by Bruce Feiler
“Maybe Washington, D.C.,” I said. “But not everyone goes there.”
“Here, everyone goes to two places,” he said. “Jerusalem and the desert.”
The first place Raz sent me was nearby Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, one of the earliest kibbutzim in the Negev and the onetime home to Israel’s founding father, its first prime minister, and the greatest champion of what might be called desertopia. David Ben-Gurion was born David Gruen in Poland in 1886 and adopted a Hebrew name after moving to Palestine in 1906. In no time he became an early leader of Zionism, the movement to reclaim the land of Israel for Jews that took its name from the biblical term for Jerusalem’s westernmost hill, Mount Zion.
Ben-Gurion, a socialist, was the person who declared Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948, led the country through the war that followed, and spearheaded the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. A short, stocky man with an Einstein-like shock of hair and an insatiable intellect (he had twenty thousand books in his library), Ben-Gurion towered over people who disagreed with him. Shimon Peres, his protégé, who later became prime minister, wrote of his mentor, “He was not an easy person, or a congenial one, or a person who strove to be liked by others. His personality was very complex, distinguished as it was by an exceptionally strong character, tremendous willpower, and stubbornness.” But, Peres noted, Ben-Gurion challenged Jews to believe that they could be a nation of farmers, not just scientists and intellectuals. “He decided that the time had come to establish a Jewish state, yet once it had been founded, he was not satisfied—it must be an exemplary state, a chosen state.”
Time and again, Ben-Gurion relied for inspiration and guidance on the Bible, which he viewed as a blueprint for Jewish life in the Promised Land. “It is not the Mandate which is our Bible,” he told the British in 1937 of their rule over Palestine, “but the Bible which is our Mandate.” Far from commonplace, this was something of a revolutionary position at the time, even among Jews. What Ben-Gurion did was say the Bible should be taken not just as a spiritual text, viewed as a product of the ancient world, but as a political text, applicable even to twentieth-century realpolitik. Wherever he went, Ben-Gurion read the text, quoted the text, challenged conventions about the text (he believed far fewer than six hundred thousand men participated in the Exodus), and used the text as a guide to his every decision. Though critics accused him of delusion, utopianism, or even “Bibliolatry,” Ben-Gurion refused to back down.
Eventually Ben-Gurion took his fascination one step further, by endeavoring to enter the Bible himself. In the summer of 1953, while on an expedition in the Negev, Ben-Gurion came upon a handful of pioneers working in a brand-new kibbutz called Sdeh Boker, or Plain of Cowboys. Ben-Gurion stopped his chauffeur-driven car and spoke with the workers. The following day he called a meeting of his advisers. “I am jealous of these young people,” the sixty-seven-year-old leader said, “what a wonderful experience!” And that December he did something even more remarkable: He resigned as prime minister of the five-year-old country and moved his wife, his life, and five thousand of his books to a small bungalow in Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, where he went to work as a sheep farmer.
The following March, Ben-Gurion wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine, called “Why I Retired to the Desert.” After emphasizing that leaders have a moral responsibility to step away from their countries to help build confidence among the people, Ben-Gurion stressed he was driven to the desert by a desire to draw himself closer to God. “It is no accident that the Law of Israel, the Torah, was given in the desert, and that the greatest teacher in our nation, Moses, was the leader of the nation in the wilderness. Here man sees the creation of God as it was in the beginning: rough, wild, and as unyielding as ever. And he finds in himself the forces needed to adapt it to human needs.”
I had heard parts of this story before, but not until I hitchhiked the few miles to the kibbutz from the field school did I realize how dramatic an act of biblical devotion Ben-Gurion had performed. His wooden bungalow, prefabricated in Sweden and preserved today as a museum, was a mere 810 square feet, with two bedrooms—one for him and one for his wife, who hated being there—a living room, a small kitchen, a bathroom, and an office. In the sitting area was a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The biggest item in the house was a giant globe given to him by U.S. General Omar Bradley. In his bedroom, where Ben-Gurion reportedly slept only three hours a night, was a cot, a stack of books, a pair of slippers, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a sketch of the burning bush.
