Defiant Discourse as a Key Scenario in Israeli Culture
As a key cultural scenario, speaking truth to power equips cultural members with strategies that, as Ortner (1973) puts it, “both formulate appropriate goals and suggest effective action for achieving them” (p. 1341). This scenario provides guidelines for how to do things with words in the particularly volatile contexts of political and cultural dissent, which involve a controversy over deeply felt ideological beliefs along with the contestation of social power positions. The emergence of ritualized communication practices in such contexts is of particular interest as this process points to an intriguing possibility noted by Ortner in her discussion of the larger dynamics of symbolic systems. She suggested that the summarizing/ elaborating binary distinction she identified in her analysis of key symbols may become blurred in particular cases, saying: “...a key elaborating symbol of a culture may move into the sacred mode and operate in much the same way as does a summarizing symbol” (p. 1344). It seems to me that parrhesia and dugri speech both provide examples of such a blending of elaborating and summarizing functions in the cultural enactment of the speaking truth to power scenario. Indeed, this scenario provides a cultural template in terms of which oppositional practices find their communicative shape, but it also marks parrhesia and dugri speech as emotionally charged ways of speaking that condense and focalize particular cultural meanings and commitments through ritualized performances of defiant discourse.
Drawing on the power of elaborating symbols to bring out the formal links of disparate cultural phenomena, yet keeping in mind their potential for acquiring condensed emotional meanings, I will proceed by sketching a mosaic of examples that will help me throw further light on the role of the defiant discourse scenario in the action-oriented, transformative project of Israel’s nation-building agenda. I begin by attending to two cultural texts that I first encountered as a student in a regular, non-religious senior high-school in Israel (early to mid-1960s) in the curricular context of biblical studies (Old Testament) and the study of Hebrew literature, both of which were central pedagogical contexts for the intense cultivation of a Jewish-Israeli cultural ethos in a period dominated by the new country’s nation-building agenda. My encounter with these very different texts during my teenage years has been etched in my memory, and I return to them here, reading both of them as socializing texts through which the cultural power of the defiant discourse scenario has become a significant part of my school legacy. Let me begin with the Old Testament example, in particular with the teaching of the late prophets in Israeli secular education. The Bible (Old Testament) is a foundational text in modern Israeli culture (Shapira, 2004), a text that grounds the legitimation of the renewal of Jewish life in the Land of Israel/Palestine since the late nineteenth century. As such, it forms an intrinsic part of Israeli non-religious education, where it is treated as a centerpiece of a national Jewish heritage. It is incorporated into Israeli schooling at the beginning of the second grade, when children have acquired some reading competence, and accompanies them throughout their formal education up to the end of high-school. While obviously part of a religious legacy, the Bible is taught in non-religious schools as part of Jewish cultural heritage and as a literary text, not as a liturgical one. Orthodox
Jewish education, including the curriculum of religious schools in Israel, has traditionally focused on the study of the Talmud, the later religious texts concerned with the interpretation of Jewish law, not the Bible that is part of synagogue-based Jewish religious practice and is not stressed in religious Jewish school learning.
As pointed out by Lammfromm (2017) in a detailed study of the history of the debates surrounding the instruction of the Latter Prophets in Zionist secular schooling since pre-state years, the incorporation of this part of the biblical legacy into the curriculum has been an ideologically fraught affair. These Old Testament Latter Prophets are held up for their moral vision and for their courage and tenacity in propagating prophecies that outraged their audiences (including prophecies of doom, nevu’ot za’am), defying both the power-holders and the social consensus of their times. Complementing these counter-hegemonic, wrathful prophecies that sometimes involved blatant condemnations of the king and/or the populace were solace-inspiring prophecies, nevu’ot nehama, with their visions of a future of radiant peace, harmony, and prosperity. For considerations having to do with the language difficulties associated with the prophetic texts, their chronological place in the overall biblical compendium, but also the message of defiance conveyed by the prophetic figure’s personal revolt, the study of the latter prophets was relegated to the high-school curriculum. During my years of biblical study, and in the ones that followed, I found the tormented image of the prophet of doom, who courageously and stubbornly hurls unwelcome messages at the people around him, especially tantalizing. Looking back, I now realize that in its socializing agenda, the pedagogy surrounding the study of the latter prophets offered students a memorable encounter with the defiant discourse scenario. Whether they berated the king for his policies or the people of Israel for their immoral conduct, these prophecies of doom can be seen as a form of parrhesia, and the biblical prophet was held up as an emblem of the parrhesiastes who is willing to take risks and defiantly challenge public opinion.
