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ОглавлениеRECOVERY OF THE QUEST, PART I — ANAMNESIS: SEARCHING WITH MY LIFE
I have no Ideology. My life is my Message.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
A philosopher, it appeared, had to engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness in order to discover its constitution by his own experience of reality, if he wanted to be critically aware of what he was doing. This exploration, further, could not stop short at the more recent events in political and personal life, but had to go as far back as his or her remembrance of things past would allow in order to reach the strata of reality-consciousness that were least overlaid by later accretions. The anamnesis had to recapture the childhood experiences that let themselves be recaptured because they were living forces in the present constitution of his consciousness.
— ERIC VOEGELIN, Anamnesis
In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain.” He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.… He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance, and attained what the alchemists called the unio mentalis. As a rule this state is represented pictorially by a mandala.
— C. G. JUNG, Mysterium Conjunctionis #756
Home
I have a mother in Africa who used to send me packages of kudu biltong. Biltong is Afrikaans for the strips of sun-dried venison the Boer trekkers took on their ox-wagon journeys into the wilderness interior of southern Africa. The kudu is one of the most regal of the African antelopes; the male, with its long spiraling horns, is well chosen as the emblem of the South African National Parks. Biltong is enjoyed as a delicacy by most native-born South Africans, perhaps most of all by the Bushmen. It is all lean muscle and sometimes so dry it can be snapped like a twig or peeled off in long thin strips. It tastes like no other food and has little resemblance to the fatty, marbled steaks of our corn- and antibiotic-fed cattle. Kudu biltong smells wild, gamey, infused with the herbs and shrubs of the antelope’s diet — the flavor of the veldt. At times of “meat-hunger,” a Bushman hunter has been known to run most of the day in the summer heat of the Kalahari Desert chasing down an adult kudu. I share some Bushman tastes. I loved long-distance running, and kudu biltong is my soul food — the taste of home. Savoring the tough strips of flesh fills me with a nostalgia so strong it’s a kind of communion. For a moment I feel like I am an African back in Africa.
At other times I also feel myself to be a Jew, an Englishman, an Israeli, and a kama‘aina, a dweller in the land of Hawai‘i. My quest began as a search to find myself in a world where identity could be a matter of life and death. Today, identity can still be a matter of life and death, and since the pieces identifying me do not make a familiar category, I risk being badly misunderstood by all.
My Jewish identity preoccupied me for much of the first three decades of my life. The time I spent working on a kibbutz and soldiering in the Israeli army empowered and healed me. But more surprisingly, Jewish nationalism opened me to the wisdom of indigenous peoples. I found myself participating in activities that gave me insight into some of those archetypal experiences that define what it means to be human, and this, paradoxically, helped liberate me from a purely “tribal” identity.
Biblical Israel was the site for the original monotheistic revelation and marked the beginning of written history as a drama of divine revelation in human affairs — what Eric Voegelin called the “leap in being.”* Modern Israel may well prove to be the catalyst in history’s next unfolding — another leap in being — or its catastrophic unraveling. Today the Middle East can be seen as the epicenter of the global crisis. Israel is armed with nuclear weapons, led by a hard-line government, and caught in a regressive cycle of fear, anger, and brutality. The surrounding Arab governments are rushing to become equivalent powers. At the same time, their people are starting to assert a form of direct democracy in an “Arab spring,” whose course currently oscillates between Islamic fundamentalism and Western consumerism but is still pregnant with the promise of something truly creative.
Beneath the furiously battling, bleeding tribal religions is the contested territory — an expanding, drying desert containing some of the largest remaining oil reserves on the planet. Climate change, drought, limited fresh water, and a rapidly degrading ecosystem threaten the protagonists as well as everyone else. For simple practical reasons all of our problems are now increasingly interlocked. A sustainable resolution to the Middle East conflict cannot be separated from global concerns about living on a habitable earth. Clearly, a bigger story of meaning and identity is required — something that goes to the shared “indigeneity” of both Israeli and Palestinian. Ultimately, this needs to express a shared love for the single indivisible homeland that is planet earth — a primal-planetary culture.
It took my own self-imposed Hawaiian “exile” to distance me sufficiently from my various homelands to recognize a deeper dynamic working in my life. Life in these warm, welcoming islands helped me envision a politics within which the unique stories of individuals, tribes, and nations could express the truth of their particularity and still flourish in a single planetary community.
So, I offer my story as a personal example of the dynamic of the future primal politics I advocate. Telling my story is simultaneously an invitation to the reader to recognize the role of his or her own story in the collective, cooperative creation of meaning that is at the living center of a future primal politics.
Exile in Eden
Just beyond the suburbs and pavements of my hometown, Port Elizabeth, are miles of spectacular beach and bush. The city is situated in a region where two very different climates meet and mix, creating one of the most unique and ancient ecosystems in southern Africa. To the west along the southern coast is the winter-rainfall Mediterranean climate. The beaches are fringed with fynbos, rich with the remains of the first human seafood culture. In the background, following the ocean and watering the coastal plain are serried ranks of mountains. To the east and north is the summer-rainfall region of the tropics. Where they meet east of Port Elizabeth is a transitional zone of extreme contrasts and diversity — the distinctive tangled bushveld of the Eastern Cape.
The Fish River marks the end of this intermediate region and the beginning of the undeveloped Wild Coast of the Transkei north to Zululand. About two thousand years ago, cattle-owning Bantu-speaking people migrated down the east coast, where there was rich pasture for their herds and a suitable climate for their summer-rainfall crops. As they moved south they displaced the original first people, the San Bushman hunter-gatherers, and their close relatives the pastoralist Khoikhoi. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch and English settlers moved from the southern coastline to the east and north. They met the Xhosas just east of Port Elizabeth, where they clashed in the Xhosa wars, which were more numerous and bitterly fought than the better-known Zulu wars. This was the true frontier separating climate, people, and culture. It was settled by the British, who developed a relatively enlightened attitude to the native population and started a number of mission schools and universities. This British-educated area was the home of some of the great leaders of the struggle against apartheid — Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Steve Biko.
The frontier land itself is full of contradictions. Some seasons are wet and rainy, others stone dry. This gives the Eastern Cape bush an utterly unique quality symbolized by the bitter-juice aloes and their bristle-topped, red-hot-poker “flowers of thirst.” Gray beard lichen hangs from the tangle of thorn bushes, giving the impression of a primeval forest. Noel Mostert, the historian of the Xhosa wars, describes in his book Frontiers the intense impression this landscape makes on the traveler:
[Here] nature flowers and fruits in a willful and undependable manner, in a fantasy of colour of feverish combinations, the soft and the delicate with the violently brilliant, blooms that poison and bulbs that feed the starving, all of it expressing the alternating bounty and generosity and malevolent caprice of the land itself.…One moment it is a land that seems to be all English meadows, parkland. Roses and carnations bloom, orchards hang with soft fruit.…Then, at no distance at all …mere yards it sometimes can seem, one confronts the other side of it all: drought, dust, despair. It is here that the aloes burn, among vast cracked granite boulders that radiate heat like furnaces, and serve as altars for coiled and venomous serpents, which add a new aberration to their threat by spitting their venom unerringly into the eyes. And all about, mile after mile, stretches thick mimosa bush, a hardy greenery, wielding massed thorns the size of small daggers, which stab and strike at whatever passes.…Sometimes in this country there is a breezy freshness blowing in from the distant, hazily seen ocean: vinegar for the crucified.1
In the heart of this wilderness around Sunday’s River is an area called Addo, named from the Bushman (Khoisan) Kadouw, meaning “river crossing.” It is one of the few relatively intact fragments of the ancient ecosystems that once covered the paleo-continent of Gondwanaland two hundred million years ago. In the early nineteenth century, miles of impenetrable mimosa thorn bush were alive with the full complement of big game. The only way to move through the bush was to follow paths made by elephants and the aggressive black rhino. One professional big-game hunter called it “a hunter’s hell,” meaning it was also “animal heaven.” This allowed a unique subspecies of the African elephant to flourish. Addo elephants were slightly reddish in color to match the earth, and many females were tuskless, probably an adaptation to intense hunting pressure. The original San Bushman hunters were driven into the mountains, but the tall, thick bush, full of spekboom — a dark green succulent also called “elephant’s food” — made it possible for the elephants to survive repeated attempts at extermination.
