Saul Bellow’s Quest for Spirituality in Jerusalem

In 1976, the great novelist Saul Bellow wrote his sole book-length nonfiction work, a travelogue called To Jerusalem and Back. Bellow’s account is informed not only by several months in Israel but also by his reading of literary antecedents, including the decidedly anti-Semitic French writer Pierre Loti, who visited Jerusalem in 1894, and the great French conservative Catholic François-René de Chateaubriand, whose 1809 travelogue displays a bit of admiration for Jews mixed in with a great deal of contempt. Considering both Bellow’s work and the works of those who influenced him, Paul Berman writes:

In the single most remarkable passage of his To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow frets over his own ability to see and to appreciate miracles and supernatural astonishments. He wants to see and appreciate, but he worries that he does not have the capacity to do anything of the sort. In this one respect, he resembles Chateaubriand pretty closely, give or take every conceivable difference. Chateaubriand had an exciting experience in the Jewish Quarter, but that was only because of exceptional qualities that, in his view, adhered to Jerusalem and the Jews. Mostly Chateaubriand considered that, for an intelligent man like himself, attuned to the modern ideas of 1809, it was no longer possible to undergo supernatural astonishments.

The Jerusalem sky reminds [Bellow] of the psalmist who sings of “God’s garment of light.” He wonders if, in gazing upward at the sky, he isn’t seeing the garment.

But it was Mount Zion, which he could see from his quarters in Jerusalem, that struck the novelist the most. In Bellow’s own words:

Letting down the barriers of rationality, I feel that I can hear Mount Zion as well as see it. . . . There is no reason this hill should have a voice, emit a note audible only to a man facing it across the valley. What is there to communicate? It must be that a world from which mystery has been extirpated makes your modern heart ache and increases suggestibility. In poetry you welcome such suggestibility. When it erupts at the wrong time (in a rational context) you send for the police; these psychological police drive out your criminal “animism.” Your respectable aridity is restored. Nevertheless, I will not forget that I was communicated with.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewish literature, Israel, Jerusalem, Judaism, Saul Bellow

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society