Writings on Walls

Christina looked eager. She didn’t allow time for them all to settle down properly.

C: “Gerald, did you read the Iranian constitution?”

G: “Only the preamble, but that is a lengthy thing and certainly interesting. What about you Miranda, did you read more Shariati?”

M: “Oh no. The week has not been good to me. Christine?”

C: “I went across the river and tried to read a bit about Judaism.”

M: “That ought to be relevant to our discussion.”

C: “That’s what I thought, but I certainly didn’t find what you found in Shariati, whose philosophy strikes me as thoroughly modern.”

G: “Side note: The preamble to the 1979 Iranian constitution differs from Shariati to some degree, but it is just as moving to read. My interpretation is that in the constitution, we move closer to Khomeini and further from Shariati. More towards the ‘we have paid with our blood to gain our independence’-emotional segment and further from a structural-historical re-reading of the Quran.”

M: “Like the words mean what they say, right? One person uses words as a direct expression of his notion of the world. Another sees words as structuring reality, tied to a historical development of the world.”

G: “I think so. Christine?”

C: “Lost. I am guilty at arriving at the subject of the Middle East with a prejudice about Israel being modern and Iran being old fashioned. Now I look at Shariati and find myself in difficulties because I haven’t read the modern philosophy that you have, Miranda. And Jews seem to have thrown themselves over Torah studies en masse. They sound verily mummified to my ears!”

Miranda laughed heartily.

M: “But I don’t think they are!”

G: “Chiming in here. I think I suffer from the same prejudices as Christine. I find this whole topic exceedingly difficult. My usual phrases don’t suffice. I’m used to listing facts and deriving conclusions. Now I have to figure out who is more modern, the post-colonialist third-worldism sociologists or those that win out on institution building and modern warfare by applying rabbinical scholarship dating from the Byzantine era. I’m confused too!”

M: “Of course that won’t do. If we can’t understand the Jewish way we’re in no position to figure out why they make the choices they make.”

The Iranian Constitution of 1979

G: “Perhaps if we started with what we have read? Let me go first.

As I said, I have begun reading the Iranian Constitution of 1979. It contains a lengthy preamble which sets the stage for the why of the document proper. It reads more like a manifesto, and I think it provides better insight into the intellectual climate than anything else.

There is no doubt the people have suffered under the Shah:”

IRANIAN CONSTITUTION OF 1979

The despotic regime which had begun the suppression of the Islamic movement with barbaric attacks on the Faydiyyah Madrasah, Tehran University, and all other active centers of revolution, in an effort to evade the revolutionary anger of the people, resorted to the most savage and brutal measures. And in these circumstances, execution by firing squads, endurance of medieval tortures, and long terms of imprisonment were the price our Muslim nation had to pay to prove its firm resolve to continue the struggle.

The Islamic Revolution of Iran was nurtured by the blood of hundreds of young men and women, infused with faith, who raised their cries of "Allahu Akbar" at daybreak in execution yards, or were gunned down by the enemy in streets and marketplaces.

[…]

After slightly more than a year of continuous and unrelenting struggle, the sapling of the evolution, watered by the blood of more than 60,000 martyrs and 100,000 wounded and disabled, not to mention property damage, came to bear fruit amidst the cries of “Independence! Freedom! Islamic government!

G: “These statements ranges from certain fact to absolutely inflated numbers. Frankly, most of it is true until they go from hundreds to a strange 60.000 dead. Measured over a longer period - a few decades - the estimate is 3.500-4.000 dead from SAVAKs activities according to more sober reports.”

C: “I never understood why people aren’t serious about numbers. Are there any sick individual in the world who would say »oh, only 3500 murdered by the Shah? Wake me when the number surpasses 50.000«.”

M: “That is one of my main gripes about fact checkers. People don’t live in facts but in narratives, and that goes for fact checkers too. When fact checkers correct Khomeini’s numbers they implicitly tell a story of a deceptive regime that fantasises about hundreds of thousands of martyrs, when in reality it was much much less. But that right there is a bit of poetry itself. The smaller number which then really becomes the insignificant number. Non-factually, 60.000 is a perfect number if the aim is to express how the horrors of the SAVAK were perceived.”

