Amos Oz sat in Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station one day this zTC winter, waiting for a train while discussing the mystical art of waiting. His thoughts were derailed by the arrival of several families of Orthodox Jews.
The men, in black hats and long beards, stood together, talking. The women rested on benches, near the luggage. And the kids, gorgeous children in yarmulkes and gym shoes, tossed a ball the length of the rail station's great hall, their elders seemingly oblivious to the fun.
Mr. Oz, perhaps Israel's greatest living novelist, missed nothing. Nodding toward them, he said that such Jews, if given to "ultra-Orthodoxy . . . are like the clocks of Hiroshima at the exact second the bombs dropped." Dead in time.
Mr. Oz, who believes that God has no interest in religion, said: "The way they dress is not biblical, it is the dress of the Polish upper class in the 17th century. It is ritualistic, not spiritual. It points to their moment of stagnation."
Also lost, he argued, are the "country club Jews" whose free-fall into the mainstream is spared total assimilation by a few customs hauled out for the holidays.
"Ceremonial Jewishness can not last forever," said the 55-year-old son of a librarian. For the diaspora to remain vital in the modern world -- particularly American Jews who will soon bury the last connections to their Eastern European heritage -- Mr. Oz suggests a path between the extremes. It is a route wending back to the haunting and windswept landscape that starred in his early works, a route to a less-than-perfect dream come true.
The aliyah road to Israel.
The road of return.
A spiritual man given to long, meditative walks in the Negev desert behind his home, Mr. Oz calls his native land a contentious society held together by "a collection of arguments." Within the vibrancy of this debate, he said, lies a future for the modern Jew shaped by the hard and humble work of compromise: "In Hebrew, the word compromise is synonymous with life. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death."
The author spoke half his mind while waiting for a train. The rest he offered to a large crowd gathered at Baltimore Hebrew University to see him accept the 1994 Maurice A. Stiller Prize in Literature. Past recipients include the novelists Bernard Malamud, author of "The Natural," and Aharon Appelfeld, who as a boy, survived the Holocaust by hiding out with prostitutes and horse thieves. On the November night of his honor -- a $1,000 tribute to eight novels, four story collections and numerous essays -- Mr. Oz challenged his audience to "understand everything, forgive some things, forget nothing. . . ."
To ignore the chance to live in an independent Israel, he said, is for a Jew to miss the greatest Jewish experiment of our time.
A combat veteran who favors "patriotism of the forests, the water, the air and the light," over blind loyalty to nation states, Mr. Oz bewailed the blood shed over a small piece of Earth loved equally by its unreconciled inhabitants. Israelis and Palestinians may never honeymoon -- there are far too many fanatics on both sides for that -- but they deserve a fair divorce.
"It's a true tragedy, a clash between right and right," said Mr. Oz, who helped found Israel's "Peace Now" movement. "Peace is something you make with your enemy, not because your enemy is sweet, but because you are looking for coexistence." Compromise, he said, might bring this ancient tragedy to a melancholic ending worthy of Chekhov instead of the bloody curtains that come down in Shakespeare.
For Amos Oz, who is considered something of a prophet at home despite the outrage his work elicits, the problem moves beyond lines in the sand to lines on the page.
"In small ways, choosing words is a moral choice," he said. "Words can kill, this we know. But words can heal. With just a pen, what should a man of words do if he lives next door to injustice?"
A writer must tell a story, where characters reveal truths that headlines can't deliver. "In a book, we find out that we are not alone with our fantasies," said Mr. Oz. "We find that yearnings, frustration -- all of our secrets, are the same. This may help disperse the basic solitude of the human condition. Characters in novels share their secrets with the reader in a way that people closest to ourselves do not."
From 1965, when Mr. Oz debuted with "Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories" through the release this year of "Don't Call It Night," his characters have taken the world into their confidence.
Often, it has been to nettle the very society to which he has invited scattered Jews to join. In his 1982 novel "A Perfect Peace" -- rewritten for the screen by Harvey Huddleston and set for filming in Israel this fall under producer Rusty Jacobs -- Mr. Oz chronicled the yearnings and disillusionment of Yonatan Lifshitz. Both the book and Yoni, the young kibbutznik at its center, are haunted by the suspicion that somewhere a place waits for us that will not wait forever.
"It's a common feeling, a vague yearning for a different way of life," said Mr. Oz. "People dream about a place, but often what they want is to be someone else. We want to go and we don't know where. We want to do, but we don't know what."
What is the thing for which Amos Oz waits? It was not the train that soon arrived to spirit him away from Baltimore as he traveled back to the deserts of Moses. It is something akin to prayer.
"There is a thirst inside of me and I quench it with silence and observation. It is necessary for me to sit and wait, stand and wait, walk and wait, lie and wait. To do nothing else.
"Waiting for what, I don't know," he said, picking up his bags. "If I try to answer the question, I will spoil the waiting."
9- Rafael Alvarez is a reporter for The Sun.