TIME PLACE AND IDENTITY: A REMARKABLE AND INSPIRING SPEECH BY PROFESSOR DANIEL SHALIT
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Time, place and identity
on the settlements….”In short: these hills were and still are the backbone of Jewish identity. Without them, Tel-Aviv is devoid of all meaning or justification, and Israel is really just a colonizing power. With them, Israel is not colonization, but homecoming.”
In this post I wish to share with my readers an essay by the prominent Israeli philosopher and composer, Dr. Daniel Shalit, as adapted from a talk given at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Swiss Center for Conflict Research, Management and Resolution marking two years to the disengagement from Gaza Strip, and as translated from Hebrew by Yaakov Macales
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| A panoramic view of Temple Mount in Jerusalem (photo: Ami Aviel) |
Rousseau and the Jews
In the year 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his book “Emile, or On Education”: “It seems to me we will never come to understand what the Jews are saying until they have a free state, schools and universities in which they will be able to speak freely and discuss matters without danger. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say”.
Here we are standing today, in a free Jewish state, in the Hebrew University. If Rousseau were to come to the University today, would it be any clearer to him “what the Jews are saying”? Well, this is quite doubtful; the Jews themselves have undergone deep crises and no longer are certain about what they have to say, and moreover: about who they are.
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In the Middle Ages, the picture was simple: one was either Jewish or Christian or Moslem. Passing from one religion to another entailed conversion, metamorphosis, a complete change of identity. Only with the advent of European humanism, enlightenment and rationalism, did it become possible to be a Jew plus something else, apparently broader: a pure human being, a citizen, Ein Mensch. Jews used this new opening and penetrated the fabric of French, German or English societies as citizens or Menschen. Many discarded their Jewish identity altogether and became just “Menschen” of the local (German, French or English) variety. In fact they became so good at being whatever they chose, that they almost started teaching the Germans themselves how to be better and truer Germans; which the Germans didn’t particularly appreciate. The wave of European nationalism that followed, and later, Antisemitism (the word was invented at that time) and of course, Nazism – pushed the Jews back to their original Jewish identity, or should we say in this case: to their Jewish fate.
Meanwhile Zionism proposed an alternative: not ignoring Jewish identity, but on the contrary, asserting and stressing it. Still, this was a new, revolutionary kind of Jewish identity, molded along then-accepted lines: secular, national, modern. No more wandering Jews, practicing their old religion and praying daily for divine redemption, but an active, political people, re-entering history, taking responsibility, gathering together from all corners of the world into their historical land as a normal people.
This revolutionary alternative met with severe objections from the traditional religious communities, but eventually it seemed to have won: the state of Israel was founded, fought for and defended along this vision. The state of Israel was meant to be the final seal to the normalization of the Jewish people: A normal state, a normal people, normal politics.
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Where do we stand today? Israel is anything but normal. It is the only state in the world threatened with total extinction. Unlike normal countries, it is supersensitive to moral charges, which are fired at it at an astounding rate. It tries desperately to act according to the most saintly international moral standards, only to find that it is still accused of being the world Goliath, a monstrous Nazi, criminal state.
Could it be, then, that the modern, secular, so-normal state finds itself in a corner traditionally reserved for Jews since the time of the Biblical Prophet Isaiah – the corner kept for the “rejected and despised, acquainted with grief and sorrow, despised and unesteemed” – but this time on a global scale? Could it be that the very thrust to normalcy was an impossibility? Could it be that the name of Israel, with all its historical and religious import, could not be used to designate a new, normal state?
And just where is that blessed normalcy to be found, anyway? Isn’t the family of nations today just as insane, just as abnormal as always, perhaps even more so, but just as tormented and desperate – perhaps desperate to find what it is that Israel taught the nations to seek: redemption, salvation, liberation? Could it be that Israel can actually be the answer to the problem of Man?
***
Meanwhile, it is not only Israel that became uncertain as to its identity; Man himself lost the sense and meaning of his existence.
Out of the glorious science that man developed, he emerges as a speck of dust in a barren infinite space; from the biological point of view – he is nothing but a meaningless carbohydrate complex; according to post-modern criticism, “Man” is an illusion, a “text” or “narrative” of the 19th century white male.
This is the post-modern “Zeitgeist”. One century ago, Zionism drew its support from then-current ideas of nationality, modernity and progress. But the same Western channels carry today doubt, uncertainty, and in fact – nihilism. The kind of identity these channels have to offer is in fact a non-identity, as the post-modern situation erodes all identities, the very identity of Man included.
This is why Jean-Jacques Rousseau would stay quite uncertain as to what it is that the Jews have to say. In the Hebrew University, as well as in the Israeli government, press and even art – all of them so normal, western, post-modern – Jewish identity leads only a shadowy life, a repressed existence somewhere back in the subconscious.
