Cherished Books, Hopes and…
This is a story of beautiful old books, photos, sentiments and of a missing picture that could tell how things went awry. It is a tale of freedom blunted, of hope stretched taut and of lasting possibility…
Of several Haggadoth [1] the one I cherish most and enjoy on the simplest level of good fellowship and family is a remarkable hand-sewn volume my mother’s parents brought from a trip to Israel back to the States in the 1950s. It has a hard plastic cover engraved with a grape-vine motif that makes it almost look like leather. Its cover page displays a wonderful interlace design featuring all the seven “fruits of the land” with five crowned pomegranates at the top and a lion of Judah in an oval beneath the title, “from the generations of Judah, Haggada shel Pesach, Yehuda edition” [2]. Stalks with ripe kernels of wheat and barley, clusters of grapes hanging from tendrils amid leaves, figs, dates, olives and pomegranates are the recurring motif that also covers the two end pages with this message embossed in the middle, in Hebrew on the right and English translation on the left.
“The message of the Haggada is intended for the present and future no less than the past. ‘In every generation it is a man’s duty to view himself as though he had come forth from Egypt.’ Many the generation which has heard this plea, but it is we who have seen with our own eyes the New Exodus, and the great return of the Children [of Israel] to the homeland and the founding of State of Israel. Our generation is witness to the eternal truth of the Haggada’s message.”
What great and happy pride, what quiet but assured joy resonates from these lines as they cite the ancient adjuration not merely to recount but to re-live the liberating experience of “the ingathering of the exiles and the rebirth of the Jewish State” as it reads in the introductory pages.
Re-settlement, planting (Vayikra 19:23), joyous re-connection, victories against all odds: what went wrong? What was missing?
By way of suggesting a brief answer, consider these other lines of the introduction: just as for many centuries, the editors write, “Jewish printers and illuminators have been able to illustrate the Haggada in terms of their own times and surroundings…it is only fitting that the eternal truth of this ancient and stirring narrative should be reaffirmed in terms of living pictures of our own land and the people of our own time.” And that is what is most wonderful of the wonders of this book to me, along with the illustrations and arrangement, the black and white photos set in trompe l’oeil ornate gold frames and glued onto a white square on pages facing the text, — photos of the land and people of Israel in the 1940s and early ‘50s with verses from the text for captions to establish the link and continuity from the earliest times to the present. From the valley of dry bones to flourishing hills and a standing host…
In this Haggada, “next year in the land of Israel” is the verse under a photo of a row of cypress trees, of grass borders and flower banks overlooking Haifa Bay. “But the Lord our God brought us forth from there” keynotes a photo from above of two open decks in the corner of a ship, its plain wooden planks crowded with scores of Jews (leaving internment in Cypress perhaps) for the Promised Land, not just a hope and prayer, but in reality. What a terrible reality they were delivered from: the next photo shows two men, one squinting in the sun, the other too youthful for a beard, composed and thoughtful still in striped camp uniforms above the verse, “for it is not one alone who has risen up against us…” And the rest of the verse bears repeating: “in every generation they rise up against us to finish us.” And indeed, the world’s diplomacy and wars have seemed directed largely of this ancient plan, this negation of the Creator by annihilating His people.
