Leivick in Eretz Yisroel 1937, Part 4
We Must Cease to Stand with an Indifferent Face to Modern Eretz Yisroel
Back to Part Three
‘We Must Cease to Stand with an Indifferent Face to Modern Eretz Yisroel’
— At a gathering with Va’ad Poale of the Hisdarut — Arabs responding with terror, with blood, with death to the best Jewish intentions — The Jew in the Soviet Union and the Jew in Eretz Yisroel — the Jewish land is a necessary, historical continuation of our lives —
Leivick in Davar, the Hisdarut paper. If you actually want to see Leivick in 1937, scroll to the bottom…
With the Va’ad Poale of the Hisdarut
At a gathering with the Va’ad Poale of the Hisdarut.1
I believe that I need not explain too much who and what the Hisdarut is — the large workers’ body in Eretz Yisroel, which includes within it over a hundred thousand people and which controls almost the entire social life in the country. It isn’t only a professional body. It is, one can say, a workers’ government in Eretz Yisroel. Labour movements, intellectual movements, conflicts of workers aspirations and interests — like limbs of a large body.
It will likely still occur to me to speak about the Hisdarut later, because it itself, as a phenomenon, is one of the most important accomplishments of the new Eretz Yisroel, and one can wholeheartedly take pride in this achievement of the Jewish working people.
There are also arguments against the Hisdarut — and strong arguments, arguments in connection with labour divisions, in connection with certain tendencies of bureaucracy, in connection to the question of language and in connection to the Arab question. But with all arguments, what must certainly be taken in mind, and one may them in no manner at all wash away and alter, but rather bring them out into the light of positive critique and and true responsibility — with all arguments the Hisdarut, together with the kibbutzes, is the light which illuminates this new Eretz Yisroel with belief, with inner purity, with heroic deeds.
At the gathering, aside from the members of the leadership committee and editors of Davar, were also assembled those working with the other central establishments of the Hisdarut, representatives of politicals groupings and cultural institutions.
I felt the full responsibility of such a coming together, and didn’t want to simply make do with official words of greeting. My connection to the Jewish working class, wherever it should be found, I feel it as close within myself as my connection to Jewish literature, and it wanted to itself speak out, not touching so much upon the questions which matter to us all, about the course of Jewish life in the entire world and in Eretz Yisroel.
I’m no theorist and no practiced speaker. I have no prepared formulas, and there is not always the proper word which might describe what is in my heart, whether it is that which cheers or that which oppresses the heart.
I know, though, one thing: Something unpleasant occurs to us and in every one of us and, at the same time, something great and wonderful happens to us and in us — we want lives, new lives, whole lives. We wish to be redeemed.
And now I am in one of the most acute dramas which has played out in our history — state of war between the Jewish community and the Arab one. Between two peoples who have in themselves so much historical closeness, there has laid down such a chasm. Jews wish, with unusual passion, with almost a mystic falling to the earth, to the stone, to the plants, to natural things, to rebuild themselves, to immigrate, — and Arabs do not wish to recognise their right to this. The Arabs respond with terror, with blood, with aroused hatred — with death.
And here I am in the middle of my own, inner arising contractions. Cultural contradiction, human contradiction. And over all of this — such sorrowful and such burning eyes — eyes which need pierce and turn every human heart. Eyes which cry: I want a home, home, home.
It is then, a sort of irony, that now we are together, we sit by one table, — a Jew amongst Jews, a worker amongst workers, a writer amongst writers, and see here — there is very much a division between us. A sort of distance, as such, between us. Our hearts stretch to one another and — there is a sort of sorrow between us, a sadness like a cloud over the joy of meeting.
Let us take a look and consider if we haven’t done each other harm, if we haven’t sinned by denial against one another; if we haven’t scorned one another.
Let us see if we haven’t taken the most profound motifs of our lives and from the life of our people and made stilted abstractions of them, cliquish programmes, bureaucratic dogmas, narrow fetters, above which one cannot move. Let us take a look if we have, as needs to be, cared for the ordinary people, whomever they may be, if we are not treading over their mute, unspoken sorrow, if we haven’t wounded their hearts, if we have listened well to their quiet weeping.
Let us see if we are deserving of redemption. Are we are innerly worthy? Is redemption become but an empty word? Does not redemption often become transformed within us into miserliness, into brutal hunger for power, into chauvinism, into hatred toward ‘not-ours’? Does it not fall upon us with an lolling tongue, like a dog, astray and riled, to take a lick, this black, dark, racial-poison and authoritarian-poison, with which the fascists today flood all of the paths of the world in great streams?
So I speak to myself and to the people around. They are so near to me. Such a thirst for friendship and understanding in all of us.
Z. Rubashov2 feels it, from him there speaks both pain and warmth. He speaks in Yiddish.
— We have many advocates, he says amongst others, advocates who believe and laud us and our achievement. But we also have a deep wound which doesn’t heal because of this, those who necessarily are nearest to us, most fraternal in feeling, who dream, like us, the dream of liberation of man and society — they want to see themselves in us and with us, experience together with us, to seek, to consider and also to struggle as comrades. Fate has confused the affairs — the nearest are the furthest, and the far are near.