May be Rousseau should hurry back to his 18th century France, for if he stayed any longer in the Hebrew post-modern University he would become uncertain even as to who he himself is.
But before doing that, being already in the Middle East, perhaps he should pay a visit to some settlements in Judea/Samaria. Maybe they are Israel’s suppressed Jewish conscience. Maybe he would come to understand there something about Jewish identity, and perhaps about human identity too.
What the settlements say
The Israeli settlements in the “the West Bank” are perhaps the least understood spots upon this earth. To people influenced by the mass-media, they are associated with severe injustice (to Palestinians), with ruthless oppression (by Israel), with unchecked greed for land (by settlers) and are somehow close to racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, hatred, and other such things from which decent people should keep their distance.
Rarely ever does one hear anything in defense of these places or the people inhabiting them. Who are they? Why have they gone there? What do they have to say in their defense?
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The areas where the settlers settled are referred to in the Wikipedia as “Palestinian Territories”, in all languages except Hebrew. In the Hebrew Wikipedia, however, they are called “Judea and Samaria”. This tells almost the whole story. The Arabs feel that a foreign body has invaded their territories, where they have been living for generations. However, the foreign invader himself denies his being foreign; he says he has only returned to his four-thousand-years-old homeland. To him, the “Palestinians” are the newcomers to the area, and in fact, invaders or infiltrators from their native Arabia. To him, the “Palestinian territories” are the heart of the Land of Israel; they includes places like Bethlehem, Beth-El, Jericho, Shekhem, the City of David in Jerusalem; they were the route of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they were the site of two Jewish kingdoms and two temples for a thousand years; and later, throughout the two-thousand-years forced Jewish exile, they were the subject of constant yearning and prayers – to return to Zion.
In short: these hills were and still are the backbone of Jewish identity. Without them, Tel-Aviv is devoid of all meaning or justification, and Israel is really just a colonizing power. With them, Israel is not colonization, but homecoming.
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Three objections may be raised against this argument:
1. Are you coming to deny the rights people who live there here and now – in the name of mere history, in the name of things that happened thousands of years ago?
2. Who says, that over such a long period, your own identity has remained the same? Have you not undergone considerable change over these millennia?
3. Why insist on territories at all? have we not suffered enough from that animal “territorial imperative”? Have we not outgrown attachment to miserable stretches of ground?
These three objections gained power in our post-modern era. They question the validity of history; the reality of identity and the uniqueness of place.
Therefore it is worthwhile to take a closer look into our own time.
Postmodernity and identity
Post-modernity is not just a fashion and not only a passing fad; first and foremost, it is the current state of our civilization: science, technology, economics and society; it is also the “Spirit of the Time” (zeitgeist), which dominates the intellectual world as well as art, literature and popular culture.
This central Zeitgeist dismantles all traditional structures such as nation and family, authority and hierarchy, all traditional values (goodness, truth and beauty) and orientation in general (center vs. periphery, importance vs. unimportance; seriousness vs. triviality, depth vs. shallowness).
Post-modernism thus has a corrosive effect not only on Jewish-Israeli outlook, but on Western civilization itself. If it is possible somehow to reconstruct the world of human values, it will be to the benefit of Man at large.
Time, place
Time and place are interconnected. Intuitively, we perceive time as “What it takes to travel a particular distance”.
Now, in the global village, both time and space have all but disappeared. In cyberspace virtually no space/time is involved, geographical distances are irrelevant; connections are instantaneous.
What is happening in the technological realm is supported by Post-modern thinking. Traditionally, place and time were not only abstract dimensions but had an actual structure: place used to have a center vs. periphery; surface vs. depth and height. These physical dimensions had their mental correlations: center meant importance, periphery meant irrelevance, unimportance. Surface meant superficiality; depth and height meant significance and import. Now, postmodernism rejects both physical and spiritual distinctions.
And there is some truth in this. Indeed, who can deny, that nowadays the universe is conceived as infinite; that in such a universe – center, height, depth etc. are only relative to the observer. Our mega-cities have the same non-structure: old towns had their ancient center with church, market and townhall – marking the center of mass as well – and around it, in ever-widening circles – suburbs, periphery, while post-modern mega-cities are a conglomerate of suburbs with no center, or at best multi-centered. Another example is the Web, with no editing or regulatory center. Post-modernism takes these examples to be good parables to the non-structure of reality and of consciousness: there is no central view or truth: there are only points of view.
This sounds to be heralding a new era of openness and tolerance (and indeed it is a step forward from narrow-mindedness and ego- or ethno-centrism). But this total openness means that there is no truth at all, nothing is important or trivial, high or low, deep or shallow. Everything is important and trivial, deep and shallow, and nothing really matters.
