Why travel, Why Jerusalem

WHY TRAVEL

"We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
-George Santayana, "The Philosophy of Travel"

"For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."
-Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel"

"We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us."
-Sir Thomas Browne

"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."
-Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel"

"We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand."
-James Elroy Flecker, "The Golden Journey to Samarkand"

"And God shall make thy soul a Glass where eighteen thousand æons pass,
And thou shalt see the gleaming Worlds as men see dew upon the grass.
And son of Islam, it may be that thou shalt learn at journey's endWho walks thy garden eve on eve, and bows his head, and calls thee Friend."
-James Elroy Flecker, "The Gates of Damascus"


WHY JERUSALEM

"Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures."
-David Shipler

"When I saw the country from the plane I felt a twinge in my heart. Despite everything that's wrong here, and God knows there are many faults and evils, it's our country, and I love her as I always have."
-Yonatan Netanyahu

"Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity."
-Yehuda Amichai

"When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming."

-Eli Wiesel

"Jerusalem, for me, is above politics. Mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible, Jerusalem is the national landmark of Jewish tradition. It represents our collective soul. It is Jerusalem that binds one Jew to another. There is not a prayer more beautiful or nostalgic than the one which evokes the splendor of its past and the shattering and enduring memory of its destruction."
-Eli Wiesel

"By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion,
There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres,
for our captors asked us there for songs,
our tormentors, for amusement:
'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.'

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate
if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in my memory
even at my happiest hour."
-from Psalm 137

Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinksy (1880-1940)

Jabotinksy's another guy I studied a good bit last summer. I'm so glad I revisited him! It was hard because last summer I had to read a LOT of his writing in a very short period of time and I was overwhelmed and didn't process very much of it.  But I LOVED what I read this time around! I have a new Zionist hero! He's such a badass.

He was born in Odessa, and became a foreign newspaper correspondent, traveling all over. In 1903 he helped organize a Jewish self-defense corps in Odessa, and later petitioned the British to form Jewish battalions in Palestine during WWI. He succeeded in forming three, and on one of them became a lieutenant.   After the war, during the Arab riots of 1920, her formed a self-defense corps in Jerusalem, for which he was sentenced by the British to 15 years in prison or illegal possession of firearms, but popular outcry earned him a pardon. He was elected to the Zionist executive in 1921 but resigned because he believed in rapid massive immigration of Jews to Palestine and reliance on Jewish military and police, and felt that the Zionist Executive contrary views would lose Palestine for the Jews.  He formed the New Zionist Organization, whig helped organize illegal immigration into Palestine and Irgun (Jewish paramilitary) action against the British.  He died of a heart attack in 1940, and he willed that his body not be buried in Palestine until there is a Jewish state there... his remains were moved rather recently to Moutn Herzl in Jersualem :).

From his speech, "Evidence submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission" (1937)

"Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own party, accused of asking for too much - Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes, we do want a State; every nation on Earth... they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same conditions as the Albanians enjoy, to say nothing of the French and the English, then it is called too much. I should understand it if the answer were 'It is impossible,' but when the answer is 'it is too much,' I cannot understand it. I would remind you (excuse me for quoting an example known to every one of you) of the commotion which was produced in that famous institution when Oliver Twist came and asked for 'more.' He said 'more' because he did not know how to express it; what Oliver Twist really meant was this: 'Will you just give me that normal portion which is necessary for a boy my age to be able to live.' I assure you that you face here today, in the Jewish people with its demands, an Oliver Twist who has, unfortunately, no concessions to make. What can be the concessions? We have got to save millions, many millions."

POW!!!

"So when we hear the Arab claim confronted with the Jewish claim; I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, or No. 6 - that I quite understand; but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation."

ZING!!!

Honestly, his entire speech was brilliant. I loved it.

Jabotinksy <3 <3

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)

I took a class about Rav Kook last summer. I remember the instructor, he was great, and I remember we listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" and then I argued with Jonah about whether or not that song coming true would be a good thing (can you guess what side I was on?) But it was good to revisit some of Kook's writing a year later, when everything I learned last summer has had some time to process.

