Against Disappearing

In his short story “Pipes,” Israeli author and screenwriter Etgar Keret offers a representation of his young self floundering through various job assignments in the Israeli army. But Etgar Keret does not simply write himself into his terse tales, penned in vernacular Hebrew, a tight but complex language whose roots link to the Bible. Instead, Keret writes his emotional experiences into different contexts—often everyday, even mundane, situations. In “Pipes,” the protagonist isn’t a soldier; he’s an unenthusiastic metalworker, day in and day out fashioning pipes for his well-credentialed engineer boss. He’s the kind of guy that just can’t seem to find a place to fit in. “I was pretty good at it,” he says of his profession, “but I didn’t really enjoy it. To tell the truth, I didn’t really enjoy anything in particular.”

Claiming complete and utter disinterest, the protagonist describes his habit of remaining at the pipe factory after hours to “make myself odd-shaped pipes” and “roll marbles through them.” But when he makes a “really complicated” pipe, rolls in the marble as usual, and it fails to “come out at the other end,” he discovers that the marble was not, as one might expect with such a twisted pipe, “stuck in the middle.” The marble had disappeared. “That was when I decided to make myself a bigger pipe, in the same shape, and to crawl into it until I disappeared.”

Keret’s sad and sardonic protagonist constructed an elaborate, winding pipe so that he could disappear in its twists and turns like so many marbles tossed into nothingness. Sometimes trying to navigate Israeli culture—and national and religious identity within it—can feel like falling through Keret’s fantastical pipe. The challenge is not to disappear.

Last week, our Israel Seminar explored Israeli secularism, a Jewish Israeli identity independent of movements and even politics, still influenced by the founding myths of Zionism and still grounded in Torah.

Any discussion of secular identity in Israel must begin with the caveat that it bears little resemblance to the American notion of “secular”—so, for that matter, do the words “Jewish” and “religion” mean differently here. In the US, “religious” and “secular” are opposites and one can fairly safely assume that “secular” identified people have little Biblical literacy and few traditions that stem from, for example, Christian theology. They may have Christmas trees, but they don’t quote Scripture. In Israel, the line between “religious” and “secular” is blurred in many ways—not simply because the separation between Church and State here is incomplete, leaving the Orthodox rabbinate in charge of all marriages and conversions, for example. In Israel, even secular-identified people have a deep knowledge of Jewish theology, text, and religious traditions. However, the Orthodox seem to have the monopoly on the word “religious,” and “Judaism” here is defined nearly entirely by the strict views and conservative interpretations of the Orthodox community.

I heard this very sharply when we visiting a secular Jerusalem high school to discuss Israeli Jewish identity and Reform Judaism with a group of 16-year-old Israelis. Frank and direct, the students certainly acted like “typical” Sabras: gruff, playful, independent, honest. They asked piercing questions, getting to the heart of our commonalities and our differences. They were skeptical of Reform Judaism’s relationship to personal choice. “You don’t believe you should do what it says in the Torah?” one young man asked, not with hostility, but with genuine surprise and interest. I responded by suggesting that perhaps it is not always so simple to discover “what it says in the Torah”—even its language, while infinitely more accessible to these Israeli students than it is to me, differs from contemporary Hebrew. While it’s easy for me, an American Reform Jew, to take sacred Jewish texts as open to interpretation, for these young Israelis, being Jewish means one of two things: living in the Land of Israel or observing all halakhah (Jewish law). Even the young woman who lights candles every Friday night reluctantly called herself “Masorati” (perhaps best translated as “traditional” but meaning, in Israel, not “Orthodox” and not “religious”) and in contrast referred to the ultra-Orthodox community surrounding the school as “religious.”

Etgar Keret argued that labels are always “dehumanizing,” but he also acknowledged that they are necessary. Think of the “Pipes” protagonist, seeking a way to fit in, a label to rally beneath. In Jerusalem, I am learning how crucial it is that Israel find a way, despite its founding Zionist myth, not simply to absorb (and to disappear) contradictory voices but to take the risk to allow those different voices to develop, to carry forth from an Israeli position. Keret argues that he writes as an “outsider,” from his own feeling of not fitting in. I am trying to pinpoint what is “Israeli” about his style, just as I tried to parse out the meanings of “Israeli,” “secular,” and “religious” for the young students who pressed me on the issues of Reform, choice, and halakhah. Keret argues that it is his language that is Israeli—the colloquial Hebrew that with ease “moves between registers,” from the street to the heavens, combining the vernacular with the Biblical. The students, too, demonstrated a deep grasp of Biblical concepts and halakhic ideas—striking given that several of them identified as “secular” and most at least called themselves “not religious.”

But I think there is something else in this strange “secular” identity—a secularism that holds Israeliness dear, clings to the Land, and demonstrates knowledge of halakhah and observance of so many Jewish customs and mitzvot that Americans would without hesitation label “religious.” With a high percentage of entrepreneurs, Israel seems to breed inventiveness. In his stories we can see how Keret takes “commonplace” emotions and even quotidian language and transforms them into something beautiful. Keret himself says, “People don’t just start writing because everything’s okay.”

Israel’s ambivalence, its constant need to deal with the influx of competing ideological claims and complicated origin myths for its national identity, is perhaps its greatest strength as well. Like Keret’s protagonist, the tension it lives with daily (if it is not reified and frozen by a monolithic national tale) can lead to invention—it was, after all, the young narrator who constructed the pipes, and it was he who was willing to enter, though he didn’t know what to expect in the end.

He finishes his giant, twisting pipe and looks at his creation: “When I saw it all in one piece, waiting for me, I remembered my social studies teacher who said once that the first human being to use a club wasn’t the strongest person in his tribe or the smartest. It’s just that the others didn’t need a club, while he did. He needed a club more than anyone, to survive and to make up for being weak. I don’t think there was another human being in the whole world who wanted to disappear more than I did, and that’s why it was me that invented the pipe. Me and not that
brilliant engineer with his technical college degree who runs the factory.”