Even more telling was Ben-Gurion’s office, which was twice as big as the two bedrooms and kitchen put together. In addition to the books, Ben-Gurion had three miniature statues. On his desk were busts of the Greek philosopher Xeno and the Buddha; and directly across from his chair was a replica of Michelangelo’s Moses. Also on his desktop, tucked underneath protective glass, were a half dozen biblical passages, most from the Book of Isaiah, from which Ben-Gurion claimed the origin of his plan to “make the desert bloom,” to turn the Negev into a Garden of Eden. “For the Lord will comfort Zion,” read one citation, from Isaiah 51:3. “He will comfort all her waste places; He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in it, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.”
Walking around the house, I was amazed by the spartanness. It was as if Franklin Roosevelt, having won the war, had decided to go back and live in Lincoln’s log cabin. Though Ben-Gurion did return to the prime minister’s office from 1955 to 1963, Sdeh Boker would always remain his home, and it was his vision that led to the formation of the Research Institute, which he called a “Hebrew Oxford in the desert.” Even more impressive was the greenness of the place. The house itself, which was painted the color of wintergreen, with forest green shutters, was shrouded with pepper trees and ficuses and boasted geraniums up to my waist.
“I have a lot of respect for Ben-Gurion,” said an elementary-school teacher from the kibbutz who was walking her dog outside. “He was right about settling in the Negev. In the Gulf War we almost lost the country because so many people live in Tel Aviv. The Scuds could have killed the entire population.” Also, she said, this place was closer to God. “I went to Greece recently, and it was beautiful. But when I came back, the first thing I did was come here. It was the right time of day, the light was perfect. I just stood here for a while.” She paused. “It’s good for the soul.”
While residents of Sdeh Boker may deem Ben-Gurion a hero for glorifying their life in the desert, many scientists have long dismissed his notions of transforming the desert into a garden as naive or, worse, ruinous. After my visit to Ben-Gurion’s house, Raz directed me to the home of Yoel De’Malach, a farmer, researcher, and winner of the prestigious Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, for his work in revolutionizing the role of water in the Negev.
At seventy-five, De’Malach was a slight man whose stooped shoulders and hesitant step belied his flickering eyebrows and crackling wit. He reminded me of an old European clown who refused to stop joking even after his acrobatic days were behind him. Born in Florence, De’Malach came to Palestine in 1944 and was sent to the Negev by the Jewish Agency, the organization run by Ben-Gurion that organized the resettlement of the country. What did De’Malach think of the task of transforming the desert? “Experts had enormous faith,” he said.
Actually, even that wasn’t true. The centerpiece of Ben-Gurion’s plan for the Negev was to pump water into the area and reclaim the wasteland as arable soil. Despite his adoration of the Bible, in effect he wanted to undo the desert as a spiritual foundry, and make it an agricultural one. He even proposed paving over the two giant craters and using them as reservoirs. Few thought it was a good idea. During one trip to the Negev, Ben-Gurion stood in front of what’s called the Small Crater and proclaimed, “I want to fill this crater with water.” His advisers responded, “It can’t be done,” to which Ben-Gurion replied, “Who said so?”“The professionals,
” they said. “In that case,” Ben-Gurion said, “give me other professionals.”
De’Malach didn’t need professionals to tell him what he soon discovered: that even with water pumped south from the Sea of Galilee, the Negev was too dry for farming. But the public didn’t want to hear it. “There were young people crying, ‘How can you say this! You are reducing our hopes!’ Children, I am sorry, but I cannot change the world. We have to compromise our dreams.” He added, “Don’t think we didn’t have any feeling for the Bible. On the contrary, I think that we held the Bible in higher regard than Ben-Gurion, who was stuck in Tel Aviv all those years. We lived here, in the desert, in the same place where the patriarchs lived, so we believed we were close to the ancients.”
