Under This Blazing Light (13 page)

Eventually the young man plucked up the courage or the impertinence to interrupt the monologue and ask Pinchas callously why he himself had gone into politics.

I won’t say what Pinchas replied to me. I have already said more than enough about that conversation in London, and there were others, no less interesting. Let me just tell you that at the end of Pinchas’s reply we both had a good laugh and Pinchas lit another cigarette, made some caustic remark about his own smoking, and used the cigarette as an example to drive home his point.

I said to myself: this man should have devoted his life to scholarship, not politics. He could have been a thinker, an ideologue, a theoretician, a great teacher. Despite all his practical talents, politics may have been a protracted, bitter-sweet blunder in his life.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story.

It was the late Hanke and Ozer Huldai, my teachers and adoptive parents in Kibbutz Hulda, who introduced me to Pinchas in 1960, rather in the way that in the old days a promising young rabbinical student was presented to the Rebbe, so that they could enjoy each other. The first meeting did indeed resemble a test: not a test in Gordonian ideology but in sharpness and irony. Incidentally, I did not manage to pass this test: I was so excited and impressed that I did not grasp what was being asked of me. But I saw in front of me a man who at that time was at the centre of a great public storm, brimming with a strange and unusual combination of mordant, fierce, almost destructive seriousness, a sort of deadly razor sharpness, with a great talent for dreaming and believing, whether in visions or ideas.

What a wonderful combination! Dreamers are always thought of as idlers, whereas clever cynics ‘without illusions’ are well known to have no talent for dreaming.

And, in general, what a fascinatingly contradictory character he was! He was as cold and sharp and precise as a knife blade, yet he was also - in a comer of the dining hall at Hulda, for example, surrounded by his disciples and friends - warm, loving and fatherly. A stem judge of any lie or pretence, but sensitive and almost bewildered wherever he discovered real distress and pain. Pinchas was devastatingly ruthless with ‘clever’ people, but with all others he was patient, attentive, and sometimes even humble.

Despite all that Pinchas told me about the crippling effects of politics on those who engage in it, he managed to save himself. Because, unlike many other people, including most of the other politicians I have met, he did not seek love in politics. He reserved his power to love for other activities. And, particularly in these bad times, I feel a need to underline the vital importance of distinguishing between political activity and the search for love.

Pinchas walked on his own. He did not court the love of the masses, and he barely interested himself in his ‘image’ or the affection of rivals and fellow-travellers. He did not court anybody. He did not try to please or to be liked. On the contrary, even his devotees, who are sitting here today, often felt the sharp edge of his tongue.

A couple of hours ago I happened on a sentence that Pinchas wrote many years ago, and in these bad times I would paint it in foot-high letters on the walls of Israel in 1976:

‘No people can exist for long by virtue of historic momentum alone, without its future development being devastated or even castrated.’

And this is just a drop in the ocean.

Pinchas Lavon was a dreamer, and he was a scoffer, and he was very often right. His dreams (the national and political ones) were about roots, foundations, organic growth, trunk and branches, fusion, growth, putting down roots, putting out branches. It was no accident that he drew so many of his images from agriculture and botany. Organic growth was an image of wide application for him. He always derided whatever had no basis or roots. Any kind of uprootedness, anyone with no visible means of support, who ‘lived on air’ or ‘floated in the clouds’ or ‘rolled his eyes to heaven’. Here, too, Pinchas’s stock of terms of contempt points to an imagery that was deeply rooted in his makeup.

He involved himself in many controversies, he tore off many disguises, he killed many unsacred cows, and he had his fill of bitterness and anger. And yet he once told me the gist of a dream he had had (a private one, not a national political one): there was an orange grove, a young woman, a mistake and a lot of compassion.

One day Pinchas got tired of politics, switched off his powerful mental searchlight beams, folded away his analytical razor and sank into twilight, and then into dreams and delusions; he wrapped himself in silence, as though he had become a vegetable, far away and deeper still, perhaps to the place of roots and bases. We who loved Pinchas could no longer talk to him. Even if we had been given permission to say just one more sentence to him, we would surely not have dared to say we loved him, for fear of getting a dusty answer back. But we might have told him how badly we need him here now.

