As a New Year Dawns

As a long year draws to a close and a new one begins, it strikes me that we do not allot our attention to both those facts with the same level of enthusiasm or interest. This Sunday, for example, is the last day of a year that brought us an exceptionally wide variety of things, some expected and others wholly unanticipated, some encouraging and others beyond calamitous. Then, the very next day, a new year will begin in which nothing at all has yet happened. It would be reasonable, therefore, to focus on the year we can discuss in detail and to wave away the year still to come as a blank slate, as a bag of possibilities, as a story as yet fully unwritten. Our tradition, in fact, encourages just that kind of ruminative introspection focused on our deeds and misdeeds in the past year. And yet, tradition or not, we mostly (at least in public) do precisely the opposite, preferring almost always to focus on wishing each other a happy new year replete with all God’s best blessings and taking some sort of strange pride in the degree to which we feel ready to move on from last year’s foibles, missteps, errors of judgment, ethical shortcomings, and instances of moral failure without suffering over them all unduly. In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t believe I have ever heard anyone greet another on Rosh Hashanah by congratulating him or her on having survived the year now concluded and leaving it at that!

A while ago, I noticed a similar phenomenon on the train. As riders of the Long Island Railroad will all know, the train’s cars usually feature seats facing forward (i.e., in the direction the train is moving) and seats facing backwards from which you can only see where the train has recently been. I myself always try to find a seat facing forward. Judging from what I see all around me, I think that that is what most people do: it somehow feels natural to face forward and see where the train is going. (That’s how the world looks when you’re out for a walk too, of course: you see where you’re going, not where you’ve been.) But life is just the opposite because, on the train of life, we can only clearly see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. What the future will yet bring us is at best a hope or a dream that none can see clearly. There can’t ever be any certainty about our vision of what yet may be: even prophets cannot know that God will not relent and specifically not make even a divinely-inspired prediction come to pass. (Jonah is surely the best known prophet to have had that specific rug pulled out from under him. But there were others too.) All that is true. But it still feels strange to sit in the backwards-facing seat, and that is so even despite the fact that where we’ve been is all we can see as we journey ahead on the aforementioned train of life.

Therefore, in addition to wishing you all a very good, happy, and healthy year to come, I would like to congratulate you all on surviving the year that now concludes. It has been, to say the very least, a roller coaster ride for Jewish Americans. This was the year of Pittsburgh and Poway. This was the year in which the House of Representatives proved unable, or at least unwilling, unequivocally to condemn anti-Semitism other than in the context of every conceivable other kind of prejudice or bigotry (including, as I’ve said several times from the bimah now, some so obscure that I hadn’t ever heard of them before). And this was the year in which we have had to deal not once or twice, but repeatedly, with elected members of the House of Representatives using well-worn anti-Semitic tropes to castigate American Jews for being firm supporters of the State of Israel who believe wholeheartedly and unambivalently in the democratic right of Israel’s people to elect their own leaders and then to be governed by them. And we have had also to endure members of the Congress openly questioning the loyalty or patriotism of Jewish Americans, a canard most of us felt certain had been laid to rest decades ago.

These are all events that I am happy to contemplate in the rear-view mirror even if I really do always prefer the forward-facing seats on the train. It has been a wild ride, this last year. But I face 5780 with courage born of confidence in our nation, in its national values, and in the innate fairness and reasonableness of its citizenry. As a new year dawns, I pray—and without the slightest trace of irony, cynicism, or ambivalence—that God bless America. And I pray also that God grant us all a happy, healthy, productive, and prosperous year. May it bring us all only good things! And may it be a year of peace for us all, both here, in all the lands of our dispersion, and in Israel itself.