Kook was born in a small town in Latvia. When he went to Yeshiva, he was extremely pious but yet was heretical because he loved to speak in Hebrew (which was a no-no, at the time, Hebrew was reserved for prayer).  He became a prominent rabbi in Europe before he moved to be the rabbi of Jaffa in 1904. He was very spiritual and devoted, but also made some notably lenient rulings as rabbi, such as saying that they didn't need to let the soil of Israel lie fallow on the 7th year (as is commanded in the Torah0 due to some technical reason (probably survival...).  He visited Europe in 1914 but got stuck by WWI, and so didn't return to Eretz Israel until 1919, where he was elected Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, which he did until he died in 1935.

You know, sometimes I think of myself as very religious.  But then I read stuff by someone who's really REALLY religious and I then think maybe I'm not very religious at all, haha. Kook definitely makes me feel secular.

Quotes from "The Land of Israel"

"In the Holy Land man's imagination is lucid and clear, clean and pure, capable of receiving the revelation of Divine Truth and of expressing in life the sublime meaning of the ideal of the sovereignty of holiness; there the mind is prepared to understand the light of prophecy and to be illumined by the radiance of the Holy Spirit. In gentile lands the imagination is dim, clouded with darkness and shadowed with unholiness, and it cannot serve as the vessel for the outpouring of the Divine Light, as it raises itself beyond the lowness and narrowness of the universe. Because reason and imagination are interwoven and interact with each other, even reason cannot shine in its truest glory outside the Holy Land."

"Deep in the heart of every Jew, in its purest and holiest recesses, there blazes the fire of Israel."

From "The War"

"It is not meet for Jacob to engage in political life at a time when statehood requires bloody ruthlessness and demands a talent for evil."

From "The Rebirth of Israel"

"An Ancient Jewish heresy, in which pagan influence was present, announced the abolition of the specific commandments of the Torah, while it haughtily and magniloquently took over religious and ethical values from Judaism."

I'm pretty sure he's talking about Christianity here, and I found it interesting. Those be fighting words!

"The world of the gentiles is tattered and rent. In its view the body is divided from the soul, and there is no inner bond and identity between matter and spirit, no basic unity between action and idea. At present, before the Light of Israel becomes manifest, the doctrine of Communism represents the highest spiritual ascent of gentile culture. But how poor is a world in which this black evil has raised its head and pretends to be its highest aspiration."

Again, pretty accusing! I think it's interesting that he calls communism a black evil, especially in contrast to the social zionists I read about earlier. And I like his note about embodiment.

"It is a grave error to be insensitive to the distinctive unity of the Jewish spirit, to imagine that the Divine stuff which uniquely characterizes Israel is comparable to the spiritual content of all the other national civilizations."

From "Lights for Rebirth"

"It is a fundamental error to turn our backs on the only source of our high estate and to discard the concept that we are a chosen people. We are not only different from all the nations, set apart by a historical experience that is unique and unparalleled, but we are also of a much higher and greater spiritual order. Really to know ourselves, we must be conscious of our greatness. Else we shall fall very low."

This is where he definitely started to make me very uncomfortable.  When I think of the people I know who are of the highest spiritual order... they're not Jews, haha! But I think the demands of Judasim are very high. I prefer to think of "chosen" as the idea that we were chosen to receive the Torah, which mean stat we, very early on in human ethical development, were ordered to behave in a very civilized fashion, and I do think we should remember that or we could, and do, fall very low.

"But Jewish secular nationalism is a form of self-delusion: the spirit of Israel is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter how secularist his intention may be, must, despite himself, affirm the divine. An individual can sever the tie that binds him to life eternal, but the House of Israel as a whole cannot. All of its most cherished national possessions - its land, language, history, and customs - are vessels of the spirit of the Lord."

Aaaand right when he seems really out there to me, he comes back with something I love:

"The claim of our flesh is great. We require a healthy body. We have greatly occupied ourselves with the soul and have forsaken the holiness of the body. We have neglected health and physical prowess, forgetting that our flesh is as sacred as our spirit. We have turned out backs on physical life, the development of our senses, and all that is involved in the tangible reality of the flesh, because we have fallen prey to lowly fears, and have lacked faith in the holiness of the Land. 'Faith is exemplified by the tractate Zeraim (plants) - man proves his faith in eternal life by planting."

