A response to Yoav

Yoav's comment:

Ari, כה יעשה לי אלוהים וכה יוסיף I Wish I could have time to learn your culture In the way you study mine, but your point of view is still too narrow. by all means study hebrew, study it's literature and history, not to say nationality, but be ready to accsept that your blog is just a darft, pages in the notebook of a detective that is trying to solve a case. I don't know the german source but Zach and Amichai did translate LS poems into hebrew and it would be interesting to compare your translations.

I must say that I've heard about most of the people you've mentioned in this post but I must say that their affect on the israeli society only began in recent years.

While I was writing my thoughts I thought about things I've told you.
I think that atleast some of your inconvenience with Hebrew would be solved if you use Babylon more often, perhaps the most useful thing when you translate or write or loves or fights is self-doubt

My Reply:

Yoav,

I think there's an important point to be made in regard to this such 'study of culture'; I agree that my vantage point is fashionably narrow and even at that I am not trying to look at it from the lenses of the German language (in fact an impossible task) but through a 'mediator' that one could call "der jüdische Erbe Europas" (the Jewish heritage of Europe)... I believe this to be important because the 'culture' is so foreign yet so close home. For an example, Margarete Susman had an uncanny erudition of a great part of both the German, German-Jewish and Hebrew literature of her time, and remained after her own fashion one of the best and perhaps only serious critics of Hebrew literature and of Israeli "Judaism" in the 20th century... not without leaving the grandiose halls of the German language.

I certainly study Hebrew and its literature, although there's a great chunk of the contemporary authors that befind me as sympathetically boring, more than anything I've taken a certain interest in all kinds of religious poetry. The language itself is another matter, because more than often I found that things taken for the granted in Israeli Hebrew are actually rather complex constructions, altogether there's this claim going around among some linguists that modern Hebrew is a European language (and so does uphold my own advisor who is a theologian) that is in my opinion groundless... but it's neither a Semitic language to the degree of purity that a typological classification would demand. Ghilad Zuckermann is perhaps one of the few Israeli linguists to have studied seriously this phenomenon of the Semito-European character of Hebrew. You can see the great amount of phono-semantic matching done during the genesis of the language... there's just so much Greek flying around in the air, so that the morphology remains quite a mystery (you might perhaps want to see the work of Outi Bat-El on the prosodic morphology of Hebrew, she lectures at TAU on Optimality Theory). The syntax is entirely Western (and therefore the inner life of the language) with the exception of a certain morphological and therefore prosodic access to parataxis that the syntax does have. Just like in the German language I'm an advocate for linguistic purity, reason for which I indulge myself in such lack of fluidity in Hebrew, almost unconsciously refusing to use the state-of-the-art neologisms.

I don't think one should study a language's "nationality", in fact I find the cunning of the term very troubling and unbefitting to our age. And this is where my cultural criticism starts, not only that of Hebrew-speaking culture, but of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel itself. Those of us speaking about the nation, are undoubtedly speaking the language of the 19th century and of the Romantic period... the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology. Therefore Israel can't stand on its own in the history of contemporary culture, it is the missing link in the understanding of the roots of Modernity... because out of this paradoxical national narrative "we" as Israelis have entirely become cultural parvenus. You see it in the book reviews being written, the movies made and especially the flavour of the recently published literature. Guilel agrees me with me that one should go back to Ahad Ha'am and to Judah Magnes, to some extent to Buber (whose philosophy I don't like very much), in order to understand that the possibilities of an authentic Hebrew culture (and not the culture of the State of Israel, for there has never been such a thing as the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany or of the Austrian Republic, just culture in the German language - with the exceptio of alas! the period between 1933 and 1945) are not in the love of the nation or in the lack of it, but rather in something more radically individual and universal such as the love of the world. Something makes me think that so much would be achieved if Israelis could see themselves as a phase in the history of Jewish culture, which is not the history of Zionism.... but rather eighteen centuries of contribution to European civilization and just as much to the near East. The Galut culture is definitely not what one needs today, but it can't be disregarded just so much.

I agree the blog is a draft of something that is not, but I've never aimed to be a Hebrew writer and after other than having studied Biblical Hebrew back in my heyday, I basically taught myself the language. Maybe I'll solve the puzzle one day, I don't know... but it's important for me to keep a great degree of this 'Occidental perspective', lest I want to lose myself in "authenticity", another term I believe to be outdated. Luckily the world of culture is one in which there's no such a thing as outsiders, unless one were to define it by nations. I know some of the translations of Amichai which are truly beautiful and want entirely something else from Lasker-Schüler than I do, notwithstanding I like him very much überhaupt. I also found not long ago a book with translations of Rilke, but I was very disappointed. When I introduced Margarete Susman and Mascha Kaléko at the Hebrew University no one had a clue, but it is so typical of that place... the last German imperial university. All those poets are certainly by no means Hebrew, but some of them did have a Hebrew mind actually, an almost Biblical touch for their own languages... and it is from the sources of this "hidden tradition" that one could look forward to a Hebrew culture that doesn't look at its predecessors as mistakes of other spiritual age. I'm by no means meaning to strip the value of 'your' Hebrew culture, nor pretending to cure its ailings with 'my' German culture, I'm simply saying that this Israeli culture is in fact suffering from ills no different from those of the whole Western world, to which it is undoubtedly indebted for so many misnomers. This isn't a literary or a cultural position, but a entirely diremptive and therefore philosophical perspective.

I don't think I can speak about other thinkers, because my opinion is that there're really no thinkers who were ever influential in Israeli society ever, to the degree that there was a Goethe cult in Germany or a whole full-fledged Derrida school in France. Israel has so far produced no philosophical schools and no philosophers of great renown, other than some Jew here and there who decided to make his home there, people like Yirmeyahu Yovel and Shlomo Avineri.. who belong still to the generation of the Holocaust and whose narrative has stopped being binding for just too many people. That there's a living culture here I will not deny it, but that there's a spiritual crisis in the country that neither religion or secularism can heal any longer... is something that doesn't need any proofs. It is the living reality of the street.