The prophet Jeremiah (seventh century BC), also known as the “weeping prophet,”1 stands out in my memory as the most impressive of these biblical voices of defiance. Prophesying the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians, he confronted the people of Judah, reprimanding them for breaking their covenant with God - for worshiping the gods of the gentiles, for their practice of human sacrifice, for the priests’ greediness, and for the disappearance of all social decency. The situation in Jerusalem was as bad as it had been in Sodom, when not one righteous person could be found to redeem that evil city. Jeremiah constructed the situation in terms of lack of honesty and truthful dealing, saying “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city” (Jeremiah, ch. 5, verse I).2 Since no righteous person was in view, Jeremiah reiterated his prophecy of doom in one of its many versions, saying:
Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their back-slidings many.
(ibid., verse 6)
In his theological discussion of silence-breaking in Old and New Testament texts, Brueggerman (2018) discusses what he calls acts of “interrupting silence” by prophets-poets of antiquity. Breaking the silence in those days involved acts of verbal resistance against material imposition and silencing by kings, priests, scribes, and “the crowd.” Jeremiah was one of the silence-breakers mentioned by Brueggerman, who recounts that “In a crisis of war when Jerusalem was under siege, the prophet Jeremiah was labeled a traitor who undermined the war effort” (p. 22), and was put to death at the behest of court officials who complained to the king that his words were demoralizing the soldiers (but his sympathizers among royal officials rescued him from the pit where he was left to die).
Unlike the Greco-Roman or the modern parrhesiastes, who spoke the voice of his or her own conscience, Jeremiah attributed his truth-speaking to a divine calling, claiming that his parrhesiastic acts involved words God had placed in his mouth. Yet like the parrhesiastes who was impelled to speak by a sense of inner-compulsion, Jeremiah, too, felt compelled to give voice to his prophetic vision despite his awareness that he was provoking the outrage of the king, the priests, and the public at large. Feeling debased and persecuted by the people he was sent to warn and save through his prophesy, Jeremiah performed an act of parrhesia toward the Lord himself, complaining in sharp terms of the mission thrust upon him and the people’s response to his prophecy:
You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.
(Jeremiah, ch. 20, verses 7-8)
Of course, much more can be said about Jeremiah’s at once tormented and fascinating figure (e.g., Lau, 2013). For the present purposes, suffice it to say that biblical prophecies of doom, by Jeremiah and others, can be seen as an early enactment of the defiant discourse scenario, marking a deliberate attempt to provoke the outrage of rulers and the people who follow them.
