The Hidden Cave

If you’re sick of reading about contradictions and tensions and thought-provoking juxtapositions, you might want to visit another blog. Today, we began our Israel Seminar, a year-long exploration of Jewish and Israeli society, culture, and identity that will include both text and field study. The course will examine the stated and unstated aims of Zionism and the tensions inherent in actualizing those aims in Israel, given its complicated history and vastly diverse population. The course will also give us an opportunity to consider how we will teach about Israel, Israeli identity, and the relationship between Jews and this land when we are serving in congregations (or elsewhere) some day.

“Tale tale is told of an old man,” we read in S.Y. Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat,” “who groaned from his heart.” The only thing that comforted the sickly man was the amazingly sweet milk of a goat that he had bought and raised in his home. Curious as to why she provided “milk that was sweeter than honey and whose taste was the taste of Eden,” the man remarked to his son that he would like to know the daily whereabouts of the goat. The son willingly investigates, devising a complicated scheme to follow the goat and discover the origins of the Edenic milk.

What does he find? The goat leads him through a cave; the journey took “an hour or two, or maybe even a day or two.” And the young man found himself near “lofty mountains, and hills full of the choicest fruit, and a fountain of living waters”—a veritable Eden, a Paradise. And he asked some people there for the name of the beautiful place. They replied, “The Land of Israel.”

The story progresses, with gorgeous references to Biblical texts and other Jewish literature, in perhaps an unexpected direction, with the son remaining in Israel and attempting, in a very indirect way, to bring his parents there, too. He hides a note about his experience in the goat’s ear and sends her on her way. But the father does not find the note, and assumes his beloved son is dead, and mourns and weeps, and eventually, because he can no longer bear the sight of the goat who reminds him of his son, slaughters the goat.

And of course he finds the note. But the goat is dead and she cannot lead him to the cave. The weeping father mourns a triple loss: the goat with her comforting milk, his beloved and irreplaceable son, and a missed opportunity to enter the Land of Israel.

“Since that time,” Agnon writes, “the mouth of the cave has been hidden from the eye, and there is no longer a short way.”

For me, this year is an opportunity to find a way into Israel—not a short way, and along many hidden paths, through caves that will require me to grope in the dark, to squeeze through narrow passages. But these will be caves that will also reveal unknown beauty beneath the surface, great, expansive halls of stone carved by the mere action of water and time. I am willing to take the long way, and I am willing, too, to look for the hidden mouth of the cave.

And when I emerge, what Land of Israel will I discover? Will I be in Eden? Is Israel a Paradise? Should Israel be a Paradise? Can Israel be made a Paradise by human action, through tikkun olam, the repair of the world? Or will be Israel become a Paradise only through the intervention and will of God?

These are questions, I am learning, that have occupied Jews since the days of the Babylonian Exile—questions that lay beneath the rhetoric of early Zionists, questions that continue to spark controversy and argument between secular Israelis and ultra-Orthodox Jews who lament the existence of an Israeli nation-state.

For me, and hopefully for the Jewish people I will serve as a rabbi, the relationship between Jews (and I mean, of course, Jews of all kinds) and the Land of Israel is an ever-unfolding one. It has never been static, and I am grateful for that complexity, that movement, that layering. I am not sure whether this place is essential to my soul as a Jew, but I do know that, once you’ve tasted the sweet milk of Torah, ancient history, and Jewish rhythm that flows uniquely in and from this place, you want to know more about its source.