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May. 8th, 2011 11:18 pmTo mark Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut, the beautifully dualistic commemoration of those lost to defend Israel and the joyous bounty we have reaped because of their sacrifice, I would like to share three quotes that I've carried with me over the years- three perspectives on Israel and the Jewish nation composed by two non-Jews and an English Jew in the century before the establishment of Israel. They all prompt the same response in me, a strong sense of awe that the situation that drew out these perspectives was so rapidly replaced with the reality of Eretz Yisrael. It is astonishing from our perspective today just how unlikely the State of Israel was even to people living less than a century ago.
"But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again."
Henry Longfellow "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport", 1854
"No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's clutching a noggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world."
James Joyce Ulysses, 1921
"An explanation of certain defects of Jewish life is often sought in the generalization that the Jews of the middle ages were what the middle agesl made them. in truth the effect of external pressure was negative rather than positive. The Jews suffered more from the dispiriting calms of life within the ghetto than from the passionate storms of death that raged without it. The anti-social crusade of the medieval Church against the Jews did more than slay its thousands. It deprived the Jews of the very conditions necessary for the full development of their genius. The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment. I am far from asserting that Judaism is a force so feeble that its children sink into decay so soon as they are robbed of the influence of forces foreign to itself. But it was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza. The ghetto had its freaks, but the men just named were not born in ghettos. And how should it be otherwise?... The defects of the Jewish character prove this as well as its virtues. Most of its defects are the result either of isolation, or of reaction after isolation."
Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, 1896
"But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again."
Henry Longfellow "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport", 1854
"No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's clutching a noggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world."
James Joyce Ulysses, 1921
"An explanation of certain defects of Jewish life is often sought in the generalization that the Jews of the middle ages were what the middle agesl made them. in truth the effect of external pressure was negative rather than positive. The Jews suffered more from the dispiriting calms of life within the ghetto than from the passionate storms of death that raged without it. The anti-social crusade of the medieval Church against the Jews did more than slay its thousands. It deprived the Jews of the very conditions necessary for the full development of their genius. The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment. I am far from asserting that Judaism is a force so feeble that its children sink into decay so soon as they are robbed of the influence of forces foreign to itself. But it was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza. The ghetto had its freaks, but the men just named were not born in ghettos. And how should it be otherwise?... The defects of the Jewish character prove this as well as its virtues. Most of its defects are the result either of isolation, or of reaction after isolation."
Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, 1896