Elections in Israel: The View from Athens

Although my Greek never really got good enough to read the great tragedians in the original without a dictionary by my side, I nevertheless grew through my studies to love their work and to understand why Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, all of whom lived and worked in the fifth century BCE, eventually became pillars of Western culture. Even today I retain a real fondness for their work and an appreciation of its value and its artistry. But the part I always liked the best was their common use of an on-stage chorus—known to history because of them as a “Greek” chorus—to act sometimes as a kind of intermediary between the playwright and the audience, but other times as a kind of fictive corporate personality in its own right that interacts not with the audience but with the various characters in the play. In either case, however, the idea is almost always the same—to remind viewers that things are never as they seem, that behind even the most banal off-hand remark can hide a universe of emotion and meaning, and that we are, all of us, bit players in a huge drama that none of us has read and that no one therefore fully understands. It is that specific concept of an all-knowing Greek chorus that I would like to bring to bear in my attempt to analyze the results of last Tuesday’s elections in Israel.

As has so often been the case in these last years, the results at best equivocal—somehow both clear and unclear with respect to their potential impact on the future. As I write these words on Wednesday afternoon, it feels as though Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party will probably end up with a slight edge—something like 32 or 33 seats to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party’s possible 31 or 32. With 95% of the votes tallied, it feels likely that those numbers will hold, but even if the numbers were reversed the outcome will be exactly the same because no one party will have won enough seats—sixty-one— in the Knesset to govern all by itself without the need to form any sort of coalition. (Indeed, no party in the history of the state has ever won a majority of seats, the closest being the 56 seats that the Alignment coalition won in 1969.) And with that thought in place, let’s bring the chorus out onto the stage.

In classic Greek plays, the chorus is often depicted as a chorus of elderly persons possessed specifically of the kind of wisdom that, if it comes at all, comes to most in old age and it is precisely that kind of chorus of wise oldsters that in my mind’s eye I see stepping onto the stage. In my mind’s eye, I see them dressed in shapeless robes, their demeanor suggestive not of creeping senescence but of burgeoning insight as they turn first to face the audience and then, one by one, to the players in the drama unfolding on stage to offer them the benefit of their perceptive acumen, of their deep awareness of how things really are. The strange masks they are wearing are part of this as well: by denying them specific in-play identities, the members of the chorus appear instead as symbols of wisdom itself. And, indeed, the characters in the play are generally depicted either as being entirely deaf to the insight being offered them by the chorus or, in some ways even more tragically, as being vaguely aware that it is being offered but, at the same time, being far too distracted or otherwise occupied by their own egos to take the information being offered to them to heart.

The whole parliamentary system of government is theoretically designed to make elections more about ideas and policies than specific individuals. And that is how things are, at least theoretically, in Israel: voters don’t actually vote for anyone at all, just for the party they wish to see form the next government. Of course, the personalities involved are well known to all: as part of its campaign, each party publishes a list of the specific individuals who will serve in the Knesset if the party gets enough votes to seat people that far down the list. So everybody knows who will be Prime Minister if any specific party gets enough votes to form the next government because that individual appears as number 1 on that party’s list. The only problem is that the system doesn’t work quite as well as intended and, even though Israelis technically aren’t voting for any individuals at all, it somehow feels entirely as though people are voting for the person who will serve as Prime Minister if his party gets to form the government.

And now the curtain goes up to reveal our opening tableau. At the back of the stage on a kind of platform is the chorus, their wise presence as reassuring as their masks are unsettling. Upstage in the center is Reuven Rivlin, the President of Israel, wearing a dark suit and looking as though he knows his lines well enough but can’t quite remember to whom he is supposed to deliver them. To his right is a nattily-dressed but still clearly dejected Bibi Netanyahu. To the left, looking slightly surprised to be on stage at all and not at all ready to be off-book, is a rumpled-looking Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White Party. And hovering overhead, held in place by a hoist similar to the one that holds the Angel aloft in Angels in America, is Avigdor Lieberman, outfitted with a set of outsized white wings like Emma Thompson’s in the mini-series.

