“They have everything,” he said, waving toward the stand strung with heavy net bags of overripe fruit. “Guava, mango, passion fruit. Though I recommend a combination of pineapple, melon, and mint.”
“Thank you, really, but I’m fine.”
Friedman shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He asked me whether I knew the country much, beyond Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Had I been north to the Sea of Galilee or spent time in the desert? The landscape had astounded him as a child when he’d first arrived here. Reaching into one of his pockets, he produced a potsherd and handed it to me. To walk into the setting of the Bible stories, to find what had been inscribed in his imagination corroborated by stone, olive tree, sky. The fragment of terra-cotta in my hands was three thousand years old, he said. He’d picked it up not long ago in Khirbet Qeiyafa, above the valley of Elah, where David slew Goliath; the ground there was littered with them. Some archaeologists argued that it was the biblical city of Shaaraim, that the ruins of King David’s palace might be found there. A quiet place, with wildflowers growing up through the stones and rainwater in ancient bathtubs reflecting the silent clouds passing above. About this they would go on arguing, Friedman said. But the fallen walls and the broken pots, the light and the wind in the leaves—it was enough. The rest would never be more than technical. No physical evidence of a kingdom had ever been found by archaeologists. But if David’s palace was the dream of the writer of Samuel, just as the brilliant insight into political power was his, what did it matter in the grand scheme of things? David, who might have been only the tribal leader of a hill clan, had brought his people to a high culture that has since given shape to nearly three thousand years of history. Before him, Hebrew literature didn’t exist. But because of David, two hundred years after his death, Friedman said, the writers of Genesis and Samuel established the sublime limits of literature almost at its beginning. It’s there in the story they wrote about him: a man who begins as a shepherd, becomes a warrior and a ruthless warlord, and dies a poet.
“Writers work alone,” Friedman said. “They pursue their own instincts, and one can’t interfere with that. But when they are guided naturally toward certain themes—when their instincts and our goals converge in a common interest—one can give them opportunities.”
“What goals do you mean, exactly? To cast Jewish experience in a certain light? To put a spin on it in order to influence how we’re seen? Sounds to me more like PR than literature.”
“You’re looking at it too narrowly. What we’re talking about is much larger than perception. It’s the idea of self-invention. Event, time, experience: these are the things that happen to us. One can look at the history of mankind as a progression from extreme passivity—daily life as an immediate response to drought, cold, hunger, physical urges, without a sense of past or future—to a greater and greater exercise of will and control over our lives and our destiny. In that paradigm, the development of writing represented a huge leap. When the Jews began to compose the central texts on which their identity would be founded, they were enacting that will, consciously defining themselves—inventing themselves—as no one had before.”
“Sure, put like that, it seems extremely radical. But you could also just say the earliest Jewish writers were at the frontier of that natural evolution. Humanity had begun to think and write on a more elevated plane, giving people greater sophistication and subtlety in how they defined themselves. To suggest a level of self-awareness that would allow for self-invention, as you say, is assuming a lot about the intentions of those earliest writers.”
“There’s no need to assume. The evidence is everywhere in the texts, which are not just the work of one or two individuals, but a series of composers and redactors who were supremely conscious of every choice they were making. The first two chapters of Genesis, taken together, are about exactly that—a meditation on creation as a set of choices, and a reflection on the consequences that result. The very first thing we’re given in the very first Jewish book is two contradictory accounts of God’s creation of the world. Why? Perhaps because, in echoing God’s gestures, the redactors came to understand something about the price of creation—something they wished to communicate to us that, if we were to grasp it, would verge on blasphemous, and therefore could only be hinted at obliquely: How many worlds did God consider before He chose to create this world? How many scales that contained neither light nor dark but something else entirely? When God created light, he also created the absence of light. That much is spelled out for us. But only in the uncomfortable silence between those two incompatible beginnings is it possible to grasp that at that instant He created a third thing, too. For lack of a better word, let us call it regret.”
“Or an early theory of the multiverse.”
But Friedman seemed not to hear me. We stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Overhead, the Mediterranean sky was stupendously blue, utterly cloudless. Friedman stepped out in front of an idling taxi and began to march across the street.
“Read closely enough, it’s impossible to deny that whoever composed and edited those first texts understood what was at stake,” he said. “Understood that to begin was to move from infinity to a room with walls. That to choose one Abraham, one Moses, one David, was also to reject all the others that might have been.”
We turned onto a quiet residential street, lined with the same squat concrete apartment houses that are everywhere in Tel Aviv, their ugliness softened by the lush vegetation that grows around them, and the bright purple bougainvillea that climbs up their walls. Halfway down the block Friedman stopped.
According to the sign, we were on Spinoza Street. I assumed that was the reason Friedman had brought me there, since it was the Jewish philosopher who first claimed that the Pentateuch wasn’t given by God and scribed by Moses but was rather the product of human authorship. But what would Friedman’s point be? At the heart of the Dutch lens-grinder’s assertions, at least where Judaism was concerned, was the idea that the God of Israel was Himself a human invention, and as such Jews should no longer be bound by the Law ascribed to Him. If there was ever a man who strained against the notion of Jewish binding, it was Baruch Spinoza.
Friedman said nothing about the name of the street, though. Instead he gestured to a gray four-floor apartment building whose facade, inset with rows of hollow concrete blocks in the shape of hourglasses, was the only thing that made it stand out from the other stucco buildings on the block.
“I know from your books that Kafka is of interest to you.”