Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

few vague ideas about his country—was not enough. He needed an idea. This led him to a store in Tel Aviv where they sold the writings of a rabbi, Yehuda Leib Ashlag, whose readings of Kabbalah and Marx led him in the 1930s to a kind of mystic socialism. Eran picked up a pamphlet called
Th
e
Book of the Giving of the Torah
, in which the rabbi argued that altruism was at the center of the Jewish religion. “We must understand that all of the commandments of the Torah are no more and no less than the sum of the details to be found in the one commandment ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ ” wrote the rabbi, echoing a much older lesson taught by the sages.
    Altruism, like everything else, proceeded in steps, he wrote: first you love your immediate family and then your more distant relatives; then you learn to love your country and then the whole world. True altruism becomes possible in the third stage, because when you are part of a nation you give to people you don’t know. That is why the Torah was given not to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, who were just patriarchs of an extended family, but much later, to Moses in the desert of Sinai, when the Hebrews had become a nation of hundreds of thousands.
    The rabbi agreed with much of Marx’s thinking, though he observed that the implementation of this thinking in Soviet Russia showed that people weren’t ready yet. But he was optimistic. Humanity, he wrote, is “climbing up as if on the steps of a ladder,” and this was the thinking behind Marxism and also behind the Torah;
Th
e Ladder
was the name of the rabbi’s most important book. He identified two forces at work in the machine of human development. One, egotism, is a negative force that leads people to take care of themselves and destroy their neighbor, and the other, altruism, is a positive force whose highest expression is giving to others without expectation of receiving anything in return. “The egoistic force acts like the centripetal force, pulling things from outside a person and concentrating them inside himself,” he wrote in one of his essays, “and the altruistic force is like centrifugal forces, flowing from the inside of his body outside; these two forces are to be found in every part of creation according to its substance, and also in the human being according to his substance.”
    Eran brought the pamphlet to the outpost, kept it in his webbing, and read it when he could, sitting on the soiled mattresses under fluorescent lights, sneaking a cigarette in the yard between tasks, flicking the ash between his scuffed boots. He divided the men at the Pumpkin into two groups: the ones trying to do the minimum and make it home safe, and the idealists, who were committed to something larger than themselves. In hours spent arguing with the others about this he forged the following conclusion: He was there not for himself, not for the respect he received when he returned home, and not even for his friends. He was there
for the country
. This was the highest altruism he could imagine from where he stood. He volunteered for everything.
    Before first light one day, someone shook Eran awake and told him to take over one of the guard posts for Readiness with Dawn. Eran didn’t think it was his turn, and he was exhausted, so he argued and tried to go back to sleep. In the end he was forced to concede. He loaded his rifle and trudged up the stairs to the dark trench, angry with himself for resisting. He was here for the country, and his own fatigue should have no meaning. He had been weak, and in his memory this is how he left the Pumpkin—after descending a step on the ladder, after letting himself down. The night sky lightened.
    A few hours before, around 3 a.m., a lookout using a thermal camera at the Pumpkin’s surveillance post had seen seven figures leave Nabatieh, the Shiite town, on foot. The lookout was certain they were guerrillas. They were heading for