G: “Partially agree. They didn’t have a to overstate the factual reality to relay the picture of a wildly unpopular SAVAK organisation that both CIA and Mossad had a share in creating.”

M: “I can easily see why both US and Israel got involved in that, but the consequences in terms of legitimating massive accusations of colonialist plotting was so obvious that it almost hurts.”

G: “Very much so. US loved the geographical position of Iran pressed up against the Soviet sphere. Israel at this point was not firmly in the Western camp. As you recall, Soviet initially was among the first to recognise Israel in 1948 and they even provided them with arms via Czechoslovakia. But Soviet also furnished Israel’s enemies with weapons, hence they swung back. But no ideological reason. Socialism had a strong footprint in Israel itself.”

C: “So after many years of CIA and Mossad backed and trained SAVAK, the people snapped?”

G: “Well, yes, they did so several times, but now we start to see the organisational abilities of the priesthood. See here:”

After experiencing the anti-despotic constitutional movement and the anti-colonialist movement centered on the nationalization of the oil industry, the Muslim people of Iran learned from this costly experience that the obvious and fundamental reason for the failure of those movements was their lack of an ideological basis.

G: “I think this taps into what Miranda talked about regarding Ali Shariati. He was visionary in his application of the Quran. He fed into a growing new political and religious awareness in Iran. After the revolution, a plebiscite was held:”

Unanimously, the Iranian people declared their final and firm decision, in the referendum on the Islamic Republic, to bring about a new political system, that of the Islamic Republic. A majority of 98.2% of the people voted for this system.

G: “That number may even be correct, but one must remember that the ballot simply asked something like ‘do you want an Islamic Republic, yes or no?’.

C: “That is like signing a paper which is later filled out by the actual contract.”

G: “Well, yes. But then if you look at the preamble of the constitution, you find a humanism that can’t be denied:”

In materialist schools of thought, the economy represents an end in itself, so that it comes to be a subversive and corrupting factor in the course of man’s development.

In Islam, the economy is a means, and all that is required of a means is that it should be an efficient factor contributing to the attainment of the ultimate goal. […] it is the duty of the Islamic government to furnish all citizens with equal and appropriate opportunities, to provide them with work, and to satisfy their essential needs, so that the course of their progress may be assured.

G: “This clearly sounds felt, and like before in history, harder to deliver on. I can’t say whether or not Iranians feel the revolution succeeded.

Here is another example: Women. Islamic or conservative, you tell me…”

[…] it is only natural that women should benefit from a particularly large augmentation of their rights, because of the greater oppression that they suffered under the old regime.

G: “Once they get to talk a little further, this freedom from oppression in wait for women will free her up to focus on child rearing.”

The family is the fundamental unit of society and the main center for the growth and edification of human being. It is the duty of the Islamic government to provide the necessary facilities for the attainment of this goal. This view of the family unit delivers woman from being regarded as an object or instrument in the service of promoting consumerism and exploitation. Not only does woman recover thereby her momentous and precious function of motherhood, rearing of ideologically committed human beings, she also assumes a pioneering social role and becomes the fellow struggler of man in all vital areas of life.

C: “Hardly convincing to our ears.”

M: “Women were as far as I know massively present in the streets, protesting against the Shah. It’s a revolution. The masses rarely fight the exact same war as their leaders. Who has ever elected anybody because they agreed with everything he said? For now I see no reason to think women didn’t actively work to establish a new society. What may or may not have happened later is another matter.

Well, enough about that. How about the other side of the war… Israel. Christine, you did some reading?”

C: “Hmm, what… No! I said I got confused by reading. That is something different.”

Hesder and Torah study

M: “Nobody expects you to understand and explain the allure of studying the Torah. Just try to relay your thoughts.”

C: “As I said, I’ve been reading what now seems a, well, minor, but classic article by one Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein” called The Ideology of Hesder.

Okay, so very briefly: A yeshivah is a school of a sort where they study the old bible.”

