. The villagers kept away from him and he from them, their speech brief and halting, no more room in it for good or evil than the space between a cloud and a lone thorn tree in the desert. (first lines)"

"Sometimes it rained a little. Sometimes they went thirsty. They knew that God was far away. Perhaps he was in the mountains, the place of the priests and the tabernacle. (p 133)"

"The Hittite woman would not give up. Each time Salu came, she clutched desperately at the threads of his life as if at a garment she could pull him by. (p 171)"

"Nationalism reinforced by fundamentalist religion equals conflict. In this region, we are drugged on man-made drama; on a perpetual high of violent politics. It will take more than a few men signing a paper to make people realize the strength of the ordinary; to feel that sanity can be exciting. Only visible, everyday change can, gradually, with great patience, make it happen. (Preface)"

"One essential thing did change: from now on it is not automatically Jew against Arab and Arab against Jew; it is the Jews and Arabs who support peace, and those, Jews and Arabs both, who oppose it-not one nation against another, but two bi-national coalitions. That in itself constitutes the greatest change in the Middle East, perhaps the only one that might succeed, indeed, perhaps a last chance. (Preface)"

"To my mind, the whole world is nothing more than an invitation to take part in creation. Literature, at least-or at least the magic of opening sentences-answers this need. ("Beginnings")"

"What should we do about myth: tell it from generation to generation, love it, and, in some part of ourselves, even believe it a little; but also open it, and add to it another midrash and another interpretation and some more knowledge, ours and that of others. There is no contradiction to them; "all are words of the living God," and the ability of man to contain different things is limitless. We may discuss myth at the dinner table, and say the blessing over these candles without any difficulty, and know and tell our children that the jar of oil, as a metaphor for continuous culture, will never be lacking. ("What Should We Do about Myth?")"

"Food is a world view. It is the real relationship between man and his environment; it is enjoying all this bounty, or forcing and being forced. ("On Being a Levantine")"

"I am a Levantine because I see war as the total failure of common sense, an execrable last resort. And because I am a Levantine, all fundamentalists on all sides, from Khomeini to Kahane, will always want to destroy me and all Levantines like me, here and in the neighboring"

"The strength to carve signs in stones is for me the Levant, and is what makes it all worthwhile."

"reference to a Georgis Seferis poem, in the essay "On Being a Levantine""

"This writer said in October 1967, in an article in Ha'aretz, that if we hold on to the territories, the first consequence will be that we will start lying to ourselves. That is exactly what happened, very rapidly, and that is what is happening today, when a weak population, deprived of citizenship and rights, lacking arms and the means to defend itself, is claiming its rights-a claim that is consonant with the Israeli social interest itself-but is reflected in our warped mirror as actually threatening the existence of the state. Not only an outsider will have trouble understanding this; so will the historian of the future. The worst of it is that these tribal mythologies leave us with no alternative, no scale of possibilities, no prospect of culture, no choice of identity-except to be either murderers, the murdered, or both. As though Israel had no other identity. As though, in the biggest lie of all, this were Judaism. ("Israel: The First Forty Years")"

"One of the things Zionism was meant to make from scratch was a Hebrew present. Not only in reality; in the language, too. In ancient Hebrew, there was very little grammatical present. There was a past and a future--that is, memory and longing. We almost never said "I go," "I do." It was necessary to make the present a linguistic habit, a routine part of life. Perhaps Zionism came into being primarily to create for us a present tense. To say at long last that the Jews, too, have a present. Whoever now denies this present has forgotten the whole lesson of Zionism; he would send us back to the days of remembering and longing of the Diaspora. We came to Israel so as to not wait for a messiah who is yet to come; rather, we came to be here now, today. That is Zionism in a nutshell. ("Life Is Now, Mr. Shamir")"

"We write of what we know, but a large part of our local culture-not all but a large part-tends to lose its significance in transposition."

"It is probable that the time of governments' wishing to control literature is past. What we are faced with now is the frightening authority of great, terrifying masses of people who hardly ever read, who prefer television and the movies, and who carry the terrible weight of sheer huge numbers. What can we do? Essentially, what we have been doing so far: write of what we know, our places, our environment, our families. Tribal literature, if you wish. All the world understands families. A family contributes to the understanding of people as people."

"One example of our inability to cope with large numbers is our lack of comprehension of the magnitude of the Holocaust. During the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, it was the individual murders that registered in our memories and our senses rather than the descriptions of mass murders. For many of us who attended the trial, Eichmann had to answer for personally whipping to death a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy who stole an apple. Large numbers tend to become abstract, too abstract to identify with. No writer can write about the six million of the Holocaust; we must write about individuals, about families."

"To a certain extent, all writing is working within tradition: we use idioms, linguistic connections, and associations known to our tribe, because we cannot go outside language, and languages are tribal affairs."

"Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical.""