The audience quiets down and waits for the play to begin. All eyes, naturally, are on Rivlin, whose job it is to invite someone to attempt to hobble together a coalition large enough to govern effectively…or at all. Clearly, the opening soliloquy, ideally in the form of an invitation to get to work forming a government, is his to deliver. But as he produces some sort of computer print-out from his inside jacket pocket and begins to scan the numbers yet again, the chorus quickly intercedes and sternly instructs him to remember that he is above the system and not bound to the tyranny of its numbers, that he can—that he must—guide the nation forward by selecting the individual whom he deems the most likely to be able to govern wisely and well, not slavishly to turn to the guy whose party got the most votes. That makes his job both simpler and infinitely harder: simpler, because he can act as he wishes; but far more daunting because his decision will almost undoubtedly affect the nation’s future in a profound, perhaps even irreversible way…and he is far too savvy to pretend that he doesn’t understand that fully. As the chorus sings out their warning, his face grows pale, almost ashen. He seems weighed down with responsibility. He himself belongs to Netanyahu’s party. But he knows that his job is not to support Bibi, but to keep the Angel overhead aloft and the ensemble below from being crushed if he descends too quickly or too roughly.

And now Bibi steps forward and delivers his own opening soliloquy. Yes, he admits, his party got fewer votes than Benny Gantz’s. But why should that matter? Is Mrs. Clinton President of the United States? What should matter, he declaims in his weirdly American English, is that he can form a coalition, that he can govern, that he can and will lead the nation forward. He clearly has more to say, but again the Chorus intercedes. Looking not at Bibi but at Benny, they sing out a warning. “Remind him that he won’t be able to lead the nation that effectively from a prison cell…and that even you have lost track of the numerous indictments pending against him.” Then they look to Lieberman, still hanging there in mid-air and looking as smug as ever. “And you there,” they continue, looking up at the kingmaker, “remind him, again, that the way to bring you into the government is to form a grand coalition with Benny and yourself…and specifically to leave the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, out of the mix. Tell him, again, that it’s you or the black-hats…but not both. Not until they agree to serve in the IDF like every other Israeli citizen. He knows all that, to be sure. (You have told him that a few dozen times in the last few days alone.) But can you be sure Bibi always knows where his own best interests lie? Why not tell him again anyway? What can it hurt?”

And then, clearly on a roll, the Chorus of the Elderly, turns to Benny Gantz. He is a tall man, and wearing his newly pressed IDF uniform—he was, after all, the Chief of the General Staff, the Ramatkal, from 2011 to 2015—he looks even taller. He somehow seems sure and unsure of himself at the same time, confident and ill at ease. He wanted this, obviously. He personally founded the Hosen L’yisrael (“Israel Resilience”) party just last year and guided it into the coalition first with Telem, the party of Moshe Yaalon (also a former Chief of Staff of the IDF) and then with Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”), Yair Lapid’s centrist party. The resulting Blue and White party is therefore his baby, something he himself created, something in the remarkable victory of which he can take personal pride. And yet he looks uncertain. He looks at Bibi and feels untried and inexperienced in the ways of government. He looks up at Lieberman, still menacingly hovering overhead, and wonders what price he will have to pay to bring Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”), Lieberman’s party, into a coalition. And then he looks at Rivlin and wonders what it’s going to take to get him to stop staring at Bibi with that unsettling mixture of awe and frustration.

I would tell you more, but the play is still in rehearsal and only opens in a few weeks when President Rivlin formally asks someone to form a coalition that could conceivably govern effectively. As also on Broadway, things in Israel can (and probably will) change dramatically before opening night. But the Chorus is already in place, already positioning itself to remind the players that what they see is not all there is, that acquiring power and exercising it wisely are not at all the same thing, and that the fate of the nation—and, by extension, the course of Jewish history—depends not slightly or tangentially, but fully and really on what the show actually looks like when the curtain goes up and the show actually opens.

As the Holidays Approach

Elul, the month that leads directly into the High Holiday season, should be ideally devoted to the thoughtful, principled introspection that can serve as the foundation upon which the spiritual work of the whole holiday season should then come to rest. And that only makes sense: to come before Judge God and successfully to negotiate the experience requires, at the very least, knowing yourself well enough to speak honestly and authoritatively on your own behalf and in your own defense. And that level of self-awareness comes to most of us, possibly even to all of us, solely as the result of the kind of wholly honest self-scrutiny that yields the unvarnished truth about ourselves and our lives.

