A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [35]
Once Uncle Joseph said to me: "At your school, my dear, I imagine they teach you to loathe that tragic and wonderful Jew, and I only hope that they do not teach you to spit every time you go past his image or his cross. When you are older, my dear, read the New Testament, despite your teachers, and you will discover that this man was flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, he was a kind of wonder-working Jewish pietist, and although he was indeed a dreamer, lacking any political understanding whatever, yet he has his place in the pantheon of great Jews, beside Baruch Spinoza, who was also excommunicated. Know this: those who condemn me are yesterday's Jews, narrow-minded, ineffectual worms. And you, my dear, to avoid ending up like them, must read good books—read, reread, and read again! And now, would you be kind enough to ask Mrs. Klausner, dear Aunt Zippora, where the skin cream is? The cream for my face? Please tell her, the old cream, because the new cream is not fit to feed to a dog. Do you know, my dear, the huge difference between the 'redeemer' in Gentile languages and our messiah? The messiah is simply someone who has been anointed with oil: every priest or king in the Bible is a messiah, and the Hebrew word 'messiah' is a thoroughly prosaic and everyday word, closely related to the word for face cream—unlike in the Gentile languages, where the messiah is called Redeemer and Savior. Or are you still too young to understand this lesson? If so, run along now and ask your aunt what I asked you to ask her. What was it? I've forgotten. Can you remember? If so, ask her to be kind enough to make me a glass of tea, for, as Rav Huna says in Tractate Pesahim of the Babylonian Talmud, 'Whatever the master of the house tells you to do, do, except leave,' which I interpret as referring to tea leaves. I am only joking, of course. Now run along, my dear, and do not steal any more of my time, as all the world does, having no thought for the minutes and hours that are my only treasure, and that are seeping away."
When he arrived in Jerusalem, Uncle Joseph served as secretary to the Hebrew Language Committee, before he was nominated to a chair of Hebrew literature in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was opened in 1925. He had hoped and expected to be put in charge of the department of Jewish history, or at least of the teaching of the Second Temple period, but, as he said, "the grandees of the university, from the exalted heights of their Germanness, looked down on me." In the department of Hebrew literature Uncle Joseph felt, in his own words, like Napoleon on Elba: since he was prevented from moving the whole European continent forward, he shouldered the task of imposing some progressive and well-organized order on his little island of exile. Only after some twenty years was the chair of history for the Second Temple era (536 bce to 70 ad) established, and Uncle Joseph was finally put in charge of this subject, without relinquishing his position as the head of the Hebrew literature department. "To absorb alien culture and to turn it into our own national and human flesh and blood," he wrote, "that is the ideal I have fought for most of my life, and I shall not abandon it to my dying day."
And elsewhere he wrote, with Napoleonic fervor, "If we aspire to be a people ruling over our own land, then our children must be made of iron!" He used to point to the two bronze busts on the sideboard in his living room, the raging, passionate Beethoven and Jabotinsky in his splendid uniform and his resolutely pursed lips, and say to his guests: "The spirit of the individual is just like that of the nation—both reach upward and both become unruly in the absence of a vision." He was fond of Churchillian expressions like "our flesh and blood," "human and national," "ideals," "I have battled for the best part of my life," "we shall not budge," "the few against the many," "alien to his contemporaries," "generations yet to come," and "to my dying breath."
In 1929 he was forced to flee