Today the elephants prosper in Addo, which is now the only game reserve in southern Africa extending down to the ocean and hosting the “big seven” — with whales and great white sharks in addition to lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, and leopard. As a child, I was moved deeply by our family weekend outings to Addo. Driving out of the city on dirt roads into the bush in the hope of encountering elephants was like traveling back to some incredibly wild and wise old Africa. I felt deeply connected to the place and the animals, but I had no story to make meaning of my experiences, no way of connecting them to the rest of my city life.
I grew up as an Orthodox Jew in racist South Africa during the fifties, when the Nazi death camps were still fresh in Jewish memory. The president of the country during the time I discovered politics was Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, who had developed his vision of strict racial segregation while a student in prewar Germany. It was not much of a leap from apartheid to anti-Semitism. South African Jews were legally white, but definitely not Dutch-white. My deeply tanned father was once mistaken for Coloured* and turned off a whites-only bus. Like many middle-class children, I was well loved by my parents but spent much of my time in the close company of Africans — warmly cared for by housemaids, cooks, “garden boys,” and nannies; playing with them, eating their food, listening to their music, fascinated by their click-inflected Xhosa language.
In a society that was obsessed by race and tribe, I experienced my Jewishness as a problem — a peculiar tribalism in a world of tribal warfare. Both my parents were Ashkenazi Jews whose parents came from eastern Europe. My father grew up in a small anti-Semitic Afrikaans village; he was the last of five brothers in the solitary Jewish family, which true to stereotype owned the only shop in the village. His first language was Yiddish, which he spoke at home to his parents and brothers, then Afrikaans, used in school. Only later did he become fluent in English. Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazi ghettos — a mixture of Hebrew, German, and Slavic languages written in the Hebrew alphabet. By their neighbors and themselves, the Ashkenazi were considered a people apart, distinguished by ethnicity, language, dress, and religious practice.
During the Middle Ages, when the majority of the European population was illiterate, Jews had achieved almost universal literacy in Hebrew. Literacy was a condition of religious practice, which involved reading and ritually reenacting an epic story of identity — of tribal, desert nomads, bonded by shared revelation and then shaped by over a thousand years of history amid the arid crossroads between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Since religious practice was tied to a story of identity, Judaism had little interest in converting outsiders.2 Eventually, Ashkenazi Jews became one of the most genetically isolated and culturally distinct ethnic groups in all of Europe.3 By the nineteenth century this group constituted the heart of world Jewry, with some five million concentrated on the western boundary of Russia, in a gigantic reservation known as the Pale of Settlement. Here they lived in largely self-governing communities, practicing an exclusive religion, dressing and eating differently, speaking Yiddish, and praying and studying in Hebrew. It was a peculiarly contradictory tribe, insular and fiercely protective of its culture and religion, yet simultaneously landless, rootless, and cosmopolitan.
According to a czarist survey at the end of the nineteenth century, the largest group of Jews in the world constituted the most impoverished and destitute of all the oppressed ethnic minorities in Russia.4 They were also the most politicized, disproportionately represented in the leadership of progressive, revolutionary, and utopian movements of the time. This was the crucible of modern political Zionism, a movement that created the modern State of Israel, widely admired in its early years, much reviled today. But Zionism also produced a unique utopian community — the agrarian, democratic kibbutz — which in the words of the Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber was the “experiment that did not fail.”
After the anti-Jewish massacres at the end of the nineteenth century, some Jews moved to Palestine, inspired by the Zionist dream of building a new country in the ancient homeland. There they joined the small, impoverished Sephardic (Spanish) communities that had returned to the Holy Land in the fifteenth century when the Inquisition expelled the Jews of Spain. But the bulk of the Ashkenazi emigrants left for the rapidly growing capitalist economies of the West. The Jewish community of South Africa came almost exclusively from the Lithuanian part of the Pale. Of those who remained in Lithuania, 90 percent were exterminated during the Holocaust.
South African Jews enjoyed the benefits of honorary white status, doing well in business and professional life, and suffering only indirectly from cultural anti-Semitism. But their political sensitivity inspired a disproportionate number to join, and sometimes lead, the struggle against apartheid. For example, in 1955, when police arrested 156 antiapartheid activists for treason, more than half of the 23 whites arrested were Jewish. In 1963, the South Africa security service raided the headquarters of the underground antiapartheid African National Congress (ANC). As a result, Nelson Mandela and nine of his comrades were charged with sabotage. Of the nine, four were black, five were white, and all five whites were Jews. All but one received life sentences. The first white elected as a member of the ANC national executive was a Jew, Joe Slovo, who remarkably went on to become chief of staff of its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, “Spear of the Nation.”5 My sense of being part of a minority in opposition to brutal, powerful rulers was a source of some pride, but also anxiety. We still lived with the ancient tension of a tolerated, sometimes privileged outsider, aware of past and impending persecution.
My father’s hero was the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, who had spent his early years fighting apartheid in South Africa. In my ignorance and insecurity, I rejected this as the traditional Jewish path of passivity, perhaps cowardice. Like most of my peers, I was drawn to a more assertive Jewish nationalism. I joined the South African branch of a global kibbutz-Zionist youth movement, Habonim — “The Builders,” based on a mix of the utopian socialism of the Israeli kibbutz, the back-to-nature movement of the German Wandervogel, and the heroic vision of returning the Jews to their biblical homeland after two thousand years of exile and persecution. Habonim made sense of the weirdness of being a Jew in Africa and started framing my political worldview.
Zionism attempted to grasp the entirety of Jewish existence in a single passionate narrative: millennia of struggle, culminating in the present moment as an opening for creative politics — redemption through a return to the land of origins. The narrative began with Jewish identity forming around the monotheistic revelation, and the creation of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, followed by a succession of wars, foreign occupation, exile, and return. This ended with the final conquest by Rome in the first century and the global dispersal of the Jews into the Diaspora — the Galut. For centuries Jewish history in the Diaspora was a cycle of oppressive decrees, anti-Semitic riots, massacres, and expulsions, only to be followed by acceptance into a new country and accommodation, until the inevitable cycle of persecution and expulsion returned.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and during the first part of the twentieth century, small groups of young Jews from eastern Europe organized themselves through the international Zionist youth movements and moved back to the biblical homeland to form communal agricultural settlements. Land was purchased by the Jewish National Fund through the Keren Hayesod and held collectively for the nation; it was given to these young groups of idealists. Technically they were colonists, but of a radically different sort from the European colonists who came to America, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. First of all, they were without a motherland and without state backing. They were not part of commercial ventures by chartered companies in search of profit. Nor were they looking for gold or silver or opportunity in a fertile land or for good jobs in a growing economy. They were idealists who were united in a near-mystical notion of transformation, a dream of remaking self and society through hard physical labor on the ancestral homeland. Out of this grew the agrarian, communal settlement — the kibbutz — that became one of the founding institutions of the State of Israel. Like most nationalist movements of liberation, Zionism was almost wholly self-absorbed; it never creatively engaged the indigenous Palestinian population. Early Zionists conveniently saw “a land without a people” for a persecuted “people without a land.” Palestinians saw outsiders and colonists arriving, buying up land, and asserting an alien identity. Only a handful of visionaries saw the larger, more complex reality and struggled, vainly, for creative coexistence.
