“Is one big fucking mess, Azariah! What order are you talking about? Where the fuck is it? Once, in a raid against the Syrians, we knocked off a few of their soldiers. We set up an ambush for their relief force, and they walked right into it with their jeeps and armored cars like flies into a jam jar. When it was over, we took a dead one—only he wasn’t just dead, his body had been blown in two exactly at the waist—and we put him in the driver’s seat of a jeep with his hands on the steering wheel and a lighted cigarette in his mouth and we called it a great big joke. To this day everyone laughs when they think of it. I wonder what your Spinoza would say about that. That we were animals? Murderers? The dregs of humanity?”

“You’d be surprised, Yoni. Most likely he’d point out calmly, without even raising his voice, that you did what you did because you had no choice. And neither, by the way, had the Syrians.”

“Of course he would. What else would you expect? That’s exactly what the whole world has been giving us from the day before we were born, our parents and our housemothers, and our teachers, and the kibbutz, and the army, and the government, and the newspapers, and Bialik, and Herzl—the whole lot of them. All they’ve ever done is scream at us that we have no choice but to work and fight for our country because our backs are to the wall. And now you and your Spinoza come and tell me the same goddamn thing. Welcome to the party! And while you’re at it, pour me some more whisky. Pour’a a little more’a. Thanks a lot. That’ll do for now. So what else do the two of you have to propose?”

“Excuse me?”

“I asked what the two of you propose. You and your Spinoza. If there’s never any choice and our backs are always to the wall, what do you propose that we do about it? If everything’s so hopeless, why did he bother to write that book and why do you bother to read it like a jackass?”

“Look, Yoni. Everything isn’t hopeless. That’s not what Spinoza says. On the contrary. He specifically stresses the idea of human freedom. We’re free to recognize Necessity and to learn to accept calmly, even lovingly, the powerful, unspoken laws underlying the inevitable.”

“Hey there, Azariah!”

“What?”

“Do you really love her?”

“Now let me tell you, Yoni.”

“Yes or no?”

“All right. Yes. And I love you too. Even if I am a fink.”

“And you love the whole kibbutz?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And this country?”

“Yes.”

“And this whole fucking life? And this rotten rain that’s been falling on our heads like God’s own piss for half a year already?”