Erotic/Neurotic? - Jewish writing and identity

Judaism, Fall, 1999 by Joshua Sobol

I experience within the Israeli cultural domain exactly the clash between those two tendencies. Israeli culture has been very erotic until a certain moment. It was very open. It was very stimulating to others. It was interested in the other and in otherness. Now there is a tendency in Israeli culture to become exclusivist, to close ourselves against others, to separate ourselve from others. This is the recent neurotic tendency in our culture. I hope very much that the future years will prove that the neurotic tendency was only temporary disease. I hope that we can still overcome it.

I believe very much that the quintessence of Jewish writing and of Jewish culture is eroticism, more than anything else. I think the Jew had always that image of being an erotic creature and this is what frightened others, that he wanted to penetrate their culture, that he wanted to change it. It was true. And it was rightfully so, I think, because this is a lively contact with others.

I will end my contribution here with a joke which Kruk tells in his Diary, a most terrible joke. He quotes it to characterize the kind of humor that developed in the Vilna Ghetto. A Jew asks another Jew what's the difference between a partial liquidation and total liquidation. And the other Jew answers: "If they liquidate 50,000 Jews and not me, that is partial liquidation. If they liquidate me, that is total liquidation." When I read this joke in Kruks' Diary I understood what I was supposed to do if I dared to put my hands into the fire and write that play. I had to become as irreverent as could be in dealing with that material. It is the spirit which can send a shiver down your backbone which is the authentic spirit of Judaism. It is that spirit which tells you not to lower you eyes when you are confronted with truth, but to look truth into the eyes. Go all the way with it and you will do your job as a human being and as a writer.

This reminds me of a Hasidic maxim, saying that you should never celebrate finding the truth in the place where you found it because it is no longer there.

YEHOSHUA SOBOL was born in 1939 and is one of the leading playwrights in Israel today, He has written an extraordinary number of plays (35), which have been translated into an astonishing number of languages (25), and has also received an extraordinary number of prizes.