Ben-Gurion once said in one of his dithyrambic moments that here in this country we made a nation out of the human chaff of the Jewish people and turned the Worm of Jacob into the Lion of Judah. That’s no more than to say that you and I were worms and chaff, and these long-haired cretins are the lions that we prayed for. How did Alterman once put it in a poem? “As wondrous as the butterfly’s birth from the worm.” It’s enough to bring down the house, I tell you. Why, the thought of this tiny, ugly, airless, poor man’s America of ours doing its own banal thing …

And you, by the way, you’re to blame too. Nor can you be forgiven. If it had been up to me, I’d have clamped down with an iron fist long ago on all the yowling, all the commercials on the radio. From morning till night this country is being flooded by the most apelike, positively murderous Negro sex music, jungle drums, jazz, rock-and-rock, as if we had come to this land to live in the jungles of Africa and turn at long last into cannibals. As if none of us had ever heard of Chmelnitski and Petliura and Hitler and Bevin and Nasser. As if the last remaining Jews had gathered here from the far corners of the earth for the sole purpose of having an orgy.

Ah, well! This is no time for settling old scores. You too have wearied of tilting against an ill wind. Why, just the other day my older son came to inform me that working in the tractor shed is not for him. And that the kibbutz is not for him either. And that the state of Israel, with all due respect, is just a little corner of a big, wide world. And that he wants to see that world and have all kinds of experiences in it before settling down. In a sudden philosophical epiphany, he came to the earthshaking conclusion that life is short and that one only lives it once. Quote, unquote. And that his own life belongs to him—not to his people, not to his kibbutz, not to the movement, and not even to his parents. Na.

Good morning, Mister Whiz Kid, I said to him. Where have you been taking a crash course in philosophizing? In the sports pages? With some disc jockey? Watching the movies?

Na. He just shrugged and turned to stone.