Conflicting needs and mutual incomprehension resulted in violence. Escalation of violence eroded the vestiges of mutual empathy and set in place the vicious cycle that today is the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In my youth I was oblivious to Palestinians. Zionism healed me by explaining my alienation as an outcome of a collective condition — life in exile. I felt empowered, wholly absorbed in the drama of Jewish redemption, which would be simultaneously or la’goyim, a moral example to the world. I felt part of the Kabbalist ideal of tikkun ha’Olam — healing and repairing the world through practical action.
South Africa might have been the original Garden of Eden, but most of my childhood was spent in an indoor hell. I attended what was regarded as the best boys’ school in town — an authoritarian, whites-only, Christian establishment. Every morning when the rest of the school would gather in the assembly hall to sing hymns of praise to Jesus, a small knot of Jewish boys would be excused to stand outside in the playground, self-consciously with yarmulkes on our heads, to chant and sing our Hebrew prayers. Classes were hours of soul-sucking boredom, punctuated by sudden violent dramas. Some of the teachers had long ago given up on love of learning as motivation, and they would get our attention by periodically whipping us — getting “cuts,” we called it — one at a time in front of the rest of the class for a variety of obscure transgressions. One bored biology teacher once started class with a surprise quiz; twenty questions, and for each wrong answer we got one cut of the cane. We spent the rest of the period getting whipped. Teachers intimidated us in class, and the bigger boys persecuted the smaller in the playground. It disheartened and enraged me. I developed a loathing for bullies and hated school.
Alienation from South African society deepened with my early discovery of the Nazi Holocaust. One day exploring my uncle’s medical library, I opened a book on Nazi medical experiments and found myself looking at photographs of mutilated children. I was horrified to discover the Nazis had slaughtered two-thirds of the Jews who had stayed behind in Europe. The shock reverberated in the small daily cruelties of apartheid I witnessed around me. Injustice was brought close to home when I first confronted starving children dressed in rags, coming to the kitchen door begging for “bread and sugar water.” I remember my confusion at being stopped from acting on my childish generosity and sharing the contents of the fridge. This sudden encounter with evil cracked my world apart forever. I began the quest without knowing it as a way of healing this fracture.
I would live for weekends and holidays, when the miles of bush and the clean, empty beaches offered an escape from human-inflicted misery and a spectacular playground for my imagination. Vervet monkeys thrived in the bush, and the tidal rock pools were rich underwater gardens, crusted with black and brown mussels and volcano barnacles that cut bare feet; there were also limpets tending their little lawns of algae and bright red and orange plum anemones, spiny sea urchins, and the camouflaged, quick-darting klipvis — the rock fish, which we caught and released. With so much food in plain sight, it was easy to imagine the “beach-Bushmen” — whom the Dutch settlers called strandloopers — living a life of plenty in the wild, protected from the elements by cozy campfires in the spacious rock shelters that dot the coast.
My early wordless love for Africa and Africans remained unbroken, since our family emigrated before I had to renounce the black friends and loving caretakers of my childhood. There were many obvious privileges associated with being a white African, and many were guilty, but perhaps the most noble and the least celebrated lay in being able to regularly escape civilization into moments of “wilderness rapture.” Having direct access to wilderness as a child gave me an early introduction to crossing boundaries and being comfortable with living in the in-between. It allowed a part of me to resist being socialized and, in staying wild and African, paradoxically remain more human.
The Cave
Plato’s allegory of the cave is philosophy’s most famous metaphor for consciousness entrapped, enlightened, and entrapped again. It appears at the climax of the most celebrated text in the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, as part of the discussion of the education of the philosopher-king, the ruler who must love wisdom more than power. Socrates asks his pupil Glaucon to imagine the unenlightened — by implication all of us to some extent — as prisoners in a cave, chained by the leg and neck since birth. The prisoners sit facing the back wall, on which are projected shadows of a fire-illuminated puppet show taking place behind the prisoners’ backs — a primitive movie theater. All the prisoners know of life is their experience of the shadows projected on the wall and their shared interpretations of what they see. The allegory suggests that to some degree we are prisoners in the cave of our past experience. Any worldview becomes a cave the moment it is taken for reality.
One of the prisoners is somehow liberated. Stepping out of the cave into the larger sunlit world, the liberated prisoner is blinded by the light and disoriented. As he takes stock and explores the larger world, he remembers his journey out of the cave and is led to construct a larger universe of meaning, within which he can recognize the limits of life in the cave as a small part of a larger whole. “Anything is better than to go back and live as they do,” Plato tells us. But despite the joy of escaping, the prisoner returns to the cave. Why? We are told it is his duty to liberate his fellows. Why do we feel compelled to help, to enlighten others? Why is it good for the philosopher to be concerned with the well-being of his fellows?
On returning to the cave the philosopher finds his eyes are unaccustomed to the dark, and he has lost his easy familiarity with the world of shadows. When he tries to enlighten his companions, they ridicule his awkwardness and think he has lost his mind. Plato, in the voice of Socrates, gives us a warning. If the philosopher persists too stridently in his mission, the prisoners will turn on him and kill him. The warning is well taken, since we know the Republic was written after the polis executed the unrepentant Socrates for questioning authority. In contrast to the comforts of contemporary academia, Socratic philosophy is not an obscurantist escape from public life — but an urgent, practical, life-and-death matter. Why take the risk?
To answer this we need to reflect on what we know about the Socratic practice. Socrates wrote nothing and saw face-to-face discussion, with anyone, about the big questions, as the royal road to truth. To pursue wisdom the philosopher needed to share his knowledge and to keep learning from others. On returning to the cave, the philosopher has to acknowledge that life outside the cave has transformed his ability to live harmoniously as a prisoner. Yet to win the trust of the inmates, he needed to reconnect, to sit and listen to their stories of life in the cave. One cannot “enlighten” without listening and learning something from the “ignorant.” Having demonstrated the sincerity of his concern for their mutual well-being, the philosopher can point to the obvious asymmetry of the relationship between “those who stayed and the one who returned.” The return embodied the fact that the philosopher had undergone a conversion experience. He had opened himself to experiencing something larger and truer that illuminates the nature of the quest. Socrates and Plato called this process a “turning around of the soul,” a periagoge, an opening to the mystery of self-awareness and the possibility of living in the light of greater consciousness. This has democratic implications. To put it simply, however fixated on the shadows the prisoners might be, they are still capable of the most minimal act of reflection, which at the very least reveals that one cannot evaluate “life in the cave” without comparing it to something larger — “life out of the cave.” Everyone can benefit from the philosophical quest.
Here the metaphor needs to be expanded to serve the Socratic intention of clarifying the quest. We are all in caves of our own limited experience of life. We all need to teach and learn from each other in order to pursue the good life together. We all get the greatest benefit by opening to the experience of those who differ the most from us. We teach most effectively when we learn from those we are trying to teach, and we learn most effectively by being allowed to teach those who are trying to enlighten us. The process of face-to-face Socratic enlightenment is reciprocal and endless.
The Athenian jury gave Socrates three choices: give up the practice of philosophy, leave Athens, or die. Socrates chose death. His last act becomes his most unambiguous and eloquent teaching: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And this examination needs to take place within a community of like-minded seekers. As Aristotle famously noted, human beings are indeed “political creatures.” Once one has grasped the liberating capacity of reflection in the face-to-face situation, there is no going back. The prisoner is initiated into philosophy — the truth quest — as a minimal condition of the good life.6
Out of the Cave
At the age of twelve, a few months before my bar mitzvah, I escaped from the cave of South Africa, together with my parents and sister. We exchanged the brutalities of apartheid for the mild liberal climate of England. The small, long-established Jewish community of Plymouth welcomed us as part of the tribe and then witnessed my initiation into Jewish manhood as I sang my assigned portion of the Bible.