G: “The Torah? The Tanakh?”

C: “The … Talmud and … Halakha.” - Christine had to look in the article for the words.

G: “So, the law, more than the old testament.”

Gerald smiled at her.

G: “My daughter wanted to marry a Jewish man at some point. It fell apart, but I got to have a few fruitful discussions before that. Halakha is a body of interpretations and rabbinical analysis. You have old important Jewish lawyers such as Maimonides and later ones too. I completely lost track during our discussions.”

Miranda started to read, but quickly realised she had to isolate herself for a couple of days to accustom herself to the mentality.

C: “Okay, so a Hesder Yeshiva is a school that combines military service in the IDF with these kinds of traditionalist scholarly religious studies. His article - written back in 1980 when few such schools existed - addresses the question of whether a student of religious matters should serve in the army or conversely should not serve in the army.”

G: “Makes sense. Go on.”

C: “Clearly at the time he writes, there seems to be a consensus among some that the ‘sons of Levi’ are exempt from military service. I guess those are the religious students.”

M: “Isn’t that argument still taking place in Israel today?”

G: “Don’t kill me if I’m wrong, but I think the controversy is not over students of the Torah or the Talmud, but a whole group of Jews that consider themselves culturally distinct.”

C: “Now that I do read up on this Lichtenstein guy, I can see that he is seriously well educated in Jewish law. No wonder he sounds so dry.”

Gerald and Miranda smiled and raised their eyebrows.

C: “Anyway, Licthenstein didn’t invent the Hesder concept. Some rabbi named Yehuda Amital seems to have. But he was in early on from around 1971 onwards.”

M: “So he explains the rationale behind the need for religion and military service?”

C: “That’s what I find difficult to assess. In a way he does when he talks about obligations and how even the religious student benefits from the safety of the state of Israel.”

THE IDEOLOGY OF HESDER

The yeshivah prescribes military service as a means to an end. That end is the enrichment of personal and communal spiritual life, the realization of that great moral and religious vision whose fulfillment is our national destiny; and everything else is wholly subservient.

No one responsibly connected with any yeshivat Hesder advocates military service per se. We avoid even the slightest tinge of militarism and we are poles removed from Plato’s notion that the discipline of army life is a necessary ingredient of an ideal education.

No less than every Jew, the typical Hesdernik yearns for peace, longs for the day on which he can divest himself of uniform and uzzi and devote his energies to Torah. In the interim, however, he harbors no illusions and he keeps his powder dry and his musket ready.

M: “Those are interesting words. They certainly show a readiness for peace. Let me read up on this guy. You two go ahead.”

G: “Okay. Christine, did you learn anything that could shine a light on the longstanding conflict?”

C: “I think I found a few clues to the mentality of those Hesder students. Remember that they were an enclave in the IDF. Their secular comrades saw them as getting off easy because the program offered a reduced time in the IDF. The idea was of course that they did serve. So, rather than not serve at all, at least the IDF got these religiously motivated spiritual students.”

[…] from a Torah perspective, the justification for abbreviated service does not rest solely or even primarily upon the yeshivah’s stimulus to bravery. It is grounded, rather, in the intrinsic and immeasurable value of Torah per se — indeed, in the faith and hope that it moves us toward the realization of the prophetic vision, “Neither by force nor by might but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”

G: “Perhaps one could imagine them lending a sort of spiritual legitimacy to the IDF which otherwise consisted of young non-believers.”

C: “That is also the impression I get. It becomes a matter of what rubs off on who. Do the righteousness of the Hesder students leave the secular soldiers in a higher state or do the desensitised manner of the soldiers desecrate the integrity of the students.”

[…] the loss of refinement and the dulling of moral and religious sensitivity which may result from exposure to the rougher aspects of a possibly dehumanizing and despiritualizing existence. As the Ramban noted, the qualities of aggressiveness and machismo which are so central to military life naturally run counter to the Torah’s spiritual discipline. Commenting upon the pasuk, “When thou goest forth in camp against thine enemies, then thou shalt keep thee from every evil thing,” he observes:

And what seems correct to me with respect to this mitsvah is that the verse enjoins with regard to a period during which sin is rife. It is known of the behavior of warring camps that they eat every abomination, rob and plunder, and are not even ashamed of fornication and any villainy. The most decent of men by nature may become invested with cruelty and wrath as the camp goes out to engage the enemy.

