Poets From Israel

"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."

"If my only identity is that of the victim, the world's deterministic and doomed victim, I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity, including exiling Arabs from their homes (excuse me, dear hawks, "relocating" them) and taking possession of their land, because I am the victim and they are not; because this is the only way I define myself and my identity-forever. But if I also define myself as the son, or daughter, of a people with a splendid four-thousand-year history of responsibility, of conscience, of repairing and improving, of appealing for social order and justice, of a legal system nearly unparalleled in the world, and of the protection of these traditions; if I have indeed learned and internalized all these, so that they define my identity; then even if often in history I have been the victim of others, I will never oppress those weaker than myself and never abuse my power to exile them (excuse me, dear hawks, "bus them out"). I will not have to define my uniqueness in terms of the past alone."

"Day by day, hour by hour we create Hebrew, Israeli culture, and we take it for granted-not because we wonder whether or not it is "justified," but because this is our existential circumstance. Every day children are born here whose right it is to live, and in peace. Is not all this reality?"

"There is nothing to do but to fix and fix and repair and repair all the time, every day, all our lives."

"Where, then, in the final analysis, does our identity and our uniqueness lie? Certainly not in our being victims; there have been and are victims, including whole peoples who were wiped out without a trace and not compassionately. We have existed as a people for a very long time, and during this time we have indeed amassed a difficult and tortuous history, and very often we were victims. But our uniqueness lies not in what others do to us, but in ourselves alone, in our selfhood, our character, and our culture. It lies in our reality, which is, perhaps, different from that of others. How is it different? In our "who," in our "how." Not what was done to us, but who we are. The uniqueness of a Jew is not in his being a victim. It is in his being a Jew, a proud son of a people at least four thousand years old, who built a humane present and ask for an attainable future. Not a future of messianic proportions, but one of human dimensions."

"Under no circumstances are we to forget our tragedies. But whoever bases our identity on them and them alone, distorts the greatness of this people and keeps from its sons not only pride, but sanity itself."

"The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians."

"Perhaps our region could have freed itself from this prevailing mode of thinking; perhaps not. One cannot play the game in retrospect. Neither can one talk about statistics and numbers without addressing the entirety of human misery, or, by extrapolation, without asking the medics."

"Once a large, difficult, bloody conflict with many losses has begun, it is not the guiding policy of politicians that determines what happens in the field, but rather the ordeal, the sense of distress, the feelings of weakness at each and every spot. In a war, it is not papers that do the fighting, but people-people who are scared, stunned, sometimes hungry and sometimes desperate for vengeance; people who often make bad mistakes."

"More than anything, we must understand that this was not a battle of strength against strength, but of weakness against weakness; throughout the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, each side has felt itself to be far weaker than its opponent, and acted accordingly. We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built."

"The question remains: aside from a great writer, or a writer-historian of Barbara Tuchman's stature, who can draw an accurate picture of the situation and not enrage those who were there? Who can highlight the distress of both sides, without betraying either one?"

"The best encounter is not between Jews and Jews, or between Arabs and Arabs. The best encounter-and such things have happened-is between Jews and Arabs who know one another personally, intimately, and who can tell each other honestly what their anxieties and fear were, what they and their families felt when things happened as they did. The shock of such encounters is great. People learn things they did not know or had repressed, or that their leaders or teachers did not tell them because they did not dare break the silence-not necessarily because they had evil intentions. A different truth is revealed, and not through documents: documents do not talk; a person talks, a family talks. Then something happens: people who have recognized each others' anguish are people who are capable of making peace. People who know the anguish of one side remain stuck in the past, which becomes less and less relevant as the years pass."

"Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist."

"These two societies do not need any more probing of their pasts; they do not need to be shown what "really" happened, nor do they need a painstaking examination of protocols and documents. They need only one thing: healing. Anyone who does not bring them succor, or balm, who does not help them bind their wounds and find common ground, would do best to keep his silence."

"Charisma is catastrophic. It is a relationship-a sick one, and to a great extent symbiotic-between a man who is very, very much in need of applause and constant reinforcement, and a public that seeks a hero to whom it may attribute all sorts of mythological virtues. Once it has found such a hero, this public disclaims all responsibility, as long as the leader endlessly excites and entertains it. A charismatic leader forges an unholy alliance with his public; he becomes a kind of national drug pusher, a provider of constant thrills in return for the vocal adoration he craves. He cannot manage without his public, and his public cannot manage without him: there is a kind of unchecked, mutual, constant high. A leader of this type does not have a normal public; he has groupies. It is difficult to understand what this kind of relationship has to do with leadership, since a leader's role is to define real problems and solve them. Throughout history charismatic types have led people to disaster. Once they have vanished-and they vanish in the blink of an eye-a mere decade or fifteen years later, no one can understand wherein lay their power. In retrospect they usually look ridiculous, their speech and movements laughable, like those of bad actors. There is nothing less comprehensible than the frenzied excitation of yesterday."

"The greatest leaders the world has known were never charismatic or dependent on their public's falling in love with them."

"The first things that get lost in charismatic leadership are facts."

"The fall of the leader is a terrible disappointment, because a charismatic leader's public is always consumed with longing for purity, faith, soul, absolute justice, the whole truth-and it thinks its leader is delivering or has promised to deliver all these things. Charisma is at base a promise never fulfilled."

"An extreme always appears more pure than a compromise."

"Wherever a great promise is not and cannot be fulfilled, the resultant empty space is filled in by fantasy. Such is the case with leaders and followers, with parents and children, and between spouses; who knows better than psychologists or writers how difficult it is, then, to confront that fantasy with reality."

"Let us recall the precise role myth plays in society: it inhibits change. Perhaps that is its raison d'être."

"In charismatic relationships there is no responsibility, only guilt; in more developed relationships, responsibility is present. With charisma there is no "other"; everyone is part of one familial porridge, a publis pabulum. Anyone outside of it is an enemy."

"I have always felt that if the feminist movement had done its job well, it would not have tried to force women into large, hierarchical frameworks that do not suit them; rather, it would have done its utmost to change society from a largely vertical construct, with authority descending from the top down, as it is today, to a horizontal construct, with autonomous networks and cooperating groups."

"The charismatic leader says, "I know what is best for the people" (or "we know what is best for the people") and reaps applause. The authoritative teacher says, "There is a book; in it is written what is best for the people; you will follow me and go by that book, even against your will, so that things will be best for the people." The role model says, "Do as I do, because I have the knowledge and personal experience to know what is best for the people." But the facilitator says, "I have come to the conclusion that this is what is best for the people; let's sit down and discuss it, and I will try to convince you." Since this leader says "come let's sit down" and not "run after me," he has no chance of garnering rhythmic applause in the town square. It is difficult to ask people to sit down and think a minute. It is thought to be practically unleaderly. As if a leader, like a gym instructor, must always make people run...The facilitator demands that we be independent, think autonomously, be critical, have an open mind. In other words, he demands that we be not subjects in a more or less enlightened regime, but citizens; this is sometimes a painful process, because knowing the difference between good and evil also means expulsion from the Eden of childhood. But if we do not leave this Garden of Eden, we will never be able to mend or change anything about our reality"

"We are living in an age of peacemaking. Not peace through love. Peace through accord."

"If we leave aside Israeli self-pity and examine the facts, we'll see that it is Israel, not its neighbors, that, to date, has broken all of the made through various intermediaries since the Yom Kippur War in 1973; that it is the Arab states, not Israel, who greatly need guarantees that Israel will keep its agreements. Not out of love or hate, but for reasons of “stateness”; to abide by matters that have been agreed upon."

"That is precisely what agreements are for: so that hatred won't become war."