On Saturday afternoons, the downtown is all but deserted. There are a few cars, but no buses, and almost all the shops and restaurants are shuttered. Whether pious, skeptical or scornful, Israelis keep the sabbath, perhaps a recognition that the arrangement has been reciprocal.
Then, an hour or so after dark, the place springs not just to life but to happy fervor. The shutters come up, the tables and chairs are set out in front of the cafes, the stores open and throngs of shoppers, talkers, diners, drinkers and sellers appear as if summoned by some unheard trumpet.
And as if, having rested from their usual hectic pace, they must return to it with some vengeance, must prove their very ordinariness by being ordinary in as intense a manner as possible. “There is,” said an American in temporary residence here, “something about the local culture which prevents blandness.” Literally and otherwise, there is not much white bread in Israel.
All day every day, except from Friday evening to Saturday night, this is a country in the act of proclaiming its existence by going about the commonplace with an uncommon intensity. Israelis are forever telling themselves and the world that they are here.
It is a necessary statement. Whether or not Assistant Mufti Sheik Mohammed Jamal really said the other day that “the Jewish presence in Palestine is temporary,” after almost a half-century of existence Israel still sometimes has to assert its right to exist.
And no matter how intent the average citizen may be to demonstrate how ordinary national life here is, there are the soldiers. They are everywhere, toting their rifles or machine-guns as though walking around city streets with them were the practice the world over.
There is no strutting with these weapons. They are simply necessary implements, and no one uses them as a symbol of manliness, perhaps because so many of the armed soldiers could not possibly hide their womanliness.
This constant effort to act as though the extraordinary does not matter and the commonplace is special is not without its costs. One reason it’s easy to run into Israelis almost anywhere in the world is because every once in a while, they just have to leave. A common practice is that after an Israeli finishes his three (or her two) years in the military, the money saved finances a few months in Thailand, Kenya, South America or someplace else. Anyplace else.
Then there is a certain loss of civility, especially in political discourse. This afflicts both left and right, but these days most of it comes from the right wing, which seems unable to accept the results of the last election. Inspired by the recent terrorism, conservatives have been demonstrating almost daily, insisting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin resign, though there is no reason to believe either that his resignation would end the terror or that most Israelis want him out.
At the fringe, there is a small but very loud minority, outspoken in both its political and religious conservatism, whose response to the outrages of a specific Arab is to commit an outrage on an Arab, any Arab. That this violates several precepts of the faith to which they assert such devotion seems not to bother them.
The majority of Israelis, though, are far too busy dealing with the realities and contradictions of their lives to plot harm to anyone. Even if they were not surrounded by enemies and threatened by terrorists, Israelis would not find life easy. For one thing, the place is kind of crowded.
True, it’s slightly larger than New Jersey, with about half the population, but that comparison is misleading. Much of the Negev desert is habitable only in a few places, and then only with great effort. And both because people have to eat and because the country needs something to export, it has to keep much of its fertile land available for agriculture.
The solution, perhaps sadly, has been to imitate that institution of American ordinariness-suburbia. Crowded little cities surround Tel Aviv with a low-rise urban sprawl, and the lovely hilltops around Jerusalem are made less lovely by clusters of red-roofed housing developments.
No doubt they are necessary. People have to live somewhere. Still, it is hard to believe that they are what Isaiah had in mind when he commanded the people to “build the old waste places.”
With suburbs come traffic jams and air pollution. But perhaps the greater danger here is that suburbia breeds real ordinariness, without intensity, creating the danger that Israel will forget how extraordinary it is.
This remains a country whose existence and survival defy not just the assistant Mufti but common sense. In the modern, rational, skeptical world, people do not simply go around re-creating nations destroyed almost 2,000 years earlier. But that is what Israel’s founders did, rational and skeptical people though they were, and that is why the people have to act every day as though their everyday existence is something of a miracle.
More unrealistic yet was trying to bring back as the common, ordinary, speech of the people a language that the people did not even speak 2,000 years ago. Before Emperor Titus destroyed the second Jewish commonwealth in A.D. 70, the language of the people was Aramaic.
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So the idea that factory workers and shopkeepers should speak Hebrew to each other was absurd on its face. But here they are, on the streets, in the shops, on radio and television jabbering away in the language spoken by King David and the prophets.
The soldiers of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising spoke no Hebrew. It was in another language that they began their hymn by saying, “Never say you have gone down the last road,” and ended it by shouting, “We are here.”
That was the vain bravado of a doomed army. They were annihilated, and they are not there, not at all.
But every day that Israel, by living its daily life with uncommon intensity, proclaims its existence, it proclaims, too, that the doomed army did not go down its last road. They are not there. They are here.