Without Lifting A Finger

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you. The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke (The Road)

This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

“Abravanel was never impressed by nationalism. At all. Anywhere. He was totally unimpressed by a world divided into hundreds of nation-states, like rows and rows of separate cages in a zoo. He didn’t know Yiddish—he spoke Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek—but to all the states in the world he applied a Yiddish expression: goyim naches. Gentiles’ delight. Statehood seemed to him a childish and outdated concept.”

The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his...