The problem is that most of us find any sort of serious self-analysis off-putting, unnerving, and, to say the very least, deeply anxiety-provoking. And yet, that is precisely what otherwise halcyon Elul offers: week after week of days unburdened by any other holidays or special observances that may therefore be given over to thinking carefully about ourselves and our lives and our deeds…and, painful though the process may be, also in identifying our own moral shortcomings, errors of judgment, ethical missteps, and unnecessarily missed opportunities to do good in the world. It is a pleasant experience for almost none, but it can be a productive one.

To assist in making the whole Elul experience as positive as possible, it has been my custom in recent years to recommend to my readers a single book that might prove helpful in framing otherwise amorphous thoughts and regrets in a productive way, in confronting the larger paintings of which the details of our personal lives are the brushstrokes, in setting our personal stories into the larger saga of humankind and its foibles and flaws, and, generally speaking, in coming to terms with the lives we have constructed and owning up to the various ways in which those lives have been characterized more often than not by decisions that, for all they seemed reasonable at the time, feel flawed and inconsistent with the values we claim to hold dear when viewed in the rearview mirror.

Last year, I recommended a remarkable novel that I had just read, Marcos Aguinis’s book Against the Inquisition, which I found both moving, intelligent, and stimulating. (To revisit my thoughts from last Elul, click here.) This year, however, I would like to recommend a book that I first read decades ago, and which wasn’t that new a work even then: Clark Moustakas’s book, Loneliness.

Moustakas’s renown has faded in the years following his death in 2012 at age eighty-nine, but in his day he was one of America’s foremost psychologist/authors and was widely acclaimed specifically as an expert in humanistic and clinical psychology. He published prodigiously throughout his career, but the book I wish to recommend was one of his earlier works that first appeared in 1961. (I read it when I was a student at JTS more than a decade after it first came out.) I would like to introduce it to you in this week’s letter and suggest why I feel it would make an excellent choice for Elul reading.

The book isn’t long at all, a mere 107 pages in the first print edition. Yet the author manages in those few pages to speak almost amazingly deeply and provocatively about the human condition…and in a way that is somehow both reassuring and challenging. I just finished re-reading the book and, even after all these years was struck again by its remarkable profundity. If there is one book you can find the time to read this Elul, Loneliness is the one I recommend you consider. (Nor is this a pricey investment: you can find used copies online for $2 a book.)

I was prompted to re-read the book by an article I noticed the other day on the website of YouGov, the U.K.-based data analysis firm, that determined—not anecdotally, but by using actual data collected this last summer and subsequently analyzed by themselves—that the millennials among us can reasonably be characterized as the loneliest generation ever. (Click here to read the article for yourself.) This came as a huge surprise to me—you would think that people raised in a world in which people are practically defined by social media that offer the possibility of maintaining not dozens or scores but hundreds or even thousands of “friendships” concurrently, you would think such people would constitute the world’s least lonely people ever. And yet, the report seemed unequivocal: 30% of millennials polled reported feeling “always or often” lonely (as opposed to half that many baby boomers such as myself) and more than one in five—22%—of millennials reported that they do not have any friends at all. A different slice of the millennial pie—27% of the total—reported having some friends but no “close” ones. Together, that’s one percentage point short of half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-seven reporting that they either had no friends at all…or at least no close ones. When asked why they find it difficult to make friends with others, a startling 53% responded that the fault was in their own stars—that they personally were too shy to go out there and find people to be friends with. All of this came as a huge surprise to me.

There’s more thought-provoking data on the YouGov site to consider as well, but what interested me most of all was the basic assumption of the essay’s author, Jamie Ballard, that loneliness was a bad thing that healthy people would naturally avoid (and thus a situation in which most would only find themselves accidentally or tragically). Nor was I amazed that she took that approach, which I think is probably what most people actually do think. The phenomenal success of the television series Friends, which ran for ten years starting a quarter-century ago, was probably rooted in that concept as well: the show was a little about romance and a little about life, but it was mostly about friendship—its name basically said as much—and its great success lay in the portrait it offered viewers of young urban types, the sustaining feature of whose lives was precisely the degree to which their friends watched out for them, cared for them, and, yes, loved them even when they were being otherwise disagreeable or snarly.

