Religion is a central element in the Jewish civilization, perhaps even its origin, but that civilization cannot be presented as nothing more than religion. From the religious source of that civilization grew spiritual manifestations that enhanced the religious experience, changed it, and even reacted against it: language, customs, lifestyles, characteristic sensitivities (or perhaps it should be said, sensitivities that used to be characteristic), and literature and art and ideas and opinions. All of this is Judaism. The rebellion and apostasy in our history and in recent generations - they are Judaism, too. A broad and abundant inheritance. And I see myself as one of the legitimate heirs: not as a stepson, or a disloyal and defiant son, or a bastard, but as a lawful heir.
And what follows from my status as an heir will certainly cause you people great unease, for it follows that I am free to decide what I will choose from this great inheritance, to decide what I will place in my living room and what I will relegate to the attic. Certainly our children have the right to "import" and combine with my inheritance what I see fit - without imposing my taste or preference on another heir, on you for one. That is the pluralism I praised earlier. It is my right to decide what suits me and what doesn't, what is important and what is negligible and what to put into storage. Neither you, nor the ultraorthodox, nor Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz can tell me, in whatever terms, that it's a package deal and I should take it or leave it. It is my right to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And from this follows another fateful spiritual decision: can any civilization survive as a museum or does it only live when it wears the garb of dramatic improvisation?
A museum curator relates ritualistically to his ancestral heritage: on tiptoe, in awe, he arranges the artifacts, polishes the glass cases, cautiously interprets the significance of the items in the collection, guides the astonished visitors, convinces the public, and seeks, in due time, to pass on the keys of the museum to his sons after him. The museum curator will proclaim, Holy, Holy, Holy. And he will proclaim, I am too humble to determine what is important here. It is my lot only to see that the light of this inheritance shall shine in as many eyes as possible, and that nothing is damaged or lost. Up to this point I have presented a drawing (sketchy and simplistic, for the sake of argument) of the museum curator. But I believe there can be no vital existence for a museum civilization. Eventually it is bound to shrivel and to cut off its creative energies: at first it permits innovations only on the foundations of the old, then the freedom is restricted to the freedom to interpret, after that it becomes permissible only to interpret the meaning of the interpretations, until finally all that is left is to polish the artifacts in their cases.
A living civilization is a drama of struggle between interpretations, outside influences, and emphases, an unrelenting struggle over what is the wheat and what is the chaff, rebellion for the sake of innovation, dismantling for the purpose of reassembling differently, and even putting things in storage to clear the stage for experiment and new creativity. And it is permissible to seek inspiration from and by other civilizations as well. This implies a realization that struggle and pluralism are not just an eclipse or a temporary aberration but, rather, the natural climate for a living culture. And the rebel, the dismantler, is not necessarily perverted or trying to assimilate. And the heretic and the prober are, sometimes, the harbingers of the creator and the innovator.
On this we disagree, at the root of the matter: Museum or drama? Ritual or creativity? Total orientation toward the past - "What was is what will be" - i which every question has an answer from the holy books, every new enemy is simply a reincarnation of an old familiar one - or not? Can it be that history is not a spinning wheel but a twisting line, which, even if it loops and curves, is essentially linear, not circular?
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