But coming from a South African school, I scored poorly on the standardized “thirteen plus” — a placement test taken at age thirteen — and was consigned to a nonacademic “secondary modern” school to learn a trade. After a year we moved to the small picturesque university town of Cambridge, where, thanks to private tutoring, I was accepted into the academic Cambridge Grammar School for Boys. It was an enlightened institution that had abolished corporal punishment and had been chosen to pioneer the integrative Nuffield approach to science education. My teachers were young, well qualified, some with PhDs, and fired up about the rapidly growing fields of evolutionary biology, cosmology, quantum physics, and biochemistry. They enjoyed teaching, and I started loving school.
However, I had escaped the cave of apartheid only to find myself in another — an exclusively human-shaped environment devoid of wilderness. The town had the pretty River Cam running through it, and like Port Elizabeth, it was comfortably human scale. But it was surrounded by a relentless patchwork of field, hedgerow, pasture, and village; everywhere worked by human hand. There would be no weekend escape into the miles of deserted beach and mountain, no encounters with the animals of the veldt. At times I felt as if I was suffocating, and I pitied my English school friends who had never known the ecstatic expansion of the soul when alone in truly wild places.
My efforts to assimilate put me in the position of Plato’s returning prisoner. During my infrequent visits to South Africa, it became obvious that I could no longer step into my old life. In some important ways I had seen a larger, “truer” reality, and I had a critical perspective on both England and South Africa unavailable to those who had never left either cave. Every new experience was changing me. South Africa was also changing. Like it or not, I was out of the cave and on the journey. There was no going home.
While one part of me was successfully being educated in science and becoming English, the Jewish exile in me was becoming a passionate nationalist. I helped found a Cambridge branch of Habonim, which was already well represented in the larger European cities. My life out of school was taken up by the movement’s program of self-education, seminars, campouts, and campfires. At the end of the day we would gather for hours of wild Israeli folk dancing, shouting out Hebrew songs, spinning in circles of horas. We felt part of a creative vanguard of history, drawing energy and enthusiasm from the counterculture of the sixties, but amplified and focused by a three-thousand-year-old Jewish narrative climaxing in liberation here, now. Unlike much of the youth revolt, we had a utopian model under construction — the democratic, self-organizing, idealistic kibbutz. Increasingly I identified with the new State of Israel — a place I had never actually visited.
Meanwhile, science was capturing an unrelated track of my imagination. In my senior year of high school I started realizing that the compelling perspective of quantum physics, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology were interlocking pieces telling a story of a single evolving reality. I have a glowing memory of an epiphany walking home from school on one of those rare sunny English afternoons thinking about what we were learning and, in a flash, realizing that the wilderness I thought I had left behind in Africa was present right there, in every glistening rain-washed piece of vegetation. Inside every green cell were the same chlorophyll-containing chloroplasts — invented by evolution two billion years ago. They were still silently at work, absorbing photons of light traveling from the nuclear furnace of the sun, ninety-three million miles away, energizing the conversion of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. I could visualize the molecular structure of the simple sugars being joined together into the more complex starches and celluloses that make up the green living matter of all the plants on which the rest of life feasts. All of it, every sunlit, fluttering leaf on the poplar trees in the backyard, every green blade of grass on the lawn, every clod of earth, indeed every animal and every human being that had ever lived — including my own idiosyncratic self — was part of our one and only, still-evolving biosphere. This single reality had been steadily growing and unfolding for millions, indeed billions, of years before there were human eyes to gaze at it, human hands to work it, and human consciousness to be amazed at it all.
It was a vision beyond words — utterly astounding — a true revelation. It was made all the more astonishing by the fact that no one, Christian, atheist, or Jew, seemed to notice. Even the teachers who had convinced me of its scientific truth were primarily concerned about the usefulness of the information. No one cared about the big picture. I vaguely sensed that if people really took the time to see and feel this larger reality, everything would have to suddenly stop and change. Business as usual depended on keeping our eyes averted and our thoughts to ourselves. How and why this should be was beyond me. But more importantly, the vision seemed to have nothing to do with the other track of my imagination — the Zionist narrative that was giving my life meaning. The evolutionary revelation was left hanging.
By the time I graduated, the carpet had been rolled out, my choices made by my success in the sciences. I followed the urging of parents and teachers and accepted a scholarship to study medicine at Cambridge University. Barely three weeks into the term, it hit me that I had made a terrible mistake. After my recent initiation into the beauties of cosmology, medicine seemed mundane, like a kind of biological mechanics. I came from a family of doctors — including almost all my uncles and one of my aunts — in a world that seemed to have no shortage of doctors. I felt no passion to heal sick bodies. I did, however, feel a compulsion to understand and respond to human-inflicted misery, particularly that playing out in the drama of Jewish persecution and its recent heroic redemption in the creation of the State of Israel.
The packed medical curriculum with its labs, lectures, and tutorials left me little time to think. I went into depression and then panic. Finally I rebelled. I considered a variety of options, from philosophy to archaeology and even Arabic (which seemed an obvious choice, since I planned to live in the Middle East), but I realized I had no gift for languages, and finally I shocked family and friends by getting accepted into the history department. At that point, my anatomy professor and director of studies, Bernard Towers, intervened. He had been educated in the best tradition of the public school “good-all-rounder” and had come to medicine after a degree in the classics — Greek, Latin, and philosophy. He offered a compromise. Instead of burning my bridges with medicine, and risking my relationship with both my parents and common sense, he reminded me I could gain a respectable, practical medical degree after two years. I could then use my third year of the Cambridge Tripos system to specialize in the history and philosophy of science, deal with some big questions, and still graduate with honors.
In one of those coincidences whose meaning would only become clear many years later, Towers also happened to be president of the British Teilhard Association. He encouraged my compromise with medicine by giving me a copy of a slim biography of Teilhard de Chardin he had recently authored. Teilhard had the distinction of being both a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist. He was also one of the most original theologians of the past century and one of the first thinkers to recognize that the scientific discovery of the evolutionary narrative could itself constitute an evolutionary leap in self-reflective consciousness, with enormous implications for human affairs. Here at last was a Cambridge-sanctioned intellect who could put words to my wordless high school revelation.
Teilhard’s genius was to be able to take in the detailed big picture as a whole and recognize in the entirety of the evolution of the universe a single direction. That is, over time there is a gradual unfolding from simplicity to complexity, and with complexity of structure there is an increase in that mysterious interior aspect of reality we recognize in ourselves as consciousness. For example, we can understand the evolution of life on earth as the successive appearance of concentric spheres, each compounding the complexity of what previously existed. Four and a half billion years ago the earth started as a molten ball, of which the core — the barysphere — still persists today at the center of the planet, periodically erupting as volcanic lava. Over the eons the planet cooled and crusted over, creating the lithosphere. As the cooling continued, millions of years of rain created the layer of oceans covering the earth — the hydrosphere. Within the water layers, molecules aggregated into more complex megamolecules, which in turn self-organized in the primeval soup into the first simple cells and then organisms, all of which constituted another layer of complexity — the biosphere. Each new layer was an emergent property of the preceding layers that compounded the number of possible relationships with those preceding layers, stimulating further emergence of novelty and complexity. Finally, organisms developed a central nervous system and self-reflective consciousness, creating the most complex layer interacting with all the others — the noosphere — the layer of creative, culture-producing, freely choosing humanity.
