Going basic in matters of the soul

Every year I’m struck by the opinion of Yosef Klausner about Yom Haatzmaut. He was all for critique of Israel, but argued that we should allow ourselves one day when we might celebrate nevertheless. 

“For three hundred and sixty-four days of the year we are busy with criticism. We criticize the nation’s priorities, and the nation’s leaders. We count the many mistakes that our leaders and ministers make… But a nation must have one day in a year that is a real celebration. On that single solitary day, all the prosecutions must cease, and the harsh criticism must stop…”

Although he wrote this in 1953, there is no doubt that the past 364 days of this year have also been busy with criticism and even despair. I accept the idea that we should allow ourselves one day off for “real celebration”, but I’m working hard to make it real. Is it possible or preferable to dedicate one solid day to celebration of Israel’s independence?

In March this year I found myself with time to kill in Chicago, and I took myself to a theater show. A Steppenwolf production of Fool for Love, by Sam Sheppard. I love Sheppard’s writing, and I’m familiar with the play, but the whole experience shocked me nevertheless. The play rests on no reference to a time or a place. It has no political ramifications I could discern. Instead it is bursting with timeless passion, yearning, pain, longing, love, hate, laughter and humanity. I was knocked sideways when I noticed how unpracticed I was in experiencing these emotions. Like a weight-lifter might find it hard to weigh the difference between two small bags of flour, my Israeli emotion-muscles were amazed to be handling the gossamer of the soul.  I guess life in Israel in this past period has wrenched me away from matters of the spirit. 

This past year I have been so overwhelmed by the concrete and the fundamental that everything has felt basic, particular, urgent. There are no flights of fancy available these days, no room for day-dreaming or wishing or searching for intangible symbolism. I remember when the novelist Ian McEwan visited Israel over a decade ago and called out the crushing gravity of our society: “You cannot isolate [literature from the real world] but I take it as a bad sign when politics permeates every corner of life”. When we constantly find ourselves face to face with grave matters of life and death we can appreciate the primal significance of it all, but lose a sense of the finer, more delicate matters of being. 

I remember talking of this in a podcast Israel Story made with me. I tried to elaborate on the notion of a “small sadness”, which needs to be differentiated from the gaping chasm of pain and despair emerging from Gaza – locals and hostages alike. There is something about one’s emotional state here that becomes blunted with such urgency. And in a blunted urgent world matters of the soul, art, religion, can find no place.

I know that great art, classic art, is the art that can surpass the moment, touch all not some, reach the beyond rather than the here and now. Yet I know that my artistic work in the past year has also become specific, nailed down to a narrow binary meaning of life. My last show, Come Sit With Me, was essentially a musical demonstration of how Israeli songs have been permanently tied to the details of the war. Israeli songs no longer give us wings, instead they drill down into tunnels.

After my theater experience I realized that I needed set symbolism free. This Seder night we did not refer to the war. Pharaoh was not likened to Bibi or Trump, he was Pharaoh. The ten plagues were those referred to in every Haggadah, we discussed freedom as a spiritual concept, and did not ask if a Wicked Son is one who accuses Israel of genocide. I don’t know if this is something we will do every year, but this year our Festival of Freedom celebrated releasing ourselves from the shackles of current relevance. It’s a privilege, I know, but isn’t that the whole idea of Pesach, that we celebrate the privilege of freedom?

Approaching Yom Ha’atzmaut in blinking surprise as one always does after emerging from the bubble of Pesach, I wonder how I might draw on these experiences to fulfill Klausner’s demand? Is there a way to celebrate despite the year that has preceded us and the dread of the one to follow? 

Perhaps the blunting of my senses might help. Since nuance left the building over 19 months ago, perhaps I might manage to focus in on the basics:

To Be | A People | Free | In Our Land. As the penultimate line of the Hatikvah national anthem reminds us, this country had four basic aims at its birth. Three years after the Holocaust Zionists created a place where we could be in control of our security (To Be), gathered together as a nation (People), making our own collective and individual choices (Free), in some part of the Land of Israel (In Our Land). 

Every other year I am sure I might waggle a Talmudic thumb and suck my teeth over our disunity as a People, our terribly fragile liberal regime, the struggles over homes and borders, and the terrible toll in human life our security has cost. But perhaps this year I might force myself to keep it simple. I’ll crack open a bottle of Goldstar and work on drinking to the fact that we basically survive, we are more or less still together in this project, still anticipating the freedom of elections perhaps even before next Yom Ha’atzmaut, in this heart-breakingly beautiful troubled land. 

I’ll go back to the barricades the day after.

Chag Sameach. 

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