There are group photos of smiling youths from five to thirty-five, jammed together as if to show, proudly and gladly that the extermination had not succeeded even in these times. In one oval-framed shot, a beaming Yemenite Jew in traditional headdress and dark jacket and a European Jew in white button-down short-sleeved shirt throws an arm over each other’s shoulders and clasp hands. One tries not to think of some of the history in that rescue, immortalized by the name, “on eagle’s wings” (Exodus 19:4). But that is why the newborn nation has not yet become “a kingdom of Priests and a holy nation” – it is not, it has not been allowed to be a whole-heartedly Jewish State. But the light in the smile of that man’s face, his black beard gray at its twisted ends says that the Promise and potential that survived millennia of assaults and degradation is not only still alive but inextinguishable. That is why “the nations rage…”
There are photos of the mountains of Yehuda and the Shomron in spring, the time of Pesach, putting forth again their greenery; of cultivated fields in the Jezreel valley (“a delightful, good and spacious land”) stretching to the mountains in the east; of an Indian Jewish family sitting at a Seder table laden with large curling matzos, greens and fruits, the men holding up cups of wine as they read from haggadoth. There is a bowl brimming with fruits above the verse, “eat of its fruits and taste of its goodness”; Torah scrolls in an Ark armored in intricately engraved silver; three Jewish soldiers, watchmen on guard atop a cement and wooden tower. And last of all, illustrating the song, “just one little kid,” three children in shorts, sitting in a mountain of hay cradling and smiling over a kid.
The beautiful song that in its count-up fashion expresses the wonder of creation and the basics of Judaism concludes with the Holy One Blessed Be He slaying the Angel of Death who slew the slaughterer as we may yet see in our day for Israel, the kid amidst a world of wolves whose lust for Jewish blood seems to be unappeasable.
There is no photo, how could there be, it would mar the mood of the sinking of the Altalena though in a way everything that subsequently went wrong was a footnote to the lack of brotherhood and resolve to return fully that went into that terrible event [3]. The picture and the story that are not there explain the gap between the calm joy and wonder of the intro and the reality sixty years after the founding, and the sinking of liberation.
I have another remarkable book, handmade and sewn, of photos printed on heavy stock, its very thick cardboard covers embossed with an interlace design surrounding a view of David’s citadel at the southwest corner of the old city’s walls [4]. The inside boards have a marbled design in green water color and every photo, scenes from the early decades of the century is on very thick stock and covered with a glassine sheet anchored in the binding. There is Allenby Road in Tel Aviv, bustling with pedestrians, autos and busses in the 1920s. There is Dizengoff Square, its lovely fountain and park, and one’s memory swims from the strife with Aaron Aaronsohn to the terrible bomb blasts of the 1990s [5]. There is Rothschild Boulevard with the triple-tier of lush trees in its esplanade and airy space between buildings no higher than four stories. There, most remarkably, is a tractor, circa 1910 pulling an even funkier baler in the Jezreel valley, men working in caps and shirtsleeves with pitchforks. There is the Temple Mount its dome still plain seen from the Mt. of Olives, the rebuilding Jerusalem spreading mightily beyond it, west, north and south. A corner of the Western Wall, it appears to be the “little Wall” with a full array of Jews: men in caps, jackets and laborer’s shoes; black-hatted and gowned Chassidim; women huddling under umbrellas against a wall fifteen feet away. There are Tiveryah by the Kinneret and its surrounding mountains and Tzfat, not a fourth their current size. There are the remnant walls and partly restored massive main entrance of an ancient synagogue on Mt. Meron where Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is buried. Most poignantly of all, there is Rachel’s tomb seen in full as it cannot be seen today because of the massive cement “security barriers” that enclose it to deflect Arab sniping and herd in the Jews, channeling and restricting their access to one of their holiest sites as various world powers and their local contractors prefer: there is a simple road, not fifteen feet wide lined by four foot high walls of stone rubble; there is the giant olive tree, seen in the foreground, in the grass amid the stones across the way. There best of all is the simple dome above the tomb and the 19th century building for public functions adjoining it, its wide-vaulted doorway expansive and serene.
The photos that are missing are of a fully resettled and re-sown Promised Land, at least those areas west of the Jordan River; and really, the great failure of love and identity that truncated and followed the military victory of 1967 precluded the reclamation of much more land, Torah and truth than this small area, too. Aaronsohn, Weizmann and others worked hard, at least twill 1922 at including the Litani and Yarmuk parts of the Jordan watershed within the Jewish National Home, — to no avail. This could have been made good in 1967 and afterward had the desire been there [6].
