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PARTISAN REVIEW
to Toynbee's analysis of the stimulus of hard countries. The Jews are not
making a new migration but a return. And while they are partly impelled
by material adversity, a strong element in the stimulus which drives tnem
to establish technologically an agricultural system in this stony terrain
is a psychic frustration. The migration is not a casual exploration for
Lebensraum
but a deliberate pilgrimage toward an apparently unre–
warding place.
To the J ew the Bible is a saga, a blend of history and mythology.
It
seems to belong to prehistory and both the religious and rationalist
sections of the people are aware that they are making an attempt to
resume contact with a half-mythological world, a Golden Age. On the
Sabbath, truckloads of families from Tel Aviv go for excursions to
Galilee and the Negev to see not only the bullet-shattercd scttlements
but also the biblical sites, from Dan where the spring water flows into
the racing Jordan to Beersheba where Abraham dug his wells. It is as
though Le Morte d'Arthur were to be authentic history. There is an
apparent dichotomy of the rationalist and religious groups in the
country, a conflict of the modern and the traditional, the West and
the East, the blue-shirted youngsters of extreme Left parties and the
young men with the long side curls who drive tractors and study the
Talmud. There is the jeep driven by the soldiers in cowboy hats singing
songs in praise of Mitzi and Zippi, (the Hebrew counterparts of Dinah
and Sweet Sue) and the donkey, with his heartbreaking sobs, who pulls
the little two-wheeled truck driven by the bearded farmers. But the
cleavage is more apparent than real. The Hebrew religion was a
revolt against the desert. The Puritanical Jehovah was a necessary
protagonist against the dissipating sand, the insignificance of time, the
compulsion of hot-blooded lusts. The Arab came to friendlier terms with
his senses. Architecturally, the mosque is phallus and breasts. But the
Jew was an intellectual. The Synagogue is as bare and abstract as the
Universal God. With the modern rationalists, Jehovah becomes Reason
and the Communal or Party Committee, representing the Group, ac–
quires the veneration and authority formerly held by the Sanhedrin.
At the same time there is a sense of revival, a renaissance of some–
thing old in new terms. It is the poetry of the desert, a Jewish romantic
movement. The rites and customs, the ark and scroll of the law, the
apparatus of a religious statehood interrupted in A.D. 70, preserving
itself for so long in the irrelevant celebrations in ghetto synagogues, are
rooted again in the seasonal rites, so that spring and harvest festivals
are once more days for the flower-decked cart and white-dressed
children, for parties where Western Jews dance to swing and the Yem-
