People of the text
PROPHETESS Deborah, King Rehoboam, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook – they are grand Jewish characters plucked at random from Jewish history. Were they to meet in some ahistorical space, they would be seemingly alien to one another on nearly every account except for Bible trivia.
“They will have common topics of conversation: Jacob and the 12 tribes, Moses and Mount Sinai, the Land of Israel and its natural and human geography,” write acclaimed Israeli author Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger in their new book Jews and Words.
With the problem of Jewish continuity facing communities around the world, they tackle the contentious issue.
Judaism is not about “chromosomes” or birth certificates, or “stones or clans”, the authors write. “Ours is not a bloodline but a textline.”
Just as the four random Jewish figures were bound by knowledge of Jewish texts, the authors believe contemporary Jews are “texted to our ancestors” – bound by a lineage of intertextual, intergenerational and intercultural reading, learning and interpreting of the holy canon.
Oz has written more than 20 works of fiction and numerous essays on politics, literature and peace. He is a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva and was the co-founder of the Peace Now movement.
In an interview with The AJN, Oz says: “Jews for millennia have been discussing texts. It’s the combination of text and dinner table, the combination of text and family life, the combination of text and child raising – this idea of having three or four generations around the family dinner table that is the essence of Jewish civilisation.
“This is a story about how a civilisation survived through words; not through armies, not through castles, not through bridges, not through cathedrals, but through words.”
Oz-Salzberger tells The AJN that a long and tragic history of displacement has seen Jews adjust to the strains of a nomadic existence by carrying only two things: “A child in one arm and a book in the other.”
The book, which is a companion to the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilisation, examines the relationship between Jews and words, framed within topics such as continuity, women, timelessness and individualism, told through the authors’ unique reading of Jewish history and literature.
In response to the perennial question, ‘Who is a Jew?’ the authors write that you don’t even have to be a Jew in order to be Jewish – all you have to be is a reader.
“We are saying something metaphorical,” Oz-Salzberger explains. “That every person who deeply loves books, who feels they are anchored to their past through this kind of reference, is ‘Jewish’ by metaphor. You don’t have to be Jewish by actual identity or technical registration in order to be ‘Jewish’ in this sense.”
The phenomenon addressed most comprehensively is the authors’ grasp of secular Judaism. The father and daughter are strictly non-believing, authentic kibbutzniks, or as they put it: “atheists of the book”.
Oz-Salzberger says the authors are sending a signal to non-religious Jews around the world that it is possible, if not highly recommended, to be deeply Jewish in a “textual way, in a cultural way, but not in a religious way”.
Separating themselves from the New Atheism construct, their philosophies may be more comparable to those of Jewish atheist thinker Alain de Botton.
But instead of employing religious structures to facilitate spiritual and meaningful connection, as de Botton ventures, the father and daughter turn their gaze to Jewish parchments and urge their counterparts to “lock horns to the end of time” on the essence of those scriptures.
Oz says that, according to the Jewish tradition, even the subject of God is debatable.
“This was the case with Abraham in the Valley of Sodom as he bargained over the destiny of the sinful City of Sodom, as one would with a second-hand car dealer,” he says
“When Abraham loses the argument, he turns his eye upwards and pronounces the very daring words: ‘Will not the justice of all the earth do justice?’ Mind you, he was not struck by lighting for his chutzpah, for his impudence. God accepts what Abraham says to him: that you, God, may be chief legislator, but you are not above the law.”
It is in the Jewish DNA to be distinctly disputatious, an inheritance on full display in the streets of Israel.
“Israel is a fiery collection of arguments,” says Oz. “Every electrical line near a bus stop is likely to catch a spark and turn into a fiery open-air seminary with total strangers debating about politics, history, religion and the real purpose of God.
“The Jews are not a nation, not a religion, they are one big open-air seminary – where people discuss and debate, relating to the same texts for thousands of years, but interpreting and re-interpreting those same texts.”
Oz-Salzberger returned to Israel last year after a five-year tenure in Australia, most recently holding the position of Leon Liberman Chair in Modern Israel Studies at Monash University, and is a history professor in the faculty of law at the University of Haifa.
She says Israelis have a lot to learn form the Jewish communities in Melbourne and Sydney.
Jews and Words is published by Yale University Press.
REPORT by Timna Jacks
PHOTO of Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger by Ben Weinstein
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