The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is known for its collection of Near Eastern antiquities from the Biblical period. Yet amidst its galleries stands a startling cultural artifact of far more recent origin.
Kuma—meaning “Rise”—is a nearly ten-foot-long scroll depicting a dense, vivid, intellectually rich, and aesthetically stunning account of Jewish history. Its full title, “Kuma, Mei Afatzim ve-Kankantum,” refers to the materials used to prepare ink for Torah scrolls and other sacred texts. Evoking an unfurled Torah scroll, Kuma is the high-school senior project of a brilliant young yeshiva student, artist and poet named Eitan Rosenzweig הי”ד. Staff Sgt. Rosenzweig, an Alon Shvut native and student in the Yerucham Yeshivat Hesder, served in the Givati brigade and was killed in Gaza in November 2023, at the age of 21.
Kuma weaves together Jungian theories of the unconscious, the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of the heroic journey, and imagery drawn from Western art and Jewish history—some of which appear elsewhere in the Bible Lands Museum. Kuma also incorporates literary allusions to the Bible, Talmud, modern Hebrew literature, Eastern and Western general philosophy, and more. It is a work of art that one must study rather than merely observe.
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From the deluge of fascinating news from Israel’s remarkably successful “Rising Lion” operation against the Iranian regime, one interesting tidbit relates to children’s literature, of all things. According to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, IDF intelligence began to assemble a list of the leading scientists driving the Iranian nuclear weapon program in 2022, and their research efforts were given the secret code name “Narnia.” At 3:00 am on June 13, when the Israeli Air Force swiftly eliminated 10 of these scientists, along with striking the Natanz nuclear plant and other military targets, the operation was officially dubbed “Operation Narnia.”
In describing the operation, the Jerusalem Post writes that name “reflects the operation’s improbable nature, like something out of a fantasy tale rather than a real-world event.” Indeed, it was hard to believe that the same country that suffered such devastating losses on October 7 due to intelligence failures could execute such a meticulously planned and perfectly executed military offensive. Yet there are many fantasy tales, and the name Narnia is much more than a metonym for all that is improbable or unlikely to occur. Could it be that somewhere in Israeli intelligence circles there is a fantasy geek who specifically chose this code name to evoke a specific connection with the literary world of Narnia? Perhaps. In the meantime, Israeli schools and all other activities are cancelled and we are stuck at home. So I find myself reading Narnia with some of my kids, perhaps for the third time. In our bleary-eyed and underslept state thanks to 2:00 am trips to the safe room, these are the connections that seem to emerge:
While some readers of Narnia stop at the famous first book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the later books in Lewis’ series introduce us to other lands and cultures which surround Narnia and in doing so offer pointed parallels to the geopolitics of Lewis’ own time. One of these countries is a Middle-Eastern type of desert nation called Calormen, characterized by a hodgepodge of Persian and Arabian motifs: “The Calormenes have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-coloured turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people”. Calormenes have many admirable qualities, like a rich culture of storytelling to which Lewis’ narrator is obviously sympathetic, and splendid landscaping and food. Yet while it may outshine Narnia on the material front, it lacks basic freedoms which prevents the full flourishing of its people. Everyone in the society understands their place in a rigid hierarchical structure, and all are required to slavishly try to curry favor with their vainglorious leader the Tisroc. In the capital city Tashbaan, “there is only one traffic regulation, which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important; unless you want a cut from a whip or punch from the butt end of a spear.” When a poor boy raised in Calormen is mistakenly identified by the Narnians as a member of their party he is smitten with these joyful, bright-eyed people who seem to live without paranoia and insecurity. Yet he can’t help but lie about his identity, as the narrator explains: “he had, you see, no idea of how noble and free-born people behave.”
The individuals we meet in Calormen aren’t all that bad, but centuries reared in a culture where deception and obsequiousness, rather than hard work and talent, are needed to get ahead certainly takes its toll on the moral character of the society. Lewis contrasts this with Narnia, where freedom is cherished, and consequently people develop virtues like courage, honesty and kindness.
Now Narnia may be intended as a stand-in for Lewis’s own England, but in the spirit of William Blake’s “Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green & pleasant Land,” I believe there are some parallels with Israel too. While Israel is certainly influenced by its Middle-Eastern surroundings, it is an informal culture where people by and large have the freedom to speak their mind and determine their own destinies. Unlike nearly every other great military power in history, it never set its sight on building empire and controlling other nations. Like Narnia, it is content with merely perpetuating its own way of life within its own borders. Thus it remains a mystery why countries like Iran seek its destruction so vehemently and for so long. If it remains baffling to us, King Edmund of Narnia does offer a kind of answer. In trying to make sense of the curious urge in Calormen to wage war on Narnia, Edmund observes: “We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire. He longs to blot them out, gobble them up” (A Horse and His Boy, p. 68).
Israel right now is doing a lot to make Iran angry, but this anger predates airstrikes in Tehran by decades, and is rooted in the same lust for empire that C.S. Lewis observed during his own dark times. Our response must be the same as it is in the world of Narnia, to push back against Islamic expansionism through military defense, and also to cherish all of the qualities that make our culture unique and worth preserving.
