1.
We all exist in time, meaning that we are living with an awareness of the passing of time. For brief moments during the course of our lives, we sometimes stop and our imminent end flashes before our eyes – the mortality of man. Then, in those moments, it suddenly seems that the priorities that have driven our daily routines are completely wrong. These are the kinds of personal, existential issues that touch every human being.
But Jewish civilization has added the additional burden of the idea of collective time – links that join together an imagined collective, from the dawn of our people and onward. It is not enough that we feel the mental burden of our individual passing time, we are made to feel responsible for the passing time of our entire nation too.
A significant portion of our actions as individuals is influenced by thoughts of those who came before us and those who will remain here after we are gone. It is like that old man in the famous midrash, who justifies the fact that he plants trees by saying that he found the world full of trees when he first arrived. "Just like my forefathers planted, I will plant for my sons," he says, even if he will never get to enjoy the literal fruit of his labor.
2.
Collective time manifests in the concept of a "generation." It is the individuals – men, women, children – who exist in a certain time period, representing a segment on the collective continuum of the nation's existence. With time, the word "davar" entered the Hebrew language, literally meaning a letter carrier, or postman. But the similarity between the word "davar" and the word "dor" (the Hebrew word for generation, which is actually spelled exactly like the word "davar," only with different vowels) can be interpreted as a letter being carried over to the next generation. Not any letter, but THE letter – one that holds all the wisdom, the knowledge, the culture, the faith and the experience that has been accumulated until that point in time, and are now being passed down. In other words, the word generation implies tradition.
And if a generation is a link in the chain of time, "dor vador" or generations and generations, is a multiplicity of generations, or an eternity. That is why this phrase is included in oaths and pledges. "And he said: 'The hand upon the throne of the Lord: the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.'" (Exodus 17:16)
The unifying factor in a generation is a shared spiritual and cultural biography. It is not any one individual's life experiences, and it is not the unique fate of the individuals, but rather shared historical events and a shared cultural climate that influences the entire generation. It is on this dichotomy of the individual versus the collective – on national and social crises alongside unusual historical leaps and paradigm shifts – that a generation constructs its sense of identity. Not everyone identifies with this identity, but even those who try to rebel against it can't escape acknowledging it as the thing they are rebelling against.
The Jew, therefore, exists on two time planes: the personal time and the collective time. While this can be inspiring and produce genius invention, it can also do the opposite: stifle to the point of making a person want to push back and destroy everything. The seven decades of the State of Israel's existence may lend themselves to seven different time periods, with each decade its own period, but that would be an arbitrary and artificial division that don't correspond with the heart of the concept of a generation.
3.
Israeli society exists on the tense distance between the long history of the Jewish people and the short history of the renewing Jewish state. The relationship is between the "eternity" and the time that can be measured by the flesh; between the collection of all the generations, which we can only imagine, and the generation that exists now; between the diachronic outlook that meanders back and forth between the generations and the synchronic outlook that observes living, contemporary figures. It is the tension between mythos and logos.
These are not cliches. Seventy years are a lifespan of an individual, but only a link in the generational chain – a generation, two or three at most out of many (the number of years that is defined as a generation changes periodically). A generation is not a hermetically sealed unit. It is open on both sides, preceded by those who came before and succeeded by those who come after.
There are generations that choose to describe their collective experience with tales of rebellion, patricide, a new world built on ruins of the old world, a new Jew distinguishing himself from the old Jew, a generation of redemption that broke free of the chains of exile. But the truth is that the differences, even if they are quite significant, are just one tiny aspect of the entirety of a generation, which largely rests on the preceding generation, and, in fact, on all preceding generations. Even the most rebellious generation holds within it the lives of those who lived before – their achievements, their investment and their beliefs. In order to rebel against something, you have to contain inside you the thing you are rebelling against. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob didn't just continue the legacy of his father Isaac and his grandfather Abraham. He also held Esau inside him. It was only after he acknowledged the Esau aspect of himself, using his own interpretation, that he was able to reconcile with his red headed brother.
While it is true that the previous generation's baggage is concealed; the old is pushed aside to make room for the new, but if we delve deeper into the characteristics that define a generation, we will find how the treasures of the previous generation have melted into it, even the ones it rebelled against. What is a kibbutz, for example, if not a modern, secular hasidic movement? What is the iconoclastic behavior that we witness from time to time if not an interpretation of the second commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"?
4.
Every generation views the generations that preceded it as dry bones. But those bones comprise a skeleton that holds this generation up. In Hebrew, the difference between the word for bones – atzamot – and independence – atzmaut – is only one letter. Could we ever have risen from the ashes had we not held within us the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in his vision? The generation of the national revival could not have resurrected without standing on the shoulders of its forefathers and foremothers in all the previous generations. Herzl would not have been able to mobilize a single Jew were it not for the oath of the generations that had been imprinted into our blood year after year – we shall not forget thee O Jerusalem, lest we become lost in time like many great civilizations that existed but exist no more.
There is no Israel without Judaism. Sure, a person can proclaim to be an Israeli and not a Jew, but that is a choice made by individuals. The age-old phrase "knesset of Israel" that is attributed the Jewish people can be interpreted as an ingathering of the souls of all the Jews from all the generations. The nation, as a collective, holds an ingathering of all the generations. It cannot erase the active connection – an existential connection – with everything that has been created by it in is thousands of years.
Just take the most trivial, simplest example, that we still consider a miracle – the Hebrew language. Even the most far-flung Jew, living in the most distant spot on the earth, uses the ancient language, the sacred language, the language of the Bible and the prophets. It is the language of the Midrash and the Talmud, and the language of of the Kabbalah and the Middle Ages all the way to the present day. "A generation that inherited the most fruitful of all our sacred traditions – our language – cannot, even if it wants to very badly, live without tradition," concluded Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem in 1926. So as aforementioned, the word "generation" houses tradition within it very prominently.
Everyone wants to be individualistic. Everyone wants to be one of a kind. But our success would be much more profound if we operate from an awareness of existing on the generational continuum of our people. A drop of water does not have the power that a drop of water in an ocean can possess. The latter is still unique, but its strength and vitality are infinitely amplified.
