“You too?” shouted Kuba.
“You fight over every project as if it’s house-to-house combat.”
“You’re a coward,” Kuba taunted. “You’re afraid to stand up to them.”
“This is Ein Shemer,” said Avital. “We’re not in Stalingrad.”
IN 1967, EIN SHEMER turned forty. There was much to celebrate. Nearly six hundred people lived on the kibbutz. Every apartment now had its own separate bathroom. While members continued to eat together in the dining room, they could buy modest supplies in the kibbutz’s new grocery, housed in a former stable. Even the communal kitchen, thanks to cooking classes sponsored by the movement, was improving. A seltzer dispenser was installed in the dining room, and for the founders, who had hauled water from a distant well in the early years, there was no greater luxury than cold seltzer on tap.
But the young people were beginning to question the egalitarian premises of the kibbutz. Why should a lazy member get the same salary as a devoted worker? Why should the collective decide a young person’s professional future? And just how special was the kibbutz? Clearly it hadn’t created a new man: kibbutzniks could be as petty and envious as people anywhere. And even if the kibbutz really was the most evolved human community, was communal life suitable for everyone?
Avital’s lack of interest in Marxist ideology, which he had once regarded as a flaw, had become the norm among Ein Shemer’s youth. Still, he felt that his friends were going too far in their disaffection. No, Ein Shemer hadn’t created the perfect society. But had any group of human beings ever come closer?
THE SHOWDOWN BETWEEN the generations happened on May Day 1967. For years, Ein Shemer’s veterans had bemoaned the decline of ideological fervor among their children. The forms of May Day observance remained—the roll call of comrades, the gymnastic displays like forming a human pyramid, the festive meal featuring borscht. But the passion was gone.
For Ein Shemer’s founders, the day celebrating the workers of the world was sacred, joining their loyalties to the Zionist revolution and to the Communist revolution. May Day transformed them from a footnote to a harbinger: they weren’t merely a private experiment in altruism in a tiny country in the Middle East fighting for survival but a model that would no doubt be adopted one day, in one form or another, throughout the world.
In the weeks leading up to the May Day march in Tel Aviv, the Ein Shemer newsletter tried to rouse the comrades with guilt: “Once people were ready to sacrifice for the ideal, and all that’s being asked of us today is to board a bus and march for two or three kilometers like on a hike, and suddenly that’s too difficult.”
The newsletter published an informal poll about attitudes toward the march among Ein Shemer’s young people. The responses among “tomorrow’s political fighters,” as the newsletter called them, were not encouraging. Ada was acerbic: “I’m not a monkey on display in a zoo. There at least they feed him peanuts, but [on the march] you don’t even get that much.” Avital, blunt but conciliatory, said, “My attitude toward the demonstration is negative. [But] I’ll go out of a sense of obligation.”
Barely two dozen comrades from Ein Shemer attended the march. But a worse blow came at the May Day symposium held in the kibbutz dining room. Amnon Harodi, one of Avital’s closest friends and a fellow paratrooper reservist from the 55th, declared that Hashomer Hatzair should end its infatuation with the Soviet Union. The red flag meant nothing to him: “It’s their flag, not mine.”
The response came in the following week’s newsletter. How was it possible, wrote one veteran, for comrades to feel no connection to the working class? “Comrades should know what the fate of the kibbutz movement will be if the government falls to the right.”
TWO WEEKS AFTER MAY DAY, Nasser began moving troops and Soviet-supplied tanks toward the border. Nasser’s threats to destroy Israel, encouraged by the Kremlin, ended the debate over the Soviet Union in Ein Shemer. The young people openly cursed the Second Homeland, and the old-timers were silent.
Messengers appeared, calling up reservist pilots and tankists. One by one, Avital’s friends in the orchards were disappearing. But the dozen reservists of the 55th Brigade who lived in Ein Shemer had not yet been drafted. The commander of Avital’s unit, Company D, happened to be a fellow Ein Shemer member, Haggai Erlichman. “Any word?” Avital asked him. “Don’t worry,” Haggai replied dryly, “if they need us they’ll know how to find us.”
On May 22 Nasser shut the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s southern shipping route to the east. That same night, a messenger from the 55th Brigade arrived at Ein Shemer.