When Narnians go into battle, the symbol that is displayed on their flags and shields is a lion. The lion of course is a reference to Aslan, the spiritual icon of Narnia and a Christological metaphor. The reason Jesus is associated with a lion is rooted in the Bible of course, “the lion of Judah,” and in Judaism lions are associated with kingship and sovereignty. Thus it’s also not surprising that “rising lion” is the name and symbol of the current Israeli campaign. The name “Rising Lion,” which is a translation of “Am KiLavi Yakum,” derives from the Prophet Balaam’s blessings of the People of Israel in the book of Numbers: “Behold, a people that rises like a lioness and raises itself like a lion. It does not lie down until it eats its prey and drinks the blood of the slain.” (Num. 23:24) Some unhinged Israel haters have pointed to this verse as proof of Israeli thirst for atrocities. The verse is obviously meant to be symbolic, but the truth is, lions are fearsome creatures who devour their prey. And we have learned over the past twenty months that, in order to defeat evil and restore peace and order to the world, we must be stronger and fiercer than our enemies. This does not always look nice. But that does not mean that it is not a moral posture. Here too, the Narnian parallel can be illuminating. When Susan first learns about the great lion of Narnia she is understandably scared: “Is he—quite safe?” I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” Mr. Beaver responds: “Safe? . . . Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King I tell you” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, p. 80.)
The current IDF campaign in Iran, and even more so, the extended war against Hamas in Gaza, contains visuals that are terrible and painful to behold. But as Lewis’s narrator reminds us, “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.” What lions symbolize, in the Bible, in the world of fantasy and right now, is the way in which ferocity and justice must, in certain circumstances, work hand in hand. Critics of Israel’s campaign who are supposedly driven by religious pacifism may also take note another verse in Balaam’s litany of blessings directed at the Jewish people: ”He crouches and lies like a lion and like a lioness; who will dare rouse him? Those who bless you shall be blessed, and those who curse you shall be cursed” (Num, 24:9)
3-Pacifism is Not a Virtue
This brings me to a final point about some of the well-meaning critics, many of them Christian, of Israel’s courageous campaign against evil and America’s supporting role in that effort. While many fairy tales end with a vague “happily ever after,” Lewis takes care to remind us at the end of the Lion, the King and the Wardrobe how the four Pevensie children, now turned kings and queens, spend their days making good laws, keeping the peace, and waging honorable battles in defense of their beloved Narnia. The first progressive in the series is their annoying cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, who surfaces in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he accidentally gets sucked into a grand voyage with Edmund and Lucy through a painting. Eustace is just awful, a bully and a stick-in-the-mud who has no use for the grand adventures of the sort for which the Pevensie children live. Eustace’s coddled upbringing has given him few opportunities to appreciate the real dangers that exist in the world, although this thankfully changes when he is turned into a dragon. The privilege of distance from danger allows him the freedom to antagonize everyone around him and avoid retribution by declaring “I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in fighting.”
Lewis was, indeed, critical of those who could never distinguish between a just war and pointless bloodbath. He viewed this problem as similar to an inability to distinguish good from evil. As early as 1940, Lewis delivered a lecture to the pacifist society at Oxford University entitled “Why I am Not a Pacifist,” in which he articulates, from various angles, a justification for wars that need to be fought in order to protect higher values. This does not make the realities of war any less terrible. Yet only by recognizing human necessity can one begin to improve things.
Lewis says:
To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.
To try to fight a better war, or a shorter or more precise war in which less civilians are killed, is a noble virtue. To avoid war altogether, in all circumstances, is simply a pipe dream that, as Lewis says in the same lecture, will result in “[handing] over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbour who does not.”
Lewis’ analysis applies perfectly to Israel’s situation in its seven front war from Gaza to Iran. The war we fight now is intended to prevent future wars, to invite peace and prosperity to this beleaguered region as well as to other parts of the world. We are not waiting for a lion to save us from “beyond the sea.” We are an “am shel ariyot,” a nation of lions, fighting our hardest on behalf of our highest values. May the current conflict and this larger war come to a speedy, victorious and decisive conclusion.
Last week when President Trump announced his intention to clean out and rebuild the Gaza Strip, I don’t think I was alone in feeling something I had not felt in a long time. It was not the elation of giving it to ones enemies, or the smug satisfaction of political validation. It was a rather fragile feeling, somewhat tentative, one might even say naive. Throughout the war we have experienced crushing blows but also astounding, miraculous, successes. Yet in these victories there is often a cyclical dynamic: we conquer territory only to withdraw weeks later, we kill terrorists only for their ranks to be replenished by a seemingly infinite supply of hateful young jihadists. Even our genuine exhilaration at the return of a few of our hostages is marred by our fear of what’s to come from from the murderous and unrepentant terrorists who are being released in turn. As always, we trust in God and our military and wish for the best, but common sense tells us that, in good measure, the problems we face today aren’t going anyway time soon.
For real hope to blossom, we need to understand that change is on the horizon. Trump’s proposal, whether or not its likely to materialize, offers a rare vision that could potentially break the cycle in which we find ourselves. I was therefore surprised to notice a few American Rabbis and “Jewish professionals” pontificating on the matter with critical accusations of ethnic cleansing and the like. On second thought I suppose it’s not that surprising. Only someone who is not particularly starved for hope could look such a gift horse in the mouth. If Trump’s Gaza proposal leaves you ethically outraged, or even indifferent, this simply demonstrates your own removal from the pit of despair in which Israelis find ourselves since October 7th. In the days following his announcement, I have not spoken to any Israeli, on the right or the left, who does not feel just a little bit hopeful, or at least tickled, that a world leader finally has the courage to propose a way out of our current morass.