Teilhard recognized this tendency to grow in complexity and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the evolving universe, which he stated as the law of complexity-consciousness. This meant simply that over time increasing complexity of structure was associated with increasing consciousness. Consciousness was not a foreign implant, seeded on our planet by some extragalactic alien, but a fundamental, emergent property of matter. Consciousness could be simply regarded as the interior aspect of matter gradually manifesting through the eons of the evolutionary drama, expanding its interiority, as material complexity increases over time. This continued until it reached its most self-conscious form to date — the knowledge-seeking, ethically awake human being. Teilhard summed up his revelation with the statement that the “atomic physicist is the atom’s way of looking at itself.” We could rephrase that as “the philosopher is the planet’s way of knowing itself,” and then choosing its future. Descartes was wrong. Inner and outer are not absolutely separated; they are two faces of a single reality. Consciousness is a facet of matter.
The Teilhardian vision didn’t end there. The superclusters of galaxies are still racing apart with the energy from the initial Big Bang; the universe is still cooling and complexifying. There is no reason why this trajectory, which has been unfolding for billions of years, should suddenly stop dead once the noosphere has produced a civilization that has discovered consumerism. As humanity stumbles to grasp itself through the symbolic narrative of science, history, and philosophy, the cosmic process seems to be reaching some sort of threshold. The obvious question is: What is impending? What would a further leap in complexity-consciousness look like? Given our current reality, what would a more fully self-conscious realization of human agency and creativity look like?
Teilhard made the crucial connection between the evolutionary vision and the political project of seeking the best way to live. But he expressed his anticipated leap in the language of Christianity — as the emergence of a Christ consciousness — the “Christosphere.” This left me cold. Christianity was still, for me, contaminated by centuries of anti-Semitism. Nothing in the Christosphere resonated with the Zionism that by now had become the guiding passion in my life. What sort of personal and collective politics could the Teihardian vision support? At some level I must have known I would eventually have to reconcile my politics with scientific cosmology. But more urgent existential issues intervened. I would have to commit fully to the Israeli drama before I returned to philosophy years later, when I could think more freely in the peace and beauty of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Redemption Land
By the time I graduated, I had a degree in medical science and the history and philosophy of science, but intellectual life had lost its enchantment. Graduate work seemed like another layer of verbiage added to an infinite regress of words and reflections on other people’s experiences of life. I felt unbalanced, unsure of my grounding in the world. My indoor bookish life seemed a continuation of two thousand years of alienated Jewish existence in exile — escapist intellectualism, study, prayer. The overheated brilliance of Cambridge accentuated what was missing: the world of nature and the body, and direct experiences of the primary realities of existence.
I started reading Micah Berdichevsky, the Nietzschean Zionist writing at the turn of the twentieth century, and all my doubts disappeared. I suddenly saw my path clearly. Berdichevsky was born in the Russian Pale, the son of a long line of rabbis and scholars, and was himself a brilliant scholar of the Talmud and Kabbalah. His father disowned him when he discovered him reading forbidden enlightenment literature. Berdichevsky responded:
I recall from the teaching of the sages: Whoever walks by the way and interrupts his study to remark, How fine is that tree, how fine is that field, forfeits his life!
Is it any wonder there arose among us generation after generation despising nature, who thought of all God’s marvels as superfluous trivialities?
Is it surprising that we became a non-people, a non-nation — non-[human], indeed?
But I assert that then alone will Judah and Israel be saved, when another teaching is given unto us, namely: Whoever walks by the way and sees a fine tree and fine field and fine sky and leaves them to think on other thoughts — that man is like one who forfeits his life!
Give us back our fine trees and fine fields! Give us back the Universe!7
I wanted to experience trees and fields — the natural universe that I felt I had shut out for years. I needed to get out. I needed action.
In three more years I could have been a fully qualified doctor. Instead, as soon as I graduated, I turned down my place at a teaching hospital, left the golah, the Jewish exile, and made aliyah — the ascent to Israel. I moved to a kibbutz, where I worked as a laborer in the banana plantations while improving my Hebrew.
Kibbutz Zionism seemed to offer a respectable, even noble, respite from academia. While at Cambridge I had considered some of the other radical political philosophies of the sixties. But none of the visions to emerge from the amorphous counterculture came close to the richly realized utopia of the modern Israeli kibbutz.8 Kibbutz Zionism in its most complete form offered more than agrarian communal living. It included a passionate narrative of meaning in which the Jewish return to the land was offered as a kind of psycho-spiritual healing. Scholar and mystic Aaron David Gordon preached a “religion of labor” in which physical work on the biblical homeland would unite body and soul in a liberated life. Without access to a life on the land, Jews would always be at the mercy of others, lacking the basis for true self-sufficiency. This was a matter not simply of economics and politics but of a psycho-spiritual disease that could only be healed by contact with the living earth. As Gordon put it:
The Jewish people have been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand years. We have become accustomed to every form of life, except to a life of labor — of labor done at our behest and for its own sake.9
Gordon was, like many of the other chalutzim — the early pioneers — the son of a family of scholars. He came to Israel at the age of forty-seven, a frail, slight, white-bearded figure, revered as Hazken — “the Old Man.” He spent the rest of his life working the land, living an ascetic existence, and preaching his philosophy based as much on Kabbalist mysticism as Zionist agrarianism. During the day he sweated in the fields extolling “labor not to make a living, not work as a deed of charity, but for life itself …one of the limbs of life, one of its deepest roots.”10 At night after an exhausting day of work, he would join the spinning circles of hora dancers, caught up in the joy of bonding with his beloved community of farmers.
For Gordon this reconnection with the primal realities of human existence was the movement’s moral and spiritual center, the source of its vitality and creativity. Another thinker, Ber Borochov, used a graphic image to support this insight: for centuries in exile the Jewish pyramid of labor had been upside down, balancing on its point with the base up in the air. The majority of Jews, the base, were intellectuals, scholars, rabbis, and professionals — luftmenschen — literally “air people.” Only a tiny minority, the point of the pyramid, worked on the land in the primary productive process without which no society can survive. The labor Zionist vision in its essence was simple: set the pyramid back on its base; replace the vulnerable, neurotic intellectual with muscular, earthy farmers and soldiers. Or as fellow Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg summed it up sharply: “Only donkey work could straighten the crooked back of Jews in exile.”11
But the kibbutz was meant to be more than tribal therapy. It saw itself as a specifically Jewish contribution to the utopian vision of creating a democratic egalitarian community. The average kibbutz had a few hundred members and functioned, like the Athenian polis, as a self-governing direct democracy. Unlike Athens, the kibbutz insisted on complete gender equality, with all adult members, men and women, involved directly in government, gathering face-to-face in the general assembly (assifah klali) to discuss and decide issues of collective concern. The economy was based on the noble principle of caring and sharing similar to that of hunter-gatherers: from each according to his or her ability; to each according to his or her need. All four polarities of the primal politics of simple hunting-gathering bands were present, at least in principle, if not always in practice: the small-scale, egalitarian, democratic community; the self-actualized whole person in the image of the farmer-soldier-philosopher; a way of life guided by a vision, a big picture, a shared narrative of meaning; and finally a creative and spiritualized relationship to the living earth.
It was as if under the extreme pressures of persecution and revolution in Europe at the turn of the century, Ashkenazi Jews had reached back through the depths of their own history and psychology to retrieve the archetypal practices and norms of primal politics. But the vision of Kibbutz Zionism was incompletely developed in theory, and it was ultimately overwhelmed in practice by a strange mix of warfare and consumerism. Like almost all political movements of the twentieth century, the four elements were never fully grasped as converging in the value of all values — the creative and spiritual life of the primal truth quest.
