I made my way to Amos Oz's funeral in Kibbutz Hulda from the city of Rehovot, from a city founded during the First Aliyah (1882-1903) to a kibbutz established during the Second Aliyah (1904-1914). I thought there was something symbolic about that because we are dealing with a great writer here; and as the great writer Charles Baudelaire once said, nature is a "forest of symbols." He never knew Israel. Here, it is not just nature, but the road and the streetlights that are symbols.
In its own way, the revolutionary Second Aliyah erased the First Aliyah and quickly came to lead the Zionist movement, leaving the Revisionist movement on the sidelines until the political upheaval that saw the Right take power in 1977 and that really came about only recently.
Oz documented this transition in his books. In many ways, he made his own similar transition to the heart of the socialist avant-garde, becoming the spokesman and the spiritual leader of the Zionist Left for the last 50 years.
I came to show my respects for one of the most prominent Hebrew authors of the second half of the 20th century. We are a nation that has always believed in the power of the words "to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to overthrow; to build, and to plant," as the Prophet Jeremiah was told at the beginning of his initiation. We formed a covenant with the word, and in recent generations, these words have been formulated for us by our authors and poets. Our nation's resurrection from the ashes came about through the power of the word and initially through literature.
On the way to the cemetery, I looked at the view and the red earth saturated with the rains of the Hebrew month of Tevet that have blessed us in recent days. I saw modest homes and a sign on an old building informing passersby that this was once the site of a large chicken coop, some 100 yards long, where chickens would lay eggs. Through these sights, I tried to imagine a young Oz arriving at this kibbutz in the 1950s and later retreating to begin work on his literary enterprise.
Now interred, he enjoys "a perfect peace," like the title of his book that focused on life on the kibbutz and the gap between members of the founding generation and their children, and the burden imposed on the children by their fathers was often too much to bear. All around me stood women and men with silver and white hair, a disappearing generation of pioneers. Facing the bouquet-covered grave, my sense was that this was the end of an era.
Next to me stood the new CEO of Peace Now, Shaqued Morag, holding a bouquet of flowers to place on the grave of one of the founders of her movement. I have never before felt the tangible change of the guards in Israeli society as much as I felt it on Monday, standing by the freshly dug grave of Oz. This changing of the guards is necessary and vital to our existence as a nation that desires life. The nature of the world is such that leadership groups rotate under the stretcher of our ancient people.
Later, those in attendance sang from the Book of Psalms, "Who is the man that desireth life, and loveth days, that may see good therein? Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it" (Psalms 34: 13-15).
And suddenly they burst out singing:
"Here in the land of our loving forefathers
All the hopes will come true
Here we will live and here will create
Lives of glamor, lives of freedom
Here the spirit (of the Eternal God) will dwell
Here will blossom the language of the Torah."
And an echo was heard from the mountains of Gush Etzion: Amen.
And when I left the kibbutz, the signs pointed to the roads leading either to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, with Amos Oz in the middle, resting in peace.
