Natan Alterman, like Leah Goldberg, built air conditioning from words. He wrote of forests, lightning, mountain inns—the elements of the landscapes of his childhood in Warsaw, his youth in Kiev, and his manhood in Nancy. And his Israeli audience, desperate for even the slightest breeze, the smallest hint of shade, devoured his wooded, nocturnal, and wintry words, steeped in their melancholy Gothic ballads.

“Since you took me by storm, forever I shall sing for you.” Alterman chose to play the troubadour, to devote himself eternally to an unrequited love: “My prayer asks for nothing, my prayer says only: Oh, you.”

I ask nothing of you (except, perhaps, permission to sing for you.) And you, in turn, ask nothing of me. Who is the “you” of the poem, to whom this desire is directed? Perhaps a woman, perhaps a muse. Or perhaps, if we catch the allusion in the poem’s fourth stanza, the land of Israel: “To the bounds of sadness, to the wellsprings of the night, down the long and empty iron streets, My God commanded me, majesty to your babes, from my great poverty, nuts and raisins.”

Almonds and raisins are like Yiddish to Hebrew: They are the diaspora perception of the land of Israel. In the cities of Europe, “The moon is on fire,” and “the moist firmament thunders its cough,” but in the land of Israel, it is the sun, not the moon, which is fiery, and the skies are wet from the sweltering heat, not from the cold of winter.

Alterman’s Stars Outside (1938) is the most popular and canonical book of poetry in Israel, and “Never-Ending Meeting” its most famous poem. Yet, the language is not of the land of Israel. Indeed, it is precisely the most “Israeli” poem because it was written to the land of Israel, not from it (although it was, in fact, written in it). It is the most Israeli poem because it is the song of a stranger, an immigrant; to be an Israeli is to be one who walks (holech) the land, and not one who rules it (molech). This poem is a ketuba, defining the relationship of Jews to their land.

In the same year that Alterman offered us almonds and the raisins, the literary journal Turim published its opposite, negative image. The poet Yonatan Ratosh sent it by mail from Paris, where he lived at the time, hard at work on his first compilation, Black Canopy. When it was published three years later, it had more resonance than influence: It caused a stir among some, although for the general reader, it was no “Never-Ending Meeting.”

Ratosh proposed a marriage with the land of Canaan. Not a ketuba, but a full-fledged canopy. True, readers at the time were excited by, even enamored of, his ancient, hypnotic Hebrew. But only a few, then and since, have identified with its contents. The Semitic, Ratoshian option remained the mirage of those few Jewish Israelis who became estranged from Judaism, and thus never succeeded in becoming Israelis. Black Canopy can be read as Canaanite substitutes for the traditional seven benedictions of the Jewish wedding ceremony. “Remorse” (“Al Het,” literally, “On Sin”) is the only poem in this collection that contains a speck of Jewish content, albeit one with overtones of subversion. The first stanza ends with the words “the tune of Lecha Dodi,” a reference to the well-known, erotic-mystical hymn of Jewish liturgist Shlomo Alkabetz, colleague and companion of R. Luria: “Let us go, my beloved, to greet the bride.” As in “Never-Ending Meeting,” “Remorse” speaks to someone who is absent, though it does not inform us who this someone is. Unlike Alterman’s poem, however, which pines for the unattainable from afar, “Remorse” describes carnal love in a sweltering, baking land, as imagined from the cold, austere streets of Paris. Ratosh, in his exile, yearned for a heat wave, much as Alterman, in Tel Aviv, longed for air conditioning.

The beauty of Ratosh’s poem lies in the sin of sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and of the pagan-like worship of the physical: Of the body, and of the land. But it was Alterman, not Ratosh, who won the hearts of the Zionist enterprise in Israel, for it was Alterman who recognized that this enterprise could be one not of total symbiosis with the land, but rather of longing for it while longing for an air-conditioned refuge from its heat. The return to Zion, he knew, was no wedding.

Alterman and Ratosh were both Romantics. The difference between them was the disparity between Romanticism’s two opposing attitudes, which were presented in a collection of poems that defined the entire movement: William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth, in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was overwhelmed by nature’s beauty, and wrote of his communion with it; Coleridge felt uneasy with nature, writing of its awesome, often frightening, power. Wordsworth saw nature as an ethereal, feminine entity, an all-embracing Mother Earth; Coleridge experienced it as a monstrous stranger, an omnipresent reminder of man’s insignificance and sheer vulnerability.

The legacy of Romanticism, in this respect, is the choice between Wordsworth’s model and Coleridge’s; between John Constable’s pastoral landscapes and J.M.W. Turner’s disturbed ones; between the sunny music of Felix Mendelssohn and the heartbreaking compositions of Chopin; between the jaunty prose of Alexander Pushkin and the lurid writings of E.T.A. Hoffman; between William Blake’s euphoric communion with everyone and everything, and the broken, melancholic, longing poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Sergei Yesenin, Bialik, and David Vogel.