I think most of us subscribe to the notion that loneliness is a bad thing. And yet Moustakas’s book goes off in the precisely opposite direction, describing self-growth—and specifically the kind that leads to self-awareness and self-confidence—as an edifice almost of necessity built on a foundation of the kind of aloneness that moderns inevitably denigrate as unwanted, unworthy loneliness.

He writes anecdotally, telling us the stories of several of his patients and also telling his own story in a few intensely personal, sustained episodes. But he also writes about famous people and describes the source of their inventiveness, their creativity, their artistry, and their success in life as having been rooted in the deep sense of personal autonomy that begins with the acknowledgement that we are all alone in our lives and then goes on to create the impetus to seek the kind of companionship that, rather than denying or masking that sense of aloneness, celebrates and enhances it to the degree that we find in love the experience of being fully autonomous—and thus fully alone—in the company of a similarly autonomous individual. Among the people about whom he writes, some will be familiar to all—the sections on Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and Admiral Richard Byrd are particularly moving—and others, like the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or the German adventurer and explorer Hermann Buhl will be less well known. But, taken all together, the portraits he paints are all of individuals who found in loneliness the foundation upon which to build a social, meaningful, intensely productive life guided by principles forged by those individuals themselves in the crucible of their own autonomous selves.

Perhaps I should let the author speak for himself. In the introduction to these portraits I just mentioned, he sets forth his argument in these terms:

Every man is alone. Ultimately, each person exists in isolation. He faces himself in silence, wending his way in individual pathways, seeking companionship, reaching out to others. Forever, man moves forward stretching to the skies, searching the realization of his own capacities. In loneliness, man seeks the fulfillment of his inner nature. He maps new meanings, and perceives new patterns for old ways and habits.  Alone, the life of man passes before him. His philosophy, the meanings he attaches to his work and his relations, each significant aspect of his being comes into view as new values are formed, as man resolves to bring human significance, to bring life to each new day, to each piece of work, to each creation. In loneliness, every experience is alive and vivid and full of meaning. When one has been greatly isolated and restricted in movement, one deeply feels the value of openness, of freedom and expansiveness. Life takes on an exquisite meaning, an exhilarating richness. When one has lived in total darkness, one piercingly appreciates the sunlight, the fireside, the beacon, the beginning dawn. When one is cut off from human companionship, one discovers a deep reverence for friendship, for the one who stands by in the hour of need and shame. In the days of pain and defeat, loneliness takes on a human depth.  When one is sequestered from life, when one is purely alone and dying, when one is lost in a world of dreary emptiness, then color becomes exquisite, rich, desirable, fulfilling. When one has been sharply isolated and lonely, every moment is pure, every sound is delightful, every aspect of the universe takes on a value and meaning, an exquisite beauty. The isolated tree stretches out to meet its new neighbor; the lonely star twinkles and turns to face its emerging companions in the night; the lost child runs to loved ones with open arms.

A mere excerpt or two won’t do justice to the book, which is remarkable both in terms of its brevity and its profundity. I recommend it wholeheartedly to all—both broadly as a very interesting, challenging way to consider the human condition and more narrowly as an Elul book that has in its handful of chapters the capacity to frame the whole experience of entering the Days of Awe almost upon us not as a burden or a test, but as an exercise in deep, sustaining self-awareness and self-knowledge.

What Melville Saw

When we lived in Heidelberg, we often heard it said that the reason the town was largely spared during the Allied bombing raids that hastened the end of the Second World War was because General Eisenhower had already decided to set up the headquarters of the American Army in Europe in that town and wished it to be, at least more or less, in functioning order (i.e., with clean running water and an intact electrical grid) when the Germans finally surrendered. That much apparently is true—but the part of that same story I’m less sure about is the assertion that Eisenhower chose to spare Heidelberg specifically because he fondly remembered reading Mark Twain’s very funny account of his visit there in his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad, and thought it would be a kind of after-the-fact homage to Twain to set up American headquarters in one of the few German cities with deep roots in American literary history. After all, it had to be somewhere!

