golda

Hamutal Bar-Yosef and Esther Cameron

A CONVERSATION ON LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Hamutal: Literature, as part of contemporary culture, needs a kick from time to time, like a blanket that does not cover the whole body. But when culture itself becomes full of kicks for the sake of kicks, when the kick is the ticket of admission, the bon ton, then we need to kick the kick and to cover what was left uncovered, or perhaps the other way around: to illumine what was covered by the blind spot of whose who create and dictate culture.

I mean specifically the habit of giving, from time to time, high marks to poetry that is “innovative,” “young,” that kicks both at tradition and at existing reality; poetry that is bitter, angry, that “shakes you up,” protest poetry, post-trauma, injustice, revulsion, poetry that wants to shock the reader and leave him shocked, poetry that wants to expose and show only the dark side of the moon, poetry that works on the reader with a certain violence and gives him permission to be vengeful and petty; and on the other hand, basically from the same direction, to give law marks to poetry that in the end wants to appeal to the reader’s reason, to calm him down, sometimes to make him laugh, to show him that with all due respect to the moon it also has a bright side, to give him a perspective from which it is possible to go on living and loving life, even to succeed in life, even after the most terrible things, as God explains to Job and as He permitted to Cain, poetry that speaks tenderly, calmly, with quiet humor, delicately. Poetry that gives honor to things that deserve it, poetry that is mature and wise. Poetry that has nobility and magnanimity. I’m not talking about self-righteousness, but about a broad and understanding view of the most terrible drawbacks of reality, without being shocked and without screaming.

Esther:I agree with most of what you’ve said, but would note that sometimes it is necessary to be shocked and to scream. But the shock should awaken us to see ways of rectification and not become a habitual state in which we basically accept the situation and just give ourselves credit for being shocked – while forgetting to value the good that remains.

Rilke has a poem that begins, “Say, poet, what do you do? – I praise.” The refrain “I praise” comes back after the question: “But the deadly, the monstrous? How do you stand that, how do you accept it?” Every poem worth the name has an element of praise for the Creation, even if the only good thing that appears in the poem is the poet’s ability to see things as they are and to give them their true names. But it is important not to see only the negative. In my poems I unfortunately have to note and analyze a good many negative things, but I have taken on myself to try, at least, to respond to the beautiful things that I encounter, and draw attention to them.

There is a natural tendency, against which one must struggle, to respond to bad things more than to good. This has a biological basis: if an animal fails to react to the approach of a predator, for instance, this is likely to be fatal, whereas it will survive a failure to notice some source of food. Failure to notice the good does have bad results in the long run, because what we don’t notice tends to disappear.

Hamutal: If in poetry and culture we give low marks to reason (as the enemy of natural feeling and spontaneous love), this is due to the founders of Romanticism. Since their day, more than two centuries have passed, and this idea has been sucked dry, not without producing many monsters, some of them very beautiful (like the poetry of Baudelaire) which have enchanted us for a long time, but are already beginning to be boring – not the original ones, but those who chew them like a cud. On the other hand the human need for things that have reason, maturity, tenderness and kindness, nobility and humor (not satire, not irony – there’s a difference!), has for a long time been humiliated and trampled with jackboots. Therefore it is necessary to reawaken this need and the corresponding poetic tradition, and to assert their right to high marks. We need a poetry that expresses and instils nobility and kindness, poetry that express and instill the light of understanding itself and a sense of humor even about the ugliest and most frightening things!

The intimidating shadow of the Soviet “socialist realism” need not frighten us. In our country there is no political censorship of poetry and the demand for refreshment here is not the result of any political position whatsoever. It is the result of feeling and taste which many readers have carried inside them for many years but which are not expressed, and just because kindness and good taste, like nobility of soul tend to shrink back from rebellion and proclamations. And maybe it really would be better to refrain from making this proclamation, and just to write! Time will choose the product that will last.

Esther: About the necessity for reason, I agree completely. It’s really a disaster that a world where technology, the product of extremely sophisticated thinking, has gotten out of control, people do not permit themselves to think about how man, created in the image of God, could regain control. They thereby miss the pleasures of reason and condemn themselves to helplessness. Your demands on poetry are mine. Hear hear!

But is Romanticism to blame? I must admit I have a weakness for Romanticism. The poetry of Baudelaire is a late phenomenon – post-Romantic. And even he has poems that are just beautiful, in which he forgets that he has to be evil. But you won’t take Keats away from me! At its best, Romanticism gives us to feel the internal riches of the human soul, the beauty of nature, the music of feeling.

As you say, our position is not like “socialist realism.” We’re not attempting to impose censorship. On the contrary, we need to put an end to a different censorship, which got itself established when no one was looking. Example: in the 80’s I translated beautiful long poem by Simon Halkin addressed to the soul. At Halkin’s suggestion I sent it to a journal that has published another long poem of his, one written in an ironic tone. I got the answer: today it is impossible to write about the soul.

Hamutal: I am sick of the unconscious. Don’t you see that this monster, this false messiah, is ruling our lives, our literature, our poetry, giving license to violence, to screaming, to continual demonstrations of misery? Freud’s call to free the subconscious from immoral inhibitions (at least in the clinic; Nietzsche went on to free us from inhibitions in action) appears against social background completely different from ours. Then it was necessary. Today the inhibitions have been almost completely extinguished – at least in certain social circles – and the expression of impulse in poetry, however dramatic, has become trite, repetitious, boring, since there is no need of any courage in order to give expression to what was considered reprehensible a century ago.