I don’t know if it is providence or simply an all-knowing algorithm, but last week a new song popped into my Spotify playlist called “Ribbon of Hope,” “Chut shel Tikvah,” written by the popular Israeli singer-songwriter Aaron Razel and his wife Efrat. The song was actually composed about a year ago, around the time of the first hostage release, when Razel and his wife were enjoying a beautiful day together on the Tel Aviv boardwalk. I understand those kinds of days as I’ve experienced many of them myself since October 7th. A lovely day when you have the chance to appreciate the beauty and wonder of daily life in Israel, with the sickening knowledge that all around us families are grieving, soldiers are fighting for their lives (and ours) on the battlefield and that dozens of our brethren are wasting away in the depths of Hamas torture dens. Yet this day was different, as Razel sings, there was a sense that something monumental is about to change.
Soon the gates will open
and soon
the sun will rise again
the wild flowers will fill the fields
with colors anew
until they do
we won’t forget the pain.
The song has a kind of 1960s, folksy feel, amplified by harmonica interludes by the famous Israeli musician Ehud Banai. Although it owes a debt to peace anthems from the past, there’s a difference here, a respect for the necessity of war and also, I think, a kind of underlying ambiguity that is not necessarily apparent on first listen.
Above in the skies
are the voices of war
while in our hearts
we long for comfort
And I, like a captured child
tie to my window
a ribbon of hope
Two allusions here may be familiar to listeners. One is the “ribbon of hope,” which likely references the Book of Joshua’s story of the harlot Rachav, who saves the Israelite spies in Jericho and hangs a red string from her window. Interestingly, in Joshua the Hebrew word tikvah means cord – but hints at the hope that Rachav and her family can ultimately be saved from the wicked society on whose edge they dwell. The ribbon in the song also is reminiscent of the yellow ribbon that has morphed into the ubiquitous symbol of the Israeli hostages imprisoned by Hamas.
The phrase “captured child,” is a translation of “tinok shenishba,” a Rabbinic term that refers to a Jew who was kidnapped by gentiles as a child and as a result cannot be Halakhically held responsible for his lack of Jewish observance. It could be that the Razels chose “tinok shenishba,” just for its associations with innocence and captivity, though I wonder if something else is being suggested here. The term “captured child” is used in Rabbinic literature in reference to sin, it allows us to relieve responsibility from adults who simply don’t know better.
Perhaps some of the implication here is that a certain kind of hope is indeed naive, and perhaps even wrong. We hope and pray for the safe release of our hostages, even if we know that under the current parameters it comes at a cost that is unforgivable. We dream of an end to the war, even if we know that ending it prematurely means passing on the baton to the next generation, that is to our own children and grandchildren. Yellow ribbons have become mixed symbols in our divisive national context. We all long for the return of our hostages alive and in good health. But the cars that sport yellow ribbons often have washed out anti-Bibi bumper stickers as well. Hostage Square is just around the corner from Kaplan Street, and despite many many fine efforts to steer things differently, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum is hopelessly politicized and pointed often in the precise direction of its potential allies.
Finding shared sources of hope and consolation in this environment can be challenging. Which perhaps is why the Razels chose to newly rededicate the song to Agam Berger, a 19 year old observation soldier and gifted violinist who was released in a recent prisoner exchange. Reports about Agam have captivated the Israeli public since they filtered out after the first hostage deal, how she refused to eat unkosher meat or clean or cook for her captors on Shabbat, how she lovingly braided the hair of female hostages before they were released, even though she was forced to remain. Her first message to the world upon her release (in exchange for 50 craven terrorists) was “I chose the path of faith and in the path of faith I returned.”
Amidst all the protests, uproar at the Knesset, burning trashcans on the Ayalon, we are presented with the image of one brave young woman clinging to her faith, using it to hold up herself and others, and in doing so uplifting her nation as well. This also is a version of hope because it presents us with another path. If the hostage crisis has been used as yet another wedge to pointlessly drive us apart, perhaps the purity and heroism of these individuals can also help us find a way to move forward together.
The new addition of the song includes an added stanza that honors Agam. The line “who is this coming up from the desert” is a quote from the Song of Songs, and can just as easily be applied to the Jewish people leaving their Egyptian captivity. In the song it also refers to Agam:
And I ask
who is she
who is she
who rises up out of the desert
And I hear
I am she
I am she
clear as a lake (agam) of rivers.
Both Agam the person and also the sparkling water imagery with which she is associated, adds the presence of something refreshing and new. A new shot at national unity, at spiritual consciousness, and for her and her family, a new chance at life – it is not a coincidence that the Hebrew words mikvah and tikvah are related. And now, “on the horizon/ are days of hope/the waves whisper their faith.”
Personally I don’t know anything about what the coming years, months, or even days will bring. None of us do. But we can be grateful for the mere chance to be a teeny bit closer to breaking away from a rotten paradigm that has brought so much bloodshed and destruction – toward something new, “rising up from the desert.” Maybe things won’t exactly pan out in the way that the American president, and all of us, dream (there may also be some differences there). As for me, I’m still going to cling to ribbons of hope.
