homeward bound [I wish I was] the centre of earth

'deterritorializing jewishness'

~!@!~

The Tanach
and other sources of Judaism
reveal certain ideas
concerning The Land
that reflect,
or are parallel to,
primitive Semitic,
other Near Eastern,
and, indeed,
widespread conceptions
about the significance
of their land
to a particular people.

Israel
is represented as the centre
of the Earth ...

The religious man
desires to live
as near to this sacred space
as possible
and comes to regard it,
the place
of his abode,
his own land,
as the centre of
the world.

There are
two diametrically opposed moments
in the Jewish discourse
of the Land.

On
the one hand,
it is crucial
to recognize
that the Jewish conception
of the Land of Israel
is absolutely and essentially similar
and contiguous to the discourse
of the Land of many
[if not nearly all]
"indigenous"
peoples of the
world.

Somehow,
the Jews have managed
to retain a sense of being rooted
somewhere in the world
through twenty centuries of exile
from that someplace,
and organicist metaphors
are not out of place
in this discourse,
for
they are used
within the tradition
itself.

~!@!~

There is
accordingly
something profoundly disturbing
about Jewish attachment
to the Land
being decried
as regressive
in the same discursive situations
in which the attachment of Native Americans
or Australians
to their particular rocks,
trees,
and deserts
is celebrated
as an organic connection
to the Earth
which "we" have
lost.

At
a conference
an aboriginal speaker from Australia
began her lecture with greetings from her people
to the indigenous people of the United States,
of whom there were two representatives at the conference,
whom she addressed
by name.

Much of her lecture
consisted of a critique of the rootlessness of
Europeans.

I had
a sense
of being trapped in a double bind,
for if the Jews
are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel,
as Zionism claims,
then the Palestinians
are indigenous nowhere,
but if the Palestinians
are the indigenous people of Palestine,
then the Jews
are indigenous
nowhere.

engel

09 sep 2005 - bewerkt op 25 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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