Esther : The unconscious – that’s a complicated subject. To me it’s clear that poetry needs not only reason but something that is beyond reason and consciousness. A place where we know more than we know. Perhaps we do not have to call it the “sub”conscious, with Freud; perhaps it’s the “super-conscious” of Rav Ginsburgh! But apparently there is a confusion between what is outside our consciousness and the sewer of raw impulse on which many choose to draw – between descent to the depths and the casting-off of restraints.

As many have said, the poet is the successor of the primitive shaman, who would go into a trance and travel to the world of the spirits in order to bring back something for the world. The myth of Orpheus contains a memory of that role. The poet was always something of a deviant, but as such he served society. The problem today is that this deviance serves not society but a kind of antisocial individualism.

The violence is the expression of an extreme individualism, but in my opinion it is also stems from the need to attract attention. As I said before, we all have a tendency to pay more attention to negative than to positive things. And it’s not really new that poets make use of this tendency. There is plenty of violence in folk songs and folk tales. If it seems to be getting worse, this is perhaps because poetry and literature in general have to try harder for attention. I’ve been in several poetry groups in which one poet, generally not the most talented, wrote something especially appalling and got a lot of attention, which spoiled the atmosphere of the group. I protested, but no one joined me. They didn’t seem to understand that if we don’t set limits nothing will remain of real poetry. But here the subconscious or the unconscious was not to blame.

Hamutal: “Who has sanctified us with His commandments” – that is, the fulfillment of moral obligations makes man more divine. In other words: the daily exercise of the muscles of will and inner discipline contributes to man no less than physical exercise. Today the neglect of those inner brakes is threatening the health of every one of us, and obviously also threatens all the established systems, including education, the army and the government. More and more we are becoming addicted to traumas, we give them honor and need more and more healers, instead of coping with them and healing ourselves. Yes, healing ourselves. It is quite possible in most cases, dear psychologists, to heal ourselves just as much and just as fast as in a clinic.

Esther: I would add that psychology causes harm when it is detached from morality. Example: I know a woman whose husband got into a pattern of insulting her. They went to a psychologist to whom only feelings counted. So she assumed that when he became insulting, this was because he was feeling bad, and the solution was to help him to feel better. Of course, this method only rewarded the insulting behavior, and it became worse, till the couple were on the verge of divorce. Finally they went to a rav who had no psychological background but only applied moral criteria. With his help the man understood that you don’t insult someone else or give someone else the responsibility for your behavior, and this appears to have saved the marriage.

5. Hamutal: Literature, as part of present-day culture, has forgotten the enormous, comforting,, constructive power of “togetherness.” It’s clear that the framework of family and society brings pressures, but a familial and social vacuum is an incubator for traumas. Judaism seems to be the one religion that makes the approach to God conditional on the experience of human togetherness and understands how vital it is to human existence. Joseph weeps not when his brothers throw him into the pit and not when Zuleikha maligns him and he is thrown into prison indefinitely, but from repressed longing for the brothers who did him terrible wrong and the father who spoiled him, and he is already an important person who could easily have avenged himself on them and doesn’t really need them. For he had pity on them – not for himself.

Esther: Agree with every word. And if today there is an over-reliance on therapy, maybe it’s related to the distance between people in modern culture, a lessening of reliance on one another.

Hamutal: There is not literature (or art of any kind) if the work does not make you say “Wow!” There is no literature of value if the writer or artist does not have a sense of humor. A sense of humor is the highest form of perspective.

Esther: I do see what you mean. As you say, humor of the right kind is “the highest form of perspective” -- a sign of our ability to lift ourselves above fate. Among actors it’s proverbial that it is harder to play comedy than tragedy. On the other hand, humor can all too easily descend into vulgarity and callousness. Moreover, humor is not present in all great literature. There isn’t much humor in Keats, for instance, and what there is, is not very successful. In “King Lear” there are jokes, but the jokes are not funny. Have you found any humor in the book of Psalms? In the end we are vulnerable.

Hamutal: Literature and poetry that protest in a simplistic way against wrongs done to women, ethnic minorities or homosexuals are what we once called “engaged literature,” and dismissed as inferior literature.

Esther. It seems to me that as in all genres, there is both good and bad. Probably mostly bad. It depends on whether the writer is coming from a personal engagement or just following literary fashion and “political correctness.” I am thinking of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children,” written in protest against child labor. Or Blake’s poem on the lot of the chimney sweeps. These are among the most powerful poems of the nineteenth century.

Hamutal: In the poetry of the last century there is a lack of gratitude and reverence – the feelings that produced the genre of the ode and much religious poetry and music. These feelings are good and necessary to human beings, even when reality is bad. Especially when reality is bad. In his poem “My Heart Leaps Up” Wordsworth speaks of “natural piety.” What arouses gratitude and reverence in contemporary poetry?

Esther. Would generally agree, though one can still find them now and then. I’m thinking of Wendell Berry’s “To the Holy Spirit.”

Hamutal: Contemporary poetry has completely neglected musicality – rhyme, alliteration, syntax that creates harmonies and breaks them. This is a serious loss, which encourages the spread of graphomania.

Esther: Yes, I remember reading in an article by some critic about the avoidance of alliteration in modern poetry. It seems that somehow alliteration, not to speak of rhyme, is considered uncool.

This is not happening in a social vacuum. The musical devices of poetry are essentially hypnotic techniques. The poem wants to cast a spell, to “transport” the reader. For it to work, the reader has to be willing to let down his or her guard. And in a society where human relations are breaking down, there is a wariness, an anxiety, a fear of being taken in.

