Night of 20th (play) / Yehoshua Sobol

From Night of 20th (play) / Yehoshua Sobol


Akiva: there are barely 30 poor settlements and maybe sixty thousand Jews in all the cities and villages. Yesterday I sat and looked at the calendar… in two weeks it will be November 2nd. The date laughed at me, a fatal laugh… the Balfur declaration… what hopes we had… now the Jewish youth will rise, will come in masses. The Jewish youth continues to live a good life in Vienna and Berlin.

Efraim: a really good life. They live in a fools' paradise. They don't feel that the ground is on fire, right under their feet.

Akiva: we are hiding from the truth. Today I raised my head and looked- empty desolate mountains as far as the eye can see, and we're thrown on some mountain… in Europe great things are happening, the world is being revolutionized, and we have ripped ourselves from the heart of the global drama and rolled to some empty corner. The most remote corner in the universe.

Efraim: right. You prefer a convenient life? I want a life of danger.

Akiva: we need to get up tomorrow morning, and instead of going to fight some Arab farmers for a piece of rocky ground, we need to get up as one, cross Syria, and walk to Russia. Our great deed awaits there.

Efraim: walk to Russia. We have left Europe, slammed the front gate in its face, and you want us to go back to it through the servants' entrance… Europe is cruel and barbaric, and all it can create is a sentimental culture.

Akiva: and us? What about us?

Efraim: we hold in our hands the messianic hope of an entire nation, an entire humanity. What do we want to create here- another Jewish settlement? Something that isn't better or worse than the Jewish community in Vienna? That doesn't give a better answer to our questions than the Jewish ghetto in the Diaspora?

Akiva: and what is going on in Israel? Most of the chalutzim camps have a melancholic atmosphere right now. Sadness, apathy, emptiness.

Efraim: that is all there is? And what about the conversation, and what about the singing, the dancing till the middle of the night, the tough transition to the life of labor, conquering the Hebrew language… it is a social revolution, we are fighting a war of culture against all the other existing Jewish communities in the world.

Akiva: we have faint signs of a social life. Every day people are leaving the camps and moving to the city, to the stupidity and emptiness of the urban party. Looking for the light… becoming bourgeois, Efraim. The soul craves the bourgeois lifestyle…

Nechama: but there is still a ray of light- Dganya…

Akiva: Dganya is an exotic flower. People come and go there, but its spirit doesn't live in the soul of the generation.

Efraim: why talk about Dganya. Take us. Take the meal we have together after a tedious day on the road…. Take the ordinary things- plate, spoon, piece of bread…. These are the channels through which the global erotica comes to us. We have created something that the European culture has long ago lost- the altar of a commune…. The meal… I know- all of these are still only beginnings, attempts, but our deed will stop being just an attempt only when it will be surrounded by a real nation. We will redeem ourselves and the land, only if we will be the urge of the generation.

Naftali: aren't you asking for too much? How will I deal with the urge of the generation when I haven't learned how to communicate with my own little urge…
No, really, I don't know what you want- God takes a whole nation, spreads it all over the world for no reason, kills a few thousands on the way… no evident path, no evident solution… all of a sudden he takes a few young men and women, drags them back to the fathers' land and expects them to start all over. I don't understand. Where does he expect us to take the strength from?

Efraim: from the necessity.