Think About Elizabethan English, Where The Entire

A Little More Than A Hundred Years Ago, "tel Aviv" Was Not A City. It Was A Title Of A Novel Written By An Author. The "return To Zion" Was A Name Of Another Novel. There Was A Bookshelf. There Was No Country. There Was No State. There Was No Nation. There Was No Physical Jewish Reality In This Country.

Israel Is Imperfect, Of Course It Is - A Far Cry From The Monumental Dreams Of The Founding Fathers. One Of The Reasons Is That Their Dreams Were Unrealistic. They Were Bigger Than Life. These Were Messianic Dreams, Dreams About Total Redemption For The Jews, For The World. Such Dreams Do Not Come True, Not In Their Entirety.

We Got A Wonderful Present From Stalin And Hitler That They Never Meant To Give Us. We Were Immune For 60 Years Or So To Aggression, Racism And Militarism. They Made Us Partly Immune To These Things. Now It Appears This Stalin-hitler Present Has Reached Its Expiration Date. We Were Spoiled By This. So Maybe We Are Just Emerging Out Of A Relatively Golden Age.

I Wrote A Novel About Israelis Who Live Their Own Lives On The Slope Of A Volcano. Near A Volcano One Still Falls In Love, One Still Gets Jealous, One Still Wants A Promotion, One Still Gossips.

I Often Write About Reconciling. Reconciling, Or Maybe Half-reconciling Between Antagonists, Between People Who Are Deadly Enemies. I Write About Reconciliation, But Not As A Miracle, As A Slow, Gradual Process Of Mutual Discovery - Discovering One Another. I Write About Sad, Sober, Sometimes Heart-breaking Compromises.