— It still rings in our ears, that poem of yours, full of bitter irony, about the communists and the socialists who march separately, and in the middle — the police which must protect one from attacking the other. Still bloodier and more painful the gap between our camps.
This same thread, which Rubashov untied from a large knot and wound, I wind further:
——— It isn’t a trial between us, it’s a conversation of our hearts. I wish to make myself clear. It is also true that there are, therefore, also elements of trial and war, increasing misunderstandings.
— A conflict has arisen between a great portion of Jewish lives of the wider world and Eretz Yisroel.
— A new man affects the Jewish life of recent eras. I see him as he goes off over the larger world, experiencing the great drama of interruption — from the old life to a new. Going across the world, living in many milieus, cultures, languages, he got by carrying upon him and carrying through him more than a man is generally strong enough to bear. The surrounding event are stronger. And it is all of our longing not only to seek a way out, but also a true path in the wider world.
— I always had an inner connection to Eretz Yisroel. Excessive for me to say — a positive connection to the entire accomplishment of Eretz Yisroel, which is one of the most important, most affective, most fateful chapters of our drama in the world.
Your yourself will not say that you have already solved the problem — psychologically — of all ofJewish people. How much I have observed and wanted to find a means of faith in all Jewish people in the wider world — I haven’t yet found it. I want to hope that Eretz Yisroel will help me to find the way to all the Jewish people.
In the Soviet Union, for example, there also occurs one of the most important chapters of our drama. I see that the Jewish ethnic-person has broken himself, has interrupted himself, and also would interrupt the entire fate of Jewish history — would revolt against his history, against himself, and scream out his revolt against the entire world, — the true fundamental Jewish rebellion which stretches from Job onward, against the course of our history — the unavoidable nightmares pass, but also the wondrous, lauded martyrs. — This chapter is also a rightful part of our tragedy.
— Zionism greets me like a great idea of revival but then, when the idea is narrowly bound with socialism, however, we cannot satisfy ourselves with the path, even with the socialist path of Eretz Yisroel, if Eretz Yisroel sets itself apart from the entire Jewish life of the world, as if with a partition.
— We also suffer so enough from dualism, from the division of our souls and lives. — Division between word and deed, between politic and living, between the ideal of socialism, cultural dreams and reality. — There’s still a boundary now, a division, a partition, which works fatally upon the psyche of the Jewish people. And a large portion of the guilt for the partition lies in the linguistic conflict, in the negation by Eretz Yisroel of Yiddish. Yiddish and Hebrew has become a very fraught question. It can, however, go no further. We cannot see Eretz Yisroel in tatters. It’s ours. Everyone’s.
— We want our liberation everywhere. We cannot all forsake the wider world, even if we wanted to. It’s a hopeless thing. We, therefore, do not fasten upon Eretz Yisroel as a Bereshit, but as a continuation. It’s the same danger as with Jewish life in the Soviet Union, where it seemed that it began anew and the Jewish person and Jewish culture began from 1917, from present Minsk or Kiev. —
Of course we cannot weigh Eretz Yisroel by the measure of Soviet Russia, but in certain features, one can see formal likeness. ‘Bereshit’ is indeed a very daring idea, but in simple, near sequel there is, it seems to me, more positivity and truth than in Bereshit. In the Soviet Union I saw a sort of Com-arrogance (Communist-arrogance), and there were moments we felt in the Israeli approach to Jewish life in the world, to Jewish culture and language, a similar sort of Zion-arrogance. And I could never forget, though, the lonely and marginal Jews of Brazil, or the solitary, actually truly solitary and lonesome Jews that I came across in Trinidad.
We approach the heroic accomplishment of Eretz Yisroel as though a necessary historical fulfilment of our life, and we all, in particular the Jewish workers of the entire world, must cease to stand with an indifferent face to modern Eretz Yisroel. The separation, the tearing apart, must be discarded if we want Jewish life to be truly creative. And you, too — don’t raise your generation not to know their brothers, the language, their people in the world.
Don’t take it as a rebuke. I’ve long wanted to be able to say it eye to eye with you, and reveal for you the conflicts which I have within myself.
I am not come merely as an observer. Writing Yiddish and Yiddish poetry, leading our stubborn struggle for Jewish rights, for the Jewish word, for the Jewish community in New York, in Paris, in Warsaw and in Buenos Aires, and for the oppressed and tortured man in general, we have with them also helped to build Eretz Yisroel. Exactly as you, building cities, and kibbutzes and roads here, you have, with this, built Jewish life everywhere. This is the synthesis. This is the profound and warm sense of feeling rooted in one another.
H. Leivick, Tog, 15 December, 1937
If you’d like to see Leivick at the Hisdarut with Zerubavel and company in 1937, then there’s a treat for you to be found here.
On to Part Five.
Better known as writer, poet and later President of Israel, Zalman Shazar