So maybe a new way should be found to reestablish our relation to truth, value and meaning. May be the parables of physical space, of megacities and of the web are inadequate to describe the dimensions – vital, mental, spiritual – within which man acts, of which he is a microcosm.
In the meantime, until such new ways are found, Western culture, the dominating culture of our era, acts without guidelines, without structure.
***
So much for the de-construction of space and its conceptual parallels.
Time, too, loses its structure both in practice and in thought. In post-modern thinking, and contrary to former notions of progress, history does not go anywhere. also there is no historical “truth”. History is only a kaleidoscope of narratives.
Identity
From this follows the erosion of local identities. In any case, MacDonalds is the same everywhere; also, production and selling techniques are standardized. Local cultures are wiped out and at most offered as attractions in the Global Mall (exotic foods, ethnic music, authentic bistros, village inns). Malls are the same, manpower is the same, and all individuals dissolve into an indifferentiated mass.
Again, theory confirms practice: when space and time lose their value, identity which used to define itself by time and history, is eroded also.
Here too, the loss of identities presents itself as an advancement, almost as a redemption: no more differences, no more boundaries: borderlines dissolve, and all cultures, all races, all genders come close to each other and embrace, “Sympathy and Understanding, Harmony and Trust Abounding” (“The Age of Aquarius” from “Hair”).
But this is a sweet illusion. Love occurs only between complementary opposites. Washed-out non-identities are not capable of fertility but of degenerating into an inert mass.
***
And as said before, it is not just personal or cultural identities that have been degraded. The very identity of Man, his self-conception, has been erased. In fact, Man is being denied.
The denial of man
The entire Western culture was built by and for the self-determining, autonomous subject. The free, autonomous man or woman is still the pivot and cornerstone of democracy. Now while these values are still highly lauded, in actual fact they are depreciated and devalued. Man is being denied, both in practice and in theory.
As employee, he is helplessly drawn into a global business machinery that he cannot grasp, and which erodes his humanity. As customer, he is tempted and coerced into consuming what he does not need, while the machinery of persuasion will use all means, over or under the navel, to trick him into it; in fact he and his needs are being re-shaped and re-engineered. As political subject he is treated by professional public relations men with utter contempt, as a particle of a mob, crowd or faceless mass, to be manipulated, coerced and tricked.
At the top of the pyramid we find the leaders – Entrepreneurs, Political leaders, media and art celebrities. These reap the full glory of leadership and decision-making. But in fact they too are pushed by the incomprehensible circumstances, slaves to the demands of career, competition and image. They never had the time or peace of mind to find their inner truth; busy with amassing renown, money, or power, they are devoid of humanity just as the least among the crowd.
So much for the denial of man in practice; now to theory.
From the scientific point of view, man does not deserve much dignity: not only his home Planet Earth, but the whole solar system hovers somewhere in an insignificant tail of the Milky Way, which in itself is just one of billions of galaxies making their way from an insignificant bang to an insignificant thermic death. On this insignificant planet, man is just some chance chemical compound, which somehow survived but is currently heading for suicide. Good riddance; insects and microorganisms will survive it, and won’t miss it much.
From the Postmodern point of view, “Man” with capital M, or the Subject, in philosophical jargon, is nothing but an “invented entity”, a “narrative” of western culture, a “text” to be deconstructed and debunked. Anyway, it never served anything but the hubris of this curious species and its unjustifiable aim to dominate all animate and inanimate existence.
So much for the Denial of Man, the stripping man of all dignity and identity, both in practice and in theory.
***
Somehow, in spite of everything, Identity survives as need, deep inside man, gnawing away at him.
The post-modern condition recognizes this need and caters to it in its special way. It supplies illusory, hollow, outward-oriented identities: a winner, a celebrity, a success; “smaller” people are offered smaller roles: a label consumer, a fan club member.
***
Another way of identifying is through hate: We don’t know any more who we are, but we know whom we hate. I hate, therefore I am. (this is the grim reality contrary to the dreams of Universal Love).
Identity through hatred is not a new invention: hatred always helped to boost identities and mobilize masses. But nowadays as natural identities are dwindling, the role of hatred increases. Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in his novel “1984” epitomized the role of hatred in dictatorships. But today it seems that not only in dictatorships, but in democracies as well – free, tolerant, open and otherwise amiable people may need some demon to define themselves against. This time hatred is not invoked deliberately by some external tyrant: it is rather a need coming from the inside, from the individual or collective unconscious, projecting deep inner fears and guilt onto an external individual or group, making it “the totally other”. Since it is not forced from the outside but demanded by the inside, it is much more difficult to diagnose and cure. People practicing demonization will not readily admit it, because this has been their way of self-cleansing. Because by pointing it out to them, the caricature they have been drawing of “the totally other” may be mirrored and projected back upon themselves. They may feel that they themselves are being demonized, and vehemently reject the allegation. (Therefore we will not press the point, but merely lightly suggest that such deep processes may at the root of the international demonization of Israel and “the settlements”.)