“I know you, Avital,” said Ada, helping him pack. “If someone needs help, you’ll do everything you can. All I ask is that you don’t throw your life away on a heroic gesture. Or at least not a heroic gesture that has no chance of succeeding.”
“I’ll do my best,” Avital promised.
Chapter 2
THE CENTER
THE TORAH OF REDEMPTION
WHEN YOEL BIN-NUN was twelve years old, he confided to a girl his deepest longing. “I want the Temple to be rebuilt,” he said. The year was 1958, and they were walking home from a meeting of Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement. “With animal sacrifices and blood and all of that?” she asked, incredulous. “That’s what is written in the Torah,” he replied.
Yoel, named for a grandfather killed in the Holocaust, sensed that his life’s purpose was linked to understanding the mystery of Israel’s resurrection. What was the meaning of the juxtaposition of destruction and rebirth, either of which would have been sufficient to define Jewish history for centuries to come? And what role was he, a part of the first generation of sovereign Jews since the destruction of the Temple, meant to play in his people’s destiny?
Yoel offered his passion to Bnei Akiva, the Children of Akiva, named for the rabbi martyred by the Romans and whose emblem was the Ten Commandments, a sickle, and a sheaf of wheat—religious and socialist. The symbol of a Bnei Akiva boy was the knitted kippah, or skullcap. Unlike the traditional black skullcap, the knitted kippah wove two colors together, a relative vivacity.
Wearing a kippah on the streets of Haifa, where Yoel grew up, was not self-evident for a religious boy. “Red Haifa” was Israel’s most secular city. City hall fought the creation of religious schools and buses ran on the Sabbath; it was the only city with a Jewish majority to officially desecrate the holy day. Most Bnei Akiva boys wore berets in public—an ineffective disguise, since only religious boys wore them. Secular children taunted them with a nonsense rhyme, “Aduk fistuk”—pious pistachios.
But Yoel and his friends insisted on wearing kippot in the streets. Surprisingly, they were not harassed. If you respect yourself, Yoel discovered, others would respect you too.
Still, young religious Zionists suffered from an inferiority complex. Israel’s pioneers and military heroes were almost all secular. The secular youth movements dismissed Bnei Akivaniks as Zionism’s rear guard, more suited to becoming accountants than farmers and fighters. As members of the Haifa Bnei Akiva branch hiked up to the desert fortress of Masada, they were taunted by secular youth: “When Bnei Akiva go up Masada, they say Shema Yisrael”—the prayer recited by religious Jews at the moment of death. Even worse than being wimps, religious Zionists were a threat: their political leaders forced government coalitions to adopt religious laws, like ensuring rabbinic control over marriage and divorce.
And yet ultra-Orthodox Jews resented religious Zionists for validating heretical Zionism. In ninth grade, Yoel’s Talmud teacher, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Moshe Rebhun, told his students he wouldn’t be celebrating Independence Day. Zionism, he explained, had inverted the meaning of return to Zion, which was supposed to bring the Jewish people closer to God. Instead, the secular Zionists had uprooted Torah from the people. “You Zionists should ask yourselves why the holiest parts of Jerusalem aren’t under the control of the Zionist state,” taunted Rabbi Rebhun. “We have to go up to Mount Zion just to get a glimpse of the Te
mple Mount. And why? Because the Zionists don’t deserve it.” The Torah, he concluded triumphantly, was given in the Sinai Desert, outside the land of Israel, to teach Jews that the law was more important than the land.
Yoel entertained his friends by mimicking the rabbi’s German-accented Hebrew: “Why was the Taurah given in Sinai?” But Rabbi Rebhun’s challenge weighed on him.
AT BNEI AKIVA meetings they were debating whether to separate the sexes during folk dancing. Bnei Akiva hardly encouraged promiscuity: when members went on overnight hikes, they strung blankets across trees between the boys’ and girls’ areas. But “mixed dancing” was a Bnei Akiva tradition, a link with secular Zionist youth movements. Proponents warned that a total separation of the sexes would shift Bnei Akiva closer to ultra-Orthodoxy.
Yoel sided with the opponents. Just as we are scrupulous about kosher food, he argued, we should be scrupulous about the laws of sexual modesty.