A Tramp Abroad is mostly forgotten today, although it really is very amusing and interesting, as is its companion work, The Innocents Abroad, which wraps up with Twain’s extended account of his trip to Israel—then Turkish Palestine—in 1867. I read both books years ago—I went through a period during which I could hardly read enough of Mark Twain—and enjoyed them both, as I also did Twain’s other travel books, particularly Roughing It (which is about Twain’s travels in the Old West and Hawaii in the 1860’s) and Life on the Mississippi (about the years he spent as a riverboat captain on the St. Louis to New Orleans route). For readers who only know Mark Twain through his fiction, I recommend all these books for the glimpse they offer into the man himself when he wasn’t writing about Tom, Huck, and all the rest.

I was brought back to thinking about The Innocents Abroad this summer by an essay by Meir Soloveitchik in which the author compares Twain’s account of his visit with one that took place a cool seven centuries earlier, the one undertaken by one of the greatest of all medieval Jewish scholars and authors, Ramban (i.e., Rabbi Moshe ben Naḥman, also called Naḥmanides) in 1267. (To read Soloveitchik’s essay, published in Commentary just last month, click here.)

The thrust of the essay is to show how two authors, both clearly men of integrity and insight, were able to look out at the same landscape and see two entirely different things.

For Twain, what mattered most was the dreariness of the place. He has some caustic comments about the “big” tourist sites—he is particularly biting about his visit to the alleged grave of Adam within the confines of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—but his most acidulous disdain he pours out on the land itself, which he found barren, lifeless, and—to say the very least—desolate. It is not at all a flattering portrait. Nor would or even could anyone reading it cold (i.e., without any previous sense of attachment to the land) come away possessed of any sort of interest in ever visiting it personally.

To this uninviting travelogue, Soloveitchik compares Ramban’s account of his visit. What brought him to Jerusalem is a sad story in its own right. Ramban apparently acquitted himself quite well in the famous 1263 public debate about the legitimacy and reasonableness of Jewish beliefs known to history as Disputation of Barcelona. (For interested readers, a remarkable graphic novel about the Barcelona Disputation by Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke called Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 and is extremely readable and at least as interesting as it is upsetting.) By all accounts he was eloquent and convincing, for which effort he was rewarded by being charged with blasphemy and eventually exiled from Spain. And so, after several years of sojourning in various overseas locations, he arrived in Eretz Yisrael in 1267, precisely six centuries before Mark Twain. 

Ramban also found the place desolate and mostly forsaken. But instead of describing the land as bleak and abandoned, he saw in it a land in mourning for its former glories. Indeed, he suggested that, just as people tend only to find true solace in the wake of tragic loss in the company of caring family members, so does the Land itself exist in a state of misery as it awaits the return of its children. And so he set to work, playing a major role in galvanizing the Jews present in the land and, among other things, founding the famous Ramban Synagogue that has existed ever since in the Old City of Jerusalem other than during the dark days of the Jordanian occupation from 1948 through 1967. And he also invented Zionism, writing passionate, interesting letters back to Spain in an attempt to re-awaken a desire among his people to return to Zion and re-establish Jewish life in the Holy Land.

Soloveitchik’s essay, which I liked very much, set Twain and Ramban in opposition. But I would like to add a third voice, one almost always ignored even by Americans otherwise familiar with his work: I am thinking of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and one of my personal literary heroes. Melville, the bicentenary of whose 1819 birth lovers of American books everywhere are celebrating this year, also made a trip to the Holy Land and wrote about it. But he did so in an entirely different way than Twain.

