Last night I had a dream where I was on a subway platform with a lot of other people in a private party and one group of us suddenly announced themselves as Zionists. They wore blue and white hats or armbands and were singing songs, one of them a girl, was a little out of control. I was doing everything I could to distance myself from them, to say, this is not my group.
Then a tall one at their table—now it was a big table like at a party—came over to me and said, Phil, join in. She recognized me, and I sort of recognized her. She was tall and beaky and reminded me in spirit of a neighbor of mine who’s a Zionist, but also of Hannah Mermelstein, an anti-Zionist whom I like. She said, Will you sing the Sabbath song? I don’t know the Sabbath song, I thought, but I nodded, and I said, will you be singing it too, and she nodded and said she would feed me the words. It was still a moment of anxiety, like being in a synagogue and being summoned to the altar to say Hebrew, as one sometime is. I half-remember and half-recognize the Hebrew and try and overcome the awkwardness by singing well in that situation. But it’s not like I have kept up on my Hebrew, the language of my people, as Jeffrey Goldberg puts it. I’ve let that go.
My interpretation of the dream is that it’s about New York (the subway) and my alienation from a lot of my old Jewish NY intellectual crowd over the pro-Israel issue. Many times in recent days, names of old friends have come up and I’ve winced, wondered about talking about them by name on this site, because they are engaged in pro-Israel activities, but I feel some flicker of loyalty to them as friends. The Jewish family issue. The dream is also about the possibilities of ultimate reconciliation over the question. Hannah Mermelstein and my neighbor could not be more different politically. Yet both of them have great compassion: my neighbor for the Jews of Israel, Hannah for the Palestinians of the occupation.