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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE GoD YOU BELIEVE IN FAILS? ÖR THE ideology, once taken for granted as a narrative of the past and a projection for the future cannot explain what is happening in the present? The difference between what is imagined and what is real generates a deep feeling of loss, something that has become a defining characteristic of the Israeli experience. When I say loss, I am not talking about the death of parents or of children who are buried by their parents in a country still at war. I am referring not to the end of life so much as the ending of a set of values that have been taken for granted as critical in shaping the nation's identity. Not that everyone meets the standards set by these public values but almost everyone acknowledges their pre-eminence. Judging by two Israeli ideals that bracket the country's seventy-year anniversary and that seem wildly different-utopian socialism now buried by the entrepreneurial spirit of the start-up nation-it is striking to note the common ground both share. Both are imagined as the normative grid against which individuals are measured and as a collective dream everyone possesses.
No one captured the agony of living with the loss of this normative grid better than David Grossman in the "Sticker Song".1 Perhaps he thought that only lyrics blasting out a series of brutal slogans in rap could deliver the truth about Israeli society and the fractures that provoked a sense of dislocation as profound as any in the past. No celebration of diversity, the "Sticker Song" is a lament for the losses suffered by people trying to bypass politics and ignore the idealistic visions that once gave Zionism its momentum. Perfectly poised for the present contentious moment, David Grossman has marked the fifty-year anniversary of the Six-Day War with "Yesh-Matzav" ["There is a Situation"],2 a rock 'n' roll commentary paying homage to Zionist hymns and religious scripture, and urging Jews and Arabs to share the burden of forging a common destiny. Öne of Israel's preeminent novelists, Grossman has become a kind of prophet for the causes he champions and for the country whose flaws he laments where Israelis, worn down by "Ha-Matzav" [or "The Situation"]3 think nothing can be...