In Chapter 15, Simon writes briefly about an orthodox school, and then about his visit to the Kibbutz Chofetz Chaim (a transliterated name, so spelling varies depending on whether a Yiddish or Hebrew system is being used). By coincidence, this religious kibbutz was named after the man who headed the third and last Yeshiva that Simon had attended as a teenager in Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. This was in Radin (Raduń) near the Lithuanian border.
In addition to his description of a wedding and of the infrastructure at that kibbutz, he writes about what adaptations have to be made to this new way of life. The religious Jews he was used to had all been townspeople. I’m sure the question of what to do with the milk from a cow that has been milked on Shabbes was not a burning one in his youth. Similarly, “shmite”, the seventh year when the land must be left fallow, had been either a curiosity of ancient history or an abstraction.
Consistent with his views up to now, Simon sees the changes he observes as not just surface ones, but as tokens of a true transformation, even a rupture, in Jewish life. A strong, Jewish athletic teacher, or a proud military guard, who is also devoted to the Talmud was not just a curiosity, but was irreconcilable with his image of the young Talmudic scholars he had grown up with, and betokened future combinations he had never dreamed of. Simon jokes about Orthodox Jews raising race horses one day. As far as I know, that never happened, but Kibbutz Chofetz Chaim did later go on to build a water park. A strictly gender-segregated one, mind you.
Chapter 16 departs, for now, from the author’s long string of kibbutz visits. He describes his visit to Holon and conversations with a close childhood friend there. I, who grew up on my grandfather’s Chelm stories, was delighted to learn that his friend was named Beinush. Beinush the Policeman was the hero of a story in “More Wise Men of Helm,” a book that I knew practically by heart from childhood.
This Beinush, however, is an ardent Zionist. For the first time, Simon’s disquiet about Israel is now discussed in its fuller context. A restless man with a deep love for and high demands of the Jewish people, he had long been vocally unhappy with what he saw as a lack of creativity and communal commitment back home among American Jews. Simon wanted American Jews to keep the Yiddish language. He wanted the secular Yiddish schools, and the community of adults around them, to find a way of making Judaism a full way of life, not just a weekend supplement to an assimilated American way of life. To do that required a return to studying the source texts, a certain degree of separatism from the gentile population, and perhaps even a renewed Halachah, consistent with our modern understanding of the world. As it turned out, his secular Yiddish colleagues were not all that interested in what Simon wanted. In his earlier writing, he had warned that founding a state based on Zionism was not just risking a break with Jewish history, but also posed yet another threat to American Jewish society, because American Jews would look to the State of Israel both to set a cultural tone for our lives here, and to embody our hopes for the future.
And so, Beinush turns the tables on Simon. “Why haven’t you established a Yiddish-speaking generation in America, which is as stubbornly determined as we are with Hebrew here?” He describes Jewish life in America as in decline, as still living off the cultural and spiritual “scraps” of a bygone way of life, and as empty. Who are American Jews to tell Israeli Jews how to live, when they can’t get their own act together? His son-in-law is even more blunt. Why should Israel solve American Jewry’s problems when they have their own, very different, problems? In fact, he views the differences between diaspora Judaism and Zionism as a zero-sum game: “We want to use your strength for us. It’s a question of who will use whom.” Remarkably, given that there were then over five times as many Jews in America as in Israel, both Beinish and his son-in-law see American Jewry not as the older, stronger, more influential community, but merely as “manure” for the growth of a new Jewish state. As we slowly declined, we would send Israel our money and our young people, and they would know what to do with them.
Simon does not argue any of these points here, but simply presents their views. I will point out that there is a deep contradiction in Beinish’s argument justifying the rejection of Yiddish, even while admitting that choice went against the unity of the Jewish people. “But, first of all,” he is quoted as saying, “we do believe in the unity of the Jewish people. Second, we wish to intentionally distance ourselves from everything that smacks of goles…” Yes, the Israelis welcomed all Jews and considered their country, at least in theory, the home of all Jews everywhere [How they actually treated Jewish immigrants who were “other” is outside my purview here]. But “goles” was where most Jews, including most Israeli Jews, had been raised. The price of acceptance was rejection of one’s culture of origin. In America this was called “assimilation,” but in Israel, “a new Jewish People.”
The Nation State and the Promised Land 