It was an honor to review Koren Press’s outstanding new book One Day in October for the Jerusalem Post Magazine this past week. While the book is not necessarily “literary” in nature, it is brilliantly written and edited, and moved me in a way that few books have. This piece is actually an abbreviated version of a longer review essay that will hopefully appear in the Jerusalem Report in the coming weeks. Grateful to be part of this “עם של אריות,” “nation of lions,” whose incredible bravery continues to exhibit itself each and every day.
It’s now been two weeks since we heard the news of the murdered hostages – six holy souls who were executed in cold blood after enduring eleven months of torture at the hands of their Islamist captors. The news hit everyone in Israel quite hard, and it cast a shadow over the normally hopeful first day of school. Since then quite a few more innocent Israelis have been murdered or killed, including a policeman whose own daughter was killed defending the Sderot police station on October 7th. Yet even as a society that has been completely bombarded with tragedy over the past year, the uniquely cruel nature of these deaths, compounded by newly released footage of the horrific conditions in which they are kept, has left many of us struggling to find the conceptual vocabulary to reflect on the events unfolding around us.
Almog Sarusi H”YD
Since everyone in Israel is separated only a few short degrees, one name that particularly seared me on September 1st was of the hostage Almog Sarusi, a handsome 27 year old who was abducted from the Nova festival. Almog’s father Yigal owns an electrical shop in Ra’anana, around the corner from where I live. Almog was a charming, thoughtful, engineering student who loved nothing more than to explore Israel, play guitar, and spend quality time with his family and friends. He attended the music festival with his longtime girlfriend Shachar and stayed behind to help her when she was shot and severely wounded (she later died.) Since his abduction, his parents fought tirelessly on his behalf, exhausting every political and spiritual resource they could muster. The Sarusis don’t define themselves as “dati,” or religious. Yet Yigal nobly stood nearly every Friday on the corner outside his electrical shop requesting passers by say a tefilla or a bracha in the merit of his son Almog’s safe return. My friend Tamar accompanied him and provided home-baked cookies and boundless energy to find recruits on the sidewalk. Unlike some of the other hostages, there were no videos released of Almog during his captivity, and we didn’t know with any certainty the status of the young man for whom we prayed. My first thoughts when I heard the news on September 1st was that perhaps these prayers did keep Almog and the others alive for 11 grueling months. My subsequent thoughts, of course, threw me into a theological rut from which it was harder to emerge.
Canvassing for tefillot on Ostrovsky Street
The 1943 short story “The Secret Miracle” by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges depicts a Jewish man named Jaromir Hladik, a moderately well-known author and playwright, who is earmarked for execution by the Nazis. Hladik is terrified by the prospect of death, but he is also terrified that he will not have the chance to finish his magnum opus, a verse drama called The Enemies. In the darkness of jail cell he prays to God ,“Thou who art the centuries and time itself,” to give him some extra time. And indeed, in a “secret miracle,” God gives him a year to complete his play in the privacy of his own mind: “the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.” The story raises interesting questions about whether there’s such a thing as a perfect work of art, even if it is entirely disconnected from an audience or context. By extension, it also explores the meaning of consciousness, and celebrates the value of life, of perception, and of artistic creativity for its own sake. These lofty concepts contrast with the Nazis for whom all of this could be snuffed out for the most shallow of reasons. At the end of the story, Hladik is murdered like countless other Holocaust victims. In an act of magical realism, he experiences a secret miracle that allows him to observe, feel, and create, albeit unbeknownst to anyone else, for a precious additional year’s time.
The six recently murdered hostages survived nearly a year under the most horrific conditions and are now dead. Recalling the “secret miracle” of the Borges story, what did those 11 months mean for Almog, Hersh, Eden, Ori, Alex and Carmel? What kind of torture did they endure? Amidst their suffering, what sort of sanctuary did they find, in their thoughts, in their environment, and with each other? What gave them strength, and what sort of discoveries did they make, about themselves and each other, about life, and about God?
Almog’s family sat shiva in a park next to pastoral green walking paths in Ra’anana. Many people from all walks of life came to pay their respects. We sat for a bit with Almog’s father Yigal, who spoke with remarkable composure, deftly balancing sensitivity to the various parties in front of him: two bashful seminary-age girls, another pair of women with tall head coverings who had driven in from the Shomron, and Noam Tibon, the retired army general turned October 7th hero who is firmly on the left politically. Yigal spoke about Almog’s love for the land of Israel, his sensitivity for others, how his army friends call him “Abba,” because he was the sort to always take care of those around him. He also spoke about the complexities of his own efforts to free his son. He did not believe in a hostage deal “at any cost,” but he believed that in the absence of complete victory over Hamas then the hostages had to be prioritized. His comments kept drifting to the 6 martyrs, the 6 “kedoshim” he called them. He said that Almog loved to have deep conversations, and he imagined what sorts of things they spoke about together. In his better moments, he thought of Carmel Gat doing yoga exercises with them, of how they must have given each other strength and solace until the end.
