My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (14 page)

But Shmaryahu Gutman knows that Zionism is in trouble. Although it has fended off the Arab revolt of the 1930s and brought forth the economic miracle of the 1940s, history is closing in on the audacious Jewish national endeavor. The Arab threat has not vanished. It is clear to the Zionist leaders that when the Second World War ends, the brutal conflict over the fate of Palestine will be renewed.

Yet the Arab threat is not the only one. Rommel’s Afrika Korps has just managed to pummel the British defense line not far from Benghazi, Libya. While in the summer of 1941, it seemed the Germans might attack Palestine from the north, it now looks as if they are about to invade from the south. Faced with an Arab threat and a Nazi threat, it is clear that without the use of force, Zionism will not prevail. It will go down in history as yet another movement of false messianism. This is why the
youth of Israel must be prepared. Only the sons and daughters of Zion can save Zionism from utter destruction.

The Palestinian guides lose their way. The day turns to dusk. After two short stops at desert springs, the column arrives at the Bedouin camp it was supposed to have reached at noon. Some of the travelers want to stop for the night. The camels are exhausted and refuse to go on. Despite the setback, Gutman is determined to forge ahead. After all, this is the very reason he has brought these cadets to the desert: to steel them, to strengthen their resolve, to teach them not to recoil from adversity. When the sun goes down, the trek will continue by moonlight. If the camels refuse to carry the load, the young men will shoulder it themselves.

Now the journey is totally altered. The navigation mistake, the delay, and suspicions regarding the Bedouins demoralize the hikers. They have been on the road since 3:00
A.M
. The previous night they had not really slept. They experience anxiety and fatigue. Their eyes can hardly see in the pitch-black night. Their throats are parched because of the shortage of water. The straps of their heavy rucksacks cut into their shoulders. The air is salty. The desert is filled with chasms and ravines. There is no plant life, no animals or birds to be seen. There are just the heavy footsteps of a column marching on.

Gutman, of course, does not know that on the previous Tuesday, January 20, 1942, fifteen representatives of the ministries of the Third Reich gathered in Berlin’s Wannsee Villa to formulate the Final Solution. He does not yet know that the deportation of Jews to the east has begun, or that within six weeks, in a small redbrick building in a remote camp named Auschwitz, a first gas chamber will begin to exterminate Jews. But Gutman does know that Zionism’s bleak forecast regarding the future of European Jewry is becoming reality. He knows that in every country they take, the Germans mark Jews, gather them, and concentrate them in ghettos.

Because he has a profound understanding of history, Gutman realizes that for the Jewish people the current world war is going to be far more significant than the previous one. He sees that what is happening are not the customary anti-Jewish pogroms of typical European wars. Something is happening that has never happened before. Tens of thousands of Jews have already been murdered, and their numbers might
soon rise to hundreds of thousands. If the Red Army does not block the Germans in the Crimea and Leningrad, disaster is imminent. So it is not only Zionism that is at stake. For the Jewish people, the year 1942 could turn out to be the worst year since the destruction of the Second Temple. It could turn out to be the most catastrophic year in the Jews’ catastrophic history.

As Gutman watches the hikers, he understands how difficult the journey is for them. They are not adept at walking in the desert as he is, and they have little experience with thirst and fatigue. The slopes of Masada are frighteningly steep, and the ascent will be difficult. The sliver of moon that has just appeared above is too weak to light their way in the menacing dark. Many are soaked with sweat, their breathing labored. Some stumble, some fall. After sixteen hours of walking, the forty-six are not far from breaking. But they are made of stronger stuff than that. Those born in Palestine’s spartan twenties and shaped in Palestine’s violent thirties have grown to be rock hard. Brought up on the values of strength and fortitude that define the new Hebrew culture, the cadets are tough and determined. Even when their legs betray them, they continue to march. Even when they fall, they get up again. Gutman smiles as he looks at them. As he tells me in an interview conducted in the early 1990s, he finds in their shining eyes the determination he had hoped to find.

