302 Yair Zakovitch
a. During the time that the Bible’s primacy went unchallenged, the Ho-
locaust was left , awkward and shamefaced, in a dark corner. Gradu-
ally, however, the Holocaust emerged from its hiding place, slowly
settling into our lives and pushing the Bible off to the side. As we see
from the overfl owing bookshelves of Holocaust volumes published
in Hebrew, the kingdom of the Bible made way for the kingdom of
the Holocaust: it would seem that two founding myths cannot dwell
together under one roof. Th e Holocaust, which confronts religious
thought with horrendous challenges, was adopted by a secular Israel
that desired security in safe borders, not necessarily those promised
by God in the Bible. Th ese Israelis believe in the security of nuclear
— not divine — power.9
b. Th e Ta n a k h, the pillar of fi re for the Zionist immigration movement,
no longer illuminates the path among contemporary Israelis, many of
whom take for granted living in their own land. Th e Bible, the model
for renewing Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, no longer fi nds
listeners among those born into a sovereign state that has already ex-
isted more than sixty years. Our generation, which avoids outright
calls to aliyah and no longer looks disparagingly at those who leave
Israel, now presupposes this lack of interest in the Bible.
c. Th e ultimate guide for those who cultivate the land and pasture fl ocks,
the Ta n a k h no longer speaks to the hearts of modern Israeli society.
Early Zionists exalted the Jew who left the yeshiva to build roads and
farm the land. But today the people who work construction in Israel
are likely to be Arabs or Romanian guest-workers, and few Israeli live
on farms. What has the Bible to do with the anti virus soft ware and
microchips for which the Israeli economy has become famous?
d. Th e Bible is not the story of the individual; rather, it tells the history
of a people, “the history of Jacob.” In our age that worships the indi-
vidual, there is no room for the voice of nationalism, and not much
hope for the literature of the Bible, which is rooted in a sense of com-
munal responsibility, in the notion that all Israel is responsible for
one another.
e. Now that the illusion of Israel’s unity has grown faint, we no longer
need the conception of the romantic Orient, the East of the patri-
archs that was supposed to provide a common denominator, a single
origin for all Israel. Now that the fi re in the melting pot has cooled,
ethnic identities of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Yemen, Mo-
rocco, Iraq, Poland, Ukraine, and dozens of other places are being