He also spoke about how even in this most devastating of circumstances, “miracles” had occurred. It’s a miracle his family could bury Almog with his body intact. That only several short days after he was killed they could stand at his gravesite and give him a proper funeral that paid tribute to his many wonderful qualities. And maybe other miracles too, he wondered aloud. I thought of his weekly efforts to canvas for tefillot near his shop on Ostrovsky Street.
It’s hard to say what constitutes a miracle and what is precisely the opposite. Even in the Borges story, one can dwell on the “miracle” experienced by the protagonist, or the pure and unadulterated evil that led to his predicament in the first place and ultimately his murder. I have heard so many wonderful October 7 miracle stories and it is hard not to be moved by them. But then there are the “non-miracles,” the Nova escapee who survived hours in the woods only to be killed by a fresh wave of terrorists, the hostages who were killed just hours before their rescuers arrived. In these circumstances we are left looking for more modest sources of consolation. Maybe this is the meaning of a “secret miracle,” not only a miracle that happens in secret, but a miracle that we manage to see or experience even when everything else seems to have gone wrong. Moments of strength, courage and love in a dark and claustrophobic tunnel. Even the sheer miracle or life itself, sustained for so long in an environment so hostile to it. Or the miracle of the resilience of the Jewish people. A father in immeasurable pain who raises his eyes to God and also to others, managing to transcend an impossible circumstance with an expansiveness of spirit that itself is also a kind of a miracle.
The upcoming holiday of Shavuot evokes the receiving of the Torah on Har Sinai, flowers and greenery, and of course delicious dairy food. It is also the holiday of “malkhut,” or kingship, when we read the book of Ruth, which recounts the backstory behind the emergence of the royal house of David. Shavuot is the culmination of 49 days of counting the Omer, a seasonal agricultural offering in the Temple wherein each week of seven weeks is categorized by one of the Kabbalistic “sefirot”. The final one of these sefirot is Malkhut, described by the Zohar as “having nothing of her own.” Notwithstanding its connotations of royalty, Malkhut is understood to be a void that receives all of the preceding weeks’ sefirot. While Passover celebrates the miracle of liberation from Egypt, Shavuot emphasizes groundedness in the Land of Israel. In contrast to hastily baked matzot, Shavuot features the wheat harvest and the bread and first fruits (“bikkurim”) offerings in the Temple. Its theme of malkhut prompts us to think about the nature of leadership in our own time – that which we have and that which we lack. It prompts us to question what true kingship might look like in a modern era.
In the early days after October 7th, for many of us here in Israel, our feelings of shock, horror and grief were also accompanied by a sense of having been set adrift. With greater urgency than ever, we asked- the question of who, if anyone, was steering our national ship. One didn’t have to be a member of the anti-Bibi camp to feel that our leadership had failed us. Moreover, it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, might be able to lead us out of this morass. A friend commented that “this was the first time in my life that I realized we had a problem that even a group of the most brilliant Jews in the world together in a room couldn’t solve.” In the months since the massacre, these questions have in many ways been exacerbated, as Israel finds itself mired in an even deeper set of conflicts – balancing international pressure with achieving its military goals in Gaza and of course the question of how best to go about retrieving the hostages, to the extent that our efforts may yield any fruits at all. It’s not that these issues don’t have solutions per se, it’s that the leaders needed to implement these solutions, who can rally their nation, unify factions, leverage diplomatic relationships, inspire trust and move forward with confidence, often seem to be missing from the room.
Counterintuitively, as our politicians continue to bicker and the international picture looks bleaker by the day, we find ourselves surrounded by heroes. It wasn’t only the countless tales of heroism from the day itself: the brothers Elhanan Hy”d and Menahem Kalmanson who jumped into their cars on October 7 and drove from the settlement of Otniel to battle terrorists and evacuate dozens of survivors of kibbutz border communities. Aner Shapira Hy”d, who caught and threw back seven explosive grenades while hiding in a shelter near Re’im with two dozen others until he was killed by the eighth. Or Amit Mann Hy”d, the paramedic with an angelic voice who was killed treating patients in the makeshift clinic she refused to abandon in Be’eri on that day. In December of this year, Hanukkah time, the singer Ruchama ben Yosef released a wonderful song called “VaYehi Or,” “Let There be Light,” where she addresses the theological implications of October 7th for a person of faith: “a great miracle did not occur, we did not find the jar of oil.” Instead of discovering a miracle from above, ben Yosef sings, “we discovered ourselves.”
News reports out of Israel are, more often than not, depressing. Yet the closer in you stand to events the more you can see how in many ways the days since October 7th have demonstrated a national love affair with our soldiers. These young men and women, representatives of every single sector of Israeli society, jumped into action on October 7th and have not since stopped sacrificing to protect our beloved country. Included in this category are their families who also sacrifice and in the most tragic cases mourn, all also in the name of duty to our country and nation. Israeli civil society has also been roused into activity, supporting the many populations left vulnerable by the ongoing threats from Hamas and Hezbollah. When you evaluate it top-down, the picture in Israel does not look great. But from the bottom-up we have a society that continues to be strong, resilient and for the most part united.
This dichotomy is one that we have seen before in Jewish history, and it is nowhere better exemplified than in the book of Ruth. Ruth is a story about two brave women who transcend tragic circumstances in order to make a lasting contribution to the Jewish people. The Book of Ruth is also, as mentioned above, a story of malkhut. It depicts the transition from the Book of Judges, wherein centralized leadership is lacking – “in those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did as he pleased” – to the Book of Samuel, which depicts the beginning of the Davidic Monarchy.
