I was very interested in learning how Prof. Yigal Schwartz sees the
current Israeli phase of our people’s perpetual encounter with the
concept of normalcy (Haaretz Magazine Jan 1 08). I also appreciate his
documentation of one literary form that publicly expresses and manifests
our abnormal behavior!**
This obsession we have with being normal is I believe, one of our most
constant and powerful pathologies. It seems to be an archetypical
anxiety of the Jewish people for the past three thousand years.
It is a real challenge to designate the origin of this conundrum. It may
well be that there are more than one point of genesis.
Surely the directive in Genesis to Avram at the very beginning of our
communal creation; to leave his homeland which includes the promise
…And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you . . . and
by you shall all the families of the earth be blessed. must have
contributed to the concept of the Chosen People which we have carried
with us for generations. It seems it would be a real challenge to be
both chosen and normal. It is in this attempt that our dilemma is
situated. By definition to be chosen is to be different. Yet our
experience is that we are, individually as well as communally, very much
the same as everybody else, if not more so. So how could we also be
chosen?
I would also add the encounter between the prophet Samuel, and our
people who demanded that he make us a king to judge us like all the
nations. Yes, we still are engaged in the same desperate quest, to be
just like everyone else, to be like all the peoples.
One of the prime theories of Zionism was also that by having a
geographic home, like all the other nations, we would too would become
just another nation among the nations. We would not be seen as different
or special. We would be related to exactly like other nations related to
one another. We would become normal as a people and as individuals.
Some of us are still waiting for this normalization to actually take
place. We watched as Great Briton fought a war thousands of miles form
its capitol in a different hemisphere, in the Falklands Islands and
could not understand how it was that we were condemned for our struggle
against enemies situated a few hundred yards from our homes.
That some of our great writers would reflect this confused should come
as not great surprise.
One of the essential questions that remain is; will the world let us be
normal. Will it consider the injustices committed by other with the same
judgment as those committed by us? Alongside this question projected
outward, is one even more important that we ask ourselves; are we able
to perceive and judge ourselves by the same criterion that we judge
others. Can we be as forgiving and compassionate towards ourselves as we
are towards the other?
