Dorit Rabinyan Quotes

Judaism is a cult religion. There is no evangelizing, newcomers are not welcome. Religious Jews cultivate and practice segregation at all levels. In terms of food, they separate milk and meat. Our weekdays are different. There are various materials that you're not supposed to wear. In fact, there are lots of elements from God's creation that aren't allowed-ranging from certain certain types of fish that you cannot eat to certain types of people you cannot marry. So it's a very isolated position, which means that Jews-wherever they live-often stick together and don't assimilate. I really wish that Judaism could be practiced in the way it deserves, that those who claim to be Jewish could show more respect for the non-Jews around them, for a start. The way I see it, thinking and wisdom are absolutely fundamental to the Jewish attitude. Judaism has been elaborated throughout more than 2,000 years of exile, but now that we've become masters of this country, taken by power, this wisdom has suddenly been forgotten. Look at Jews in Diaspora, in the global society, the fact that they're a minority makes them better Jews...Because they don't see their Jewishness as a passport. For them, Judaism is an obligation to be better people, they don't have a choice. Here in Israel, the Bible is used to suppress other religions, to control other people's lives, to kick people out of their home and subdue an entire nation. Just because you've had this book for so long, and then come back to where the action took place, you feel you can say, 'I'm going to use force, I call on the army!' We're talking here about people who demand land for spiritual reasons, and it's done in such a crude way. That's exploiting the Bible.

Quiet hours and long talks, awash in each other... (ch 14)

There is something so wonderful and reassuring about the organism called "The Family', a multi-limbed, multi-headed creature. It's awful to tear oneself from such a large, warm body, but it is essential for growth. I would very much like to use the 'Me' term, but I can't. It's not accidental that I haven't yet written a novel with a first person singular narrator, only stories told by 'We'.

I work with the Palestinians, I try to communicate, try to be a part of the intellectual movement that wants to build a bridge. But walking on that bridge, or being a brick in that bridge-I'm not sure how much value that would have. I believe in the masses, in what happens in the grass roots.

The old role for writers was linked to nation building. The country was so young, and we needed someone to speak on behalf of the people, but today, the disparity in opinions is so great that no one can claim to hold the absolute truth anymore. I can't stand and say that I know the truth. I feel confused and at a loss, like most people. That's why I practically never write newspaper articles. Nothing here is black and white, everything is shades of gray. Even my left-wing politics are fluid, because everything in society is fluid. I'm no Amos Oz, who's always ready to take a firm stance. I need someone to talk to me. Personally, I prefer listening to academics rather than authors, because academics analyze reality every day. At a political level, he or she is far better equipped to do this than someone who can write a love story that makes me melt. Authors are best at internalization, having empathy-an author who is good is good at a personal level.

The lighthouse of marriage is only one of a host of glimmering lights.

(In Europe, Amos Oz is often talked about as some kind of modern Israeli prophet.) DR: That's because he can't let go of the old prophetic gestures. It's a nice role and he's comfortable with it, and maybe we need him to open people's eyes. Who knows, maybe it's just me who's cynical. But there's nothing prophetic about the rest of us, particularly the younger writers. Your horoscope can tell you more about the future than we can. I don't see writing as a kind of vocation or destiny, but as the only profession that I've mastered. If someone discovers something greater underlying it all, then I've been lucky. But I don't work an eight-hour day in order to deliver a message. I'm trying to find out something about myself, about my life, trying to control something in all this chaos. For me, writing is the only way to give order to my life. To earn a living by doing something that gives me peace, and that makes me happy

Art and literature are about a magical appeal to identity and empathy. How an identity in literature is transferred into your own identity so that you care for a fictional stranger so that you get into his skin and wear his gaze. This is what is so powerful. It is an antidote to the armoury we are requested to put on. This shield of ignorance and indifference and apathy. Because if you really sense everything, if you don’t wear this shield, it is painful.

If you allow only one perspective, you narrow the world. [Then] something is missing for us to interpret our future. Where we are heading.

I don't know anyone, certainly not myself, who would sit and write for eight hours a day, if it were not for some lack, something broken in his life. History of art proves that emotional confusion and a crisis of values are a prerequisite for creation. I create not out of abundance but out of broken worlds. (What is so broken about your world? You grew up in a big, loving family.) There was a kind of weakness, when the home confronted the street. If I had not been the daughter of immigrants, if I were not aware of the gap between Ispahan and Kfar Saba, the tension between what my parents expected to find here and what they found, I would probably not have become a writer. That is the pit out of which I write.

yesterday, in cafés and bars and streets all over town, thousands of other young couples had met, men and women whose paths had crossed and who had spent the weekend together, taking comfort in each other, salving their loneliness in this vast city. That's all, I thought as I sank down and my breathing grew deeper, aligned with his. Just as quickly as it started yesterday, it could be over tomorrow. It could all end with a big hug and a friendly kiss at the door. (chapter 13)

This strange craft of writing stories requires self-belief in these visions that you have

I’ve always been a little bit suspicious, because sometimes this poetic sensibility in Israeli culture turns the conflict into something romantic. There is nothing romantic about occupation and occupiers and the occupied.

All the Rivers touched a raw nerve in Israeli society. The book tries to address the Jewish fear of losing our identity in the Middle East. And yet that very fear condemned it to official rejection. It was banned from the high-school curriculum on the grounds that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten to subvert our distinct identity.” The Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett had claimed that I portrayed Israeli soldiers as sadistic criminals — even though he flatly denied reading the book — and now all the Israeli social networks, news sites and current-affairs programs were discussing All The Rivers.

...my gaze meets the laptop screen and the words I poured out all afternoon. It began yesterday without any particular intent, just a quick reply to my sister. But today when I went back, the email suddenly took on a different form, more feverish, more poetic. I was seized by a storytelling binge, a lucid, cutting clarity, and from page to page the words joined together and frothed and flowed. And it is then that I realize I am not writing to Iris anymore. That the recipient is in fact myself, an as-of-yet unknown self, a me who has long ago gone back to Israel and is living my tomorrow-life in Tel Aviv, a distant me who will one day open up this file and read the words, and perhaps with hindsight have a better understanding of what is occurring inside me now, what I am going through in these mad and beautiful days. She will remember us as we once were, in New York, in Hilmi's Brooklyn studio. She will read the lines and remember how I sat here once on this couch, in December of 2002, like the bird perched on the windowsill all afternoon, and watched myself loving him while I wrote these words. (chapter 14)