10. Hamutal: In Israel the moderately religious, who keep Shabbat, are the future audience of literature, because at least on Shabbat they read, even the young people. And even on weekdays they have a little more linguistic and literary background than most secular people. They also have a tendency to be interested in spirituality, sensitivity and morality, and to take these things seriously. Secular youth who are interested in literature are hedonistic, narcissistic and entangled in traumas, and that is also what they seek in literature. The common denominator is a blessed innocence.

Esther. As a “moderately religious” person, I was amused recently to read about a very secular author who didn’t seem to have much use for religion but admitted that his readership is largely religious, judging by the volume of emails he receives after the close of Shabbat! It seems as though in recent years more and more people have become disillusioned with secularism, in one degree or another. Perhaps the secular literary world will eventually follow suit and recover some of the values which the religious community has preserved.

11.

Hamutal: Our picture of reality is drawn for us to a considerable degree by the media. The media are supported by advertisers, who are interested in ratings. As is well known, anything that is bad and scary and anger-provoking pushes the ratings up. The result is clear. In this way news broadcasts and documentaries give a selective view of reality, ignoring pleasant surprises. The fear and anger which they arouse create a bad, frightening, and angry emotional and cultural reality.

Esther. Quite.

12.

Hamutal. Details on the life of an author do not contribute to the understanding of his work. They create an attitude toward the work as if it were an autobiographical document. It is clear that every artist, especially a writer or poet, uses his personal experience as material for the work, but that does not mean that he wants to tell only of his own experience and share it with the address. For that there is the diary and the psychologist’s office. A literary text of lasting value (the Bible, Shakespeare, Bialik) does not put the author’s head on the shoulder of the reader, but the other way around: it offers the reader a shoulder on which to put his head. An autobiographical reading diminishes the text and the writer, puts them on the same petty, gossipy level as the reader, release the reader from reverence for the genius of the writer.

The context that is useful for the understanding of a work of literature, music or visual art is the other works of the same artist and an acquaintance with the works that were created in his time or shortly before, an acquaintance with what was accepted in his time. Dates in the margins of poems or stories are useful only for that purpose.

Are these reflections stamped with the stamp of my old age? Yes, but if they are only that they are not worth much.

Esther. I agree, mostly. Mandelshtam said that the biography of an intellectual is the list of books he has read!

Still, I can’t help thinking of James Joyce, who positively invites the reader to make connections between his work and his life! And it can sometimes be instructive to compare the work with the life, for if we understand how he uses the autobiographical material, how he transforms it, this helps us to see the direction in which he was moving. This assumes that literature is not just an aesthetic experience but part of our search for meaning and orientation.

But biography as gossip does do a lot of harm. Recently a new biography of Paul Celan came out, which I don’t intend to read, and am afraid that anyone who reads it will never understand the poems. I wonder if anyone today can read him as we read him in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, when the poems seemed to stand almost in the void, which I believe was what he intended.

13.

Hamutal: We need a literature that is written from the place of the therapist, not of the patient. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy his “teacher”’ and did not think that diminished his greatness. Clearly, a good teacher will wrap his message in art. Good teaching is an art in itself, which deserves respect and even reverence.

Esther: Agree.

14.

Hamutal. It’s amazing how intelligent, important people with standing in the community, people with a critical sense, are addicted to their narcissistic ego and to the feeling of their own importance, and display it to the public without qualms.

Esther. Yes, sadly. And intellectual life is stifled when everyone who has written a book regards his ideas as his property and doesn’t connect with other minds.

15.

Hamutal. Does a literary work have to expose and reflect reality (individual, social, emotional, political, etc.) exactly and with great honesty, or should it depict reality in a way that will help the reader to live, that is, to see that reality in a positive light, to judge reality and himself in a moral way, and to use the work in order to live better? And if we choose the second possibility—how justified is the writer or poet in dwelling on the aspects of reality as he knows it that are irreparably cruel, desperate and disgusting? Should he cause the naïve young reader to shake off illusions about love, marriage, and parenthood? Is that good, because it warns him against mistakes, or is it bad, because it leads him to a pessimistic outlook that will damage his mental and physical health? In general, is it good to dwell in illusions, despite the sudden blows that are likely to land on you? Perhaps the optimistic, naïve person who dwell in illusion will absorb the blows more easily?

Esther. That is a delicate question. On the one hand, without illusion about human beings and society and human relations, life is simply hell. On the other hand it would be well to warn youth against tendencies we all have, and if we not warned against them they can lead to catastrophe. For instance, boys and girls approaching adolescence need to know not only the raw “facts of life” but also to be aware of the impulses that are connected with those facts, what behavior those impulses can lead to – and also how the media use those impulses to lead them to actions that further the interests of the advertisers and not of those influenced by them. I would add that what calls itself “honesty” in literature is sometimes driven by a destructive motive or the above-mentioned wish to get attention, and isn’t honesty at all.

16.

Hamutal. I have my doubts about the literary value of a work in which the main pleasure for the reader lies in the hunt for allusions. This pleasure is based on the feeling of a shared culture between the reader and the writer, on the reader’s feeling that he is “at home” and shares an identity with the writer. This is not a matter of identification with the hero or with the message of the book, but of outward resemblance between the milieu described in the book and the milieu which the reader knows. This reminds me that at the end of the 1980’s, when Yitzchak Navon was Ministry of Education and Culture, I was present at an event in honor of Book Week, in which the minister addressed the audience of writers and said: I don’t understand what you write, I read and I don’t feel at home. Here Yehuda Burla writes such and such (he quoted some description of a character walking down the street and crunching sunflower seeds) – with this I feel at home! Some years later I had to teach again and again a course entitled “Criteria for Praise and Blame in Hebrew Literary Criticism”, and could not find any explicit formulation of a criterion of “feeling at home.” But I see it operating without shame in the desire of Sephardi readers for Sephardi literature, of religiously observant readers for literature by religious writers, of kibbutzniks for literature about the kibbutz, of women for literature that describes the world of women, and so on. If literature that is value should be lasting (“eternal”) and universal, then this criterion seems to me human, touching, but dubious.

