Robert Frost and donkeys in the Knesset

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Israelis will head to their third parliamentary election in under a year on March 2, due to the repeated inability to produce governing Knesset coalitions.

The idiosyncrasies of Israeli politics and this ongoing impasse has reminded me of a visit I made to the Knesset in July 2003 with my brother, Amir Afsai, during which we observed a parliamentary debate about the government’s long-delayed plan to construct a security barrier (geder hafrada in Hebrew) in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank.

Curiously, questions about this barrier – a network of fences, ditches, dirt mounds and concrete walls intended to deter attacks by Palestinians – also revolved that summer around the meaning and significance of the poetry of Robert Frost.

The speaker in Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall” describes a yearly spring ritual in which he and his neighbor work together to repair the stone wall separating their farmlands. The neighbor is adamant about the need for this annual work, twice repeating the phrase “Good fences make good neighbors.”

The poem’s speaker, though, is less certain than his neighbor about the goodness of fences. He twice repeats his conviction that walls are somehow unnatural: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Neither he nor his neighbor has grazing animals, and he sees something insulting in insisting on such a separation between them. He wonders: “Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it/ Where there are cows? But here there are no/ cows./ Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense.”

By the end of the poem, the speaker regards his wall-repairing neighbor as dangerously uncivilized and spiritually retrograde, imagining him “like an old-stone savage” who “moves in darkness”: “I see him there/ Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/ In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed./ He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/ Not of woods only and the shades of trees.”

The first Knesset member we heard referring to “Mending Wall” on the day we visited was Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, a famous refusenik and a Likud party member, who expressed his hesitancy about constructing the barrier. Before cementing his argument, he turned to an analysis of Frost’s poem and a lament of Israeli illiteracy:

“I just want to call here to the Minister of Education and the Chairman of the Knesset Committee on Education … and to say that the debate over the fence requires all of us to once again examine, Mr. Chairman, the issue of reading comprehension in Israel, because at least three or four times I have heard it said as an argument in support of the fence – by educated people, apparently – that even Robert Frost wrote: ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ If I hear this once more, Mr. Chairman, I do not know – I will apparently demand a parliamentary committee on reading comprehension.”

Edelstein continued, explaining the reason for his ire: “They only forget to mention that the one who says these words is the ‘anti-hero,’ the antagonist of that poem by Frost, that hero with whom the poet is in constant debate. Apparently, Robert Frost claims, as we heard just now from the friend of Israel Tom DeLay, that a good fence does not make good neighbors, but only peace – the fervent desire for peace on both sides – makes good neighbors.”

Overall, Edelstein might be said to have provided a correction to the way the poem was often being used in political discussions – but for his additional comment that in “Mending Wall,” Frost conveys the idea that “the fervent desire for peace on both sides” is what “makes good neighbors.”

Frost does not offer a key to what makes peace between people. The poem actually suggests the more complex idea that there may be both benefits and negative consequences to barriers, depending on the circumstances, and therefore people ought to consider what they are “walling in or walling out.”

In any case, maybe Edelstein should have also contemplated a parliamentary committee on active listening. Shortly after his speech, Amram Mitzna, of the Labor party, a former general, rose to declare that he was in favor of the barrier, mustering “Mending Wall” to his cause. He also demonstrated that he had neither read Frost’s poem nor listened to a word Edelstein had just said.

The left-leaning but security-minded Mitzna declared: “It is true that in the world-view I represent, the intention is to separate from the Palestinians and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even in times of peace a fence will be needed, for there is no neighborliness without a fence. This was said before me, of course, by Robert Frost.”

As someone with a literary background, it was interesting to see an American poem assume such prominence in an Israeli political debate. But I also wondered why anyone believed that several dozen lines by an American farmer-writer waxing poetic about his interactions with his neighbor on their idyllic New England farmlands ought to carry weight in discussions about whether to build a barrier between two warring Middle Eastern nations.

Perhaps feeling that Israel’s life-and-death security decisions should be grounded less in early 20th-century American poetry than in biblical exegesis, Rabbi Nissim Ze’ev, of the religious Sephardi Shas party, put aside Frost and instead turned to the Book of Numbers as part of an impassioned plea to build the barrier.

Ze’ev spoke about the role of Balaam’s donkey in preventing its owner from cursing the Israelites as they prepared to enter the Promised Land: “I am puzzled about many Knesset members who do not understand the indispensability of a fence. Even Balaam’s donkey understood and agreed that in order to block Balaam, his hatred for the nation of Israel, he must be taken and placed between walls – a wall on either side. Then they managed to block Balaam.”

But it so happens that in the biblical narrative, the donkey’s attempt to use walls to block Balaam –  who had been hired by the Moabite King Balak – from carrying out a nefarious plot to harm the nation of Israel does not work, and so an armed angel must address the wicked man directly. 

The staunchly secular but erudite Yossi Sarid, of the left-wing Meretz party, who passed away in 2015, lost no time in pointing out the rabbi’s error: “Knesset member Nissim Ze’ev spoke about Balaam, the wall, the donkey and Balak. … And it turns out, for the who-knows-how-many-times, that he did not comprehend at all what was read.

“I suggest you read again the story of Balak, Balaam and the donkey, and then you will understand that you do not understand even this. It is exactly the opposite of what you said, but it is a shame to waste time on this.”

A positive way to look at such parliamentary discussions is to see them as signs of Jewish reverence for texts. It has been a tenet of Judaism that the answers to life’s greatest questions may be found in literature. Maybe this turning to American poetry is indicative of Israelis’ continous urge to justify their state’s actions to the nations of the world, which from that perspective might best be accomplished by using those nations’ literary vocabularies.

Then again, perhaps this focus on Frost reveals a decrease in shared Jewish vocabulary among Israelis. But when even a learned rabbi in the Knesset misreads a basic biblical text, what can reasonably be expected of other members’ Jewish literacy?

SHAI AFSAI lives in Providence.

Israel, Knesset