"Our return will succeed only if it will be marked, along with its spiritual glory, by a physical return which will create healthy flesh and blood, strong and well-formed bodies, and a fiery spirit encased in powerful muscles. Then the one weak soul will shine forth from strong and holy flesh, as a symbol of the physical resurrection of the dead."

Aaaaand then he ends with something totally out there.  Physical resurrection of the dead??? I was with you, Rav Kook! Why'd you have to go saying something weird like that???

Berl Katznelson (1887-1944)

Berl Katznelson  was born in Russia in 1887, and though he was active in the Jewish parties there, he moved to Jaffa when he was 22. Arthur Hertzberg writes, "In these early years he led a strike, founded a traveling library for farm workers, helped create a labor exchange to find work for new-comers, and wrote frequently for the journals of the Labour-Zionist movement."

He joined the new Battelion of Palestinian Jews under the British in WWI, and afterward was a high ranking official amongst Palestinian Jews and in the World Zionist movement. He founded the Tel Aviv newspaper "Davar" and the publishing house "Am Oved."

Hertzberg writes, "In Katznelson there was a greater harmony between the new of Socialist-Zionism and the old of traditionalist emotion than is to be found in anyone else."

Quotes from "Revolution and Tradition":

"Man is endowed with two faculties - memory and forgetfulness. We cannot live without both. Were only memory to exist, then we would be crushed under its burden. We would become slaves to our memories, to our ancestors. Our physiognomy would then be a mere copy of preceding generations. And were we ruled entirely by forgetfulness, what place would there be for culture, science, self-consciousness, spiritual life? Archconservatism tries to deprive us of our faculty of forgetting, and pseudorevolutionism regards each remembrance of the past as the 'enemy.'"

"The Jewish year is studded with days which, in depth of meaning, are unparalleled among other peoples. Is it advantageous - is it a goal - for the Jewish labor movement to waste the potential value stored within them? ...We must determine the value of the present and of the past with our own eyes and examine them from the viewpoint of our vital needs, from the viewpoint of progress towards our own future."

"Let us take a few examples: Passover. A nation has, for thousands of years, been commemorating the day of its exodus from the house of bondage. Throughout all the pain of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion, and massacre, the Jewish people has carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and has given this craving a folk expression which includes every soul in Israel, every single downtrodden, pauperized soul! From fathers to sons, throughout all the generations, the memory of the exodus from Egypt has been handed on as a personal experience and it has therefore retained its original luster. 'In every generation every man must regard himself as if he personally had been redeemed from Egypt.' There is no higher peak of historic consciousness, and history - among all the civilizations of the world and in all the ages - can find no example of a greater fusion of individual with group than is contained in this ancient pedagogic command. I know no literary creation which can evoke a greater hatred of slavery and love of freedom than the story of the bondage and the exodus from Egypt. I know of no other remembrance of the past that is so entirely a symbol of our present and future as the 'memory of the exodus from Egypt.'"

Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922)

A.D. Gordon was born in Ukraine and worked for the state of some wealthy relatives. When their lease ran out, Gordon decided to give his money to his wife and children and go to Eretz Israel. He was 47 and had not experience working the land, but he became a laborer in Zion, working with young people.  He worked on early kibbutzim including Degania. His wife and children followed him to join him. He developed cancer, and went back to Ukraine in 1922 to die.

Gordon is my favorite theorist I've read so far! His ideas about embodiment and the land really appeal to me!

Quotes from Logic for the Future (1910)

"And when, O Man, you will return to Nature - on that day your eyes will open, you will gaze straight into the eyes of Nature, and in its mirror you will see your own image. You will know that you have returned to yourself, that when you hid from Nature, you hid from yourself. When you return you will see that from you, from your hands and from your feet, from your body and from your soul, heavy, hard, oppressive fragments will fall and you will begin to stand erect. You will understand that these were fragments of the shell into which you and shrunk int he bewilderment of your heart and out of which you had finally emerged. On that day you will know that your former life did not befit you, that you must renew all things: your food and your drink, your dress and your home, your manner of work and your mode of study - everything!"

I love this quote because it's how I feel when I hike, especially in Israel! That's how I felt after Taglit.

From People and Labor (1911)

"The Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand year. We have become accustomed to every form of life, except to a life of labor - of labor done at our own behest and for its own sake... This kind of labor binds a people to its soil and to its national culture, which in turn is an outgrowth of the people's soil and the people's labor."

