3. The Land
Zionism turned the Land of Israel into the stage for the
great modern drama of Jewish history, giving its physical
form a starring role. For thousands of years the land
had played a crucial role in the Jewish consciousness;
for almost two millennia, however, its image had taken
on mythical proportions in the minds of Jews around the
world becoming increasingly distanced from the contemporary
reality. One of the great contributions of Zionism to
the Jewish people was the restoration of the real land
to the center of the historical stage and its reclamation
as the physical heritage of the nation. When the early
Zionists made Aliyah, one of their most important acts
was to strengthen their physical connection to the land:
they came here inspired by the concept of the land and
stayed to embrace its reality.
Throughout the millennia of Diaspora life, Jews had largely
become distanced not just from the Land of Israel but
also from nature in general. Rabbinic ideology had sought
to subordinate nature to the world of the text. Some had
considered observation and appreciation of the glories
of the natural world as time taken away from Torah study.
In a sense, therefore, the early pioneers’ embrace
of nature upon their return to the Land of Israel was
a double revolution. They reclaimed nature as a legitimate
human sphere for Jews just as they reclaimed the physical
land as part of their heritage.
Early Zionist literature reveled in physical descriptions
of the land. Because many of these were written in Europe
by people who had never seen the place they were ostensibly
describing, they carry the unmistakable aura of an idyll.
The romances of Avraham Mapu, considered the first modern
novelist of Zion, are influenced as much by the Song of
Songs as by contemporary reality. Haim Nahman Bialik’s
early poetry of Zion (written in Eastern Europe) was much
more realistic in its observations of nature, but it was
the natural landscapes of Russia that he was describing.
Slowly, however, works came to be published by writers
with an intimate knowledge of the land that they were
describing. Among the writers and poets of Palestine and
Israel, a completely different mood was felt: they were
now showing the real land, as opposed to the mythical
land of the imagination. Writers like Avraham Shlonsky
wrote paeans of praise to the Jezre’el valley, which
almost took on a life of its own in his capable, imaginative
hands. Today, Meir Shalev continues that legacy in a rather
more sober vein. S. Yizhar wrote descriptions of the land
with adjectives and adverbs rolling and tumbling breathlessly
after each other in long flights of dizzy physical description.
Visual artists were also central in this process. Artists
such as Reuven Rubin and Nahum Gutman played a significant
part in this process, using different techniques –
including combinations of documentary art and playful
idealized primitivism – that were, and remain, very
popular. As art moved away from primitive forms of realism
and tended increasingly towards the more abstract, it
may be argued that its ability to convey the emotional
power of the land decreased, although many painters continued
to use primary land colors as a central element in their
work.
Similarly, the sense of place is very strong in Israeli
literature and popular music. Many poems and songs celebrate
specific locations, as if to strengthen the physical ties
with the land that had been lost for so many years. Much
poetry captures in great detail a particular view, a perfect
example being Rachel’s poem Sham Harei Golan
(There Are the Mountains of the Golan). It describes
a slice of a physical landscape in such detail that it
is possible even now – eighty years later –
to find the exact spot in which she stood when she wrote
the poem.
There were those who moved from idealization of the land
to what some perceive as an ‘idolatrous’ approach.
These were the writers and artists of the ‘Canaanite
movement’, which reached its peak in the late 1940s.
This movement focused around a group of intellectuals
seeking to break away from the country’s Diaspora
roots and look for connections only in the soil of the
land in which they lived. They ‘worshipped’
the land with the intensity of paganism. Drawing their
models from the distant past of the Land of Canaan, they
produced some interesting and important artistic statements
about their new allegiance. The most famous of these is
the work of the sculptor Yitzhak Danziger, and especially
his sculpture Nimrod, his depiction of the pagan hunter-hero.
Photography also celebrated and strengthened the tie between
people and land, in both stills and film. However, this
art form developed simultaneously in two directions. Some
photographed images develop a mythical picture of the
landscape – either deserted and barren or fruitful
and renewed. Several of the old semi-documentary films
of the 1930s – such as Zot Hi Haaretz (This Is
the Land) and Avoda (Labor) – develop
both angles. They show the transition from deserted wilderness
to plentiful flowering, overflowing with water, in almost
messianic terms, with soundtracks of heavenly choirs in
the background. On the other hand, photography –
still and in films – showed the physical reality
and caught the real flavor of the land and its people.
With the passage of time, there has been a clear trend
away from myth-making toward a real appraisal of the land,
although some artists occasionally have taken different
directions. Probably the most significant of these developments
occurred after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Jerusalem
and the Biblical heartland of ancient Israel came under
Israeli control. As Israeli citizens poured ecstatically
into the new areas, an irresistible process of myth-making
arose. It was as if the very names and sites of ancient
Israel had the power to unlock the deepest emotional reactions
of many Israeli Jews. The effect on Israeli society was
deep and widespread. This will be discussed in more detail
in the section on religion (Section 10).
One last subject that should be briefly mentioned in this
context is the Israeli reaction to archaeology. In the
early years of the State, many perceived it with a kind
of faith akin to religion. The passion for uncovering
the past of the land far transcended the academic interest
that archaeological digs usually produce. It was clearly
connected to the Israelis’ existential need to strengthen
their ties to the land and to ‘prove’ that
their roots were really here. In contemporary Israel,
this passion has cooled. There is still great interest
in archaeology and archaeological sites, and museums continue
to attract many domestic visitors; but the modern Israeli’s
search for roots is weaker than that of the previous generation.