In his wonderful book Rising Moon (previously reviewed here) Rabbi Moshe Miller explores the nature of malkhut as it manifests itself in the Book of Ruth. True kingship, according to Miller, is not the exercise of power by a single individual. “Rather,” he writes, “it must emerge from society in ways that are infinitely complex, entirely unpredictable, and almost impossible to trace.” Miller suggests that the best way to understand malkhut is by drawing on the philosophical and scientific category of “emergence,” which describes complex systems, like beehives or ant colonies, that are not reducible to the sum of their parts:
“Individual bees or ants are incapable of functioning alone; they cannot reproduce; they cannot find food. They exist only as units within a larger whole. Put these units together, and suddenly, as if by magic, they begin differentiating, each individual performing a specific task according to the needs of the integrated system, the super-organism. When a hive attacks a person, it comes after him like a single organism; when ants go on a march, their relentless miles-long movement is that of a unified power, an army. Malkhut is the name we use to describe a system in which components work synergistically to produce a whole that is greater than its components.”
Miller points to the statement in the Talmud, Bava Batra 15B, “Whoever says that Malkhat Sheva (lit. Queen of Sheba) refers to a woman is mistaken. Rather it means the Kingdom of Sheba.” The implication here is that malkhut does not refer to the reign of an individual king or queen, rather, malkhut is what enables a nation to act in a united and cohesive fashion.
This particular vision of kingship as a kind of emergent collective phenomenon is not necessarily characteristic of the institution and reign of historical kings generally, or even in Israel in particular. Not every melekh represents malkhut in this sense of the word. The reign of Israel’s first king Saul, for example, was initiated by the urging of a frustrated nation, tired of Philistine abuse, against the better instincts of its prophet Samuel. Despite Samuel’s warnings about the potential pitfalls of monarchy the people insist “we must have a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations: Let our king rule over us and go out at our head and fight our battles.” (1 Sam. 8:19-20). Note the language here: to be “like all the other nations” with a top-down authority figure to “fight our battles.” Saul, from the powerful and clannish tribe of Benjamin, is genuinely a remarkable figure – the best ancient Israel has to offer in some ways – and he does end up succeeding in many battles. His great failure is when he spares King Agag of Amalek and his flocks, a lethal combination of misplaced pity and eagerness to draw short term approval from his own troops. Saul is like many leaders we know: genuinely impressive and talented, but ultimately representing a paradigm of leadership that does not emerge organically and thus could not withstand the test of shifting generations.
David the Judean, on the other hand, represents a different model. He emerges, not from a position of prominence, but seemingly out of nowhere. He attracts the admiration of all who encounter him, but he elicits love rather than intimidation. While the first physical description of Saul is that he “was a head taller than anyone else in the nation,” (1 Sam. 9:2) one of our first visual encounters with David is as a miniature shepherd standing up to a giant. David defeats the Philistine ubermensch Goliath without a sword or spear or javelin – for these the Israelites were dependent on Philistine metalsmiths who forbade the transfer of advanced weaponry to the subjected populations of Israel. Instead he attributes his success to God and nothing else. David will also make his own share of mistakes, which are in some ways even more serious than those made by Saul. But his kingship endures because it is not reducible to him as an individual or even the Judeans as a tribe. As a leader he embodies the spirit of his nation. In contrast with Saul, he is the embodiment of the bottom-up form of leadership we see incubating in Israel today. And while a feature of true malkhut is that it seemingly emerges out of the ether, the Bible does provide us with a prequel of sorts, and that is contained in the book of Ruth.
The book of Ruth provides a genealogy for the Davidic line, rooted in the union of Boaz, a wealthy Judean landowner, and Ruth, a Moabite convert. The circumstances in the early verses of the Book of Ruth are rather bleak – they depict famine, intermarriage, and the premature death of Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, and their two sons Machlon and Kilyon. The Rabbis of the Talmud detect another layer of discord in this time period, reading the book’s opening line of “it happened in the days when the judges judged” as “this was a generation that judged its judges” (Bava Batra 15b). That is, even the nominal forms of leadership at this time were unsteady and up for debate. This reading of course evokes the postmodern erosion of institutional authority across the West, or perhaps the recent debates about judicial reform that rocked Israel until more pressing concerns arose. Yet even more evocatively, the context from which Ruth and Naomi emerge is one of grief and suffering. Having lost nearly everything, they leave Moab in a state of poverty and degradation. Naomi urges her daughters-in-law Ruth and Orphah, whom Jewish tradition describes as Moabite princesses, to turn back – “My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord has struck out against me.” (1:13)
The Book of Ruth records several moments of chesed, lovingkindness, which ultimately serve to transform this situation of atomization and hopelessness into one of transcendence. The first such act is when Ruth chooses, despite their reversal of circumstances, to stand with Naomi: “for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (1:16) Ruth’s bravery here, which will ultimately produce the crowning glory of the Jewish people, begins with an act of love for and solidarity with Naomi. Ruth’s behavior forms both a parallel to and contrast with the previous actions of Elimelech who left his ancestral home in order to seek his fortune in Moab. Both figures leave their homelands, but for Elimelech it’s in order to improve his economic situation, whereas Ruth at this point is stepping into the abyss. All she knows is that she stands with Naomi, and this simple, visceral act of loyalty, it turns out, will have more of an impact on the course of Jewish history than the battles and treaties of far more senior figures in positions of leadership.
