The Jerusalem Inception

Chapter 10





The following Sabbath, Lemmy found a week’s worth of newspapers on Tanya’s coffee table. A headline read: General Bull’s Demand for Reinforcements Rejected by UN Secretary General U-Thant. Another headline: Eshkol Blames Egypt and Syria for the Growing Tension at the Borders. The paper quoted opposition Knesset member Shimon Peres: Levi Eshkol and Abba Eban Sacrifice Israel’s Security for the Interests of America and the Soviet Union!

Reading through the headlines, Lemmy realized how distorted his perception of Israeli society had been. Within the insular Neturay Karta, everyone believed the godless Israelis to be uniformly immoral, rejoicing in promiscuity and porcine gluttony. But Tanya’s newspapers reflected the dedication of the Zionist leaders to the survival of the young state. Their ideological bickering appeared sincere and passionate, not the cynical materialism that he had expected.

Before he left, Tanya gave him a thin book by Emile Zola: I Accuse.

Back home, his parents were taking a Sabbath-afternoon nap. He shut himself up in his room and began reading. Written in 1898, it was the story of a Jew named Dreyfus, whose career as a French army officer had ended in a disgraceful conviction for treason. The book argued that Dreyfus had in fact been framed as a scapegoat by the French establishment to cover for one of their own.

I Accuse enraged Lemmy. Here was a Jew who lived with the Goyim, attended their schools, served in their army, and risked his life in their wars, expecting in return only the honor of equality and fraternity, as promised by the new French Republic. But his reward was injustice, humiliation, and suffering. Wasn’t Dreyfus a perfect example of the Gentiles’ pathological hatred of Jews?

A week later, on Sabbath afternoon, Lemmy entered Tanya’s house and declared, “This book is the ultimate proof that Neturay Karta is correct, that a Jew can only live safely among other Jews who observe the strict teachings of Talmud!”

“Only Neturay Karta?” Wearing shorts and a tank top, Tanya sat cross-legged on the floor. “This whole country is Jewish. Israel offers true equality for the Jewish people as a nation, not as a religion.”

“Zionism is a rebellion against God, who told us to wait for His Messiah to bring us back and restore our independence.”

“But didn’t God give us the Promised Land and told us to go there? The Zionist pioneers have fulfilled that promise, didn’t they?”

“The Zionists violate the Sabbath, shave off their payos and beards, and don’t pray. Instead of studying Talmud, they study fragments of clay they dig up from the ground, as if those remnants of ancient dwellings could give them heritage and identity. They don’t care about God!”

“Have you ever met a Zionist?”

“Aren’t you a Zionist?”

She laughed and gave him another book. “It’s the story of the first Zionist. Let’s see what you think after reading it.”

Lemmy looked at the cover. Theodor Herzl, a Biography.

His face burned as he entered the apartment with the book under his coat. This was not a novel that could be excused as youthful indiscretion. This volume carried on its cover the face of Theodor Herzl—the visionary of modern Zionism. It was worse than hiding a pig under his coat.

That night, Lemmy tiptoed through the apartment to make sure the lights were off in his father’s study and his mother’s bedroom. Back in his room, he pulled the book from behind the shelved Talmud volumes and lay in bed to read Herzl’s life story.

An assimilated Austrian Jew, Herzl was a reporter for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse who believed in modernity and freedom as a basis for a peaceful humanity. He did not observe Jewish laws and saw himself as a free citizen of Europe. But while covering the 1894 trial of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, Herzl had witnessed fervent anti-Semitism, both within the quiet halls of justice and on the streets, where the mob chanted, “Kill all the Jews!” He became convinced that the Jews in Europe faced a grave danger, and the only way to save them was the creation of a Jewish state. In a pamphlet titled, Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, he outlined a new home for the Jews in the Holy Land, based on political freedom, religious tolerance, and racial equality. Herzl called for a secular democracy that would include the indigenous Arabs and bring progress to the desolate Ottoman colony of Palestine. He summoned the first Zionist Congress in Basel and called on Jews everywhere to end their twenty centuries of exile and return to their ancestral homeland. He travelled to Palestine, met Keiser Wilhelm II, and negotiated with the Ottoman Grand Vizier, as well as Sultan Abdulhamid II himself. From Constantinople, Herzl travelled to London, obtaining tacit support from Great Britain. Meanwhile, Zionist activists took his message to countless Jewish shtetls across Russia, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Romania, where millions of religious Jews recited daily: Next year in Jerusalem. But the rabbis rejected Zionism and ordered their followers to continue the long wait for the Messiah. Herzl died eight years after publishing Der Judenstaat, lonely and disappointed, never to find out that his premonition of disaster would be validated in the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews.

Herzl had written: If you wish, this is not a fable; in fifty years, we can have a Jewish state. Lemmy calculated quickly in his head and was awed by Herzl’s prescience: The 1948 founding of Israel came fifty-two years after Herzl had made that prediction.

It was tragic, Lemmy thought, that the rabbis had rejected Herzl’s vision. Their reasoning was familiar—it was still the foundation of Neturay Karta’s anti-Zionist stand. But the irony didn’t escape him. The small minority of European Jews, who had defied their rabbis and left Europe to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine, lived to mourn their families and friends who had obeyed the rabbis, rejected Zionism, and died in Hitler’s gas chambers, crying, “Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.”