M: “That observation is sadly appropriate for all military establishments.”

C: “But a Hesder student must solve the impossible riddle and figure out a way to make his very absence from the righteous path become his righteousness.”

At issue is a conflict of loves, not just of labors. At one level, this is simply the problem of religious Zionism writ large. On the one hand, a yeshivat Hesder seeks to instill profound loyalty to the State of Israel. On the other hand, it inculcates spiritual perspectives and values which are to serve as the basis for a radical critique of a secularly oriented state and society.

[…]

Like all yeshivot, a yeshivat Hesder seeks to instill a love for Torah so profound and so pervasive as to render protracted detachment from it painful — and yet it demands precisely such an absence.

[…]

[.. a balance] which encourages a Hesdernik to excel as a soldier while in the army but prescribes his return to the bet hamidrash before that excellence is fully applied or perhaps even fully attained.

M: “I see. It makes sense. If you can learn to walk among people without ever losing touch of the higher reasons for being there, you will have learned a valuable lesson.”

C: “But from here on the article takes a deep dive into legalistic jargon that I care little for. I am not gaining any insight into the deeper nature of the conflict.”

M: “Perhaps that is the lesson for today. Iranian revolutionaries live in a world of their own, and Jewish scholars live in another. Both worlds are too wide to ever reach the horizon where you would make actual contact with others. All you await are loose meteorites that crashes into your world in the occasional war.

I did some reading on the place where Lichtenstein went. He was invited in 1971 to the Yeshivat Har Etzion. It resides in a very early settlement, Alon Shvut established in 1970. As you remember, settlements only started after Israel ended up occupying areas in 1967 after the Six Day War in the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. But that place, Alon Shvut, has a bloody story. Before the UN 181 division plan marooned the place in Arab area, it was home of a Jewish kibbutz, Kfar Etzion, part of the cluster of Etzion Bloc of kibbutzim.

In 1947 the UN offered resolution 181, a plan for dividing the land between Jews and Palestinians. It was rejected by Palestinians, fearing that once they accepted Israel’s national project, they would forever have lost the opportunity to say no and control events. It was rejected by Arab states, who were greatly suspicious of any action involving the West, who they still suspected of colonial ambitions. But Israel accepted it, and when the Arabs rejected it, they declared independence. The Arab states immediately invaded and the 1948 war a reality.

During the fighting that broke out after the UN 181 plan was rejected, the kibbutz became the stage of bitter fighting with the Arabs. Remember, even though the Arabs had rejected the division plan, the town was also outside the area allotted to Israel. Perhaps that combined with the existing feelings ended in a massacre of 120 Jewish members of the kibbutz.

That was 1948. After Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, survivors and descendants of the old kibbutz lobbied for a return. Thus Kfar Etzion became one of the first settlements.”

C: “Nasty story.”

M: “Feuds and vengeance is everywhere in this region. And both tries to build something better on the bloody soil.

In the end, our fortresses is our only safe haven, but also our prisons. We are prisoners of our anxieties, our hatred, our inability to undo the past.”

C: “But we are also lovers of the forces that saves our lives one more day. We are indebted to our heroes and we worship those who lead us up to the next ledge before the waters reach us. One more day in a dark and endless night of insecurity. We trade in our loyalty to the God that preserves us just one more day.”

G: “That’s very beautiful, Christine, and no doubt that factors in for many. But most atrocities as well as results stem from planning. Ethics is a slave to our will to power, our will to stay alive. Nobody has ever been rewarded for feelings, whereas the rewards for keeping your head cool in the face of danger is limitless.”

The three looked at each other knowing that neither of these fancies could ever be adjoined in wedlock with any of other.

M: “So a military victory can be an ethical defeat?”

G: “Can it ever?”

/ПРИЗРАК