Thus is would perhaps be worthwhile to reexamine the work of Agnon. The reasons given by the judges for awarding him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966 were: 1) treatment of motifs from Jewish life 2) mixture of tradition and modernism 3) linguistic innovativeness, exceptional mastery of Hebrew, use of a rich and many-layered language 4) ideational and psychological depth: focus on questions of existence, identity and roots 5) complex characters and situations that raise moral and cultural questions 6) widespread literary influence.

The first three (out of six) reasons are factors that cause the Hebrew reader, especially if he is religiously observant, a feeling of being “at home.” The fourth speaks of “existence, identity and roots” , whereby identity and roots are again a specifically Jewish matter. The sixth reason is baseless. As for “moral and cultural questions” – it would be well to speak more clearly about these “questions” and their meanings especially in “The Rough Will be Made Plain” or “A Simple Story”, to say nothing of “The Lady and the Peddler.”

Esther. Here it is not clear to me why you seem to be attacking one of the main sources of literary enjoyment! After all, when reading any work on a Torah subject we are alert all the time to allusions to the sources – Bible, Talmud, Midrash, earlier and later commentators. The system of allusions does give the reader the feeling that he is “at home”, and who does not find comfort in such a feeling? And why is such comfort illegitimate? It has been said many times that Torah has been for Jews a “portable homeland.”

Modern Western writers, like Eliot in “The Wasteland,” tried to create a sort of “homeland” for Western readers through quotations from world literature. Celan does the same. A successful allusion expands the space of the work, releases it from its solitude. True, the habit of allusion can also give an impression of pretentiousness, as with Pound.

The wish to read literature by writers who share some “identity” with the reader – Sephardi, female, whatever—seems to me a separate subject. I must admit that after I returned to the United States in 1990 after living for ten in Israel where I had mainly studied sources written exclusively by men, I developed a voracious appetite for fiction written by women! It was as if I had been walking for too long in men’s shoes and needed shoes designed for the structure of my foot. Cultural and national identities are a slightly different matter. I am biologically different from a man, but not from a Sephardi or Chinese woman. There’s a different set of cultural codes, but one can learn them, as one learns a language. Some years ago I read the autobiography of a South African poet who noted that because he was colored people expected him to write about race, but what he really wanted to do was to write like Keats.

17.

Hamutal: Literature is not documentation – autobiographical, historical, ethnographical or whatever. Writers (sometimes also poets) use the materials that are familiar to them from their personal experience, from their lives or from other sources, and do their best to see that the reality they describe appears authentic and interesting, but if it is good literature the aim is not documentation, however fascinating and amusing that may be, but the meaning that is hidden behind it. Tolstoy did not write “War and Peace” to document the war in the Russians defeated the army of Napoleon. He described the war in order to say (quite daringly, relative to his time) that war is a crazy mess, and that in order to lead a war you need to be patient and wise like Kutuzov and not boastful and vain like Napoleon. The historical information that you obtain from the historical novel is a bonus, even if not always reliable, but it is not the final aim of the writer, it is perhaps only a vehicle. In my view literature that only documents reality or a way of life is of dubious value.

Esther. Agree. Although I think that documentation is also important. You know, I wrote a memoir (or autobiography) in which I tried not to change any detail, and yet to write it so that it would sound like a novel. I inserted the poems written in connection with the events. The aim was to get the reader to understand certain events, of a kind not everyone believes in, and for this purpose it was important to be accurate. But I must admit that I don’t have any talent for fiction – I can’t invent stories. Could I have achieved the same purpose if I had invented characters and events that reflected the same truths? I’m not sure. Once someone who had attended a workshop given by a novelist told me that the novelist had cautioned the participants not to put anything too strange into their fiction, even if strange things had actually happened to them, because in fiction such things would not seem believable! So it was important to me to emphasize that the things I was telling did in fact happen.

It seems to me that the important thing in a story – whether true or fictional – is that the events should seem marvelous, should give the feeling that the Creation is not to be taken for granted. Or, as you say, literature should not only relate events but give a sense of the meaning behind them.

18.

Hamutal: When I was young I greatly esteemed, almost worshipped honesty and frankness. Deception and self-deception seemed despicable to me. I also expected literary works to be honest, as a matter of course. Today I ask myself: what does honesty accomplish? What will my frank speech cause? In my daily life this brings me to a great deal of useful hypocrisy. In literature it leads to a tendency to use my personal experience not to confess but to do something good for the reader: to elevate him to strengthen him, to warn him, to make him laugh, to change him.

Esther. For instance: it is known that the novels of Jane Austen depict a more orderly world than the world in which she lived. I read somewhere that after World War I her novels were given to shell-shocked soldiers by way of therapy.

19.

Hamutal. Is it necessary to consider alienation and dissociation within the family as laws of nature, that is, so it is and so it must be, and therefore there is no reason to be offended or insulted? The permissiveness, in action and in feeling, which is standard today toward children and adolescents, causes them to feel that everything is permitted, you have to go with the flow, to do what you feel like doing, to enjoy life here and now. Besides the harm they are likely to do to others, in the family and outside it, this is also likely to destroy the togetherness of the family, society, and the state. Whoever thinks this is allowable would do well to study a bit of history, especially Jewish history.

Esther. Indeed. And this would prompt reexamination of some important works of 20^th century literature, such as Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

22.

