Twelve years and one day ago, as a migraine kept me awake, I turned on the local radio and heard that then Prime Minister Rabin had just been shot (2 bullets reported at the time) at the conclusion of a large demonstration, around 9:30pm, and that he was in a very serious condition at the nearby hospital. I kept listening, and soon it was announced that Rabin had died on the operating table (at about 11:15pm). It would be learned on the following morning that the assassin had used exploding bullets (9mm caliber).

There had been a large demonstration of support for Y. Rabin and the government’s work towards peace. Perhaps 200,000 people from all areas in the country went to show their support, among whom people in the youth movement. This support brought great satisfaction to Rabin who had been under all sorts of attacks of the vilest sort in the previous few months. He had been compared to Hitler, associated with Arafat as a murderer (rotseaḥ), and called a traitor (boged), all things that hurt him deeply, as his face even made plain to see.

After his death, there was an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. All sorts of people, especially young people, began bringing candles and flowers to the spot where he had been shot. Many politicians were interviewed and gave dignified and emotional answers, avoiding political debates though journalists often prodded them to take sides. Some Labor speakers, however, could not help but accuse the right (without naming anyone) of having created the climate leading to the assassination. After an hour or so, we heard Clinton’s declaration in the White House (“Shalom, haver…”). We also saw Arafat giving a message of condoleance. It began in a political vein, speaking of “those opposed to peace,” but after some hesitation, Arafat came back to the microphone and offered his condoleances to Mrs Rabin, the government, the people of Israel, on his behalf, that of the PA, and the Palestinian people. This second part of the message was very important to my mind. Apparently, there were expressions of joy in the territories as well as in certain very conservative Israeli circles. There was an emergency meeting of the government in which Shimon Peres was named interim Prime Minister. He spoke of his friendship with Rabin. Peres too apparently was a possible target of the murderer, although the secondary one.

Next morning, we learned that Clinton, Bush and Carter (and Jim Baker) were coming to Israel the next day for the burial ceremony, as were King Hussein, Hassan II, Mubarak, Chirac, etc…. We also heard a number of Israeli political leaders, among whom B. Netanyahu, who was very civil and decent, utter compromising words. Rafael Eytan appeared defensive.

Rabin’s body lay in a coffin in front of the Knesset since noon on Sunday 11/5/95, and many thousands of people were coming from all over the country to pay their respects. It stayed there until about 2pm on Monday, when it was buried in a special ceremony. Perhaps over a million people passed by the coffin. Some people were bringing flowers or candles, even pictures or drawings, which were placed before the coffin by soldiers controlling the flow of people. The murderer, 27 at the time, was from Herzliyah. He was in his third year of law school (specializing in criminology, if I understood correctly) and computer studies at Bar-Ilan University. A TV show immediately gathered a few authorities in the legal and psychologigal fields, including people like Israel Lau. It was astonishing to see the latter immediately frame the event in biblical and traditional legal terms, everything flesh and human becoming grist for the theological commentary mill.

The wake in honor of Rabin continued the whole of Sunday night. Many heads of state and personalities attended the ceremony at Mount Herzl. According to the Jerusalem Post, Arafat wished to come, but the Israel government decided that it was better if he didn’t come, for security reasons. In the morning, the television showed Leah Rabin and her daughter thanking people for coming. We looked at TV images of the ceremony for several hours. The speeches by King Hussein, Rabin’s advisers (Haber, etc.), his grand-daughter, were moving. Clinton, Mubarak and the Russian foreign minister appeared to be more prepared, more political.

For days, throngs of people kept visiting not only Rabin’s tomb in Jerusalem but also the place where he was murdered, in the Tel Aviv square quickly renamed Kikar Y. Rabin. By Tuesday Nov 7, 1995, politics as usual had returned. Already on Monday night, Shulamit Aloni had severely criticized the Israeli and US religious authorities who, according to her, had created a favorable climate for the murder, and had not yet recanted, or had done so too late. On Tuesday, Ariel Sharon insisted on the unity of the Jewish people as being the most important thing to guard at the moment, but he did not forget to mention that M. Begin and he had been branded “murderers” during the war in Lebanon. Is one to conclude that a violent act did not necessarily flow from this kind of accusation, or on the contrary that they too had been submitted to the same type of violence as Rabin?

The name of Yitzhak Rabin would continue to live in the person of a 27 year-old Russian immigrant who Monday, at the time of qiddush after his circumcision, declared that this would be his name.