From Some Observations (1911)

"Galut (exile) is always Galut, in Palestine no less than in any other country. Whoever seeks national rebirth and a full life as a Jew must give up the life of the Galut."

From Our Tasks Ahead (1920)

"We are engaged in a creative endeavor the like of which is not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds. It is a people half dead, and the effort to recreate it demands the exclusive concentration of the creator on his work."

From Yom Kippur (1921)

"As long as we were penned within ghetto walls, ragged, and cut off from the great life of the world, from man and from his broad and abundant life, we accepted what our ancestors had bequeathed to us. We believed in it and we gave our lives for it. When the walls of the ghetto fell, when we saw the world and all that is in it at close range, when we came to know man and his life, when we added cultural values from without to all this - we realized that the traditions of our ancestors were no longer in harmony with what was growing and developing in our own spirits."

"Is it sufficiently founded in logic and in the human spirit - that with the loss of the basis for the blind faith the basis for religion has also been destroyed?"

From Final Reflections (1921)

"Life itself must be a song!"

Ber Borochov (1881-1917)

Ber Borochov was born and raised in Ukraine. Because of anti-semitism, he chose not to go to university. He worked for the Social Democratic Party, but was fired for being a Zionist. He helped write the platform of the Russian Pale Zion (Works of Zion) group. He had to leave Russia because of problems with the police, so he toured Europe speaking for the group. He came to the US when WWI broke out, but returned to Kiev in 1917 where he died at 36.

Some quotes from "The National Question and the Class Struggle"

"The national struggle is waged not for the preservation of cultural values but for the control of material possessions, even though it is very often conducted under the banner of spiritual slogans."

He makes some similar claims to Syrkin, saying that basically Jews wouldn't need a country if they were allowed to live properly under a different nation.

BUT, once a people are oppressed, the form of a national need changes shape:

"When the freedom of his language is curtailed, the oppressed person becomes all the more attached thereto. In other words, the national question of an oppressed people is detached from its association with the material conditions of production. The cultural aspects assume an independent significance, and all the members of the nation becomes interested in national self-determination."

So while the need for self-governance may have begun on a material level, it escalates to a cultural one when a people feels oppressed.

He says that on a practical level, it's mostly Jewish lower classes that are impacted by anti-semitism. But the Jewish bourgeoisie "would like above all else to lose its individuality and be assimilated completely by the native bourgeoisie," and so anti-semitism against lower class Jews trouble the upper classes because it more heavily defines Jews as a separate group and makes general assimilation more difficult.

He also talks about how, similar to Syrkin, anti-semitism has its roots in economic competition between Jews and the rest of the members of the countries where they live. "Emigration alone does not solve the Jewish problem. It leaves the Jew helpless in a strange country. For that reason Jewish immigration and any other national immigration tend toward compact settlements. This concentration alleviates the process of adaptation to the newly found environment, but at the same time it accelerates the rise of national competition in the countries into which the Jews have recently immigrated."

Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924)

Syrkin was raised in Mohilev (now in Belarus). He went to secular school, but he was expelled for objecting to anti-semitic remarks. He finished school in Minsk where he got involved with Hibbat Zion (love of Zion) and the revolutionary underground, for which he was jailed for a bit.  He went to Berlin to study, and the schools in Germany and Switzerland were filled with Jews like himself who'd been banned from universities in Russia.

His views were mostly Socialist-Zionist, and Territorialist (the idea that a Jewish stated could be founded anywhere, and not only in the traditional homeland). He was also big in the Labor Zionist movement and moved to the US in 1907 as an official of that movement.  He died in New York in 1924.

Some Syrkin quotes...

"While ghetto Jewry was a homogenous, though isolated, nation, emancipated Jewry soon disposed of its nationalism in order to create for itself the theoretical basis for emancipation.  This same Jewry, which but recently prayed thrice daily for its return to Jerusalem, became intoxicated with patriotic sentiments for the land in which it lived."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

Syrkin here is commenting on the phenomenon that when Jews are accepted in a society their Jewishness and Zionism wanes.  He goes on to say this emancipation is short lived and a bit of an illusion.

