On the Knesset's birthday, in Tu Bishvat, its most veteran member, Shimon Peres, was invited to deliver a speech. He said, among other things, that we can confidently say that King Lear was not Jewish. It is impossible that a Jew would ask: To be or not to be?
Some government ministers smiled broadly and peeked at the journalist gallery, to see whether the media was following. Peres confused one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, King Lear, with another, Prince Hamlet. Peres' slip of the tongue allowed them to showcase their familiarity with English playwriting. Such opportunity is not to be missed.
Slips of the tongue are a common sight in the Knesset, and this was not the worst of them or the most scandalous. The strange part was the declaration implied by Peres' words, that the question of whether to be or not to be does not bother those who belong to the Jewish people. It appears the opposite is true. Jews have always tortured themselves over this question, and they are doing it with extra enthusiasm these days.
A friend sent me an article recently written in English by Daniel Gordis, a member of the Mandel Foundation, a large foundation that contributes to social projects in Israel. The article is called "This Place Called Hope."
Gordis wrote that a few hours before he was about to fly to Los Angeles, he went to the doctor to get a prescription. “What do you do?” the doctor asked. Gordis did not want to go into complicated details. “I write,” he said. “What do you write about?” the doctor persisted. “About the future of Israel,” Gordis replied. “Oh," said the doctor, "you write short stories.”
"I laughed," Gordis wrote, "and he did, too, but it was clear that neither of us thought that it was terribly funny. And in the weeks since that brief encounter, I’ve thought about it more than a few times. For it captured, I think, the mood here, a mood that no one talks about, but that everyone feels. A mood, a kind of desperation which isn’t about the war that was, or the one that may be coming, but about something deeper."
His answer is that 110 years after the First Zionist Congress, people start asking themselves whether Zionism is a failure.
"Zionism, a failure? How, one could ask, could that be?" Gordis writes. Israel is a country boasting a stable economy, real estate prices that are "going through the ceiling", a powerful army, and internationally recognized universities. Israel is a huge success story.
At the same time, Israel "is not doing for the Jews what the original Zionists had hoped," Gordis wrote. It does not guarantee their security or provide them with normalcy. Israel, Gordis said, is the only country in the world whose very existence is open for debate.
He quoted several Western thinkers who in recent years placed the question of Israel's existence on the international agenda. Take the Palestinians, for example, he wrote. Their national movement is much younger than Zionism. Still, nobody doubts the Palestinian right for a state, while the right of the Jews is being doubted time and again, and not only by its Muslim enemies.
The solution, Gordis said, is to restore the hope. Go back to the days of Israel as a country that absorbs immigrants, rehabilitate the political system that has been atrophied and corrupted, set a border between us and the Palestinians and defend it.
It is easy to say this, but not simple to implement. Never was there in Israel such broad agreement regarding national objectives, and such a meager ability to realize them. Shakespeare's heroes are betrayed by their close aides or relatives, or by powerful urges and over-ambition. The problem faced by Israeli society is the loss of faith in our ability to change. Cynicism betrayed us.
Gordis defines the problem using other terms. "The problem isn’t Olmert, or Katzav. This is not about Israel. It’s not even about Zionism," he wrote. "It’s about the future of what we call the Jewish people. Hizbullah gets that. Hamas gets it. Ahmadinejad gets it… Why don’t we?"
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