The expressions “prophet of wrath” (nevi za’arri) and “prophecy of wrath” (nevu’at za’am) have indeed been incorporated into modern Hebrew to describe a person or a text that envision future disasters, usually including condemnations of social transgressors whose immorality or bad judgment are considered responsible for bringing about that bleak envisioned future. In English, the term Jeremiad, invoking Jeremiah’s prophecy, is accordingly used to refer to
a long literary work, usually in prose but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.3
In the early days of the Zionist nation-building enterprise, the moral zeal represented by the prophets had considerable cultural resonance and was considered a legacy to be cultivated and promoted among the young. In so doing, school curricula in pre-state and early state years included considerable attention to the Latter Prophets as cultural figures that, inter alia, promoted the cultural model of parrhesia. As Lammfromm (2017) pointed out, ever since the late 1950s, successive curricular reforms in the teaching of the Bible in secular schooling resulted in a gradual shrinking of the role played by the Latter Prophets in the school curriculum. In the latest reform in 2018, these prophecies have been removed from the list of mandatory texts for the high-school matriculation exam, a move that carries a symbolic meaning but which also means that these texts will not be part of most students’ educational experience. Lammfromm attributes the increasing marginalization of the Latter Prophets in the school curricula to a pedagogical concern about tarnishing the image of the people of Israel, who are the target of the prophets’ social and theological criticism. This move seems to suggest that mainstream Israeli culture is no longer as hospitable to the biblical legacy of parrhesiastic critical utterance as it was when the impetus for stressing the Latter Prophets in the Israeli pre-state educational system resonated with the spirit of the Zionist revolution and its parrhesiastic ethos. The diminished curricular standing of these prophetic texts in recent Israeli schooling can be seen as one more cultural indicator of a weakening of the parrhesiastic role in Israeli society (along with the revolutionary dimension of Zionism) in a broader cultural context dominated by the revival of traditional Judaism.4
Another text in which the scenario of defiant truth-telling was memorably modeled for high-school students of my generation, took the form of a short story included as part of Hebrew literature studies, whose protagonist is depicted as a staunch Zionist who gives voice to his ideologically driven revolt against traditional Judaism. Titled The Sermon (Hadrasha), this short story, written by the well-known Hebrew author Haim Hazaz
(2005), was first published in an annual literary supplement of the elite daily Ha’aretz in 1942. Its publication generated a great deal of critical debate at the time and over the years (Laor, 1993; 2009; Parush &i Dalmatzky-Fischler, 2006), marking it as a potent, influential, and controversial text. Originally intended to become a chapter in a book, a plan that never materialized, it nevertheless became part of the canon of modern Hebrew literature. In reviewing the story’s reception on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Laor (1993) described its extra-literary afterlife, comparing it to Orwell’s novel (1984). He pointed out that upon its publication, and for years to come, the story “attracted considerable public attention, triggered a range of debates and controversies, was cited in numerous contexts, and, in fact, became a recognized part of our shared system of signs” (p. B12). The story was reprinted in many anthologies, translated into many languages, and for many years was included in the high-school curriculum (from which it has since been removed). Laor and the critics he cites attribute the story’s popularity to its ideological thrust rather than to its artistic merit, pointing out that it became a code Israelis used to “re-negotiate central components of our collective identity - our links to the past, our identity as Jews and as Israelis, our relations to the diaspora, questions of religion and state, etc.” (ibid.).
The protagonist of The Sermon is Yudka, a Zionist, a hardened stonemason and Palmach [pre-state military underground] member, who is considered a man of deeds, not of words. To everybody’s surprise, he invites himself to a meeting of a committee of local Zionist leaders where he makes a fervent Zionist speech that takes the early Zionist revolutionary stance of the rejection of Diaspora Jewry to an extreme. This sermon-like speech by an unaccustomed speaker, who quite visibly struggles with this verbal task, makes up the bulk of the story. Clearly, despite his lack of eloquence, the burden of his message presses so heavily on his heart that he decides to make his voice heard, giving stark and uncompromising expression to hard-core Zionists’ rejection of traditional Jewish life, depicting the Jews’ existence away from the land of Israel in extremely negative terms. His speech is a blatant articulation of the Zionist ideological position known as the negation of the diaspora (shlilat hagola) that views the life of Jews as a scattered minority among other nations as unproductive, debased, and humiliating. It constructs diaspora Jews as powerless victims of circumstances rather than historical agents, content to assume a marginal place in other nations’ histories, and calls for a new era in Jewish history, one that would sever all links between Zionism and Judaism. Yudka’s rejection of the Jewish diaspora past as a shameful chronicle of suffering and victimhood is coupled with a rejection of the Jewish Messianic faith in divine redemption, which he considers a religionist ploy designed to keep the Jewish people in a passive and quiescent position so as to prevent its active engagement in the shaping of their history. Punctuating the revolutionary dimension of Zionism, he expresses a disdain of Jewish history and rejects the notion of Jewish continuity, saying:
You can’t begin to imagine how much I object to it, how much I disapprove of it, and how much I...I don’t respect it. Look here, think for a minute: what is it about? Well, answer me, what? Persecutions, massacres, martyrdoms and pogroms. And more and more and more of them without end...That’s what it is about, that and nothing else [...] All it has is a mob of beaten, groaning, weeping, begging Jews. And you’ll agree with me that there’s nothing interesting about that...nothing! If it were up to me I wouldn’t allow our children to be taught Jewish history at all. Why on earth should we teach them about the shameful life led by their ancestors?
