Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz

oppressed countries as well as among young world-reformers in better-fed lands.
    And this tribal feeling (we have barely emerged from being a tribe and not yet reached the level of being a nation) creates a perpetual intimate warmth which is sometimes necessary and comforting and sometimes sticky, irritating, and disgusting. It is the feeling that ‘we all depend on each other’. It is the feeling of ‘family shame’ that overtakes millions of people here every time some Jewish thief or embezzler is apprehended. And it is the pride (tinged with petty jealousy) that the whole tribe experiences on reading that some local cow or bridge-player has broken a world record and thereby ‘enhanced our national prestige’, as the President of the State will put it in the congratulatory telegram he will send them. Every failure is ‘a stain on the family honour’. Every achievement is entered on everybody’s personal record card. Such is the close intimacy which - why should I deny it? - I detest and depend on. I can’t live with it and I can’t live without it: the crush of the tribe, its soul-searching, its warmth, its shelter - and its body odour and bad breath.
    Of course, we are prey to those ancient Jewish diseases which Zionism set out to cure by a change of conditions and climate. One of them, perhaps the most repulsive, is the petit-bourgeois sickness which makes ‘upright Israelis’ force their offspring to take piano lessons and learn French and make a good marriage and settle down in a quality flat in a quality job and bring up quality children, clever but devoted to their family.
    Who would be so naive as to imagine that this Jewish sickness, which infects us more than any other people, could have been cured within a single generation. But, after all, even this sickness has not made us subside into an overfed stupor. No. We have no rest. We have no rest from our troubled conscience and our soul-searching and our self-flagellation and our alternating fits of apocalyptic rage and visions of salvation: ‘We shall be a light to lighten the nations even though all the nations are threatening to close in on us tomorrow or the day after and annihilate us ...’
    In what other country in the world does a noisy parliament assemble every morning at every bus-stop, in every queue, in every grocer’s shop, amid the violent crush and sweaty pushing and jostling, discussing and arguing and quarelling about politics, religion, history, ideology, metaphysics, the meaning of life, the true will of God, furiously, sarcastically, while all the time the participants in the debate elbow their way to the head of the queue or rush to grab a free seat.
    There are now 157 or 162 independent states in the world, both new and old. The vast majority of them are under the sway of oppressive regimes, slavery, mass-brainwashing, ruler-worship: in one way or another the image of man is effaced in them. In the whole world there are only 25 or at most 30 countries where - even if in the big cities the image of man is effaced by loneliness and alienation - the citizens have a chance of thinking, changing, ‘breathing’. Let us never forget that Israel belongs to this small minority. We may not be very high up in the league, but at least we are in it. It’s not a simple matter, nor is it self-evident. Nor, incidentally, should we ever take it for granted: it’s easy to slide downhill.
    There is, of course, a tension of contradictions and paradoxes. Take the question of our self-definition. This Jewish State, in the 29 years of its existence, has never come up with an answer to the legal-bureaucratic question ‘Who is a Jew in the eyes of the law?’ Not because of party politics, but because this is only the tip of the iceberg of the really tricky question: ‘What is the law in the eyes of the Jew?’ That is to say, are we inside religious law or outside it? For the time being we are both inside and outside. Apart from a militant minority