About Rabin’s assassination. One often heard comment was: “How could this happen, coming from a Jew?” Or: “How could this happen to us? It is not supposed to happen to us!” Others (few): “What if the killer had been an Arab?” Everywhere, on many cars and doors, the sticker שלום חבר, which didn’t prevent drivers from taking excessive risks. Old, more aggressive slogans disappeared for a while, for the most part, except some strong statements regarding the Golan (“The people with the Golan;” or “We shall not move from the Golan”).

Religious Jews (especially Zionist religious Jews) felt somewhat threatened or sheepish: one of “them” committed the murder, he came from the leading religious university, studied Torah everyday. They saw a need to fight for unity above all, because dispersion under the negative impression of more than half of the country would mean political dilution and loss of power.

Many people invoked the necessity of a חשבון נפש: couldn’t all kinds of individuals have done more to show their support for Rabin, and perhaps thus prevented the “right” from going too far. To my mind, it seemed naive to think that such good intentions, even realized, could have made any impact on the will of Y. Amir, Rabin’s killer. His reasoning was and probably still is of a different nature entirely. He heard a voice or a teaching (rabbi’s authority, coming from other authorities, etc….), telling him that relinquishing any part of Israel’s territory (i.e. what was conquered in 1967) is going against God’s promise, the highest crime against Judaism, and is therefore tantamount to high treason and punishable by death. The land itself is sacred, perhaps the Jewish people too, but as a collective first, and in that order. He also lived the frustration of a religious youth of traditional Yemenite background, upset by the threatening secularization of the country, especially where he lives (Herzliyah). In all of this, the near total absence of discussion about the real feelings of Palestinian Arabs was striking, either when talking about Rabin’s death or about the so-called peace process. Peace as a one-way street.

This morning, we went to a garage in Carmiel to have the car checked. On the way out of the kibbutz, on the entry road lined with olive trees and rock slabs emerging from the heavy ocre earth, we picked up two old ladies. One came from Hungary (mamash hungarit, said she, from Budapesht, and, with a touch of pride, I only speak Magyar!), the other one from Transylvania, from a region first belonging to Hungary, then to Rumania. As a little girl, she lived in a Hungarian village, but had to go to school to a Rumanian school. She spoke Magyar, Rumanian, and Yiddish. Without explaining her circumstances in any detail, but in a kind of side comment on the small difficulties at the beginning of our stay which we were mentioning to her, she told us that it is difficult to change. She herself had found exceedingly hard, she said, to change husband, children, country, language, and culture. The list was striking in its compactness. We didn’t ask about the first two items. Having lost everything, and in spite of all difficulties, she had embraced Israel as her country, a home where she felt at ease and free. The depth of this feeling expressed by a modest person should be the touchstone by which one may understand the value of the zionist movement, and it is at this level that one must place oneself when speaking of the “Palestinian question”: to have in mind the life of people on both sides of the divide — a life including the willfully preserved memory of previous generations as well as the desire or hope that their children may have a future to look forward to.

In the evening, we stopped in one of the malls of Lev haMifratz to eat Mexican food. The excellent food was prepared fresh by an Arab Israeli who had lived 17 years in California. Everywhere around us, sounds and sights invited Israelis to consume without any restraint and indulge their passion for objects, cars, electronic items, gadgets… Along the highway, high degree of pollution, impression of a mess in the transition from old industrial areas to the new kind of malls, the squeaky cleanliness of Toys R Us or Office Depot, and so on…. huge tiled and carpeted stores which in truth invite a real mess, but appear to be so clean, vast, efficient, organized, complete. A spotless conscience.

Rabin’s murder went to the heart of the Israeli political question and the impossibility to agree on a constitution. Two forms of zionism, one starting with the Biblical text and obeying the command to love Israel (ahavat Israel), the other one starting from a modern situation (but not without antecedents), the necessity to found a national home for the Jews of the world who need it, two forms of zionism locked in permanent struggle. Both perhaps necessary to each other?

The present US president is fond of saying that the greatest gift that his divinity had bestowed on humanity is (was?) liberty. Let’s forget about the past tense and the time stamp and restrictions it puts on divine interventions. The corollary of the way in which he frames this declaration is that our liberty-based American democracy is naturally on the side of the divinity, and vice-versa. I find it shocking to see the Bible put to such use. Scripture doesn’t speak of liberty. It speaks of slavery and redemption, not exactly the same thing as liberty or freedom. I don’t think redemption is capitalizable or useable as a sledge-hammer in foreign policy. Or at least there are ominous pronouncements against this abuse in, say, Deuteronomy. The whole Bible is written from the point of view of a people who have lost their political freedom and turned this loss into something deeper than a superficial liberty that is all too often a simple pretext for the unfettered looting of natural resources and unjust exploitation of labor.

