Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature 293guarantee his well-being. Not to worry: the infant does survive, but only
aft er the author has made her gruesome point. What the point is exactly
is debatable, but at least one reading may be that maternal instincts do not
exempt their possessors from aggressive handling of their progeny or ex-
cuse them of responsibility for risking the next generation’s life.
By contrast, in Hareven’s biblical novella Aft er Childhood,39 an aqe-
dah, a son sacrifi ce nearly enacted by a father ( just as in Genesis 22), is
presented as one of the Western sources of male violence. And whereas
Castel-Bloom made up a futuristic fantasy, Hareven invented a diff erent
ancient past. In this Israelite past, she tested the validity of son sacrifi ce
in the “morning aft er” the great adventures, the journey in the wilderness
and the conquest of the land. It is within this tough quasi-historical reality
that Hareven made up — for the fi rst time in her career as a writer — a ma-
triarch, Moran, who deliberately refuses to partake in male pursuit of power,
be it earthly or divine. Th us, while her husband, the victim of the aborted
aqedah of this story, is constantly on the lookout for military might, Moran
refuses to join him on such adventures. When he invites her to partake in
the conquest of a deserted but “well-protected” fort, she boldly states: “If
her master wished, he could visit her at home. She had four small children.
Th e trip was too much for her.”40 Th e demarcation lines seem to be quite
tightly drawn here. Motherhood and male escapades do not mix. Th e male
protagonist predictably meets his death in the deceptively well-protected
fort, whereas the mother continues in her quest, preserving the life of sons
and vines.
What are we to make of these presumably contradictory representa-
tions of the crucible of maternity and violence, of the role of contemporary
“Mothers Sarah” in the sacrifi ce of sons to the Molochs of past or future
“states of exception”?41 What light do these small samples shed on the pop-
ular attribution to women qua mothers of a “diff erent (moral) voice” (Carol
Gilligan) and “maternal thinking” (Sarah Ruddick)? Or on Julia Kristeva’s
diametrically opposite conjecture that women have a special proclivity to
political and religious extremism precisely because of “maternal masoch-
ism”? Moreover, would any essentialist generalization about women’s and
men’s attitudes toward their national sacrifi ce, and through it to the great
existential questions of peace and war, violence and pacifi sm, and other
hoary binaries, pass the test of the historical and literary record?
My answer is negative, as can be surmised. To further illustrate my point,
I conclude with three brief examples from the Israeli corpus. Th e fi rst is
Shin Shifra’s terse poem “Isaac,” hardly remembered today. Published in