Hamutal: The idealization of suffering and the sufferer in Western culture (which is still deeply rooted in Christianity) makes me want to ask: and what have you done for Jesus, besides bowing down to him, besides hating, persecuting and trying to exterminate those who supposedly crucified him or caused him to be crucified (because they are easier victims that the real crucifiers)?

The clear difference between Christianity and Judaism is the relationship to death. In Judaism the cemetery is an unclean place, the dead body is unclean, anyone who touches it or sits close to it becomes unclean. The mourner is exempt from the commandments for seven days, because he is like the living dead. But after that he is supposed to rehabilitate himself gradually, with the help of the community, whose members are commanded to comfort the mourner. But in ancient Judaism, the original Judaism, the process of mourning and comforting is supposed to last at most a year. After that there is the “gathering of the bones” and further ceremonies of mourning are forbidden. What psychological wisdom! What a healthy, correct approach to the trauma of mourning! What positive demands! The Yahrzeit and the visiting of graves of tsaddikim are the result of foreign influences, of religions less demanding than, designed for people with less developed psychological powers. But in all the religons there are ceremonies that express understanding of the importance of the community’s embrace.

Esther. As to the idealization of suffering, I agree.

As to the relationship to death, I’m not sure. I don’t personally make a practice of visiting the graves of tzadikim, but I know people who do – who sometimes seem to feel a spiritual presence there – and I’m not one to say their experience was not real. I would remind you that the first property acquired by Abraham in the land of Israel was a gravesite, which has always remained a place of pilgrimage. I’m also not sure that the Yahrtzeit is necessarily a continuation of mourning. Perhaps it is more an occasion to remember the deceased, who he or she was and what we owe them, to keep up the connection with the past, which after all is important in Judaism.

23.

Hamutal. So much has been written about “man.” But there is no “man,” there are all sorts of human beings, who behave in different ways, even in situations that apparently leave no choice, in cases of terminal illness (such as old age), in situations of survival, in the Holocaust – different people behave, speak, feel and think in different ways.

Esther. Yes, but in the end we are all in the same boat. Not only as to birth and death, but all of us bear responsibility for the future of the world, and so there is the wish to find a common denominator, and/or to put the different pieces together into a general picture. For Rav Kook, teshuvah (repentance) is the going out of the individual perspective to the general perspective. I can’t prove it, but I have the feeling that the vital movement of literature, especially poetry, is the movement toward connection with the collective soul.

24.

Hamutal: At the beginning of Ramadan I ask myself: what moves people from different cultures and religions to engage in ascetic practices, some of them very cruel, to the point of child sacrifice? Is this some deep human need, like the impulse of cruelty toward others? Since before the days of monotheism ceremonies of purification, spiritual practices, prophecy, have been widespread. Does the impulse toward such things find any expression in secular Western culture, besides dieting and physical exercise whose only purpose is to preserve physical health? And if not, are we neglecting a human need? Is the desire for professional success replacing Moloch and other deities? And what happens to a culture that neglects spiritual exercise, the “muscles of will,” as I prefer to call them? The present trend in the West toward meditation and Vispana testify to the feeling that something is lacking.

Esther. All I know is that I fast on fast days and am always very glad when they are over.

25.

Hamutal. I have heretical thoughts about the Ninth of Av. I ask myself: for what reason do we fast on the Ninth of Av, and what purpose do fast days serve in the Jewish tradition? The only fast prescribed by the written Torah is the fast of the Day of Atonement, which is not a day of mourning. It is meant to purify the soul and bring us to repentance or – to give it a more universal formulation – to improve the emotional and spiritual quality of our lives. There are 4 fast days, including the 9^th of Av, which are days of mourning for the destruction of the Temple and the exile, in addition to two additional days of mourning (without fasting) for the dead of the Holocaust and those who have fallen in the wars of Israel. It is hard for me to think of another people, a religion or culture that dedicates so many days of mourning for loss, disaster or failure, and this in a culture that treats personal mourning as a process that is meant to end within a year. It is hard for me to think of such intense cultivation of the memory of disaster and failure.

So why, as Jews, do we cultivate these said memories so much, and what does this do to our identity as Jews and Israelis?

Memory in general, and national memory in particular, is selective and can serve various purposes, for instance, it can help to build the present and future so as to prevent future disaster, but it can also shape an image of ourselves as innocent victim and of those who caused the disaster as demonic monsters forever, on whom we must take vengeance or at least to constantly arm ourselves against them. In my view it is very important how and for what purpose we use the memory of the disaster.

As for fasting – as said, in ancient Judaism there were no fast days established for national mourning. Fast days, like the fast of Esther, were one-time occurrences, meant to prevent disaster. In other religions fasts are part of initiation rites or a way of propitiating the gods. The purpose of the Ramadan fast is the same as that of our Day of Atonement. So we are left with fasts that are meant to mark destruction, disaster or failure and with the question: what is this supposed to do to us? What, basically, are we obligated to remember in order to improve the quality of our spiritual and emotional lives?

Esther. I must admit: although I know people who find the Day of Atonement fast to be a spiritual experience, me it just depresses. The Torah says to afflict our souls, and that’s what it does to me.

There is a lot of food for thought in what you say, aside from some differences which I must note. First of all, about what you call our self-image as innocent victims. Maybe that is true on the two secular remembrance days. In traditional Judaism, however, there are no totally innocent victims, because there is no one who is totally innocent. This world is a place where creatures behave according to Darwinistic laws. But God revealed Himself to us and showed us that there is a higher Law and the possibility of a different world. It was always too much for us, we have never really lived up to it, but we have tried; we bear the message, even sometimes against our will; while our neighbors have sensed the revelation and envied us for it even while resisting it. Out of this ambivalence they shaped religions which distorted the message – I object strongly to comparisons between the Day of Atonement and Ramadan, the season of jihad -- and have never ceased to persecute us (with the exception of some reason developments in Christianity). And therefore, very sadly, we have no choice but to constantly arm ourselves against them.

