At first, reading The Unmaking of Israel feels like walking in on argument. The book seems start in the middle and to only accelerate from there. Beyond that, it makes no apologies or what it is not: It is not a survey of Israeli or Palestinian history. It is not a book interested in taking all sides into account. Rather, The Unmaking of Israel, is a detailed, unsparing, but not un-hopeful history of all the ways the Jewish state has fucked itself up.

In its tone, in its willingness to acknowledge painful details, in its depressing demonstrations of how one small misstep can lead to a much greater one, The Unmaking of Israel reads a bit like an addict taking stock after years of oblivious blundering and well-intentioned plans gone awry. The book is, almost in a literal sense, an accounting of failures – Gorenberg’s 250 pages of prose are weighted by 65 pages of notes, bibliography, and other detailed sourcing. The notes add heft to what could otherwise come off as a somewhat untethered screed or rant.

Before I go on, I should say a little about my own views. I love Israel and call myself a Zionist. I am not the kind of Zionist who is interested in minimizing the plight of the millions of Palestinians who have been starved and bombed and otherwise ruined by 45 years of Israeli subjugation (some would say longer; they would have something of a point). I’m a two-stater; I think the settlements need to go, preferably all of them, preferably today; I don’t believe that Israel is an apartheid state today, but know that soon enough, if big steps aren’t taken, it could be. I’m for people, not for land. And as a Jewish person with strong emotional and strong family ties to Israel, I want nothing more than for the Jewish state I love to be a healthy liberal Democracy, untethered by the misguided settlement enterprise and the absurd demands of a super-religious minority.

I’m writing here in part because I want to flex brain muscles that haven’t been used in a while — my days writing for a Jewish newspaper are a ways behind me. So please, if I say something you find abhorrent or factually wrong or insufficent, please let me know. Back on topic: I found The Unmaking of Israel to be more than sufficient, but my favorite thing about the book was not its intellectual rigor, but rather its urgency. You can tell Gorenberg loves Israel and is scared for its future. His passion and his frustration resonate on every page, in every sentence. He writes about Israel in a definitively moral way – and he does so without the moralizing that plagues a lot of writers who are trying to get at similar points (Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart, despite their differences, come to mind.)

Gorenbergs’s ire is aimed mainly in two directions: first, toward the settlement movement, second toward the irrational grip that the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, hold on Israeli public affairs. But to even call those two separate directions is misguided. As Gorenberg demonstrates so clearly, everything in Israel is connected. The culture that allows the settlement movement to continue unabated despite every parcel of common sense indicating that the settlement movement is a terrible mistake is the same culture that funds the blood-sucking Haredim and allows their apocalyptic bullshit to seep into the country’s most important institutions: schools and the military.

I took a lot of notes about this book, and was going to turn this post into some sort of long, terrifyingly boring and reductive ramble about the structural problems of Israel’s government, etc. etc. Instead, I’ll say two things: The most compelling point I think Gorenberg makes is one about narrative: Israel, he writes, needs to graduate from being a national movement to an actual nation. Until the self-perception is of a country that is established, as opposed to a people scrapping for recognition, progress will not be made. This manifests itself in the settlement mentality, or the idea that settlers are merely continuing in Israel’s great tradition (the one that helped lead to Israel’s very existence), as opposed to putting Israel’s security and economy at risk. It also manifests itself in the ultra-religious view that Israel as a land is more important than Israel as a state with a government, or Jews as a people.

Anyway, I’ll now get to the problem I had with the book. Gorenberg, in his final chapter, lists three things Israel must do to fix itself. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, evacuate the West Bank, and work out a reasonable two-state solution. Second, it must separate synagogue from state. And third, it must take that final step ins elf-perception: In Gorenberg’s words, “graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a Democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.” These are wonderful solutions. They are well-thought out. They are eloquent. They are intellectually honest. But they are difficult. They are immensely, immensely difficult. You can (and should!) read an excerpt from this chapter at Slate.

Gorenberg does not tell us what he would do to to establish a new narrative, to unhinge synagogue from state, to pull Israel out of the West Bank. From where I stand, these things seem impossible without a willing and ambitious government. Such a government is only electable by a willing and ambitious people. For a million reasons, I don’t see this happening. Maybe Gorenberg does, though. Maybe he sees a different path to a secure, democratic, Israel. I’m going to see him speak here in Seattle tomorrow night. Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to ask him.

The atmospherics were killer. I’ll check out the movie versions. The main character was exceedingly Daniel Craig.

From GulagHistory.org

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?

The cold stung. A murky fog wrapped itself around Shukhov and made him cough painfully. The temperature out there was -17;Shukhov’s temperature was 99. The fight was on.

I’m the kind of person who is rarely satisfied with his job. The novelty usually wears off a few months in. Soon after that, the challenge of the work itself wears off too. I get restless. I begin to question the purpose of the work, how it affects my writing, whether the work I’m doing amounts to anything at all. Basically it infuriates me to no end that in order to live decently, I have to devote about half of my waking life to a job I’m not personally invested in; to a task that does little to make me a better person or the world a better place.

Reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich should then have made me grateful for working in a room that is somewhat chilly, but decidedly warmer than a prison camp in Siberia. After all, I am a man who’s warm, not a man who’s cold. At work, I sit in a comfortable chair. There is free coffee. Subway may be the only nearby restaurant, but it sure as hell beats oatmeal and fish stew. I’ve been at my current job for seven months, the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere full-time. Instead of grateful, however, Ivan Denisovich leaves me somewhat perplexed at my own inability to make the best of a not-bad-at-all situation. The man who’s warm is not supposed to be jealous of the man who’s cold.

This jealousy — jealousy might be too strong of a word; admiration might be better — is rooted in the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s approach to work. In hard work, Shukhov, can find the simple and desperate satisfaction that is otherwise absent from his life. Work is a means of survival – a way to stay warm; to secure more rations; to make himself forget, even for a little while, the cruel monotony and hopelessness of his life in the gulag. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a book about surviving and the way to survive is to  work.

Shukhov and his squad are allowed basically no time to think. Their lives are dictated almost entirely by guards and routine. (At one point, for example, the narrator notes that prisoners do not have watches because watches would be pointless in the camp.) To survive in the gulag is to let go of one’s preconceptions about dignity and submit to authority. Best to go unnoticed. Best find your scraps of dignity elsewhere. In work, for example. Shukhov is a mason. He lays bricks. He has trained himself mentally and physically to find immense satisfaction in a hard day of physical labor. For he knows that to think beyond the day’s work — about his wife and daughters, for example — is to make himself miserable. He knows that work is the best way to warm his numb fingers and toes, to secure for himself the respect of his squad-mates, and to simply make the day disappear.

Despite the fact that he is imprisoned for “spying,” Shukhov is in many ways the perfect teammate, the ideal Soviet worker. He is cunning and self-interested but he is also loyal to his squad and dedicated to his craft. He is content to give himself completely over to work. At no point does the book move any faster than when Shukhov is frantically laying bricks with his team, racing to build a wall faster than his squad-mates could mix mortar down below him and send it up in wheelbarrows. Solzhenitsyn’s pacing turns the scene into a sort of climax, which is a sad commentary on Ivan Denisovich’s life, but makes for good reading:

And now Shukhov and the other masons felt the cold no longer. Thanks to the urgent work, the first wave of heat had come over them – when you feel wet under your coat, under your jacket, under your shirt and your vest. But they didn’t stop for a moment; they hurried on with the laying. And after about an hour they had their second flush of heat, the one that dries up the sweat. Their feet didn’t feel cold, that was the main thing. Nothing else mattered. Even the breeze, light but piercing couldn’t distract them from their work.

My instinct is to wish I shared Shukhov’s ability to make peace with his circumstances, to wish that I too could simply shut everything out, disappear into a simple task and know with certainty that nothing better than that task awaited. If only I could make life as simple as brick, mortar, brick mortar, brick mortar. But the trouble with not being in a Russian gulag is knowing that something better does await you. It makes taking Shukhov’s approach to work impossible. Work is a necessity, but also not especially dire. (This isn’t to say I don’t value work. Without a job, I tend to feel fairly worthless.) Howw then, do I approximate Shukhov’s apparent inner peace?

The closest personal parallel I can draw to the experience of laying bricks in below freezing temperatures in Siberia is rowing boats in the early mornings in Seattle. When you hit the dock at 6:30 it’s still dark outside and still cold. Everything is wet, even that which is supposed to be dry. Before the work of rowing, you must do the work of preparation. The oars, with their frozen handles, must be carried from their hangers to the dock, which is sometimes glazed with ice. Then the boats must be lifted from their racks up to your shoulders and trudged out to the water. Your fingers are numb from turning tiny metal screws to adjust foot stretchers and seats, from pinching plastic spacers in and out of oarlocks. Every action is regimented and directed. The language is important: gunwales and riggers and starboard and port. Then you get out on the water.

Rowing is complicated but it is also repetitive and physically demanding. Brick. Mortar. Brick Mortar. Eventually you reach that first wave of heat. The feeling comes back into your fingers. My desire to be more physically fits has become a secondary motivation to this feeling. I get my pleasure from the rituals: from loading and unloading boats, from struggling to take and then repeat a perfect stroke, from gliding across the water alongside ducks and seagulls, from the collective struggle to stay balanced, from suffering the wakes of larger boats and then fighting through and finally feeling warm.

But rowing is a hobby. It may be physically challenging and involve lots of absurdly laborious routines, but it’s still something I pay to do. It’s still the kind of superfluous luxurious activity that someone with a sedentary job, a sedentary life would seek out. It’s not work, but an approximation of work. It’s ritual for the sake of ritual.

In Ivan Denisovich, ritual is more than that. It becomes a sort of necessary trance. Things are tough – Shukhov must sew bread into his mattress so that it is not stolen; he must hide blades in his mittens to keep guards from confiscating them. These are the realities of the camp. These are mandatory for physical survival. But for emotional survival, one must look elsewhere; one must look to places that only a man who’s cold, a man who’s lost all autonomy can access. Ultimately, these are the places I am grateful I have never been.

A Baptist in Shukhov’s squad convinces himself that he is lucky to be in the camp because it allows him more time to meditate on the miracles of Christ. A former Navy captain is unable to succumb to the realities of the camp and is sent to near-certain death in prison. Shukhov himself has work. He has ritual. Warm, cold. Hungry, fed. Brick, mortar.