Gutman is not naïve. Having grown up beside the malaria-infested marshes near the Valley of Harod, he has always known that Zionism is a struggle. Living under the hateful gaze of the valley’s Arabs, he has always known that at its core Zionism embodies conflict. Yet he has always believed in the desperate energy of Zionism. He believes that the essence of Zionism is momentum—never to retreat, never to rest, always to push forward. The new Hebrews must push the limits of what the Jews can do, of what any people can do. They must defy fate.

But now Gutman feels that Zionism’s vector of energy is about to run into a wall. The forces closing in on the audacious national movement are just too strong: the Arab front, the German front, the collapse of European Jewry. The challenge facing his cadets is unprecedented. The thought of it actually makes Gutman shiver. Twenty years after it arrived in the valley, Zionism once again demands of its followers total
mobilization and sacrifice. Coming from the valleys and the orange groves and Tel Aviv, the hiking youngsters do not realize that their very existence is in peril. They are bursting with the gaiety of Zionism’s decades of success. They are drunk with the experience of Hebrew renaissance and Hebrew creation and Hebrew triumph. But not long ago Gutman has heard Yitzhak Tabenkin say that “We are upon the abyss,” and Berl Katznelson say that “No man of words can express the horrors of these times, the great fear that engulfs us.” So Gutman knows that he has but a short time to transform these youths. It is his role to anoint them as the guardians who will stand at the gate when the time comes.

Gutman’s choice of Masada has a personal dimension. At the age of sixteen, he collapsed while participating in an early Dead Sea trek and never made it to the summit. The young man made a vow to return. When he did, several years later, he nearly lost his life but managed to reach the top. The few hours he spent on Masada changed his life. He somehow felt tied to this terrible place. In the nine years that have passed, the mountainous fortress has not let him go. Often he dreams of it, and he has waking visions as well of the ancient site. He has come to believe that Masada is the true heart of the land, the crux of the Zionist story. But only in the past year has Gutman realized the opportunity to engrave Masada on the collective Jewish psyche just as it has been engraved on his own. After the early tour of October 1941, he sent an official proposition to the national leadership, and after much lobbying he raised the necessary funds. So now he can connect the different paths of his life; he can unite the educator with the historian with the amateur archaeologist. He can draw a direct line between the horrific act of
A.D
. 73 and the heroic challenge of 1942. He can bring Masada back to life and make it the formative site of New Zionism.

Like the shadow of a hulking, sunken ship, the shadow of the mountain appears. Fatigue is forgotten, replaced by song. Suddenly walking is no longer difficult for the youth movement’s leaders as they approach the silhouette of the fortress of tragic Jewish sovereignty. A fire already dances at the foot of the mountain, lit by the front guard that arrived earlier. The rebels of the Second Temple used to signal to one another with such fires. Lamdan’s Masada poem is also replete with such fires. But here are the flames of the first fire of the new Masada. When they
reach the fire, the forty-six hikers take off their rucksacks, unroll their blankets, and set up camp for the night.

At dawn, Gutman warns his disciples that climbing Masada is dangerous. Some have climbed and died. From now on, each climber must take care of himself and must take care of the next climber as well. Danger lurks at every step. Gutman recites Lamdan’s poignant lines about the “remnant of slaughter” that climbs the tall wall of Masada.

The youngsters standing at the foot of Masada are all too familiar with the morbid words of the canonical text now being read by their mentor. They were raised on these lines, they memorized them in school, and many still know them by heart. But now, under the mythological fortress itself, the words acquire new significance. They sound like the anthem of a desperate people coming to the desert to look for a last refuge.

