In May The New York Times reported on a list of “pro-Israel/Zionist authors” circulating in the literary world, along with a call to boycott their works: “The title is ‘Is Your Favorite Author a Zionist?’ and reads like a cross between ‘Tiger Beat’ and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'”
Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel features prominently in the list; that is reason enough to buy her books, but it helps that they are both literary masterpieces and thrilling stories. Because of the boycott, I defiantly decided to Station Elevenone of St. John Mandel’s most famous novels and now a television series. The book belongs to the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre and imagines a world where civilization has collapsed and survivors struggle to survive. Mandel’s writing reflects her love for her characters and the result is a deeply human book in which the apocalypse is just a backdrop to a profound and very relatable human drama.
I must admit that in today’s threatening political environment, where so much is falling apart, it takes some courage to read a post-apocalyptic story. And yet it is poignant to stroll through Mandel’s world of lawlessness and decay as we approach Tisha B’Av, the day our own Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and an entire world collapsed 1,954 years ago.
One of the things that impressed me most in Station Eleven is how much tenderness Mandel shows for the world that no longer exists. At many points in the book, the characters born “after the collapse” cannot imagine the things that people in the old world enjoyed: turning on a faucet and getting hot water; flipping a switch and bathing a room in bright light; getting on a plane and reaching every corner of the earth; taking an antibiotic rather than dying of an infected cut. In one particularly harrowing scene, a character named Clark reminisces about snow globes, the kitschy souvenirs, and remarks that before the collapse he would never have noticed even one:
“Clark had always had a love of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He was touched by each object, by the human effort each object had required. Think of the snow globe. Think of the mind that invented those miniature storms, of the factory worker that turned plastic sheeting into white snowflakes, of the hand that drew the plan for the miniature city, of the assembly-line worker who watched the globe slide by on a conveyor belt somewhere in China. Think of the white gloves on the hands of the woman who put the snow globes in boxes, which were packed into larger boxes, crates, and shipping containers. Think of the card games played at night below deck on the ship that carried the containers across the ocean, of a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, of a haze of blue smoke in the twilight, of the cadences of half a dozen languages united by common curse words, of the sailors’ dreams of land and women, of those men for whom the ocean was a gray horizon to be crossed in ships the size of fallen skyscrapers. Think of the signature on the bill of lading as the ship reached port, a signature never seen before in the world, of the coffee cup in the hand of the driver taking boxes to the distribution center, of the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes.”
Clark realises that the world he lived in at the beginning of the 21st century was full of beautiful things, and that it functioned almost seamlessly on a delicate and improbable web of interrelationships built with enormous effort and almost superhuman ingenuity. He realises that all of this was taken for granted, and remembers complaining about his flight being half an hour late, not taking into account that he was in a 300-ton metal monster that somehow managed to fly.
I imagine that the survivors felt like this after the destruction of Jerusalem, churban. This generation saw Jerusalem at the height of its splendor: a city with a population not to be matched again until the 20th century, and the Temple at its center considered one of the wonders of the world. After the disaster, they must have been consumed with regret, realizing that they had taken miracles for granted and treated magnificent rituals as routine. They must have felt unspeakably guilty for not caring for their treasures, for treating them with callousness and entitlement, for failing to recognize how blessed they were.
We constantly hear how bad our world is. Before the 2016 US election, Michael Anton compared America to United Flight 93: hijacked by evil forces and heading for disaster. Instead of letting the so-called hijackers carry out their plan, we had no choice but to elect someone who would crash the “plane” into the earth and destroy the hopeless political system.
Anton sounded like Simon Bar Giora, the zealot who persuaded the Jews to revolt against Rome in a futile attempt. The truth is that neither 21st century America nor first century Judea needed to crash the plane to secure the common good.
We are not doomed. Yes, we live in fear and terror. America’s political system has threatening cracks that are leaving people behind. Israel is stuck in a protracted war. The world seems to have gone mad in many ways – and yet would you rather live in another time? In what historical era were people better off, safer, healthier and more self-actualized than today?
The catastrophic discourse that denigrates our present day is used by both the left and the right. At the recent Republican convention, vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance spoke of how “America doesn’t work.” A poor Appalachian boy from a broken home who went to college on scholarships, became a millionaire and is now vying for the vice presidency is the best proof that America does Work. At the same time, the left demonizes America for racism—a persistent problem, to be sure—but ignores the enormous progress America has made in paying off its “promissory note” to people of color, a term used by Martin Luther King in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. They demonize Western civilization for its slavery and imperialism, but forget that what is unique about our civilization is not the existence of these plagues that have existed since the beginning of time, but their abolition. They call to “deconstruct” (or destroy) a system that, while imperfect, has made steady progress, and replace it with some utopian vision that has never been realized anywhere in the world.
Like the Jews of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., we have forgotten one of the most important human qualities: gratitude. For my part, I fear that an angry God will eventually behave like a parent who has lost patience and say, “You want to cry? I will give you a reason to cry.”
I do not mean to downplay the problems we have, the pain we experience, and the tragedies that surround us. They are all very real and very painful, and we should work to overcome them. But this Tisha B’Av, let us bathe in humility and rejoice in the many overlooked and underappreciated wonders that make up our daily lives. Let us appreciate all that we have, big and small, for Tisha B’Av teaches us that nothing is certain; we can lose everything without ever having enjoyed it. Let us develop what the French philosopher Simone Weil called “a patriotism of compassion,” a feeling of love for our nation(s) that is a “tenderness for a beautiful thing that is both precious and fleeting.”
If we appreciate what we have, perhaps we will not become the Jews of 2,000 years ago, lamenting what they have lost.
Either that or we end up like Clark in Station Elevenand tearfully remembers a snow globe.
Andrés Spokoiny is President and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.