If we are still speaking, a few thoughts.

It seems to me that memory, even if it is negative, is part of the secret of the Jewish people’s survival. And perhaps memory is so often negative because of the tendency I noted before, to react more to negative than to positive things.

There is a saying that the Messiah is born on the 9^th of Av, that out of destruction we renew ourselves. Perhaps that is related to the universal recourse to ascetic practices and sacrifices which you noted.

I have always believed that developments which occurred after the giving of the Torah, and are still continuing, have meaning and may be part of Torah. For instance, the hymn “Lekha Dodi” was not given on Mount Sinai, nor was it written by the Talmudic sages, but no one who keeps the Sabbath today can imagine the Sabbath without it. The destruction of the Temple is surely the greatest symbol we have for the general human failure.

Like many others I feel ambivalent toward attempts to revive the Temple service today. For a long time, I viewed such attempts with great skepticism. If we do not rectify ourselves and our society, what meaning would the rebuilding of the Temple have, beyond our political self-assertion? On the other hand, as time goes on I see that the motive of political self-assertion is not trivial. After all, I do not dispute the need for the latter; after all, it is a crying shame that on our holiest site, instead of the blessings pronounced by our kohanim, there are “prayers” that curse us and the world. I’d rather see see the revival of the Temple service, animal sacrifices and all.

As for Holocaust Remembrance Day, I always wish that on that day we would try to remember what existed before the Shoah – the vitality, the hopes, the dreams, the ideas, the atmosphere of places like Vienna and Czernowitz between the wars. Brute force suppresses creativity; perhaps instead of retelling the horrors we should try to recover the energies that were stolen from us.

From a strictly religious viewpoint this suggestion is problematic, because all that creativity was bound up with abandonment of religion and adoption of many of the modern attitudes we have deplored. Thus one could go back to that period only in a spirit of “raising the sparks” from chaos.

26. To what extent is a person obliged to “rectify” himself, to fight against his instincts to as to live well? Socrates thought so, and even more so Christianity and all the Indian philosophies. Nothing of the sort appears in the Bible. The righteous man is “like a tree planted on streams of water that gives its fruit in its season” (and others can eat of the fruit too). Success is a sign that one has found favor in the eyes of God (as in the story of Joseph -- and in order to succeed or to achieve justice it is possible and worthwhile to be manipulative, as Tamar was with Judah). True, a lack of self-control (Cain) and arrogance (the tower of Babel) lead to disaster, but this does not mean that in everyday life a person must give himself pain or practice asceticism in order to avoid disaster. Moral improvement (the main aim of which is fruitfulness, growth, prosperity and the ability to give) is achieved through the fulfillment of daily commandments, as routine as brushing one’s teeth. Ancient Judaism does not recommend a romantic, dramatic life, it believes in shrewdness.

Esther. A lot of wisdom in that. I would only note that the routine of the commandments was developed by the post-Biblical sages, who also recognized the need to struggle against basic instincts (the “evil inclination”)!

27.

Hamutal: While translating Lev Shestov’s book “The Philosophy of Tragedy: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche”: He accuses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of dishonesty because there is no correspondence between their defective personalities (as described in their own confessions and as reflected in the characters of their fiction) and the moral message that is implied in their works. The ridiculous demand that the voice of the writer or poet implied in the work should be an exact autobiographical recording of the voice and behavior of the author in reality! For the author himself builds his implied voice, which reflects only the higher aspect of his personality, the part he would like to cultivate in himself!

The correspondence between various details in the work and the actual life of the writer or poet does not mean that the work is a documentation – autobiographical, historical, or social. These details are materials which the writer or poet sues to create a colorful, fascinating, exciting, authentic stage, on which everything that appears is metaphoric or symbolic. His aim is not to reflect or document, not to add to the knowledge possessed by the reader, but to make, to do something to the reader’s heart and mind, to change him, if only for a moment. Perhaps even – with the help of all the changes that will occur in readers – to change reality, the world in which we live.

Esther: I haven’t read Shestov’s book, but I would say that there is a conflict here between what we expect of an author (in Western culture) and what we expect of the just person, the tsaddik. In Western culture there is often a glaring discrepancy between the persona of the work and the personality of the individual who wrote it. It may even be the case that the wickedness of the latter is what frees the author to depict, in his work, all the nobility that is lacking in his real-life conduct. The most ethereal folk-rock songs I’ve ever heard were written by a woman who among other things is said to have robbed a convenience store. In contrast, we expect the tsaddik to be a tsaddik – to be essentially a walking work of art, to exemplify in his every action the values he teaches. Rav Kook, when he urged the revival of belles lettres in the Torah world, demanded at the same time that writers should purify themselves, become tsaddikim. We have yet to see whether that is possible, or whether we shall always have to choose, in Yeats’ phrase, between “perfection of the life and of the work.”

28.

Hamutal: Hedonism in many places has become an aim of life, an achievement, a mark of distinction. I’ve heard that on dating sites “Loves life,” “pleasure-loving” and so on have become a standard calling card, denoting an attractive trait. Is the opposite of hedonism altruism, asceticism, depression? Not at all! If hedonism means egoism as an absolute commandment (and indeed it seems to be interpreted that way), then the opposite is: consideration of others, sensitivity to their existence, their dignity, their needs. Considerateness is not altruism, consideration is general mutual. We urgently need education in considerateness. In order to continue the Zionist enterprise and ensure its justified existence we need to change the spiritual climate. The enemies: hedonism, capitalism, media. Is there a chance of fighting them?