(Based on an address delivered in 1976)

The first films I ever saw were Tarzan films. There wasn’t a single Tarzan film shown in Jerusalem that we, the gang and I, missed. We saw them all. It was when we were seven, eight, nine ... There were Flash Gordon films too, and others, all of them presenting a neat, orderly world.

I look back nostalgically on those films, on that world: it was always a simple compound of morality, beauty and strength. It is a lost paradise. Who is there who has never yearned for a simple, symmetrical world, in which the good guy is always better-looking, braver and cleverer (but not by much) than the bad guy, and where he always gets the beautiful girl in the end? All those Tarzan and Flash Gordon films were idealistic to the highest degree. To this day they still remind me of the fascinations of a neat, orderly world. By the time I had seen my third or fourth Flash Gordon I knew what one could look forward to: disorder would eventually join forces with order, and accept its rule. It was a symmetrical world, with rewards and punishments, and a reason and justification for all pain and suffering. Sometimes I could guess right at the start of a film at what point the forces of evil would erupt ... but even the sudden, unexpected explosions of evil were amazingly well integrated into what was expected and right. We knew that Tarzan would be captured by the savages. We knew that they would overpower him and tie him up and his situation would be desperate, with no hope of escape. But we also knew that at the last minute some kind of hope would appear. All was not lost. The unbelievable had to happen. The unbelievable was actually real and certain and even inevitable.

I think of all this against its background. Jerusalem. The 1940s. We were growing up in a dramatic world: the underground, bombs, arrests, curfews, searches, the British army, Arab gangs, approaching war, apprehension ... If despite all this we were relaxed, even optimistic and unafraid, surely it was largely due to the Tarzans, the Flash Gordons and the westerns that we watched endlessly.

For example, it was clearly understood that the weak would -always and without exception - defeat the strong, and that the few would overpower the many. This was the natural order of things, and the opposite was simply inconceivable. Tough luck on the strong and the many.

And so all those films were in perfect harmony with the Zionist upbringing that we were receiving. That is to say, there is a handful of good idealists surrounded by a veritable sea of cruel, barbaric savages. The few seemed to be weak, but in point of fact they were really strong and assured of ultimate victory. True, there would be losses, but only among the minor characters, never among the heroes. (And so the struggle is never really dangerous for you, because you are always the hero of all your childhood adventures, and heroes are destined to suffer, but by an immutable law they are always rescued from death.) Naturally, it was inevitable that the ‘good guys’ should be white and civilised, and the ‘baddies’ backward natives. The secret of our strength - in the cinema as in Zionism - lay in the combination of our just cause and our sophistication.

There were heroes in our neighbourhood. Not far away there lived a certain lad called Shraga. All the children knew that he was in the Irgun; not only in the Irgun - he was a saboteur. An expert at making bombs. Wonderful stories about his exploits circulated among us in whispers. He even had a motorbike. Nevertheless, we, the children, did not admire him. On the contrary, we suspected him. Why? Because he was short, dark and ugly instead of being big, tough and handsome as heroes are supposed to be. We confidently expected that one day he would be unmasked as a coward. I, for my part, spread a rumour among the other children that Shraga was a traitor and a British agent. He had the appearance of a cinema villain, and all we had to do was wait for the appearance to triumph over the false image. So it always was in the films: a traitor was planted among the goodies, but he could never deceive us, the audience, because a traitor looks like a traitor and a villain looks like a villain.

The Tarzan films also taught us the lesson that chance plays no part in the world. What seems like ‘blind chance’ is simply due to our limited perception, our lack of imagination, our inability to foresee the next step, which is always necessary and inevitable. There are fixed laws in the world. Flash Gordon will escape safely from the trap which the bad guys have set for him. And if it seems to us as if this time he has no way out, that he is doomed and done for, that is a sure sign that some mighty power is about to appear and rescue him in the twinkling of an eye. It was inconceivable that fortune should favour the many, who are base and evil.

