It’s refreshing, in a world rife with anti-Zionist propaganda, to read a book written by someone who actually thinks Israel was a good, indeed a grand idea. Daniel Gordis describes the Jews’ return to their homeland as “one of the great dramas” of human history—the story “of a homeless people that kept a dream alive for millennia, of a people’s redemption from the edge of the abyss, of a nation forging a future when none seemed possible.” From a collection of “vulnerable settlements,” Gordis describes how Israel grew into a flourishing country with the largest Jewish population in the world using a revived language that even the founder of Zionism believed could not be resuscitated.
Gordis ascribes the book‘s origin to the request of a friend of his, a leader of a major Jewish organization, that he recommend a serious but readable history of Israel that he could give to a group of lay leaders he was bringing over for a visit. When Gordis couldn’t find one that fit the bill, he decided it was time to fill the gap himself.
Gordis brought to the task a talent for deftly summarizing complex events—a skill he displayed in his last book, Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul. More important, Gordis has an ability to get to the core of issues and to discuss them in straightforward language that nevertheless conveys sophisticated analysis. Consider his treatment of the contradictions within Zionism. While it grew out of the millennia long Jewish yearning to return to Zion, modern Zionism was also a revolutionary effort to sever the connection to what came before. Gordis writes: “So desperate were the Jewish people to fashion a new kind of Jew that they even changed their names … it was time for a new Jewish worldview, a new Jewish physique, a new Jewish home, new Jewish names. It was time for a ‘new Jew,’ a Jewish people reborn.”
The story of modern Zionism cannot be understood without reference to ancient Jewish history, and Gordis manages to distill what needs to be told in a mere 15 pages. Gordis describes the Bible as ” a kind of ‘national diary,’” with the Land of Israel at the center of the story, its centrality maintained even when the Jews were repeatedly cast into exile.
One of the best features of this book is the way Gordis weaves into his narrative literature, music—even dance—that capture, and sometimes shape, the emotions of the people at a pivotal point. For example he quotes Chaim Bialik’s famous poem “In the City of Slaughter,” written after the poet’s visit to Kishinev following the pogrom there in 1903. Bialik attacks the Russian mob, but also the passivity of the Jewish men, whom he scathingly describes hiding behind casks as the Cossacks rape their women. The poem had a huge impact in underscoring not only the need for Jews to return to their land as a shelter from anti-Semitism but as a place to create a “new Jew.”
Gordis cites the enormously popular songs of Naomi Shemer: the first, Jerusalem of Gold, written just before the triumphant Six Day War, and the second, equally prescient, written just before the disastrous 1973 war, a version of the Beatles’ Let It Be. Just as Shemer had to add a stanza to Jerusalem of Gold to reflect the fact that the Old City was now in Israel’s hands, so she had to change the lyrics to the second song, “There is still a white sail on the horizon but beneath a heavy black cloud” and modify the chorus, “All that we long for, let it be.” To convey the country’s deep, ongoing sadness after the Yom Kippur War, Gordis offers the lyrics of a popular song written over 20 years later: “You promised peace; You promised spring at home and blossoms; You promised to keep your promises; You promised a dove.”
