HARD ON THE NERVES
You can tell the good Kibbutz, says one of the Israeli scholars during a colloquium on Kibbutz ideology, by the fact that it’s hard on the nerves.
A simple statement, perhaps characteristically Jewish. (After all, how could anything possibly be of value if its weren’t hard on the nerves?) Yet it fascinates me, both for its poignancy and for its reverberations into all of life. For when, as now, greed and an empty‑headed professionalism rule and it takes so much courage on the part of individuals merely to live decently, respecting friends and neighbors and the value of life itself, the decent life itself is „hard on the nerves.“
It is, in fact, the psychological fact which unites all those who wish to live in some sort of congruence with values beyond the crass spirit‑ annihilation of consumerism and defensiveness… it is hard on the nerves. Somewhere a culture may yet arise in which the spirit of generosity, of peacefulness, of the ecologically and conservation‑oriented state of mind known as caritas will be easy on the nerves. But it will require a culture, a social and economic fabric, opposed in almost every way to the present world order. It will require a world in which language itself is restored to both its original seriousness and its original playfulness‑‑ i.e. allowed to stand for its truest intentions. And, in such a perhaps utopian world, it will be the divorce (rather than the congruence) between the word and the deed which will be „hard on the nerves.“
But what would it take to have such a culture, such a world? Certainly, on a private level, a new sense of what it means to be a man or a woman, of what it means to be fully, androgenously human. But perhaps also something far more radical than that‑‑ say, a entirely new order of power and significance over the entire globe. Or, perhaps, a new concept of God. Or, more simply, a world in which man no longer emerges (or, at least, perceives himself) at the crest of a hierarchy of beings, in which no one has the power, or the right, to destroy what lives beneath him. Better yet, a world in which the very word „beneath“ has been rendered meaningless, returned to the large and palpable silence that preceded its original utterance…
That kind of world would, pardon my Hebrew, be rather easy on the nerves.