***
The denial of the value of man, the erosion of values, and parallel increase in hatred and demonization create in the West a toxic culture. Its past achievements cannot be denied: the creativity of autonomous man in science, technology, social and political thought, and the arts. But somehow these achievements themselves turn back upon Western man to poison his life.
Islam and the West
Islam strongly reacts to this toxicity of Western culture, to the loss of traditional values, to the decomposition of traditional family and the traditional system of authority.
The remedy it offers is religious discipline – a total submission to Allah. In the west Islam diagnoses too much freedom. Islamic thinkers (Maududi, Sayyid Qutb) see the centrality of Man in the west as the source of all evil; they call western culture “the New Jahilia”‘ meaning the new paganism.
Still, the only remedy Islam knows for the situation is – war: surrender – or destruction.
In fact we witness a clash of two opposed civilizations based on two opposed principals: the autonomy of man, unreserved, absolute, and total – as against the absolute, total submission of man to Allah. Total openness, tolerance, containing – against absolute divine Truth and power.
Both principles are derived from Judaism, where, in spite of the creative tension that exists between them, they ultimately come to coexist in peace and fertility. Each culture took one side of Judaism, without acknowledging its original unifying and creative power. When they face crisis now, they have no more access to the living fountain that would enable renewal, but are both bound to return to some kind of conservatism – the outer shells of their one-time religious enthusiasm.
What Man needs now is not going back but a step forward; a new fount and foundation.
What on earth has all this to do with Settlements?
First, there is no specific “settler/settlement” message. “Settlers” are not a separate tribe. Each of them has many relatives and supporters all over Israel. Settlements are simply a concise expression of Jewish identity, true to its history and to its defining sites. (And Arab media know this: they call all Israeli cities “settlements”: for them, all Israel is just one big illegal settlement).
***
Jewish identity is not easy to maintain.
It is not a fact: it is a choice. It needs to be opted for, rediscovered and re-won under every new historical circumstance;
It may be lost for a while, missed, refused, minimized, suppressed or hid; It is always put to a test.
But in every generation there is central nucleus or group which upholds it to its maximum fullness possible at that time.
Today I believe it is the settlements who hold it at its fullest: the Tora life as well as modern life, attachment to ideals as well as physical realization, Tradition and renewal.
***
What the settlements highlight today is the general Jewish message for our time:
There is hope for Man. It is possible to mediate between human freedom and autonomy on one hand, and service to God on the other.
Judaism does not reject human autonomy, dignity, freedom and creativity. All these are Man’s potential, parts of the Image of God. In fact it was Judaism, through Christianity, that laid the foundations of Humanism in the West (it is true that classical Greece, the other pillar of the west, did indeed establish the centrality of Man, but not his value or hope: Man there is essentially a tragic creature); And later it was the Jews that developed these qualities and used them to catalyze liberalism everywhere.
On the other hand, Judaism testifies for Man’s standing before God; this standing is not just obedience, submission and service, but comprises the full spectrum of love and awe, fascination and dread, intimacy and distance.
***
The paradox of Judaism – the paradox of man – branched into two clashing civilizations. How will both man’s autonomy and submission be reconciled?
Abstract formulae will not take us far. The freedom-submission balance has to be lived, fought and suffered for. This takes some specific living society, for a long time in history, centering around some specific geographical scene.
In Israel’s authentic tradition, the society where the drama of Man was and is enacted, is the people of Israel, the history is the history of Israel, the place is the Land of Israel..
Time, history, Identity – epilogue
The settlements say:
History is not just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. History has importance and meaning. It is a process of trial and judgment. Nothing is lost. You can’t just “narrate” it as you like: you may err, lie or seek the truth of history.
Place is not just territory, an abstract location. Place breathes life. Sites are pregnant with meaning and with spiritual potential. Place, the most material substance, tests and brings out our innermost life. Man is responsible for places: he responds to their potential. He invests them with care and creativity, culture and sanctity – or degrades them by irresponsibility and evil.
Identity is not just a sum of outer signs or differences. It is an inner unifying power. It is a guiding insight. Through its apparent limits the Infinite may be perceived.
***
Again, the identity of Israel is not easy to achieve. It involves a synthesis of humanism and religion, novelty and tradition, technology and ecology, individuality and community, nationality and universality. For this work to be done, we need the proper laboratory, which is the Land of Israel – and time. If we are given time and credit, undisturbed by constant threats of war, destruction and extermination, although we can not guarantee anything, but at least we may resume our work which is only for the good of the family of man.
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