299Chapter 17
Scripture and Israeli Secular Culture
Ya i r Z a k o v i t c h
“In the beginning was the word,” was the book — the Hebrew Bible, which
provides the foundation of our being. On that foundation Jews built, layer
upon layer, the cultural house of the people of Israel: translations of the
Bible, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Jewish-Hellenistic literature,
all the genres of rabbinic literature from all its periods both in aggadah
and halacha, ancient liturgical poetry from the land of Israel ( piyyut ), each
layer both feeding from the Bible and returning to illuminate it. Israel’s cul-
ture is like a many-branched tree, heavy with fruit, whose trunk is the Bible
and whose roots reach immeasurable depths.
And then one day an axe was raised and the branches lopped off , leav-
ing only the tree’s trunk, the Bible. In the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, secular Jews in Europe came to associate rabbinic literature
with narrow-minded orthodoxy. In particular, secular Zionists in the early
twentieth century wished to disassociate themselves from the shtetl, from
the life of traditional Jews in eastern Europe, which they identifi ed with
rabbinic Judaism and rabbinic texts. Th e Jewish library that had been writ-
ten since the sealing of the Bible until the modern age was cast away, disre-
garded like an object of no value. Haim Nahman Bialik mourned the rejec-
tion of the Jewish library in his poem “Lifnei Aron Ha-sfarim” (In Front of
the Bookcase):
Do you still remember? — I have not forgotten
In an attic, inside a deserted beit midrash
I was the last of the last
on my lips fl uttered and died a prayer of the forefathers,
before my eyes the eternal fl ame was extinguished. 1