Yoel’s friends gave him a nickname, at once mocking and respectful of his longing for purity: Tasbin. It was the name of a laundry detergent.
YOEL MIGHT HAVE become even more deeply drawn to religious stringencies were it not for his parents. His mother, Shoshana, was studying the ancient Hittites while raising four children. His father, Yechiel, was founder and principal of a religious girls’ high school and teachers’ seminary, an innovator in bringing advanced religious education to women.
Tough and resourceful, Shoshana had immigrated to the land of Israel in 1938, but then volunteered to return to Nazi Germany and lead a group of Bnei Akiva girls across the border. On the train, a suspicious Nazi officer pointed a gun at one of the girls; Shoshana, blond and able to pass as Aryan, indignantly exclaimed, “Is that the German education you received?” The confused officer let them go. Shoshana and her girls arrived in the Port of Haifa two days before the start of World War II.
Yechiel had come, destitute, to the land of Israel, and intended to send for his parents and sister once he settled in; but the war intervened, and it was too late. A pedant about the Hebrew language, he would glare at an unlucky student who happened to make a mistake in diction and force her to repeat the sentence until she corrected herself. That insistence on Hebraic precision was, for Yechiel, a spiritual mission. Language, he lectured his students, was the most sacred value, the mother of all values. And how much more so the Hebrew language, in which God and men had once conversed and which the exiled Jews had preserved in a cordon of study and prayer.
Yechiel constantly corrected Yoel’s Hebrew, and even that of his friends; he refused to return the cap of a boy visiting the Bin-Nun home until he corrected a grammatical mistake.
Yoel wanted to be a hero like his mother, a rescuer of Israel; but also an educator like his father, a refiner of his people. Yoel too began correcting the linguistic mistakes of his friends, but quietly, almost to himself.
IT WAS IN his parents’ home that Yoel discovered Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook—one of the great Jewish mystics, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Israel. An Orthodox weekly to which the Bin-Nuns subscribed was serializing a biography of Rabbi Kook, called The Man against the Stream. As soon as the newspaper arrived on Friday, Yoel would turn to the latest installment, captivated by Rabbi Kook’s personality. Ultra-Orthodox in his observance, he anguished about the Holy Land being built by secularists. Yet he celebrated Zionism as a harbinger of the messianic era and once danced with secular pioneers for hours, exchanging his black clothes for pioneering khaki.
Rabbi Kook, Yoel read, insisted on defining his own way. He was denounced in street posters as a heretic; ultra-Orthodox Jews snatched a body at a funeral to prevent him from delivering the eulogy.
In his mother’s library, Yoel found a booklet with excerpts of Rabbi Kook’s writings. She had considered the booklet precious enough to include among the few belongings she took on her flight out of Nazi Germany. Yoel read Rabbi Kook the way other young people read poetry, sensing himself expanding into language he didn’t yet fully understand.
Rabbi Kook was offering not just a more mystical version of religious Zionism but a unique philosophy. All of existence, he wrote, was in a state of divine becoming, and the enemy of the good was constriction, smallness, exile—of the Jews from the land of Israel, of humanity from God. He strained against the limits of conventional religion: false piety and conformism impeded human growth and freedom, diminished God’s grandeur. He so celebrated progress as the deepest expression of divinity that he saw the Creator Himself as “evolving” toward ever greater states of perfection, through the moral and intellectual progression of His creatures. And he embraced Darwinian evolution as the closest scientific analogue to the kabbalistic worldview. By enhancing the human, we enhance the divine. Asked to sum up his teaching, he replied, “Everything is rising.”
For Rabbi Kook, Zionism was far more than a political movement, an attempt to provide mere safe haven for a persecuted people. The Jews had been chosen as catalysts of human evolution; but only by ending the exile would their spiritual genius be freed, and world redemption begin.
Encountering Rabbi Kook, Yoel felt exhilaration but above all relief. Here at last was a rabbi who fearlessly confronted the spiritual meaning of this time. And in his embrace of paradox—Darwinian and pietist, Zionist and ultra-Orthodox, universalist and Jewish particularist—he offered Yoel a model for embracing his own conflicting longings between religious stringency and openness to the world.
