FOSSIL SONG

à propos d'un article dans Haaretz:  "Why Israelis should celebrate the New Year"

By Yossi Klein

Published 08:00 27.12.13

("The world celebrates and we stand on the sidelines with our hands in our pockets."

"Holing up and guarding the gates is tiring. A festive meal for 700 shekels does not make up for the great effort expended in protecting the fortress from enemies that want to kill us and from a culture that might bewitch us.")

FOSSIL SONG

if Israel did not guard its gates - then we would all be holing up 

again

as a Diasporean Jew, I have seen - I keep seeing - the resonance of Israel in our lives

Israel almost healed the grievously wounded souls of all my family, of all the Jews I know

almost - because we travel with our nightmares 

Israel resurrected us - all of us, the socially charming and secretly panicking, the exhausted, the desperately witty, the flashy, the routinely anxious 

we could stand upright again and hold high our genetic headaches

we, of the perpetually wandering minds - we had a roof on earth

something like a an echo of Jericho was shivering through our lives

the harried of the world had turned warriors 

the Zohar remained  a treasure, Schopenhauer a philosophical suspense, but  the art of war had come to us 

and the art of living was a discovery

yet I understand that Israel has a different gravity, that it has generated a new species of hurried bustling Jews - whom this essay describes as a people of easily bored tourists, balking at all things foreign, their own Jewishness included

here in this old worn out world, we still have a tendency to rush, ecstatically unprotected and bewitched beforehand (enchantés d'avance) into Christian culture - among others

so we of the other worlds, would be fossils?

of course, Israel should be dancing and popping champagne corks on New Year's Eve 

and I love Michelangelo 

let him who stands dense and gaping in front of a Pieta in Florence and who thinks King Lear is a brand of cereals

let him cast the first stone