(p. 237)
Hazaz believed that Jewish life in the Land of Israel, the ancient national homeland, needed to be reconstructed in the spirit of practical Zionism through hard manual labor and a renewed connection to the land and its biblical landscapes. The Sermon depicts a moment of defiant discourse taken to its edge, thrusting into the public sphere a hard-core version of Zionist ideology that was hard to take at the time of the story’s first appearance as well as in later years. Obviously struggling to express himself in an agitated monologue filled with hedges, false starts, and self-corrections, Yudka’s speech nevertheless presents a distilled formulation of this revolutionary spirit, particularly its defiance of the suffering, passivity, and victimhood associated with traditional Jewish life in Zionist ideology. The critical tone of this Zionist parrhesiastes was heard as extreme even within Zionist circles at the time of the story’s publication, shortly before the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust became widely known. The ongoing critical discussion provoked by this story and its afterlife in the following decades (Laor, 1993) suggests that it has indeed touched a raw nerve. Its inclusion in school curricula in the early years of the state, which was supported by some and challenged by others, can probably be attributed not only to the hold of the revolutionary spirit of secular Zionism but also to the fact that the full impact of the Holocaust had not fully penetrated public consciousness. Over the years, the negative attitude toward traditional Jewish life in the diaspora, which was inculcated in the early years of the Zionist revival, paled against the traumatic memory of the Holocaust. The story’s sharp condemnation of traditional Jewish diaspora life was controversial at the time, but would be unthinkable today, so that its removal from the school curriculum is not at all surprising. The Israeli/ Jewish binary opposition that Yudka drew so emphatically is quite unacceptable to most Israeli Jews today; the rejection of the diaspora has been long replaced by a more affirmative, even nostalgic, attitude toward the
Jewish past in the Jews’ various communities of dispersion without, however, denying collective memories of persecution. Thinking back, I cannot help wondering at the inclusion of such a story in the curriculum until the mid-1960s. Laor mentions an article by the late Aharaon Bachar, a well-known journalist, who stated how deeply he had identified with the figure of Yudka when he was exposed to it in his high-school years. The fact that this story was so strongly imprinted in my memory can, on the other hand, be attributed to the deep sense of unease its message triggered in me as a teenager growing up in the home of Holocaust survivors (an unease I could not help experiencing once again in revisiting it as an adult). These very different responses to Yudka’s literary figure are indicative of readers’ polar responses to the story and to the vibrant cultural dynamic it galvanized. Given the turn of historical events, Yudka’s parrhesiastic positioning vis-à-vis traditional Judaism could no longer be read as a cultural revolt and took on the quality of a rather embarrassing, misplaced invective against a ravaged way of life. As I self-reflexively try to reconstruct my interest in this story, I cannot but acknowledge its impact as a memorable literary example of parrhesia that was presented to me at an impressionable age, but I also clearly remember the deep unease it engendered, even though I could not articulate it even to myself at the time.5 Both the dimming of the role played by biblical prophecies of doom, along with the figure of the prophet as parrhesiastes, and the removal of Hazaz’s The Sermon from the literature curriculum, can be interpreted as a loosening of the grip of the defiant discourse scenario in Israeli culture. Today, enactments of this scenario are mostly associated with particular public figures and political dissident groups, including those that lead the unpopular struggle against the occupation that provides the empirical site of my study. Let me, then, turn to a few examples of more recent invocations of the figure of the parrhesiastes in Israeli political culture.