For several months now, I have been studying Masada, the Masada ethos, and Gutman’s Masada journey. I have read all I could find in the relevant archives and libraries; I have interviewed anyone who could still be interviewed. I reread all of my notes from my lengthy interviews with Gutman, conducted shortly before he died. I assembled this historical puzzle piece by piece. And yet, even after all my research, it all seems inconceivable. Events that took place in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, undertaken in a rational and practical manner, are already steeped in the aura of mythology. The more I learn about them, the more distant they seem to me. In an era of criticism and cynicism and self-awareness I find it difficult to truly comprehend the cadets’ state of mind as they prepare to climb Masada for the very first time. Yet I realize that this paradox is exactly the essence of the Zionist Masada; it is a modern, secular icon that transcends modernity and secularism. It is an artificial symbol that transcends its artificiality. What Gutman is doing in bringing this young, idealistic group to this desert ruin is using the Hebrew past to give depth to the Hebrew present and enable it to face the Hebrew future. In order to achieve a concrete, realistic, and national goal, Gutman imbues the fortress with a man-made historically based mysticism.

The ascent begins from the east. The long column of khaki-wearing youngsters climbs up the white rampart the Romans built to strike the fortified wall of the zealots’ fortress. When the column reaches the chasm between the rampart and the summit, the effort intensifies. The first five hikers strike the rock face with their picks, then hammer in pitons and tie ropes and drop them down for the others.

What makes the task especially difficult is the heavy load that must be lifted to the top: tents, blankets, canned goods, water, rucksacks, arms, and ammunition. The youngsters create a human chain that enables them to pass the load, hand to hand, to the top. Gutman finds the sight of the chain inspiring. “The chain was not broken” is a line from Lamdan’s poem, and Gutman is about to establish it as the generation’s motto.

Gutman instructs his cadets not to look back, not to look down. Advance, only advance. Onward and upward the forty-six go; they reach the wall, climb the wall, then at last find themselves on Masada.

It is Gutman’s third time at the summit, but he is just as excited as when he first stood here nine years ago. The desert ridges and the terrifying gorge and the quiet silver wavelets of the Dead Sea stir in him a feeling of unfathomable heartache. As he recalled half a century later, Gutman is bewitched by the eight Roman compounds that surround the lonely mountain. Even after being neglected for 1,869 years, the sight feels stifling. It feels to him as if the hundred thousand Roman soldiers of the 10th Roman Legion are still besieging the one thousand defiant Jews; and he feels just as clearly that mighty historic forces are once again closing in on the Jews of Palestine.

After a few moments of looking down from the wall into the gorge, lost in thought, he shakes off his hallucination and goes back to what he must do as leader. The youngsters do not share Gutman’s profound anxiety or ecstatic vision. But they are excited to see the desert hills painted pink by the setting sun and the remnants of Herod’s buildings that have survived two thousand years at the summit. Gutman must see to it that this youthful joy does not get out of hand. It will be dark soon, so camp must be set up rapidly. Gutman divides his cadets into several work
groups. Some gather firewood, some bring water from the wadi, some pitch tents within the fortress ruins. They improvise a table, a kitchen, a classroom. As the sun sets, the camp takes shape on Masada’s flat summit. And when dark descends on the mountains of Moav, Gutman feels pride in the tent camp that has risen among the ruins. The youngsters light a campfire and sing and dance.

Then Gutman addresses the group. He tells the tale of Masada and its heroes. “Our tent, too, is pitched on the abyss,” he says. When he is done speaking, he steps back into the darkness and watches the dancing begin anew. It is a rousing performance. Eyes afire, feet as light as air. The young boys and girls of Israel have returned to Masada to dance with abandon on the abyss.

Gutman is no dancer, but the spontaneous ritual is exactly what he wished for. For he knows that Zionism has no church and no theology and no mythology. He knows that Zionism is on the brink and needs a poignant symbol that will be a substitute for church and theology and mythology. In Masada he finds this symbol that will unite and inspire Zionism’s followers. He finds a pillar for Zionist identity that is at once concrete, mythic, and sublime. In Masada, Gutman finds both the narrative and the image that will give the young Hebrews the depth they lack. Masada will captivate them, empower them, and galvanize them for the challenge ahead. This tragic mountain will give meaning to their struggle. In the name of Masada the dancing boys and girls will fight the cataclysmic war that will save Zionism and save the Jews.