Esther. To fight all that we would need a movement based on thinking rather than shouting…

29.

Hamutal: Is there more joy in Mizrachi culture than in Ashkenazi culture? Or is there just more noise, loud voices and milling around? Noise, loud voices, and milling around are characteristics of low culture, whether Eastern or Western. I don’t think they are found in high-level Mizrachi culture. To be joyful you don’t have to yell.

Esther: Few things are more oppressive than the ear-damaging music we are forced to hear at almost all weddings, whether Mizrachi or Ashkenazi.

30.

Hamutal: “No, great sorrow does not excuse us from behaving with kindness, from treating others humanely, from thinking of others” (Leah Goldberg), in the magazine ‘Ittim, January 30, 1948, thirty days after the massacre in Haifa in which 39 Jewish workers were murdered by Arab rioters.

Esther: True.

32.

Hamutal: In book reviews one often finds words of praise such as “stunning”, “strong,” “impressive,” “delightful,” “ground-breaking.” I can’t recall seeing the word “wise”, especially not in reviews of poetry. This has dire results in the field of literary creativity, especially poetry, although – perhaps from sensitivity to the true needs of readers – poets do sometimes write wise poems. Thus Bialik, Lea Goldberg, Amichai, Tuvia Ribner, Miron Izakson, sometimes Aggi Mishol, and I am sure there are more.

If Natan Zach, in his destructive criticism of Leah Goldberg’s book Early and Late, had paid attention to the three poems of “Three Days,” especially to the third, he would have understood, that unlike him (as in his famous poem “When my girl told me: Go”), Lea Goldberg writes about disappointed love from a sober, ironic perspective, emphasizing the temporary nature of the experience and the recovery from it. He might have noticed how far she is from the theatricality of Alterman (which he repeatedly attacked without noticing its symbolic function which was necessarily unrealistic). Here is the poem:

For three days the memory of him never left me

And on the fourth I sliced the bread

And on the fourth I opened the window

And on the fourth I saw the sea.

And on the fourth I knew that the sea

Is very beautiful and its expanse is blue

And the salt breeze carried

The smell of the sea, not the taste of my tears.

***

Esther. Here I have nothing to add!

33.

Hamutal: Literary critics, and also readers of literature in this time, are drawn to politics, to social problems, to psychology, but they lack a philosophical education and the capacity for abstract, universal thinking. Therefore they have difficulty in understand symbolic works, which create myths and aspire essentially to say something about the laws of history and of human behavior, or about moral principles. Critics and writers appreciate and praise the concrete, the sensuous, the “authentic,” not what it represents. Thus the writer can no longer be a teacher. He (or the character in his work) is the patient of the reader and the critic.

Esther. Again I have nothing to add.

34.

Hamutal: There is nothing more dangerous, more likely to cause disaster and lead to pessimism and crime than a hope that is disappointed and shown to be an illusion. But where does the cause of disaster reside: in the disappointment, in the exaggerated hope, that is in the illusion: Naivete is thus a recipe for disaster. Or might it be that illusion itself will find a way to see the disaster in a comfortable light and to accept it without feelings of guilt? Illusion is good for one’s health, but only for those who stubbornly refuse to see reality.

Esther: Whether illusion is healthy or not depends on the specific circumstances. A wife who mistakenly thinks that her husband is faithful to her may be better off never knowing of his infidelities. But someone who thinks that his enemy has been appeased or deterred, when the enemy is still plotting his ruin, had better find out the truth as soon as possible.

35.

Hamutal. Cosmopolitanism is a sure sign of provincialism. It was born in the provinces that were under Roman rule, among people who turned their backs on their own ethnic identities and wanted to belong – not to the whole world, as the noun “cosmopolitanism” might lead us to think, but to the powerful and prestigious empire. Thus in the 19^th century enlightened citizens of lands that were under the control of empires identified as cosmopolitans when they wished for a pan-European identity. Similarly the Jews who claimed to be cosmopolitans: they did not want to belong to the whole world but just to Europe, which they regarded as the embodiment of high culture. Today, too, cosmopolitanism is the refusal of patriotism and the identification with prestigious cultures, not with backward ones.

Esther: I was always told that cosmopolitanism was originally a Hellenistic invention, continued by the Romans, which subject peoples were invited to adopt. But as to the motives of those claiming to be cosmopolites, I daresay you are right.

38.

Hamutal. Should poetry be understandable or obscure? First of all, it is clear that as emotional or intellectual communication poetry is indirect, not direct, and as such it says something indirectly, by hints, and needs to be deciphered, so that any poem worthy of the name contains a certain element of obscurity. Second, people read poetry from a need for a powerful and esthetic emotional and intellectual communication, which a direct expression cannot transmit, and they enjoy indirect communication, for the capability of metaphorical or symbolic connection is ingrained in the human organism. In other words: The solving of riddles and deciphering of metaphors are forms of play which give humans pleasure. Third, the degree of understandability or obscurity in a poem depends very much on the reader: how experienced he is in the reading of poetry. What is obscure to one reader is perfectly clear to another (the poems in Alterman’s “The Stars Outside,” for instance). Moreover, different readers will understand the poem more or less completely. Fourth, obscurity cannot be the justification for the poem. In poetry as in life, there is a reason for indirect communication – it occurs when direct communication does not suffice to express the intensity of the feeling or its exact quality. If so, when a poem is entirely unintelligible the reader is supposed to feel the emotional tumult which the poet wanted to express (whether authentic or artificial makes no different). But if the poem is unintelligible, and even after deciphering reveals no emotional intensity, then one can speak of mannerism, that is the use of powerful effects, concentration on linguistic technique, not of emotional expression. There are such works of art, in literature, in art and in music, at least from the 16^th century on. Mannerism can include “Samson’s riddles,” where the meaning of the figurative expressions is known only to the author. Fifth, if the poem is fully decipherable only with the help of biographical information, then the poem contains a “Samson’s riddle.” I think that such Samson’s riddles do not contribute to the poem’s quality. The same goes for poems and stories that are just memoir: literary works and documentation are not the same thing, even though both may arouse emotion. True, sometimes one needs to know the context (historical, biographical, literary, cultural, other poems of the poet) in order to understand a poem thoroughly, but if without these a poem is not understandable at all, then its lasting value is doubtful. A good test of lasting value is: what happens to the poem when it is translated (well?). If nothing remains, then the poem (and the same goes for prose) has a problem. Great works remain impressive in translation, even in bad translations.