Next, in the barley fields of Bethlehem, it’s Boaz’s turn to shine. He sees Ruth gleaning on behalf of her mother-in-law, his own distant relative, and is moved by her story, “I have been told of all that you did for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people you had not known before.” (2:11). Boaz makes sure Ruth is treated with dignity and generosity – he even invites her to share a meal. Boaz is willing to forgo the conventional status hierarchies and sees glowing virtue in a person that others are bound to ignore. The fact that this takes place in the grain fields is significant. Whereas as others look up to the skies, or to regents or kings for inspiration, Boaz looks down and it’s there that he finds Ruth, bent to the ground but driven by something noble and profound.
The climactic moment of chesed in the book is one in which it’s not quite clear which character is doing the giving and which is receiving. Ruth, following Naomi’s suggestion, lays at Boaz’s feet in the middle of night and in a position of great vulnerability, asks him to fulfill his role as a “redeeming kinsman.” (3:9) That is, as a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz is asked to marry childless widow Ruth and thus rescue their family name from oblivion. This is complicated by various factors. For one, Ruth is far younger than him, and far lower in stature. She is also a Moabite, a nation whose members Israelites are forbidden to marry by Torah law. Yet Boaz’s reacts to Ruth’s unusual entreaty with gratitude, “Be blessed of the Lord, daughter!” he exclaims, “your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first.” Like the starry eyed couple at the end of O’ Henry’s famous story “The Gift of the Magi,” the dichotomy between giver and receiver collapses in this nighttime scene. This moment of generosity and the erasure of ego will eventually result in the overturning of a legal paradigm in Ruth’s case. Boaz’s heartfelt antinomianism will ultimately usher in the birth of the David, the beginning of true kingship, which also points toward the eventual messianic age.
So what do these collected moments of chesed have to do with Jewish leadership and with the difficult times we live in today? In all of these cases it’s the loyalty, heroism and ingenuity of regular people, rooted to their land and to each other, that manages to change the course of history. Elimelech and Naomi’s original flight from Bethlehem, the tragic deaths of Elimelech and his sons, Naomi and Ruth’s downward spiral into penury, all of these things should have served to dissolve their family bonds and separate the characters in the book from one another. Instead, something marvelous happens. In their pain they grow closer, and the bonds they build together, some of which existed previously (like Boaz and Naomi’s familial ties) some of which are forged anew, end up forming the matrix from which malkhut will eventually emerge. Still it will take several generations for David to be born. And perhaps, even now, we are only in the early or midway stages of this process of forging a context from which a truly enduring paradigm of Jewish sovereignty, malkhut in its loftiest sense, may emerge.
In recent months, there’s hardly anyone here in Israel who hasn’t been touched by loss. Attending funerals or visiting shiva houses of bereaved families of IDF soldiers, even those we do not personally know, is a new national pastime. We show up to demonstrate that we share in the suffering of these families, we are grateful for the heroism of their sons, husbands and fathers, and we would like to think that maybe one more visitor or attendee might ease their burden just an infinitesimal bit. In such circumstances it’s often difficult to find the right words to say. One of the handful of lines that repeats itself is “we should be worthy of their sacrifice.” It’s possible to interpret this phrase along the lines of what we see in the book of Ruth. When confronted with tragedy that hits too close to home, all of us in a society, not only those directly affected, may take one of two paths. We can sink into feelings of despair and hopelessness, which are, admittedly, justifiable. Or we can use this painful opportunity to strengthen our bonds and form a kind of web that connects us with those we have lost, with each other, and with future generations yet to come. This latter movement characterizes the modality of malkhut, whether it may one day manifest itself in a David-like leader, or whether it’s already manifesting all around us. As Naomi blesses Boaz halfway through the book, “Blessed be he of the Lord, who has not failed in His kindness to the living or to the dead” (2:20). The emergence of malkhut will not bring back those we have lost, but it ensures that their contributions are embedded within a larger living organism that allows them, in a sense, to still be with us.
A moving new rendition of Naomi Shemer’s “Shiro Shel Aba,” sung by the students of Yeshivat Har Etzion high school in memory of their beloved teacher Shai Pizem H”YD who fell in battle in Gaza in December. Note the new additional lyrics added by Rabbi Amichai Gordon and Rabbi Chaim Navon. This is an eloquent expression of the relationship between malkhut and loss that I was trying to articulate above:
“אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז, אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז, לא לשווא אחי נפלת בין נהר לים, כי מן הדמים האלה ייבנה העם ייבנה, ייבנה, ייבנה העם”
If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold You did not fall in vain my brother – between river and sea For it is this blood that will build the nation May the Nation be rebuilt May the Nation be rebuilt
Walk the streets of Israel post-October 7 and one experiences a country transformed. This transformation manifests in many aspects of our lives: our political allegiances, our sense of certainty and security, and our attitudes toward one another. But our streets have also literally, physically, been transformed. Cars are bedecked in Israeli flags and bumper stickers that commemorate fallen loved ones and friends. The now iconic red-and-black hostage posters line storefronts and traffic poles (in Israel they don’t get ripped down). Army green is everywhere—at times every fifth person walking down the street seems to be in uniform and carrying a large weapon. And street art and graffiti that focuses on the hostages or the ongoing military campaign is ubiquitous. Grassroots memorials take various forms—from yizkor candles to red poppies (the classic symbol of military loss is also a common wildflower in the south of Israel) to countless other manifestations. This spontaneous public art is intense and concentrated in certain places, such as Hostage Square in Tel Aviv and the Nova massacre memorial in Re’im. But it also can be found on random street corners and benches, in malls or in doctor’s offices. Art is everywhere, a direct outcome of a nation that is actively grieving horrific events and continuing crises.