"To this day our language has kept its stony, concentrated, concise character, striving for the essential. This makes Hebrew practically untranslatable; a phrase of three words in Hebrew becomes a phrase of eighteen words in French, so you can imagine what it does to poetry."

"Our history is not only the history of a people, but also the history of a language...Some parts of our tradition are widely known; others are less known because it is so difficult to translate from Hebrew. Whole theories were built upon incorrect translations from Hebrew. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," as most translations have it, does not exist in the Bible. The original commandment is "Thou shalt not murder," which is entirely different. A whole ethos has been created in other cultures because of a fallacious translation of a commandment written originally in Hebrew."

"If people visit books as they do tourist sites, looking for the famous passages they have heard about, looking for the best-seller they were told about, just to be able to say "I was there," then we have missed the whole point of literature."

"Language has two functions. One is to make communication between people possible. The other is the preservation of knowledge. Without language it would be impossible to prove any scientific truth or to learn from the experience of the past. All languages fulfill these two functions. And yet different languages have developed in such ways that each one represents the peculiar mind-set of those who speak it. A child who learns a language-that is, learns to speak at about the age of one-is already learning subconsciously the system of thinking peculiar to his language, and also its mental categories."

"Generally, we translate only one level of a language, the top of the pyramid, leaving very different levels concealed below."

"Hebrew, a synchronic language, holds certain precise ethical and philosophical value concepts that belong only to Hebrew and to Judaism and that are really untranslatable."

"It is probably true that the generation born in Palestine sixty years ago was the first since the Dispersion whose parents spoke Hebrew as an everyday language. Also, for the first time in two millennia, there was no longer a division between the mother tongue spoken at home and the male language of study and ritual. This is no minor matter, for from a psychological point of view, Hebrew at that point stopped being only a language of learning and ideas and became a language of feeling."

"We may well be entering a new oral age, for we now have the means to preserve information possessed by no previous generation. We have audio and video cassette libraries, computers, memory banks-everything is taped and recorded. Immediate communication fills our space now more than the function of preservation. Who writes a letter, when you can phone? The air is full of sound-from transistors, cassettes, and TV sets. It is full of music and songs and various forms of oral communication, often of a low common denominator. True, the technical possibility of transmitting such sounds has created new borders."

"We know more about a foreign politician or entertainer than we do about the man across the road."

"At some point we will have to decide whether Hebrew in the next thirty or three hundred years will serve merely as a channel of immediate and basic communication, as a language at the top of a pyramid, without any pyramid beneath it, a claustrophobic language not much different from Esperanto, or whether it will embody an entire non-Western culture that we know is worth preserving. Since language shapes us more than we shape it, this decision will be essentially about our own identity. It seems more and more certain that this will be a matter of a conscious decision."

"if the limits of my language are indeed the limits of my world, I cannot think of a world more open to exploration and discovery, more intriguing and satisfying, than Hebrew."

"The word "teacher" does not mean a person who "presents" a lesson (what an awful expression!), who is responsible for the pupils' being able to quote a few details and dates. A teacher-if he or she is also an educator-is responsible for seeing that most of the pupils in his or her class leave school as autonomous individuals, capable of independent thinking and decisive and discriminating behavior. For a person to be able to make autonomous decisions (read: to be a proper citizen), he needs to have as much information as possible. Not myths. Not legends. Not lies. Information."

"To be able to one day change a harsh reality, we need to know how to define what needs to be changed and how to effect change. To cope with situations in life-both personal and public-we need to have a real picture of these situations and of their possible outcomes. We need to know the price of each and who will pay it in the end. To know that every act and every error has consequences. To reduce to a minimum the possibility that someone-the regime, or the press, or the local leadership-will deceive us, cram us with false "facts" that are appropriate to whoever is making use of them. To make quite sure that, in the highest possible percentage of cases, we can make our own decisions and not let someone else think for us. All these things require a constant and precise mapping of reality. In other words, they require information about what exists and what is possible."

"Whoever wants theater to "beautify" reality, the papers to "beautify" reality, literature to create "positive" heroes, and the nightly news to be "constructive" is raising loyal subjects, not citizens. The "ornamental" perception of life...has no place in an education system whose goal it is to raise citizens and autonomous adults. And if a teacher does not have the courage to look reality in the eye as it is, together with her pupils, and to think with her pupils, the education of pupils should not be placed in her hands. It is not them but herself that she shields from reality; it is she, in essence, who does not have the strength to cope with reality. And self-pity has little to do with education."

"there is nothing in the world as morally binding as belonging to a minority."

"In most universities neither law nor mathematics is taught among the humanities. This is a pity, because it would benefit the so-called human spirit to move a little horizontally, not just perpendicularly, so that people could learn a few intellectual languages in addition to those they know."