Dans un article stimulant sur la place de l’océan dans l’imaginaire occidental et non-occidental (« There was no more sea : the supersession of the ocean, from the Bible to cyberspace», dans Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 494–511), Chris Connery propose que la foi monothéiste en un Yahvé conquérant de la mer et de ses dieux a joué un rôle fondamental dans la formation de l’idée de l’océan dans cet imaginaire. Cette idée me paraîtrait encore mieux étayée et politiquement fructueuse si son développement historique était repris à nouveaux frais (ce qui n’est pas l’objet de l’article de Connery). Ce qui est fondamental à mon avis, et qui me paraît encore plus évident à la re-lecture de Schneidau (Herbert N. Schneidau. Sacred discontent : the Bible and Western tradition. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1976), c’est que dans la Bible, la nature et la vision mythisée de cette nature sont tombées sous le coup d’un soupçon radical. Les questions que pose C. Connery à l’égard des formes idéologiques des récents avatars du capitalisme (capitalisme finissant ou qui n’arrête pas de finir? une sorte de Léviathan en fuite perpétuelle) ne peuvent se comprendre, affirmerait Schneidau que je veux bien suivre sur ce point comme sur plusieurs autres, que parce que le yahvisme a fait son travail anti-mythologique il y a déjà une paille et s’est installé au creux de notre âme.

Nous trouvons des passages mythiques dans la Bible, tels que les combats anti-Léviathan, Tiamat, etc., mais ils sont bien différents de l’instrumentalisation de la mer que l’on voit par exemple dans le livre de Jonah et ne sont plus que des restes d’un ancien Yahvé plus proche d’un Wettergott que de l’être universel qui se fait jour dans le trito-Isaïe et déjà chez Ezéchiel. Ils ont peu de place dans la Bible au regard de la vision de la nature comme création divine.

Pourquoi, comme je le suggérais plus haut, est-il important de ne pas faire l’impasse sur une étude historique ou essai de généalogie dans l’explication du monothéisme? C’est que proposer un monothéisme sans histoire (ou si peu) à l’horizon de la vision moderne universelle d’une nature qui serait devenue un instrument et objet configurables à volonté, donc re-mythisables par le capitalisme, c’est se priver de voir l’élément potentiellement révolutionnaire du monothéisme et qui est justement son anti-mythisme radical. Si le monothéisme biblique prépare le terrain pour une remythisation de l’espace et du temps dans le capitalisme—le problème posé par Connery— c’est sur fonds de lutte qui est à la fois anti-mythe et anti-empires (assyrien et babylonien, même perse, mais beaucoup moins égyptien). Une vraie histoire du monothéisme qui en replacerait le développement dans le contexte de la domination par des empires faisant feu de tout bois mythique justement pour justifier leur emprise et sa perpétuation le montrerait aisément. Par “vraie histoire,” j’entends tout autre chose que l’histoire illusoire et tristement apologétique qui passe encore trop souvent pour une histoire de la Bible, c’est-à-dire la datation magique de concepts théologiques (un seul exemple de cette magie: un chiffre choisi dans la série des dates de l’empire égyptien tient lieu d’ancrage historique pour la “révélation du Sinaï”). Une véritable histoire du monothéisme—faisable à présent sans faire l’impasse sur les notions d’inspiration et de foi— montrerait clairement que l’anti-mythisation qu’on trouve à pratiquement chaque page de la Bible allait de concert avec une vision corrosive de tout pouvoir adossé aux dieux. Le combat contre les Léviathans fait partie de ce paysage. La lutte contre l’idolâtrie en découlait aussi, et elle continue à l’époque moderne sous d’autres mots.

US Secretary of State Rice was in Bethlehem yesterday and visited the Church of the Annunciation. Her decision to visit, say a prayer, and light a candle in the grotto where nativity stories claim Jesus was born, is a far cry from the rash and incoherent use of military power that has been the defining criterion of the administration she serves. I’m not saying it is more coherent or less hypocritical. A candle indeed, that is what will bring peace to the region. Roman emperors of the 4th c. CE found it necessary and convenient to discover or invent proper relics for their own political purposes: the cross, the Golgotha, the “grotto” where the nativity would have taken place, and many other “holy” places. Modern political leaders continue the tradition of hoping that the touching of relics will help the masses believe they have a good hold on reality.

Why is the President now pronouncing Iraq EEErak rather than EYErak? Did prime minister al Maliki and other Iraqi politicians summoned to the desert base where he flew for a photo-op while en route to Australia teach him that? I’m waiting to hear him pronounce the “q” correctly…. and even more, EEEEEE-RRan.