Ziva Jelin, Panorama: Pavement and Mud, 2018, acrylic and tar on canvas. Photo credit: Ron Plitnitzki.
A new exhibit, recently opened at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, seeks to explore this creative phenomenon in real time. The exhibit is simply titled “October 7.” It begins by considering the notion that art is irrelevant at the height of wartime, as expressed by the proverb “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent.” Orit Shaham Gover, the chief curator of ANU, proposes this alternative: “As the cannons are heard, the voices of the muses are emerging all the more clearly from deep down in the throat.”
Some reflections on the Simchat Torah Massacre from my own vantage point here in Israel
On a beautiful Thursday during the middle days of Sukkot, my family took a day trip to the Golan Heights. We visited a newly developed national park called Sussita, which contains the ruins of the ancient Graeco-Roman city Hippos. It was also the site of a daring defeat of Syrian troops by ordinary residents of the nearby Kibbutz Ein Gev in Israel’s War of Independence. The site’s vivid explanatory movie had my older children mesmerized, but afterwards they started to ask questions. Are there still enemy soldiers waiting in those hilltops? Could it happen again? Could ordinary people have to fight like that to save their homes and their families? I answered, of course, by reassuring them: we live in different times today. It’s true there are people who wish to harm us but we live in a strong country with many layers of protection between children like you and those enemies. We admire the heroes of the past, but we’re grateful that we don’t have to live in such dramatic times.
On Simchat Torah two days later that reassuring narrative would collapse, and we entered a new reality, or perhaps returned to a very old one…
The full essay can be found in Mosaic Magazine as part of their excellent Gaza War symposium.
Traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.
I’d like to belatedly share excerpts from an article that appeared a few months back in Mosaic Magazine. The growing popularity of religious singers among secular audiences here in Israel has been noted elsewhere. One hopes that this rising trend can serve to combat some of the tragic division we see in Israeli society right now.
“This past Sukkot, a crowd of about 500 children, parents, and grandparents gathered in the Recanati Theater in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The audience was made up of affluent and mostly secular residents of north Tel Aviv and its suburbs—stylishly dressed, sipping lattes and organic juice sold at the trendy coffee shop nearby. To an outside observer, the scene would be almost indistinguishable from a family-oriented play or concert in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The content, however, was distinctly Israeli: a jukebox musical called Aluf ha-Olam (literally, “Champion of the World”), based on the songs of the religious Zionist singer Hanan Ben-Ari, written and performed by Israel’s most prestigious children’s dramatic company, the Orna Porat Theater. Tickets for Aluf ha-Olam are in high demand and sell out quickly, so I booked seats for me and my children several months in advance. One could sense from the anticipation in the theater that many others had done the same.
Hanan Ben-Ari is one of Israel’s best-known musical performers, albeit without the international break-through appeal of peers like the religious music sensation Ishai Ribo. His strength is in his songwriting; catchy tunes, drawn from eclectic influences, and coherent, powerful lyrics that comment on personal, often spiritual, struggles…
…Ben-Ari’s penchant for infusing lyrics about universal topics with the language of the synagogue and yeshiva tends to obscure the boundaries between sacred and secular idioms. His 1980s-inspired feel-good ballad “Dream like Joseph,” for instance, argues that every story in the Bible reflects some basic human experience: “everyone leaves his father’s home/ everyone nearly sacrifices his child/ deep within is a little Sodom/ that he wishes to erase already/ and angels will rescue him…”
…Thus the prospect of translating Hanan Ben-Ari’s music into an Israeli secular vernacular, as Aluf ha-Olam seeks to do, is daunting, and perplexing. It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art…”
This past February 14th marked the 116th anniversary of the publication of Theodor Herzl’s manifesto The Jewish State, which lay the groundwork for the modern Zionist movement and the state of Israel. That same evening a special event took place in the Jerusalem Theater: a performance of Herzl’s play The New Ghetto, written in 1894, just a few short weeks before he began composing The Jewish State. It is commonly understood that the turning point for Herzl—the moment he realized there was no escaping from anti-Semitism even in enlightened Western Europe—was the Dreyfus Affair that began in the fall of 1894. Yet The New Ghetto, written shortly beforehand, is proof that, as some scholars have argued, a proto-Zionist sensibility had already been roiling in Herzl’s mind.
Last month’s production was a historic privilege for those who attended it: it was the first time the play has ever been performed in Israel.
For more about this wonderful performance, as well as an intriguing parallel with Tom Stoppard’s newest play Leopoldstadt, please see my new essay in Mosaic Magazine.
The Book of Books 