The Slopes of Lebanon by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE HYPNOSIS OF THE PAST

This historical inflationism of the early Zionists was not a sign of spiritual self-effacement vis-à-vis the past. On the contrary. The first furrow after two thousand years betokened pride that the present could provide a fitting response to the past. The historic plow was historic in the eyes of the plowmen precisely because they viewed it as a symbol that the Jews, who had existed outside history for two thousand years, attempting to float above it, to flatten themselves beneath its feet, or to hide behind its back, had decided to reenter history, to become an active force within it, shaping and influencing it—no longer to be a passive, submissive victim. The Zionist credo, in a nutshell, was the aspiration “to become masters of our own fate.”

Now it turns out that the major obstacle to our reentry into history is, ironically, our enslavement to the horrors of history. The addiction to memory has debilitated the addict. “History poisoning” is an obstacle to making history. Precisely the paralyzing intensity of the past is the most dangerous threat to the Zionist future. Zionism drew enormous motivating power from the historic past. But the past is also a stagnating force, stultifying and contradicting the very purpose of Zionism.

“The rustle of history’s wings” thus expresses the drawn-out, covert struggle between two powerful impulses: the obsessive wish to relive the historical experience over and over again, and the desire to break out of the stocks of the past in order to try to shape the present and the future as free men.

On the one hand, Zionism had to relate unceasingly to the collective memory of the Jews in order to draw from it inspiration, justification, and ardor. On the other hand, Zionism had to destroy without mercy what the writer Yosef Haim Brenner called “the hypnosis of the past.”

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