Is our Boat “Dead in the Water?”

Searching our Souls on the Eve of Yom Kippur

The literary supplement of our daily newspaper of record, Ha’aretz, has long been held by some Israelis to be one of the last strongholds of Marxist (or, to be more precise, neo-Marxist and Lacanian) analysis. It is also rich with good poetry, pickings from world literature, and profound essays on the Jewish sources; you may not like it, but you cannot ignore it, if you wish to retain your claim to being a person of letters in this country.

What caught my eye this week was a haunting poem by Dalia Ravikovitch, one of the best among the generation of poets that came into their own in the 1960s and later; always a radical, she has often offered powerful images rooted in the modern Israeli experience, some of which have become canonical writings.

This time she chose a frightening image of an ancient sailing ship on a voyage of discovery—perhaps herself, perhaps the country—now dead in windless waters, off the coast of some unreachable continent, the sailors starving to the point of eating the planks, the captain and officers going out of their minds, the ship itself slowly sinking.

Is this what we have come to in the eyes of some among our best and brightest, from Ravikovitch to “Avrum” Burg? Dead in the water, no wind in our sails, perhaps breaking apart? On the eve of Yom Kippur, it is certainly necessary for us to turn our eyes inward:

·        To assess, without undue sentimentality, the crisis of vision and the lack of inspirational leadership (among Ariel Sharon’s Churchillian qualities, one—the ability to articulate the challenge and the promise, to give us our “roar”—is sorely lacking);

·        To address the callous attitude some of us have come to adopt toward the suffering of our neighbors (which is real enough);

·        To worry about the growing social gap and the fragmentation of Israeli society. The present wave of strikes in the public sector has added to this sense of internal tension, as our longshoremen knowingly ruin the livelihood of industrial and agricultural workers whose future depends on timely exports. Much of what we see in the mirror is disturbing; and there are persistent indications and rumors of corruption in high places.

Above all, the sense of hopeless disappointment, following the collapse of the hudna and of Mahmoud Abbas’s government, has given pain and focus to this sense of malaise. (Remember the line from Shirley Valentine: “Marriage is like the Middle East. There is no solution.”) But as always, there is another, more resilient, way to look at the very same conditions, one that prompts us to do more and do better, precisely by recognizing that our situation is not nearly as hopeless as that of the poet’s stranded galleon.

To begin with, there are more ways than one to look at even our economic predicament. Israel’s best economic journalist and columnist, Sever Plocker of Yediot Aharonot—who was our guest at the 2002 AJC Annual Meeting—made a fascinating point a few days ago. Amid a terrible contraction—more than 15 percent against projected revenues, over the three-year period of the present conflict, exacerbated further by the bursting bubble of the dot.com world, which was the source of much of Israel’s prosperity in the 1990s—the Israeli business sector, now largely in private hands, found ways to survive and, in some cases, even prosper. Workers took pay cuts; businesses shed unnecessary expenditures; but, on the whole, management did succeed in avoiding massive layoffs and financial collapse. Tested by these highly adverse conditions, our ship is far from being a rotten wreck; indeed, it is an open invitation for the wise (not just the brave) to invest in a “battle-tested” economy, at bargain prices, just when a new generation of advanced science-driven products and technologies are maturing here.

What about our moral balance? Unquestionably, we shall have a lot to beat our chests for on this Day of Atonement. Innocents caught in our fire; foreign workers and their families abused; too little, too late, done to destroy the shameful traffic in women; the growing social gap and the pain of the poor—enough to fill an angry prophet’s notebook. And yet there are shining lights all about us: in the exponential growth of the “third sector,” the not-for-profit social services and advocacy groups, once overshadowed by the power of our central government but now moving in to do what it does not; the great, almost heroic, dedication of individual teachers and educators, social workers and hospital nurses, caregivers in various callings, who carve niches of great generosity in a largely ossified and dispirited bureaucracy; and noticeably, this week, in the willingness of an Israeli court to send three would-be Jewish terrorists to long stints (15 years) in jail for planning an attack against an Arab school—a stiffer sentence than any meted out by Palestinian courts to the perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities against Israeli citizens. We should be proud of this decision.