Before giving a speech at a rally, I need to warm up, like a boxer. I think of the infuriating things the government has done over the course of the week. There’s never a shortage of them. Everything is outrageous in this bad government. All inconceivable. From the stage I address in decisive tones, I make categorical statements. Anger is acute and so is hope. I try to move people, to push them to act, to go out, to protest, to hold the flag high. There is no room for doubt when you incite others to take action. There is no room for question marks.
The soul, however, is more fragile. More open.
The soul tends to identify itself. The point is this. For me, as a writer, identifying myself is the primary instinct. Identify me to exist. Identify myself with a woman for being a woman as I write. Identifying myself with an Arab despite being a Jew, to write about the Nakba from his point of view. Identify myself with those who decide to become religious, wanting to become one myself in some way, to be able to write the return to religion knowing it from within.
This movement of identification is so basic for me, so uncontrollable, that even in the polarization of these last few months I can find myself identifying, unexpectedly, with those with whom I shouldn’t identify at all. With whom Likud voted and feels deprived of his victory in the elections. With the defense minister, torn between two responsibilities stronger than him. Even Netanyahu, albeit reluctantly, arouses flashes of sympathy in me. Sometimes he reminds me of a child who is forced to lie, to lie all the time, to get out of a trap he has built himself. Too much pressure for one man. No wonder his heart can’t handle it.
Even the division between “us” and “them” is unacceptable to my soul.
– Protests against the government in Tel Aviv (Afp)
At the Shabbat table I sit with people who vote for Likud. My neighbors and friends in the city where I live recognize themselves in religious Zionism. Among my students, some of the most talented and valued come from ultra-Orthodox communities.
But there’s more: for the past twenty years I’ve been touring Israel far and wide to hold creative writing workshops. I compare myself with the four tribes that make up Israeli society, the secular Jews, the religious-nationalists, the Orthodox and the Arabs. I listen to the texts that the participants write with their hearts and my conclusion, the simple and clear deduction that arises from each workshop is: bring together members of the different tribes in one room, allow them to do creative work in an atmosphere that favors mutual listening, empathy and curiosity, and the barriers will fall. It’s palpable: at the first meeting people look at each other suspiciously, they read the label on each other’s foreheads, and then in the course of subsequent meetings the label slowly comes off. Until you’re faced with a simple human being, vulnerable and exposed and as complex as you are.
The soul opposes dichotomies. The soul opposes oneness. Sometimes, while giving a speech, I feel mine detach from the body, she looks at me from the outside, laughs at the excessive gesticulation, at the exclamation points at the end of every sentence.
What if the need to protest right now and the drive to write stories had the same origin? Perhaps there is an inner truth that needs to come out, which cannot remain hidden. The heart wants to cry out: shame! Ache! Love! And the head finds a way to transform all this into the orderly words of a speech, into the fictitious figures of a novel.
Perhaps the point is that in both cases I start from love. When I publish a new book, I hope to infect readers with my love for the protagonists, or at least to make them understand them.
When I speak at a demonstration, I do it out of love for Israel, the only country in the world where I feel perfectly understood, the only country where they fully capture my irony, the only country where the stage of every demonstration carries a memory with you. Well, here, a hundred meters from the stage of the demonstration in Haifa, I gave my first kiss, and here, on the street where we march with flags towards the president’s residence, lives my mother’s best friend, Ruty, who during the holidays summer he took care of me and my brother. Before I go up to speak, all these memories charge me with the indispensable energy of “I have no other country to go to”, because there truly is no other country in which so many people live that I love. And there is no other country where they can read me in the language in which I write, in which I think, in which I am enthusiastic.
– Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (photo EPA)
As I write I don’t think about my readers. The effort of creating imaginary worlds to breathe life into is enough, I can’t count on the readers too. But just before a new book is published — and my book will be published in Israel shortly — I wonder what feeling I would like to give to my readers. What would I like to awaken in them?
The answer changes from book to book depending on my mood, the content of the book, the historical moment. But now? What would I answer now? What sense can art have in days like these, if it has any?
Among the reactions of people who have already read the manuscript of the new book, I was most pleased by that of a musician friend who wrote to me, «The more I immerse myself in reading, the more I want to become a better husband, a better father, a better teacher, and also take better care of myself.”
Could that be a good reason to publish this book right now, in the pitiful circumstances in which we find ourselves? To restore to my readers, in these dark days, the faith that human beings can be good for each other?
(They can also cause each other pain, of course. And disappoint. And confer meaning. The deepest meaning is found in small moments of intimacy.)
I imagine my future reader. He may be as exhausted as I am after months of demonstrations. He may be as heartbroken as I am to hear his own cries go unheard by deaf ears. But he left for a few days’ vacation, maybe in Sinai or Cyprus. He needs something that takes him away from himself and at the same time brings him back to himself. He then he opens my book and reads the first few lines.
I like to believe the book will capture that. It will help him forget everything for a few hours. I like to believe that when he finishes it and puts it on the bedside table, his heart will feel a little more open. A tad bit hungrier for change.
I have no way of knowing if this will be the case, I realize that. One must do all one can, give all one has to give, and then hope.
(translation by Raffaella Scardi)