For twenty-five years De’Malach and his colleagues struggled to survive, caught between the parched land on the one hand and the unrealistic expectations of the country on the other—until a discovery in 1969 opened the door for a possible reconciliation. Drilling more than half a mile below the Negev, scientists uncovered a previously unknown aquifer, full of brackish water, ten times saltier than drinking water but only a tenth as salty as seawater. It might not have been as miraculous as Moses tossing a log into the bitter waters of Marah, but in the long run it might prove more significant. If scientists could figure out how to use it, the brackish water could reduce the country’s dependence on rainfall.
For decades, De’Malach and his team tried growing produce with the water, with mixed results. Pomegranates and grapes were successful; mangoes and oranges were not. In products that worked, the yield was diminished, but the quality improved. The reason, he explained, is that plants overcompensate for the salt by generating more sugar. “Our tomatoes are the best in the world,” he boasted.
“Wait! You’re Italian and you’re telling me that this image of a big Italian grandmother making spaghetti sauce is going to be replaced with a woman from the Negev?”
“I don’t believe that Italians will start to buy Israeli tomatoes,” he said. “This is too much! But ours are better.”
“So Ben-Gurion would be proud.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“But you’re proud.”
“When we started, nothing was here,” De’Malach said. “Now look what’s here. We’re selling tomatoes all over the world. And we did it with our own hands. So yes, I think I can be proud.”
The next person I went to see was David Faiman, a physicist, weekend biblical historian, and another European immigrant, in his case from London. Faiman was a charismatic person with a trimmed black beard and meticulous speaking voice that reflected his Oxonian past, and sandals and colorful shirts—bright orange today—that reflected his Israeli wife, an actress. I arrived in his office at the edge of the Research Institute, in an area devoted to the more futuristic aspects of the facility: pumping water through buildings as a coolant, growing algae for eating, and trying to solve the puzzle of how to use the sun as a viable source of energy. He showed me around his compound, which looked like a giant outdoor fun house, with mirrors sprouting in dozens of shapes—circular, rectangular, spherical, and conical—all angled toward the sky. The dominant structure was the four-story dish, like a giant metal oyster lined with mirrors, that was Faiman’s bid to solve the solar puzzle. “I’ve had quite a breakthrough in the last few months,” he explained. Some businessmen from Germany were arriving within the week to consider investing.
After the tour we sat in his office and Faiman explained that he admired Ben-Gurion, despite his cockamamie ideas for the desert. “Ben-Gurion wasn’t a scientist. He wasn’t aware of the climatic and geographical factors having to do with the shape of the earth and its orbit around the sun that are responsible for this place being a desert. Now we know better. Now we try to work with the desert, not against it.” Faiman moved to Israel in the 1970s and has since taken sabbaticals in the United States and Australia. He and his wife raised three children in Sdeh Boker and eventually built a dream home in the solar suburb, which included windows facing east, to heat up the house in the mornings, and a special chimney for naturally funneling heat out during the day. I asked him what his dream for the Negev was.
“The dream would be to introduce a serious rail system in this country. The country is designed for it. The New York subway system could very easily cover all of Israel. Then you could settle the Negev in an ecologically responsible manner. Some areas would be nature zones; others would be for nonpolluting industries. You could even do some market gardening. You can grow out-of-season orchids and fly them into European markets. If you did this, you could move people here from Tel Aviv and restore farmland. The best agricultural land in the country is now covered by cities, and here we are trying to develop agriculture in the Negev, when the Negev is the most wonderful place to live imaginable.”
I asked him if his vision, like that of Ben-Gurion, was tied to the Bible.
“Obviously they are related, otherwise I wouldn’t have come here. My whole philosophy is strongly influenced by the Bible. What is clear to me is that there is a physical world and a spiritual world, and I am saddened that our perception of the spiritual world is very primitive. It hasn’t evolved at the same rate as our perception of the physical world.”
“Has living in the desert affected your spiritual life?”
“For one thing, I think it deepened my understanding of the Bible enormously,” he said. “Simply because the Bible always meant a lot to me, but through British eyes. Living here, among the bedouin, seeing how they live, has brought home to me that many episodes written in the Bible were not written by European rabbis. They document events that have their very core in the desert, far away from urban life.”
“So are you a desert person?”