Much has been lost, but much has been gained and found, built and revealed. Coins, pottery and utensils from the First Temple period in abundance, dwelling places adjacent to the City of David, the Old City and the Temple Mount. The tunnel built by King Hezekiah linking the Shiloach spring to the inner walls can now be traversed from end to end, a glorious walk in summer back through 2700 years. A quarry with stones for the Temple Mount and its walls uncovered early in 2008; the full burial procession and tomb of Herod on the mountain he shaped for this purpose halfway between Jerusalem and Hebron; the tiny synagogue atop Masada with fragments of ancient Torah scrolls. Millions of Jews, Torah study, Temple implements re-fashioned; a strong economy, leading science from medicine to botany, a mighty army – and a people trodden down by an oligarchic State-media apparatus serving foreign powers: “O Israel, — who is like you!”
Despite the victories and flourishing, the sentiment and joy of 1950 are mostly gone – except when you see the Children of Israel gathered for a festival, like the intermediate days of Pesach at Hebron with their music, like the campers pioneering the heartland again in defiance of the demands of the nations and their puppets. The world seems poised in a balance, quivering for collapse and tyranny, a new pyramid and period of slavery. “It is an iron law,” many have noted, that Esau hates Jacob and the modern period, whether dating from the Crusades or from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the holocaust seems to prove the point of Torah. The mighty of the world want to finish and have done with the Promise and the Creator for they are re-fashioning a world order to their own liking, one with many fewer people, little freedom, less justice, and dogmatic Darwinism to justify the imposture. They will make their lie into “truth” and consign the Jews, their Torah and God, the Creator to myth and ghettos. They will call it, “peace” and wage an endless “war on terror” to impose it.
That is the challenge to freedom and memory in our days, it could not be more stark or overwhelming, — like the sight of Pharaoh’s army of chariots hemming one against the Sea. To date it has been “redemption in its time” like the first one. But as it is taught that the final redemption will be like the first, at the end it will be hastened with a crash of surf, a song of joy and sweetened waters [7].
1. Haggadoth is the plural of Haggada, “the telling” or “the narrative” which is the story of the Exodus in a simple form, including blessings and psalms that accompanies the Passover Seder or festive meal.
2. Haggada shel Pesach, An Israeli publication by Lion the Printer (Tel Aviv 1954); English translation by I.M. Lask; photographs by Kluger; arrangement by Shifrin).
3. The Altalena was an old ship bought after many struggles by the National Military Organization (from which, decades later, by way of the Herut {“freedom”} party emerged the Likud which expelled the Jews from Gush Katif and the northern Shomron). Loaded with arms purchased in Western Europe, piloted by an American Jew, it was sunk with most of its cargo off the shores of Tel Aviv late in June 1948 at the orders of David Ben Gurion with the guns commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. The fullest account in English that I know is in Days of Fire by Samuel Katz (Doubleday 1968), 196-252.
4. Genuine Photographs of Eretz Israel (copyright Palphot, Hertzliya – Eretz Yisrael, undated). In English it says “copyright and made by “Palphot” [perhaps a pseudonym] Hertzliya – Palestine.”
5. Shmuel Katz, The Aaronsohn Saga (Gefen 2000; 2007 English edition), 248-56, 278-87; Katz details that the main trouble was rivalry and resentment from HaShomer HaTzair; at every step of the subsequent peace conference, Aaronsohn, Weizmann and Jabotinsky had to fend off the opposition “of anti-Zionist Jews” in America, England and the Promised Land. And see pages 303-17.
6. Ibid. 308-11, 325-27, under the term, “the country of the Jordan and its affluents.” Also see E. Narrett, WW III: the War on the Jews (lightcatcherbooks.com 2007), chapter 14
7. Isaiah 60:22 and commentaries; Exodus 13:17-15:27; cf. Isaiah 55, Ezekiel 36-39, Ovadiah, etc.