Esther: I agree partly, but it is hard to set rules. There are beautiful poems that seem completely intelligible on first reading. And I’m not sure about translatability as a criterion. For instance, one of the most famous poems of Pushkin has, as far as I know, no translations that at all convey its quality. (I found about a dozen on one website, and they are all terrible). Literally, this is what it says:

I loved you once, and even now, perhaps

Love is not quite extinguished in my heart.

But let it trouble you no longer:

I do not want to sadden you in any way.

I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,

Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy.

I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly

As God grant you may be loved by another.

Iambic pentameter, abab. Except for the “dead metaphor” in the second line, no figures of speech.

At the other pole are the poems of Paul Celan, which contain a plethora of “Samson’s riddles.” It turns out that even “Samson’s riddles” can rouse associations, remind you of something, wake you up. My first reaction to a poem of his was “It’s very beautiful. I don’t understand it.” It took me years till I thought I understood something, and even then, perhaps I was mistaken. And even in translation, as I gather from other readers, the power comes through.

But why call poetry “indirect communication”? It seems to me that poetry is more direct than prose! A poem worthy of the name introduces the reader to an immediate reality that can be seen in the mind’s eye, heard with the inner ear, almost touched, thanks to the rhythm which affects the reader physically. Even if the reader may not immediately know what it is.

But I admit that in recent years I have encountered many poems that I don’t understand on any level. They just don’t speak to me. This may be partly because of the lack of a clear rhythm (Celan for the most part did not use rhyme or fixed forms, but there is a strong amphibrachic rhythm in almost every poem). These poems seem to me completely opaque, and I don’t know if it’s my fault or theirs.

40.

Hamutal: The muscles of patience, self-control – they need daily exercise over the course of years in order to function, just like the fingers for musical instruments, and all the muscles of the body. Without this there is no mental health. There is no culture worth mentioning. A culture in which everything I “feel like” doing is permitted and even justified is a renunciation of culture for the life of the jungle.

In a culture of self-control the problem begins when you force someone else to exercise the muscles of self-control, not according to his own will, but from self-righteousness or the wish to dominate.

Esther: Agree.

43.

Hamutal: About the wrongs allegedly done by the state of Israel to the immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, especially the accusation comes from religious people: who in the year 1950 volunteered to help the residents of the transition camps and to teach them Hebrew? Who brought them clothing? Who made it possible for youth who were interested to live and be educated in our homes? Was that the religious sector or the working section of the population? And when will someone say thank you for the volunteer efforts of people who had just been through a terrible war (to which they had contributed most of the effort) and traumatic news of family members murdered in the Shoah? And did those same Mizrachi people volunteer these days for new immigrants?

I think that the human need to value oneself on the basis of belonging to some group has caused great damage to humanity, for it is built on the denigration and demonization of other groups and also on the exaggeration of the suffering that other groups have caused, and fanning the flames of vengefulness.

So with all due respect to what has been written and said on the subject: it is time to cultivate not only intergroup tolerance but also to increase awareness and gratitude for the generosity of other groups. Gratitude is a healthier and more useful feeling than the urge to settle accounts and take vengeance.

Esther: Yes, recently I read the autobiography of Golda Meir and was impressed by the caring effort that she and her colleagues made to absorb a massive wave of immigration in a very short time. What a feat that was. Some bad things did happen in the course of it, like the kidnapping of Yemenite children, but in any massive effort conducted by human beings bad things as well as good are inevitably done, and one must be grateful for the enterprise as a whole.

I agree strongly with your remarks about “the human need to value oneself on the basis of belonging to some group.” There needs to form some center of consciousness that will rise above the differences (see chapter 18 of Rav Kook’s “Lights of Renascence.”) A kind of collective repentance. I would like, despite everything, to place some hope in us poets, because we are committed to writing what we see and not what we are told to see.

44.

Hamutal: Is the need for poetry, music, philosophy, art something essential to our humanity? I know wonderful people who have no need of these things, and the other way around.

Esther: Before the invention of the electronic media, poetry was something quite natural and generally-human. Workers sang at their work. When people gathered they sang together, instead of turning on deafening music. They learned poems by heart. They quoted them to each other. I read that in Florence the cart drivers sang the cantos of Dante’s Inferno. And when people sat down to write poems, the music of the songs that were sung around them seeped into the words. The loss caused by electronic means of communication is incalculable. For this reason I have been urging for many years that those who still love poetry should get together and think how to persuade people to recover the abilities that have been lost with poetry, such as memory and concentration – the way people exercise physically in order to strengthen the body that was built for physical labor that is no longer necessary.