Ratosh was a Wordsworthian Romantic; Alterman, a Coleridgean. Wordsworth’s English countryside (lakes, fields, muddy paths) was replaced by Ratosh’s Canaanite desert landscapes, but wild nature is wild nature, and communion is communion. In this, Ratosh was the most extreme proponent of the “one with the land” approach, but he certainly wasn’t the only one. There was also the work of the artists of the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and of Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv, not to mention the celebrated posters of the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund.

Whatever the differences between Ephraim Moshe Lilien and Nahum Gutman, between Reuven Rubin and the stamp designers for the JNF, the common denominator among all the artists of the period was their naïve, Orientalist view of the land. This Orientalism, in fact, was also characteristic of the musicians of the time, among them Paul Ben-Haim, Ödön Pártos, Alexander Uriah Boskovitch (the composer of the “Semitic Suite”), and their peers in the “Mediterranean School” of music. Of course, their music doesn’t sound Mediterranean at all; rather, it sounds like Béla Bartók diluted by Claude Debussy. This same Orientalism also spawned the Israeli dance movement, led by Rivka Sturman, Sara Levi-Tanai, and Gurit Kadman (all three kibbutz members), priestesses of the debka and the tambourine.

Alterman, as a “negative,” anti-pastoral Romantic, scorned these efforts to “fall in love” with the “enchanted Levant,” believing them to be nothing more than a contrivance, or a sleight of the painter’s hand, or a European foot attempting vainly to dance a Yemenite step. In 1961, he wrote a smirking elegy of a play about the founding generation of Kibbutz Degania, and placed in the mouth of one of the characters his own opinions on “the Zionist romance with pinkish sunrises and with date palms, with a plow and furrow and with a marmalade worker, with certificates of his contribution and with cans in heaven,” and on the kibbutz posters in which “pseudo-romantic camels tread on a pseudo-classic background.” Another character in the same play describes the land of Israel thusly: “A flame, at the sight of which fled the forests, the water, the fields, the men and the women, loves and laughter, and weeping, leaving the bare stones with their thin and sparkling veils of dust, and the strong sun, that never ends, pouring onto this courtyard, on the duty, on the laws revealed in the stone, on the alien and heavy tools, on the endless weariness.”

There was no air conditioning in Kibbutz Degania. Nor, clearly, was there any in Alterman’s apartment when he wrote this play.

 

These and other Israeli writers, poets, and artists sought refuge from the land’s heat and glaring light within a private world of illusions (a world very much like Ardon’s). We see this in the work of Oz again and again, through adventures in arctic tundras and forests, and crusades in the snow—anything to bring winter onto the scene. Authors such as Pinhas Sadeh, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Yonah Wallach, and Yair Hurvitz also preferred the wintry climate of the land of Oz to the blinding heat of Tel Aviv, and the dusty howling sandstorms of Israel’s deserts. The struggle in Israeli art and literature, then, is the struggle between the desire to acclimate to the land of Israel,and the refusal to accept the place, or ourselves as permanent dwellers here. This tension is an essential ingredient of Israelis’ engagement to their land, and of their view of what it means to be Israeli. 

This tension may also prevent the adoption of any permanent, definitive perspective on the land of Israel. In over a century of Zionism, Jewish Israelis still cannot agree on Israel’s borders. This is the logic of our courtship with the land, the irreplaceable eroticism of engagement: It is endless not only in time, but also in space; that is, in the dimensions of a lover’s body. A wife’s body has predictable proportions; a lover’s takes on a scope that contradicts the laws of perspective, growing larger the farther away it moves. It also, however, grows less clear, and this lack of clarity is equally essential to its apprehension by her lover. The lover, after all, does not want to see the mole on his beloved’s chin, or her fillings when she laughs. He does not know exactly how tall she is, or how much she weighs; she is both massive and petite all at once, because she is everything.

For this reason, perhaps, Zionism has refused to establish Israel’s permanent, fixed borders, so that its leaders can, disgracefully, forever draw and redraw the contours of her body, maintaining an image of the land as elusive, amorphous, and eternally surprising. From war to war, from agreement to agreement, the land has alternately swelled and shrunk. The continuing discussions over the fate of Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights have produced more possible maps than there are rifts in the nation. Jerusalem, too, is both “divided” and “united,” depending on your point of view; its size becomes smaller or larger, depending on the political or religious issue at stake. And it contains the Holy of Holies, the most elusive location on earth. Is the Temple Mount in our hands? In their hands? What is to become of it? Will it be nationalized, or internationalized, or will it remain, always and forever, a focal point of endless strife, all because we have avoided defining our lover?

The land’s navel, identified by three major religions as the birthplace of the world, is an absence masquerading as a presence. It is not so much an object as a desire for one. It is a mountain that is, in fact, a pit.

Zionism is an ache for the Land of Zion, for the City of Zion, and, at its core, for the Temple Mount and the Temple itself, a Temple that has not stood there for two thousand years. This is Israel, a home made entirely from a longing for a home.

In truth, the yearned-for Third Temple was actually built long ago. There it stands, on the Temple Mount. It is not the Muslim structure, whose very weakness is in its possessive materialism, ruining desire. It is invisible, formless, eternal, hence more beautiful than its two predecessors. We will never relinquish it: It is our wedding canopy. Yet we will never stand under it. We will marry privately, build a private home, and fill it with children.