Melville left behind a complex legacy. Moby-Dick is acknowledged by all as an American classic, but others of his books, including some truly famous in their own day, are hardly remembered by anyone. But least recalled of all is surely Melville’s epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

Coming in at a cool 18,000 lines, Clarel is a big read. Avery big read. (My edition is 893 pages long.) Nor is it an easy one: the plot is extremely confusing, the cast of characters is immense, the language is obscure in many places, and the style is—to say the very least--challenging. This is not a book for the faint-hearted.

And yet it has a place in my heart. Twain was writing to be funny and he succeeded admirably, albeit at the expense of his subject. Melville was attempting to say something profound and inspiring about the place he felt the Land of Israel—and particularly Jerusalem—should play in the American sense of the world and the place of our nation in it. Basing himself on his own experiences traveling there in 1856, he presents himself (played in Clarel by the character Rolfe) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (played in Clarel by Vine) as close friends seeking spiritual fulfillment on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then moves on from there to involve them in the lives of a dizzying amount of fellow travelers.  It’s an interesting premise and the book could have been a big seller, but that didn’t happen: the initial press run was a mere 350 books, of which the printer ended up burning the unsold copies (which constituted more than half the press run) when the author couldn’t afford to buy them at cost. In 1925, the literary critic Lewis Mumford famously found the pages still uncut in the copy owned by New York Public Library, unambiguous proof that the single copy the Library owned had remained unread for a full half-century. The reviewers, to the extent there were any, were unkind.

Melville, like Ramban and Mark Twain, found Israel to be, to say the least, uninviting. In his journal he wrote this: “Judea is one accumulation of stone: stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you and behind you are stones.” Nor does he harbor much hope for a Jewish future in that place, noting that it would be a true miracle if Jewish people were ever to find it in themselves to create a viable agrarian society in such a barren, desolate place.

Nonetheless, Melville found in Israel a place of natural haven for Jews of all sorts. In the endless pages of Clarel, he describes Jews from India, American converts to Judaism who have chosen to settle in the Holy Land, Jewish scientists hard at work deciphering the land’s geological legacy, religious and secular Jewish types, doubters and believers, socialists and capitalists, farmers (or rather, would-be farmers) and urban types. In other words, Clarel looks out at the landscape of mid-nineteenth century Turkish Palestine and sees something remarkably like the State of Israel today: a Jewish country filled with every conceivable kind of Jewish soul attempting to make the desert bloom, to create a viable economy, to find accommodations that make it possible for people of all kinds of beliefs to live in harmony with each other. Mostly, Melville writes endearingly about Judaism itself, seeing in the Jewish faith the platform on which the rest of Jewish life should and does stand. Had the word existed in his day, Melville would surely have been acclaimed as the most prominent non-Jewish Zionist the world had ever seen. (For an excellent introduction to Clarel published by P.J. Grisar in the Forward this summer, click here.)

For all sorts of reasons, American Jews are feeling insecure these days. The attacks on the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway are always in the background. The sudden, unexpected shakiness of the traditional bedrock-solid support for Israel in the Congress is (or should be) a source of intense anxiety. (I personally think that the center will hold, but I share the sense of foreboding felt at least slightly, I suspect, by all.) The rise of anti-Semitic incidents both in centers of Jewish life and in places far from those centers is beyond troubling. And then—at least for me personally—there’s Melville waiting in the wings with his gigantic poem describing the deep interpenetration of the American and Jewish dreams, and promoting the idea of the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel functioning for Americans as a symbol of what can be wrought by wholly dissimilar people when they embrace a single powerful idea.

Melville died in obscurity, his death barely noted and his name misspelled in the obituary that did appear in the New York Times. It took decades for Moby-Dick to take its rightful place among the great American books. And even today many of his works, including some of my favorites, are read by almost no one at all. But beyond all the rest stands one immense poem about America and Americans, about the Holy Land and Jews, about the specific way the future and the past meet in Jerusalem for all who journey there to seek out its peace.

On the two hundredth anniversary of Melville’s birth, I invite you all, at least a little, to sample Clarel and to marvel at what one man, toiling away on East 26^th Street, could see of the future.