“I feel I’m a Negev person. My roots are here. I have enjoyed visiting deserts in Australia and the United States, but I never felt I belonged there the way I feel I belong here. It’s part of my tradition.”
“And do you feel your work here is part of that tradition?”
“I feel that I’ve been a useful part of the process,” he said. “That I came to this place, and made it work for us, but that when we were finished, we shared our technology with the world. It’s the same with the Bible. It was originally given to us. Now it’s part of the world.”
On my last afternoon in Sdeh Boker I went with Raz to visit Ben-Gurion’s gravesite, a tasteful enclave overlooking the desert, shrouded with pistachio trees and lined on the ground with flagstones and yellow flowers. In the center were two tombs of Jerusalem stone. One for Paula Ben-Gurion, who died in January 1968; the other for the “Old Man,” as he was lovingly called, who died in December 1973. Though set up as a triumphant spot, including an amphitheater for visiting school groups, the place seemed sorrowful.
“Among my generation, it’s not popular to say we are Zionists,” Raz said. “Israel, as a nation, has lost much of its romantic appeal. It’s the same with the Negev. Once people came as pioneers. Now, they come for selfish reasons. They want to be closer to nature. They want to raise their children in the open.”
“And that’s sad?”
“A little. It’s sad because people don’t care about the communal parts of the country—education, what streets should look like. People of my generation are interested in how much money they can make, their work, their immediate family. Not even their parents. I don’t call my mother and father every day. It’s a fact. My father is furious with me for not being involved enough in politics, in religion.”
What he is involved in, he tells his father, is trying to change the image of the desert—from a place to be afraid of to a place to be enjoyed.
“People are scared of the desert,” he said. “It’s far away, it’s brown. There’s no place to swim.”
“And where does that come from?”
“It comes from the Bible. ‘The people of Israel suffered in the desert,’ it says. We read it in the first grade and never forget it.”
; “But you can’t compete with the Bible,” I said.
“Some friends told me I should rewrite the Bible in language we could all understand.”
“You’d have to rewrite the history of modern Israel, too. The desert was the enemy for Ben-Gurion as much as for Moses.”
“My principal message is: ‘Don’t be afraid. This is the best climate to live in. It’s dry. There are many places to hike. There are many ways to make money.’ ”
“So if the old slogan was ‘Make the desert bloom,’ what should the new slogan be?”
“ ‘Make the desert fun.’ ”
I thought about these conversations on the way back to Jerusalem. It was clear that Ben-Gurion had achieved one central part of his dream: making the desert central to the identity of the Jewish people, particularly to the State of Israel. He did this through his speeches, through his push to settle people in the Negev, and through his personal example of living in Sdeh Boker. But in achieving these goals, Ben-Gurion had lost a central tenet of his Negev dream: turning the desert into a Garden of Eden. Ben-Gurion’s inspirational slogan, “Make the desert bloom,” which I recall hearing as a child, is now recalled as little more than Zionist propaganda. Israel did make the desert habitable; it made portions of it arable; in the future it will make even more of it profitable. But it didn’t make it green, nor should it have. As Ben-Gurion himself said in the New York Times, the true appeal of the desert is that it brings one closer to the divine. “Here a person sees primeval nature in all its strength, unchanged and undisturbed by human hand; he does not give up in despair but finds within himself the vigor to meet the challenge and to strengthen his own powers of creation.”
And, as Ben-Gurion anticipated, bringing people closer to the desert also brought them closer to the Bible. Everyone I met, from Yoel De’Malach to David Faiman to Raz, mentioned that spending time in the Negev had strengthened his or her attachment to the text. In the end, this may be Ben-Gurion’s greatest achievement: rebinding the Jewish people to the Bible, saying that even in a world dominated by politics, nuclear weapons, and international alliances, the desert stories of the past still have a role. “Two things have to be fundamental in our education,” he once said. “Science, as a means for knowing nature and controlling nature, as well as obtaining technical and economic mastery, and the Bible, as master guide for human and Jewish upbringing, shaping our social and ethical choices, relating to man and humanity.”