"It is a familiar sight: an intellectual so sure of his thesis or model that he pesters the powers that be to put it into practice. Accountability, however, will always fall on the person who acted on the theory, not the person who invented it. We confer upon the intellectual-by definition-the full and complete freedom to create a theory and to build an abstract model without any responsibility for the results, and this is indeed one of the most difficult problems to be pondered on in the humanities."

"Any given discipline contains a majority of priests and a minority of prophets, and the eternal question is who prevails."

"Intellectuals usually analyze change, sometimes they are lucky enough to foretell it, and occasionally they are instrumental in causing change. In the usual situation the intellectual becomes a kind of ornament to a revolution, if it likes to pride itself on its intellectuals."

"The greatest danger to any discipline is the creation of a static model that keeps the same vocabulary for any length of time. In such a case, the intellectual becomes an ex-intellectual in no time."

"A group of intellectuals can unwittingly become an arrogant anti-intellectual group if it does not give a good shake once in a while to itself and its vocabulary, from the bottom up. It can become anti-intellectual if it is no longer able to live with ambiguity and cannot bring itself to say "I have no answer," "We do not know.""

"The more one shares knowledge, the more of it one has, and the more complete it becomes. Moreover, it is the sharing of knowledge that brings about greater knowledge and inspires more and better thought. Knowledge is not subject to purely commercial considerations, just as good books are not subject to the prevalent economy."

"In the Sinai of knowledge there is room for all of us, friends and enemies, opponents and admirers, all of us who populate the earth, without limitation at all, in a different ecology yet unknown to us in most other fields. Perhaps, very slowly, we shall come to know it."

"The question we must answer is whether it is possible to raise a generation on nothing but traumas that were caused by others, exclusively on a sense of perpetual destruction and deterministic hatred, or whether there are some other things about Judaism, not necessarily related to victimization, that define us both as a people and as individuals. Does being a Jew only mean being a victim, defined by the actions of others? Or does it also mean being a people that established an elaborate judicial system, created a language to be proud of, built a state and established a social order (not only fought for their existence!), and developed demands and expectations for perfecting the world and the individual, expressed in various phenomena throughout history, that no other people did? In other words, are we willing to accept Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of Judaism, "anti-semitism makes Jews" (that is, he even denies us the right of self-definition)? Or are there also things about us that have nothing whatsoever to do with the acts and attitudes of others?"

"In the short run, the identity of victim does, indeed, pay off. Sholem Aleichem recognized this in his story "Lucky Me, I Am an Orphan." Anyone who is a victim and nothing but a victim-in the sense of "deserving" compensation and forgiveness for everything-usually milks this position for all it is worth, through the end of the generation that witnessed the tragedy. In the longer run, the perpetuation of the victim identity causes complete severance from reality, utter dependence on the past and the past alone, and distortions of all proportions and emphases to the point of warping the personality."

"A time comes when it is no longer possible to use this victimhood as an excuse for everything. As every educator knows, it creates a great residue of cynicism, if only because of the obvious gap between what children are taught by rote and what they see with their own eyes. If I am a victim--and not just any victim but an eternal victim-then I am excused from many things: from having pride in what I am, for example; from exploring and studying my real identity; from looking in the mirror; from a sober look at my surroundings to see what is in it and what is not; and from any possibility of empathy for another. Semantic clichés, whose truth no one questions, arise and are parroted, such as "the whole world is against us," when in reality we have both enemies and friends, and the majority of nations and people take no interest in us at all. Or "all the Arabs want to throw us into the sea," with no realistic discernment of our actual, diverse relations with each Arab country separately."

"If I am the sole and eternal victim, then I create around and within myself and raise my children to an inability to see anyone who is not me. If I and only I occupy the throne of the victim, then no stranger can occupy it. This blindness reaches proportions that distort reality. I am not talking only about right-wing Jewish settlers, professional blind men who never see the residents of the West Bank...If I am the sole and eternal victim, then of course I refuse to accept any information that is liable to ruin my self-image. My receptors simply do pick it up. I have no need of it; I already have a map, with one marker it only: I am a victim, and everyone is against me. I refuse to hear not only about the Arabs, but also about myself. I break the mirror. At the base of this attitude is a dangerous thing: it is as if all of Zionism, if the fact of our living in Israel, is dependent on our not knowing and not wanting to know. Those who hold this attitude do not see the Israeli who gets up in the morning, goes to work, pays taxes, waters plants, raises his children, and does reserve army duty. Rather, they see the eternal victim, alone in the world, who sits upright on his throne with his eyes closed, smothering all other peoples (especially Arabs), and is always, always right, right with the blind, cold righteousness of the victim above whose head flutters the banner, "Vengeance is mine!" How many of us, today, see ourselves in this picture?"

"If we insist on absolute justice, the reckoning of lives will never end. All we can talk about is beneficial justice, beneficial for both sides-that is, a territorial compromise and the continuation of the conflict at the negotiating table."