On the avenue behind the Habimah Theater, Yolek passed a group of old Jews huddled together on a bench. With their seemingly perpetual display of loathing, despair, and bitter mockery, they might have been drawn by Nazi cartoonists. No doubt worn out by endless argument, they sat in silence, chewing tobacco and staring out into space as if they had read the future there and fatalistically accepted what it foretold.

A religious Jew named Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Yatom, the owner of a small washing-machine agency, had shut down his business and was now staging a hunger strike in front of city hall. That too Yolek had read in his newspaper. The man was threatening to starve himself to death unless the excommunication of the late philosopher Baruch Spinoza was rescinded. The mayor had sent a clerk down to negotiate, but rain began to fall, and the two men were forced to seek shelter inside.

In settlements along the borders, watchmen stared into the darkness only to see more darkness receding. Sitting on piles of sacks and drinking tea in their tin huts, they would murmur to each other in low voices:

“What quiet! Who would have thought it?”

“Maybe this is it at last.”

“Who knows?”

“Anyway, it’s quiet now. Let’s wait and see.”

Opening the party meeting, Prime Minister Eshkol declared, “We, comrades, may well be the craziest adventurers in all Jewish history. Which is precisely why, running as hard as we can, we nonetheless have to run slowly and very, very carefully.”

Very, very carefully, thought Yolek Lifshitz. And that’s precisely why the heart is so chill and will grow more chill yet, as each of us dies in his own corner without a chance to see the end.

When his turn came at last, Yolek spoke about the close relationship of international and domestic problems. While taking a few wry swipes at today’s youth, he reaffirmed his faith in the people’s ability to withstand all internal crises. He also stated his faith in their ability to withstand all external crises. What aroused his deepest anxiety was the prospect of being threatened by both at the same time. We must, he said in closing, remain alert and clear-headed. The younger members of the party must be asked to keep in mind the broader historical perspective. Countless centuries of Jewish history, Jewish suffering, Jewish yearnings, and Jewish tears are looking down, are shedding down, upon us.

It’s not just that we will soon die, thought Yolek as he left the conference room for the bus station. It’s that we ought to die. We have outlived our age.