Without a clear vision of the quest at its center, the kibbutz remained vulnerable to corruption by the universal temptations of wealth and power — ego battles, selfishness, parochialism. The vision of political community had no meaningful place for Palestinian Arabs, nor was there place for the larger community of beings, our animal relatives from our wilderness birth. The kibbutz emerged out of a universal commitment to liberation, but its ideals never extended to our shared planetary predicament. There was little to inspire the community to think beyond tribe, nation, and civilization.
However, in its early days, the kibbutz was still infused with the charisma of its creative founders and had an enormous influence in building up the country. Kibbutzim were responsible for producing the food and growing the export crops. They shaped the new institutions, provided the political leadership, and generated an Israeli national culture of chalutziut. This is most often translated as “pioneering,” but as Amos Elon points out in The Israelis, the English fails to capture the sense of selfless service to an ideal of the Hebrew with all its biblical resonance, ranging from “liberation” and “exaltation” to “expedition” and “rescue.” Each kibbutz, depending on its ideological taste, was affiliated with one of the three main national kibbutz movements, which in turn were affiliated with one of the major political parties.12 A coalition of kibbutz- and labor-based political parties ran the country until 1977, when religious and political conservatives came to power, initiating deep changes in Israeli society. Within a few years the army’s response to the Palestinian intifada had shifted the global image of Israel from noble David to Goliath. Until that time few nations had been shaped for so long by such an ethos of utopian idealism. Nevertheless, it was an idealism that tragically neglected the “other.” Both Jews and Palestinians remained prisoners in their caves, largely ignorant of, and unconcerned with, the aspirations and the suffering of each other.
In the summer of 1970 I enrolled for an ulpan — a kibbutz-based Hebrew language study-work program — and I was assigned to Kibbutz Hanita on the northern Lebanese border. My sense of heroic mission was deflated when I found the ulpan full of American Jewish volunteers. They were mostly refugees from the burnout of the counterculture who knew little about Zionism and Israel and seemed to care even less. Many were attracted by stories of the kibbutz as a utopia realized; some came for the free board and lodging in return for work in the fields. They were playful and irreverent, pacifists and spiritual seekers. Despite my initial disdain, they intrigued me and planted the seed of a vision of America as “the land of the free.” Years later this helped me make a move to another new world.
The Jewish Primal
After five months I was sick of peace-loving hippies and impatient for something more intense. I followed the example of my cousins and volunteered for an Israeli army combat unit. I knew robust army service was the quickest, most effective initiation into Israeli society. But I was also hungry for what seemed then to be that quintessentially masculine initiation in a world of wars fought by men. I felt compelled to test my courage, to face death and even, if necessary, kill in defense of myself and my community.
I volunteered through the framework of Nachal — the acronym for Noar Chalutzi Lochem, or “fighting pioneering youth” — which was organized to integrate military service with establishing new kibbutzim on the borders. After basic training I volunteered for Sayeret Habika, a ranger unit based outside Jericho near the Dead Sea. We spent a summer completing advanced training, running and shooting in one of the hottest places on earth. During the day, gunmetal would be too hot to touch, and at nights our shirts would dry white and stiff with sweated salt. Training was followed by four months of active duty. We spent alternate weeks sitting night ambushes on the banks of the Jordan River and doing dawn patrols in the mountains above the Dead Sea during the most peaceful time in the country’s history. Our patrols were like picnics, bouncing in command cars along mountainous dirt roads, scaring off ibex, below us the “Sea of Salt,” the lowest point on the surface of the earth. At the end of the patrol we would stop to brew coffee with our Bedouin tracker while watching the sun appear above the hills of Jordan.
Wanting to test myself more strenuously I requested transfer to the paratrooper battalion of Nachal. Unlike the armed forces of the United States, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF, or TZAHAL in Hebrew, for Tzva Haganah Le Yisra’el) is very much a people’s army. Israel is one of the few modern countries to conscript all men and all women at age eighteen, with men serving for three years and women for two. Men are then obliged to do a month’s reserve duty every year until age forty-five. The IDF is also exceptional in having the flattest hierarchy of any modern military, being intentionally understaffed at the highest levels in order to drill responsibility, improvisation, and flexibility at lower levels. This makes the fierce Israeli martial spirit quite unique in being connected to an assertive individualism. One of the most common army terms of abuse for a soldier who is too ready to obey orders is sabon, or “soap,” a brutal reference to the Jews of Europe who were seen as obediently marching into the Nazi gas chambers and letting their bodies to be boiled into soap.*
During reserve duty a university professor can find himself under the command of a kibbutznik or a bus driver, and a twenty-five-year-old can be training his uncle. The closeness of combat means there is little attention given to parade-ground drills, saluting, or any of the other rituals of military discipline, and a private has been known to tell a general if he thinks he is doing something wrong. Such informality reinforces a sense of shared purpose and responsibility. Since units tend to be kept together through training and subsequent active service, lifelong friendships are made and then sustained during annual reserve duty. An infantry soldier will travel all over the country, much of the time on foot, and mix with people from all walks of life. The “nation” is not an idealistic abstraction but a matter of direct experience. This makes the army crucial in creating a sense of national solidarity and the single most powerful and respected institution in the country.13
In 1971 Israel was a very different country compared to the Israel of world news today. It was still something of a second-world democracy — poor, egalitarian, well educated, doing noble development work in Africa, and even admired in the West for its moral example. There were no beggars, no homeless, and no hungry. America had only recently started supplying the air force with fighter planes; all our infantry equipment came from France and Europe and was generally inferior to that of the surrounding Arab armies. Our assault rifles were the long, ungainly Belgian FNs, which jammed easily in the desert sand and weighed twice the compact, more reliable AK-47s supplied to the Arabs by the Russians.14 Our combat webbing was World War II vintage, canvas and brass, which rubbed the skin off our hips and was impossible to run with until home customized with strips of foam padding. In the field we slept in two-man tents made by pairing up and buttoning together two rain ponchos, which were only waterproof when covered with plastic sheeting (which we had to buy ourselves). We slept on an army blanket spread on the ground, and the food was simple but healthy: plenty of raw vegetables to make our own salads — Israel is the only country where it is not unusual to eat salad with all three meals — supplemented with eggs, cheese, yogurt, hummus, black bread, and tea.* We ate chicken and turkey, but red meat was a rarity and coffee a treat for special occasions. It all seemed frugal and improvised. High morale was our secret weapon.
At the time, the IDF defended borders and fought wars. There was no intifada and no policing of civilian populations. We naively thought of our occupation of the West Bank, barely four years old, as enlightened compared with the surrounding Arab police states. There was still talk of tohar haneshek — “purity of arms,” or minimal violence in the defense of the community. We gave no thought to the fact that when the British handed their Palestine Mandate to the United Nations in 1948, and the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Palestinian-and-Israeli state, Palestinian Arabs still constituted the majority of the population.15 We saw the situation in simple ethnocentric terms: This was the ancient homeland of the Jews heroically resurrected as a modern state. Its existence was a condition for Jewish survival. If Israel lost one war, it would cease to exist. The country at its narrowest is twenty kilometers wide; the largest airport, Ben Gurion International, is within easy rocket range of the Palestinian West Bank. Our job was to defend the borders. The enemy was within view and furiously dedicated to “driving the Jews into the sea.” Knowing this, we competed strenuously to be chosen for the most difficult and dangerous work. But for all its nobility of purpose, the IDF remained an army, grimly committed to the business of killing, and necessarily brutalizing.