"Anti-semitism... reaches its peak in declining classes: in the middle class, which is in process of being destroyed by the capitalists, and within the decaying peasant class, which is being strangled by the landowners. In modern society, these classes are the most backward and morally decayed. They are on the verge of bankruptcy and are desperately battling to maintain their vanishing positions."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

Basically Syrkin wrote about how middle class merchants and peasants hated Jews because they saw Jews as competitors and they were already under economic duress.  The upper classes didn't feel threatened enough in general to feel threatened by Jews, and the proletariat dissolved most race/religious differences between people anyway.

But he then says that as class tensions escalate, upper classes will band together against race/religious groups to distract from class upheaval that would threaten their position:

"The more the various classes of society are disrupted, the more unstable life becomes, the greater the danger to the middle class and the fear of the proletarian revolution (directed against Jews, capitalism, the monarchy, and the state) - the higher the wave of anti-Semitism will rise. The classes fighting each other will unite in their common attack on the Jew. The dominant elements of capitalist society, i.e., the men of great wealth, the monarchy, the church, and the state, seek to use the religious and racial struggle as a substitute for the class struggle."
-"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

"A classless society and national sovereignty are the only means of solving the Jewish problem completely... The Jew must, therefore, join the ranks of the proletariat, the only element which is striving to make an end of the class struggle and to redistribute power on the basis of justice... Zionism must of necessity fuse with socialism, for socialism is in complete harmony with the wishes and hopes of the Jewish masses."
--"The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State"

Ahad Ha'am

Asher Zvi Ginsberg was born in Russian Ukraine in 1856, in a high class daily in the Jewish Ghetto. He became a well known scholar of Talmudic and Hasidic literature by the time he was a teenager. His family moved to Odessa in 1886 when the Tsar forbid Jews form leasing land. 

He wrote many essays for Jewish periodicals and adopted the name "Ahad Ha-Am" which means 'one of the people.'

He was persistent in arguing that the work of rebuilding Zion had to be done slowly and carefully, and he didn't fit into major parties. He was too conservative for the younger more passionate groups, but he also proposed an agnostic point of view that separated him from the Orthodox.

He did eventually settle in Tel Aviv, and the street he lived on was closed off to traffic during his afternoon nap hours. And the whole city attended his funeral in 1927.

Ha-Am had a lot to say about keeping Judaism current and not committing to ancient rules that no longer apply to a modern civilization. In his 1984 essay The Law of the Heart, he wrote "The book ceases to be what it should be, a source of ever-new inspiration and moral strength; on the contrary, its function in life is to weaken and finally to crush all spontaneity of action and emotion, till men become wholly dependent on the written word and incapable of responding to any stimulus in nature or in human life without its permission and approval. Nor, even when the that sanction is found, is the response simple and natural; it has to follow a prearranged and artificial plan." He goes on to give several examples of instances in which minutiae from Jewish law goes against common sense and decency. He laments the mishna being recorded because he feels this forced it to fossilize and basically enslave people. He writes "Conscience no longer had any authority in its own right; not conscience but the book became the arbiter in every human question."  

But he also asks, "whether the Jewish people can still shake off its inertia, regain direct contact with the actualities of life, and yet remain the Jewish people."

Here are some other quotes I liked...

From Flesh and Spirit (1904)

"When the individual loves the community as himself and identifies himself completely with its well-being, he has something to live for; he feels his personal hardships less keenly, because he knows the purpose for which he lives and suffers."

"But the existence of the man who is a Jew is not purposeless, because he is am ember of the people of Israel, which exists for a sublime purpose. And as the community is only the sum of its members, every Israelite is entitled to regard himself as an indispensable link in the chain of his people's life and as sharing in his people's imperishability."

From On Nationalism and Religion (1910)

"We have to make the synagogue itself the House of Study, with Jewish learning as its first concern and prayer as a secondary matter. Cut the prayers as short as you like, but make your Synagogue a haven of Jewish knowledge, alike for children and adults, for the educated and the ordinary folk... learning - learning - learning: that is the secret of Jewish survival."

And in The Negation of the Diaspora (1909) he argues that a successful Jewish State would need to provide enough intellectual stimulation and practical opportunity for its members not to leave and look elsewhere for these things. 

He seems to support the idea that Judaism needs both a strong diaspora and a central autonomous state.