I did not comment on Chapters 3 and 4. There are two reasons. First, Solomon Simon (may his memory be a blessing) was not a man to keep his mouth shut. And yet, he let his hosts go on and on in Chapter 3, while he just listens. His amazement, and also his fear that Israel represented a rupture in Jewish history and in Jewish life, would best be conveyed by letting the facts, and the Israelis, speak for themselves. Similarly, the book can speak for itself without explanation, qualification or interpretation here. Elsewhere, a little context might help the reader, but here it’s not necessary.
The second reason is that revising this translation is far more work than I thought it would be. I finished the earlier draft of the book over five years ago, and it turns out my Yiddish is better now than it was then. So, this is a thorough revision that does not leave over as much time as I thought it would to take you through all the nooks and crannies.
There are also plenty of conversations one might have outside the frame of the book. For example, there’s actually a story about a coincidental link from Chapter 4 to my own life. There are delightful bits of language worth pointing out, or particular challenges to the translator. I do hope eventually to bring in at least a little of that. But fear not, you can always just read the chapters themselves.
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After the heaviness of Chapters 3 and 4, Chapter 5 comes as something of a relief. It starts out like a more conventional travelogue, with complaints about the infrastructure and the prices and even accounts of annoying (sometimes downright rude) fellow tourists. Of course as he goes on there is more. He describes how the land itself seems infused with the events recounted in the Torah from thousands of years before. He brings in a character to introduce the problem of Yiddish, about which more will be said and written later. The recent war is everywhere, along with his concerns about how deeply a militaristic culture is being planted. But what stuck with me about chapter five was what the author makes of Abraham and the well and the Tamarisk trees.
“But now here was Abraham, alone, and I asked him:
“Father Abraham, did you not long for Babylon, for your father and for Ur-Kashdim? Your brothers and sisters were still there. You had planted trees there, too. Here, you had to fight with Abimelech and do battle with kings. You had seen God there too, hadn’t you?! Father Abraham, how could home be there and here?”
In this brief but remarkable passage, Simon identifies Abraham as a fellow exile, a man who had left the home of his childhood to make his way elsewhere. “Your brothers and sisters were still there.” Simon, too, had left most of his siblings behind in Russia when he immigrated to the U.S. “You had seen God there, too.” How, asks Simon, do you forsake one home for another, and how do you make your new home truly home? Especially when you have to fight an army to live in the new place.
Leaving aside the fantasy element of this literary device, why pose this question to Abraham, the founder of the tribe and the grandfather of Israel, whom God had ordered out of his home in order to wander in the land promised to his descendants? The answer, one would think, is evident. God told him to. But that may be the author’s point. There are more than enough Israelis today, in 2024, who will tell you that God promised all of “greater Israel” to the Jews. But when Simon wrote his book, that was actually not the case. Zionism was a secular movement. The country was not founded by religious people. And, even if it had been, the God of contemporary religious people is not located in or confined to a particular place – not on top of a fiery mountain and not in any particular geographical feature or country.
Abraham’s answer is, effectively, that of course it’s hard and of course there are always questions about whether you are doing the right thing, but you have to find a way to live somewhere…
The Nation State and the Promised Land 