I welcomed the brutality as an inversion of my Cambridge existence and a way of bringing me back to my body and my senses. I went from a world of words, books, and ideas to a world of action and feeling. Most of the training involved running and shooting. We ran everywhere, all the time. We ran to our meals, to the training ground, during training, and then back to camp. Since the IDF specializes in night fighting, after dark we would repeat, at a run, everything we had learning during the day. We were punished with running, called kader, the acronym for kidum derech raglayim — “progress through the legs.” If you survived the training, you got to love running. We ran carrying our battle packs and our kitbags. We ran carrying one another on our backs and in stretchers, and always carrying our guns. From the day I enlisted until the day I was released, I had a weapon next to me. On our rare weekends off, we would take our rifles home and sleep with them under the mattress.
The Israeli army was one of the first modern armies to abandon water discipline,* after some terrible deaths through dehydration, but it still practiced sleep deprivation. During one particularly excruciating month in the field, we slept an average of three and a half hours a night for a week at a time. Thursday night, the night before the Sabbath, was sleepless, spent on a forced march, jogging most of the night with full battle gear, which if you carried the platoon machine gun, as I did, meant a backbreaking forty pounds of equipment. We called it kniat Shabbat, “buying the Sabbath.” Our officers pushed us till we dropped and then made those still upright carry the fallen. If we complained, officers would curtly inform us, “There is no such thing as ‘I cannot’; there is only ‘I don’t want to,’ ” and that meant the ultimate humiliation of being kicked out of the unit. Our one day of rest would be spent sleeping off muscle fever. After one such week I was traveling on a full bus back to the kibbutz, standing up, one hand holding the handrail, the other my rifle, and fast asleep. A middle-aged woman woke me up and offered her seat. I sat down gratefully and fell asleep. The very extremity of my experiences fascinated me and took the sting out of the pain. I was pushing my limits and getting to know myself in a hard, sure way. At the same time I was being welcomed into the country and treated as a hero.
As our experiences overwhelmed language, conversations contracted. I stopped reading. Like soldiers in all armies, we resorted to obscenities to express the inexpressible, so we swore constantly, but we had to use Arabic, since spoken Hebrew had only recently been revived from the Bible. One day I suddenly realized with startling clarity the philosophical gulf between concept and experience. I also saw its visceral connection. The cultural currency at Cambridge was eloquence, wit, and literacy. Now we prized the simple virtues of friendship and loyalty, courage and generosity. We defined these concepts not by words but by actions: by how many kilometers you would carry your friend; how much of a food parcel from home someone would share; how much danger another would risk for you. It was an elemental tribal existence — intensely physical, outdoors, exposed to the elements, and exposed to one another. Language lost its omnipotence.
At first I found my fellow soldiers rude and crude and the lack of privacy claustrophobic. But we were trained to recognize that survival depended on helping one another, and I quickly got over myself. One day I woke up to the fact that I was enjoying the simple bluntness that comes with close living under harsh conditions. The rough life cut through persona and culture and exposed the best and worst in us. At one time or another we all looked ridiculous and learned to laugh at ourselves. We made brutal jokes about what scared us most — killing and being killed. Since our relationships were face-to-face, and everything was on public display, we lived with a high degree of honesty, in the truth of direct experience. Trust and understanding that might have taken years in civilian life could be made and broken in seconds. At the same time, witnessing someone else’s shadow helped each of us become a little more conscious of our own. No situation could have been better constructed to turn a group of strangers into a tightly bonded band of brothers. We started growing up quickly.
One of the glories of Israeli infantry life is that one is constantly outdoors in some of the wildest, most beautiful parts of that ancient, eroded landscape. I rediscovered the power of wilderness healing. We moved through great untouched areas of sun-blasted, stony desert and mountain, some of it covered with burnt thorny vegetation, now without the desert lions of the Bible, but still roamed by jackals, ibex, and the occasional hyena. Native forests of stunted oak survive in the Galilee, where vineyards cover stony terraced hillsides; groves of olive and almond, fig and pomegranate dot the valleys. Scattered throughout the country are ruins and relics from the Israelite kingdoms of David and Solomon and the civilizations that followed — Roman, Muslim, Crusader, Turk, and British. Israeli army initiation rites are pilgrimages to two-thousand-year-old ruins — the last standing wall of the Second Temple and the desert fortress of Masada, where, as the story goes, the Jewish garrison committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Our dawn patrols passed the Qumran Caves on the barren cliffs above the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, written in the same language we took our orders in. We assumed an astounding continuity: that we were living in the crucible of the primary revelation that helped shape Jewish identity, an identity preserved through those ancient Hebrew texts, which after centuries of persecution in exile helped inspire a return to this battered, violently contested homeland. I saw firsthand how ideas and stories could be immense political forces shaping reality.
Months passed running, falling, and crawling over the stones and thorns, with dust and sand in nose and mouth, salty with sweat, soaked with the icy winter rain of the Judean hills, at times feverishly tired, and at others wildly exuberant. I started to understand what it meant to “live in one’s body.” I became more continually aware of sensations on my skin and in my muscles, bones, breath, and beating heart. Our animal nature represents one pole of our in-between situation; ego consciousness is the other pole. The animal is the source of the passions, instincts, and impulses — related to what Freud called Eros — the life force that ego consciousness channels, sublimates, and represses according to the norms of our culture and our quest. This is the biological and emotional foundation of our existence. For this reason the animal is also at the core of the shadow, what we have to repress and forget in order to be acceptable to ourselves and civilized society. As the animal came alive, I lost my neuroses. I was at home in my body, here, now, with my people — welcomed, accepted, connected — whole and happy.
Sometimes on our all-night “fast marches,” we were allowed to sing as we ran. We would chant as we jogged, stamping the rhythm of songs of defiance and survival in a kind of ecstasy:
Am Yisrael, Am Yisreal,
Am Yisrael, CHAI!
(The people of Israel LIVE!)
Od Avinu, Od Avinu,
Od Avinu CHAI!
(Our father still LIVES!)
Singing the old songs on that ancient landscape, under the stars of the desert night, in the charged atmosphere of warfare, became a kind of shamanic channeling. As we sang about the spirit of Kind David still walking the land, we felt it coming alive in us. But more than alive and connected, we felt powerful and dangerous.
Such emotions frighten secular liberal intellectuals, and with good reason. When they are mobilized by simple stories of absolute right and wrong, they can generate seismic social forces that drive bold actions with heroic and horrendous consequences. The Nazis mobilized exactly such experience through narratives of blood and soil, oppression and liberation. But it is equally true that such passion is an expression of life energy — Eros — lust for life. Simply squelching such emotional resonance with the past is ultimately deadly. But as the Nazis showed us, Eros can also be deformed and harnessed for destruction — Thanatos — the death impulse.
We all need big-picture narratives to inspire and guide our actions, to take us beyond short-term self-interest and help us find meaning, to help us be of service to our immediate and expanded community of life. The big picture, a worldview, is an essential component of knowledge of the Good. But the great danger of visionary narratives is that they become disconnected from the truth quest. When this happens, they easily get hijacked by libido dominandi — the lust for power.
Clearly, most narratives of tribal and national identity are truncated, without an authentic species dimension and thus lacking a grounding in the truth quest. The possibility of our present moment is to go beyond such limitations. A science-guided, truth-loving narrative can now, perhaps for the first time, take us back before the origin of all tribes and all civilizations to the roots of a shared humanity born in an African wilderness. In doing so it can give us a passionate basis for taking all nations and all tribes forward into a truly global humanity.
None of this was clear to me then. I was too caught up in the imminence of war and in the exhilaration of my own healing to pay attention to what should have been obvious: the parallel narrative of meaning connecting Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims to that same ancient landscape. I was integrating some opposites at the expense of neglecting others.