YOEL GRADUATED FROM high school in 1963 at age seventeen, skipping a grade. With a year to go before the army, he decided to study in the Jerusalem yeshiva founded by Rabbi Kook and which now bore his name: Mercaz Harav, known to its students simply as Mercaz—the Center. And that is how they perceived its role: as the spiritual center of the Jewish people, and so of the world.
Yet even within the religious Zionist community—which numbered about 10 percent of Israeli society—Mercaz and its messianic theology were hardly central. The elder Rabbi Kook’s memory was revered, but few religious Zionists were actively awaiting the Messiah’s arrival. They dutifully recited the religious Zionist prayer asking God to bless the state of Israel as “the first flowering of our redemption,” but they were hardly preoccupied with the redemption process. For most religious Zionists, the creation of a refuge for the Jewish people was redemption enough.
Yoel’s parents wanted him to become an academic. But after encountering Rabbi Kook, academia seemed small. Instead, Yoel would become a rabbi, a teacher. What could be more vital than helping Jews understand the spiritual significance of this time, when their wildest fears and dreams had been fulfilled?
In the fall of 1963, just before Rosh Hashanah, Yoel left his parents’ home and went off to Mercaz, in search of the Torah of redemption.
THE STUBBORN DISCIPLE
THE MERCAZ HARAV yeshiva was located in an alley near Jaffa Road, West Jerusalem’s main street, a stone building with arched windows and high-ceilinged halls. The entrance was a crenellated stone gate that recalled the wall around Jerusalem’s Old City—barely a ten-minute walk from the yeshiva but inaccessible, blocked by barbed wire and Jordanian soldiers. The building had been the home of Rabbi Kook, and its meager furnishings reflected his modesty. In the rabbi’s den, his desk was preserved exactly as he had left it, with fraying volumes of Talmud open to the pages he had last studied. The kitchen was a drop-in center for Jerusalem’s beggars.
Yoel spent his days in the combined study hall and synagogue. Two rows of dark brown pews faced a Torah ark, beside which a sign urged students, “Know before Whom you stand.” A marble plaque commemorating a donor ended with the prayer for rebuilding the Temple, “on the holy mountain in Jerusalem, in our day.”
Walking into the study hall where Rabbi Kook had taught, Yoel felt haunted by holiness. Students were encouraged to devise their own curriculum, and Yoel decided to focus on Talmud and on Rabbi Kook’s writings. That combination would provide him with the grounding in Jewish law necessary to become a
rabbi, and with the vision to transcend the conventional rabbinate. Often he found himself in the study hall until late at night, oblivious to time, lost in the talmudic past and Rabbi Kook’s messianic future. His two chosen areas of study struggled within him. It was like trying to define reality simultaneously through a microscope and a telescope. The talmudic sensibility cautioned patience, its leisurely arguments unfolding through the centuries: If you are planting a tree and you hear that the Messiah has come, said the rabbis, continue planting. But the Kookian sensibility was restless with anticipation, straining against limits. If this wasn’t the time, then when would it ever be?
The focus of holiness in Mercaz, the living embodiment of Rabbi Kook’s teachings, was his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. His deeply lined face was at once kindly and fierce, committed to protecting what he loved. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah didn’t allow students to call him Rabbi Kook. That title, he said, belonged to his father alone. I am a fellow student of the rabbi, he insisted. Though he met with students in his father’s study, he sat not in the armchair but on a footstool.
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, as disciples called him with an intimate reverence, seemed typically ultra-Orthodox—wide-brimmed black fedora, long white beard, long black jacket. But this appearance was deceptive. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s soul despised the quietism of the ghetto, longed for the God of split waters and revelation.
Childless, he regarded his students as surrogate sons. He personally delivered the mail to them every morning, savoring the chance to bring them joy. They were his sabras, his native Israelis; some of them had already served in the holy army of Israel, warrior-scholars combining physical and religious vigor. One day, the rabbi believed, his students would help lead Israel back to holiness, to wholeness.
Like his father, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah was convinced of the divine impetus behind Zionism. How could the Jewish state possibly be a mere political entity devoid of spiritual significance? Was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of return to Zion—under apocalyptic circumstances no sane person would have believed possible—intended to merely create another Belgium?
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 4