Because if it did - the Arabs would beat us!

Death in those films was always spectacular, noble and beautiful. I never rebelled when at school, on 11 Adar each year, the anniversary of the heroic death of Trumpeldor, we were taught to declaim ‘It is good to die for our land’. Of course it was good to ‘die for’. In the films, whenever anyone (one of the minor supporters of the hero of a western, or one of Flash’s assistants) had to ‘die for’, he was always given a magnificent death, with weeping beauties, with waves of love from the Sons of Light who remained in the land of the living, with pain to the extent of a slight groan, but never with a scream, and always with an opportunity to deliver memorable ‘last words’, in the spirit of ‘It is good to die for our land’. Ugly, dishonourable death was reserved for bad men and enemies - and even then, not always. Even a dying Indian was able to dive from the top of a cliff in a fascinating arc, so that you almost envied him the wings he had suddenly sprouted.

There were a few other rules that we also learned from those films. Women, for example, are always good. Even when they seem to be bad, they always turn out to be good in the end. Since ugly women never appeared, it stood to reason that there was no such thing as a bad woman. In any case, for somewhat obscure reasons, women appeared in the films not as human beings, or as participants in the action, but always as a victim at the beginning and as a prize at the end, a kind of supreme reward, which for some reason was considered sweeter than money, praise or fame - the cherry on every cake.

And so we all began to view the world around us selectively. Jerusalem, Palestine, our street and our homes all looked to us like an imperfect replica of what was shown in the films. We all became little Platonists: reality was merely a partial, imperfect realisation of a perfect form which existed in a higher world.

Our parents were very proud of the fact that Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, was a Jew. This pride was connected with their longing for the revival of a ‘muscular Judaism’, for the resurrection of the Maccabees: ‘With blood and sweat / Shall we beget / A newer, tougher, breed’ (Jabotinsky) and so on. For us it almost went without saying that Tarzan was a Jew because he was always ‘the few’ and his enemies were always ‘the many’, because he was clever whereas they were hot-blooded and primitive. And because he always won in the end while his enemies were always defeated.

There was no distinction between our games of cowboys and Indians and Jews and Arabs. In our games Flash Gordon penetrated the strongholds of the Arab gangs and Tarzan was the man who could bring the British Empire to its knees for us. Incidentally, when it came to the British Empire my feelings were not so simple and clear-cut. I thought of the British as Europeans, intelligent and almost enviable. We had to teach them a lesson, I thought, and then - to conciliate them and win them over to our side. Perhaps we could even amicably share out the continents and oceans and straits and canals between us. And so we used to clamber up in a friendly sort of way onto the British army jeeps, smile at the soldiers, communicate with them in our small stock of cinema vocabulary, accept gifts of sweets and bubble-gum, be allowed to play a little with the steering-wheel and even the machine gun mounted on the jeep, and afterwards, from a safe distance of twenty paces or so, we used to shout at them ‘Gestapo!’ and run for our lives. (This patriotic impulse was also bom in the cinema, rather than in our Jewish and Zionist instruction at school.)

In 1952, when I was thirteen or so, I saw a film starring Rita Hayworth, called, if I remember rightly, The Suburbs of New York. A clever gang had lured or kidnapped a millionaire’s daughter and were demanding a fantastic ransom by threatening to kill her. Somehow or the other there was also a travelling circus mixed up in the film, with terrible wild animals (‘cover’ for the gang?). Then the hero (Robert Taylor?) appeared and despite the failure of the police and the obstacles raised by the stupid, frightened millionaire father he succeeded in rescuing the girl from the villains’ clutches. He did so by a mixture of cunning, daring and good luck. He worked single-handed against a whole gang, whose leader was only a fraction less clever, daring and quick than he was. Finally, when the heroine had been thrown into a bearpit and her rescuer was obliged to rip open several ravening bears, he fell at her feet - or on her neck - and announced politely but with feeling that he loved her. This was the first time in the film that they had set eyes on each other.