Standing guard alone one night, under the glittering winter stars, breaking discipline by smoking one of the cheap Nadiv cigarettes the kibbutz sent us, I thought back on my life in South Africa and England. I realized at that moment that I was better at soldiering than anything else I had ever done, except perhaps passing exams. I had moved around the medicine wheel 180 degrees from my starting point. Whether my service was ultimately compromised or noble, I knew I was growing and becoming more of a whole human being, and that seemed enough to justify the hardship and the danger.
Much later in Hawai‘i, when reading Native American literature, I immediately appreciated the esprit of the Dog Soldier Society of the Cheyenne as that of a closely bonded brotherhood of young men, living a life of the body, outdoors, defending tribal boundaries. Kibbutz and the army had given me a taste of a more indigenous, primal way of being Jewish. I felt wide awake as if for the first time in my life.
Philosophy in a War Zone
In October 1973, the Yom Kippur War blasted apart my healing revelations. On the holiest day of the Jewish year, Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked simultaneously and overran Israeli defenses. I had been discharged before the war started and was in South Africa visiting my parents. Since I was not an Israeli citizen — having volunteered as a Jew of the Diaspora — I had not been assigned a reserve unit and was not called up for one of the emergency flights to Israel. By the time I found my way back, the war was half over, and it was clear Israel would prevail. I returned not so much to help save the country as to be with my closest friends, who were going through that ultimate test — what we had spent those hard months preparing for. Most of them were serving as corporals dispersed among new platoons. Some had been guarding the frontline positions overrun on the Syrian border on the first day of the war. I went to my old base, which was empty except for a skeleton staff who told me the brigade had regrouped. It had joined the paratrooper counteroffensive across the Suez Canal and was now fighting “somewhere in Egypt.” No one knew exactly where. Had I checked in with central command, I knew, in the confusion of war I would have been ordered to some menial job away from the fighting, away from my friends. I decided to go and find them on my own.
I had no rifle or helmet, but I still had my olive fatigues, boots, and the dog tags, prisoner-of-war card, and plastic-wrapped field dressing soldiers carry with them at all times. I put on my uniform, stood at the roadside, and in minutes had caught a ride south to the fighting in Egypt. I got out of my first ride near the edge of the Sinai desert and an empty truck immediately stopped. It was driven by a jittery young infantry lieutenant who had lost his platoon on the Golan Heights on the Syrian border. He had made his way to the fighting in Egypt, where he was given the job of driving out of the battle zone every other day, carrying the bodies of dead Israelis home.
By late afternoon we could see the pontoon bridge across the Suez Canal a few kilometers ahead. We stopped behind an enormous traffic jam of military vehicles snaking across the single-lane bridge, trying to get back into Egypt before dark. My driver warned me that, at dusk every day for the past week, several Egyptian Katyusha missile trucks would race up close to Israeli lines and fire dozens of rockets zeroed in on the traffic jam at the bridge, and then escape under cover of dark. He indicated the fresh bandage on his hand from a shrapnel wound the night before. He warned me we would have maybe a second or two to take cover once we saw the rockets streaking toward us, like “little red birds.” We sat and waited and watched the view ahead. It is hard to overstate how utterly gripping the spectacle of war can be. Israeli jets were swooping low over the canal triggering Egyptian missiles and then climbing rapidly, blowing up the missiles behind them. By the time we crossed the canal, the sun had set and I was feverish with excitement.
As soon as we drove off the pontoon bridge onto Egyptian soil, I saw the “little red birds” flaming toward us. Then in one long second, with panicked screaming around me, I found myself somehow out of the truck, my face buried in the sand in the middle of a firestorm of rockets, ground-shaking explosions blasting shrapnel over me from all sides. I felt a sharp impact on my back. I thought, “You fool — now your adventure is over.” I felt behind to check the damage, but it was only a piece of packing crate sent flying by the blasts. Then for the strangest second, I saw in my mind’s eye the Egyptian soldier firing the battery — a full-grown man, scared, sweating, heroically trying to kill me. The vision couldn’t have been more unexpected or less welcome. I felt for the first time with crushing force that I was on someone else’s land, and he wanted me dead. At that moment I started to feel a personal responsibility for the whole murderous entanglement. I had chosen to be there.
For two days I hitched rides trying to find my battalion while watching a war going on around me in a fog of horror. A passing officer gave me an Egyptian helmet and a captured Russian Kalashnikov AK-47, which I cleaned, oiled, and loaded. I found a resupply unit preparing a truck of ammunition for my battalion and rode with them. Scorched, bloated bodies and burnt jeeps and trucks casually littered the roadside. Israeli tanks inexplicably charged across our path, chasing something through the sand dunes and firing just out of sight. Occasionally fighter jets screamed low overhead, making us leap out of the truck into the sand with rifles cocked. But by then the jets were all Israeli. I had grown up on my share of war comics, action movies, and stories of heroic combat. But this had no connection to any of my fantasies about war. I couldn’t get past the obscenity of the butchery — the simple fact that humans were blasting one another into pieces of burnt, bloody meat and splintered bone, left to lie and rot in the sun. Where was the glory?
The next morning my unit found us, and my friends gave me a warm welcome. That night they had charged an Egyptian position overlooking the canal and killed the garrison. Some were in shock, most simply thrilled to be alive. None of our boys had even been seriously injured. I sat with them in the newly occupied trenches listening to the crazed stories of those fresh from killing. Below us were bunkers and bodies; the air was still thick with that strange sweetish, sickening smell of fresh blood drying on the warming sand. We looked over the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula where the Egyptian Third Army was now trapped, surrounded by Israelis on all sides. We could see the streams of tracer rounds from small arms as they fired in fear.
As I sat in the trench looking over the bunkers, without warning, an Egyptian soldier jumped up perhaps twenty yards below me. I saw him clearly, middle-aged, heavyset, unarmed, with sweat stains under his arms, sprinting across the sand. Someone yelled, “Egyptian! Shoot!” Before anyone else reacted, in a single automatic movement, I had my rifle to my shoulder, dropped the safety catch, pulled the bolt back, and fired a single shot. But I deliberately aimed a meter behind his running heels as he dove into another bunker. At that range, had I wished to, I could have shot hit him square in the chest. But suddenly it seemed pointless. Strangely, there was no follow-up, and we let a potentially dangerous combatant escape. Everyone was sick of killing. But the moment I pulled the trigger, I knew I had crossed a line. There was no doubt, had I felt even slightly threatened, I would have shot to kill. I realized with grim satisfaction that I had transformed myself from a sensitive scholar into a soldier who would do his murderous duty mechanically, without feeling very much at all. It was an encounter with some dark part of myself I had previously doubted existed. It was a bottoming out, both sobering and empowering. I started to realize all possibilities are within us. Saint or sinner, killer or hero, it all depends on circumstance and choice. And choice depends on awareness.
When I met up with my company, they had been moving south toward the city of Suez, fighting down the Egyptian side of the canal. As they advanced, their commander, my old lieutenant, ordered that all wounded Egyptians were to be taken along and cared for. A close friend told me how he had watched an Egyptian soldier die slowly of terrible wounds we had inflicted, dying with a bloodstained photograph of loved ones in his hand. We were sharing intimacies with strangers we were trying to kill. It was a sad and wretched business. At one time I had imagined signing on for officers’ school. Now the adventure of a lifetime had dead-ended in another cave — a mausoleum.
Two months later, the peace accord with Egypt was under way, and we hitched home. For days and weeks afterward, when I would see a bundle by the roadside as I drove along, I would think I was looking at a corpse. Yet I was very fortunate. The war was a glancing blow, not enough to damage or disable me, but enough to get my full attention. I returned to civilian life with no interest in pursuing family and professional life. Instead of leaving me cynical, the war reinforced my conviction that the quest was critical. The question “What’s it all about?” took on a life-and-death urgency. A life of action pushed me back into the university and back into philosophy.
A Path with a Heart