This evening, the traffic on Mission Street could not drown Penderecki’s Concerto #2 for cello and orchestra or H. Schneidau’s ideas on pastoral poetry (from his Sacred discontent: discursive, opinionated, thought provoking). How easy it was to read about romantic or biblical notions of the desert, while feeling the cement under one’s feet and hearing the strange rhythms make sense of the surrounding folly. The western rim of the spreading fog, seen from the falafel place, was salmon and orange, moving colors that transformed a day of cares into something that could become graceful and be given sense later by better and more thoughtful mirrors than me.

Ezéchiel, comme Victor Segalen dans René Leys, rêve d’une ville au centre d’un pays de montagnes et plaines divisées géométriquement, désir urbain qui en se concentrant sur l’invisible derrière murs, laques et broderies, marque et remarque l’ineffable, une absence si vivante qu’elle ne cesse de provoquer des regrets. Un désoccidenté comme Segalen les poursuit. Est-ce si différent d’un Ezéchiel qui en exil veut faire table rase pour mieux les découvrir, c’est-à-dire les écrire et y croire?

Forty years ago, an early Monday morning, I left the Collège des Frères near New Gate, at the Western tip of Jerusalem (the old city intra muros), passed by Abu Atta’s café and walked fast through the narrow lanes, then Damascus Gate, to reach the Ecole Biblique and its famed library on Nablus Road. I was twenty, ignorant of politics, Islam, Judaism, or Christianity in the East. Knew little about teaching either: during the two years I was doing “coopération” in Jerusalem (a sort of French Peace Corps that could be substituted for military service), I began to learn how to teach French to high school students. And I loved to study at the Ecole.

I don’t remember what I was studying at the time: probably the paleolithic period, neolithic agriculture in the Zagros, and such topics. Around 10am, Père Benoît who was the director of the Ecole came to the library to talk to me and my cooperation friend. War had started in Egypt, he said, the Egyptian aviation apparently had been crushed on the ground, and hostilities were beginning on the Jordanian-Israeli border.
[to be continued]

Comme le cultivateur intelligent, tel qui a la science des choses justes, belles, et bonnes, ne va pas sérieusement aller écrire ces choses avec de l’eau, noircissant de son semoir-calame des discours incapables de se défendre, incapables même d’enseigner la vérité: οὐκ ἄρα σπουδῇ αὐτὰ ἐν ὕδατι γράψει, μέλανι σπείρων διὰ καλάμου μετὰ λόγων ἀδυνάτων μὲν αὑτοῖς λόγῳ βοηθεῖν, ἀδυνάτων δὲ ὶκανῶς τἀληθῆς διδάξαι. Non, ce qui est probable c’est que comme par jeu il ensemencera ces jardins de lettres et écrira lorsqu’il le jugera nécessaire afin d’engranger des souvenirs s’il atteint un jour l’oublieuse vieillesse, pour lui ainsi que ceux qui suivent le même chemin: ἀλλὰ τοὺς μὲν ἐν γράμμασι κήπους, ὡς ἔοικε, παιδιᾶς χάριν σπερεῖ τε καὶ γράψει, ὃταν [δὲ] γράφῃ, ἑαυτῷ τε ὑπομνήματα θησαυριζόμενος είς τὸ λήθης γῆρας ἐὰν ἳκηται, καὶ παντὶ τῷ ταὐτὸν ἴχνος μετιόντι.} (Phèdre, page 148 du texte de la collection des Belles Lettres en format de poche, établi par C. Moreschini, dont je n’ai pas trop suivi la traduction.)

Il s’agit ici des jardins d’Adonis dont Socrate parle plus haut dans Phèdre et qui sont un raccourci agréable mais non pratique de la véritable agriculture. Cette méfiance envers tout ce qui est rapide et enthousiasmant et la préférence pour les ensemencements en terre profonde, par la parole qui tombe au creux du cœur (l’organe de la mémoire en hébreu), se retrouvent dans la parabole du semeur de Marc 4.

Comme me le rappelle un ami: Tchouang-Zi (Taoïsme savant) écrivait: “Seul le chemin lentement parcouru est réellement parcouru!” Et Rabelais , dans son Quint Livre évoquait déjà “les parolles gelées”! avant le disque! On trouve le thème chez Montaigne.

Biking to work was a bit different this morning. You start from under a cover of fog, reach the first slopes with the sun, and again meet with fog as you get to campus. On the bike path, a bunny nonchalantly hops out of the way: little does it know that a Frenchman would love to turn him into ragoût de lapin? At the top, juice, bagel, strawberries and animated volunteers. I clutch at my half-eaten bagel until I reach Cowell where I sink into the Hebrew text of Ezekiel 27-28, an oracle against Tyre that is followed by a sarcastic, whipping dirge, perfectly propaedeutic for memo and email writing.