An Israeli Odyssey
- Uriel
- 22 hours ago
- 8 min read
We walk and talk, but rarely sail – maybe it’s time to weigh anchor? On the existential merits of a maritime mythology the Jewish tale, old and new, has yet to tell.
If being Israeli means booking a hotel room in Jerusalem and then heading down to the front desk to complain there’s no sea view, then being a Jerusalemite means going to Tel Aviv and complaining there’s no mountain air. I belong to the second category, born and bred – yet for fifteen years now I’ve taught at Tel Aviv University, and sometimes, on enchanted nights, mountain air or not, I go down to listen to the murmur of heart and wave.
Living like this, between two cities, invites musings, unsolved riddles, and a few rhetorical questions. Here’s one: what covers nearly three-quarters of our planet’s surface, yet is almost entirely missing from the Jewish story? The answer, of course, is the sea. The Jewish people has no tale of a great, stirring voyage – in both senses of the word. We have no Odysseus.
True, before the nation was born, the sea was present at the creation of the world – in the “beginning” of birth out of formless chaos, and later in the rebirth of humanity out of the Great Flood.
Once the nation did emerge, the sea became the embodiment of the abyss, of chaos, of God’s violent force of nature – dreadful and dread-inspiring. So it surfaces at the founding moment of the nation’s birth, at the exodus from slavery to freedom: there the sea was meant not for sailing but for crossing, for passage on dry ground, because only dry land is safe. So thought Jonah too, who tried so hard to flee a prophetic summons into a terrifying churn of waves, toward near-drowning and being swallowed – into the belly of a great fish.
Maybe it wasn’t that we didn’t want the sea, but that we were never allowed to enjoy it? For the sea is a present absence not only in the mythology of the Jewish people but in its geopolitics too. After all, though the Israelites lived close to the Mediterranean, they never knew lasting, secure control over the coastal strip; the seafaring neighbors – chiefly the Philistines and Phoenicians – were simply too strong.
And today? What a turnaround! Modern Israel is largely a coastal society: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashdod, Netanya, Herzliya, Ashkelon, Rishon LeZion, Bat Yam, Hadera, Nahariya. Most Israelis live not far from the sea; were it not for the traffic – and with a halfway-normal public transit system (let’s not hold our breath) – many of them could drink in the scent of the salt waves without feeling they’d embarked on some intercontinental expedition.
This is an enormous novelty in Jewish history. For the first time in thousands of years, the people’s face is turned not only toward the mountain and God, but also toward the sea – and perhaps toward the world. That opens a possible doorway to the making of a new mythology and a braver undertaking: an Israeli odyssey.
And yet, nearly a hundred and fifty years after the birth of Zionism – almost eighty of them in a sovereign state – we have still not dared to set out on the great voyage of our lives, let alone to tell it. The stories of the clandestine immigrant ships – the ma’apilim of the pre-state years – come closest, and even they are devoted not to the experience of the sea but to the inferno of one land (Europe) and the promise of another: Israel.
The sea is the missing term in our shared story. Curious that in the seafaring tongues, storytelling itself is maritime: to “spin a yarn” is a sailor’s phrase. Ours stays ashore. It seems that now, as then, Jewish culture guards itself against “weigh anchor” and gives itself over to “Go forth”: not sailing but walking; not sea, but desert and mountain.
Perhaps because the sea is never entirely ours, never quite under our control – certainly never ours alone? At times it seems that we, the Jews of Israel, are stuck at that stage of the children’s jumping game “Sea / Land,” with one small twist to the plot: we refuse to leap into the water, and we dread all those scheming to throw us into it. Even an Israeli film that tells the story of a Palestinian boy trying to reach the seashore for the first time in his life sends a shudder through the Israeli government.
But perhaps the reason for our avoidance of a sea-voyage story runs deeper, more symbolic. The sea is an invitation to a frightening exposure – and not only for reasons of modesty. The compulsive pedestrian that I am, I should know. I spent three years as a junior intelligence officer in the Navy and passed nearly all of them like Jonah – in the belly of a concrete leviathan, deep inside the military compound. But on the rare occasions I joined the sailors at sea, I could grasp at least one meaning of setting sail: unlike walking, sailing is a voyage that rocks you. It is the surrender of the illusion of solid ground. The waves see to it that you never feel entirely safe, as though living atop a perpetual earthquake that might suddenly surge and pull the ground out from under you. To sail is to live in doubt, in uncertainty.
The sea’s upheaval is physical and cognitive at once. It is no crossroads where the routes channel you along and the choice is therefore already closed; it is a dangerous temptation to leave everything open. The sea instructs: “It ain’t necessarily so.” Sometimes it calls out: “It could be otherwise.” And sometimes it whispers: “Anything goes.” And along with the wonder at all those possibilities comes the dread before the uncertainty, the perils that swell in proportion to the promise. The sea is an invitation to courage – and sometimes to recklessness.
Coastal cities – port cities above all – stand at the threshold of this temptation: they are the gateway to a future open and frightening alike. Almost like the door of The Law before which Kafka’s “man from the country” waits, the question of the coastal cities – the gates of the sea – is not only whether one may pass through them to it, but why we stand at them and wait.
A coastal city is defined by how it faces the sea beside it. Some cities answer the sea, opening to the tremor of the waves materially and spiritually. Such are democratic Athens, cosmopolitan Alexandria, the Amsterdam of the early Enlightenment, and today perhaps Izmir, San Francisco, Tel Aviv. Other cities exploit the freedom of the sea for the power of rulers – and at times for the people’s welfare, but not for human freedom. Such are Venice, Genoa, imperial London, Singapore.
Still other port cities repress the sea. There is a port, but no horizon. Albert Camus, who at times saw in the Mediterranean an almost metaphysical source of redemption and revolt, described Oran in “The Plague”: “The town itself, one must admit, is ugly … [it is] built in such a way that it turns its back on the bay, so that one cannot see the sea from it, and one must always go in search of it.”
It is instructive to compare pairs of major cities – one set on the coast, the other deep inland – within the same country. In most cases, the former tends to be the more open. Think of Athens/Sparta, Amsterdam/The Hague, Alexandria/Cairo, Izmir/Konya, Shanghai/Beijing, Buenos Aires/Córdoba, and, of course, Tel Aviv/Jerusalem. But geography is not destiny. There are inland cities that made themselves a sea of possibilities, or at least a flow of people, ideas, and goods. Think of Paris, Berlin, Kyoto, ancient Baghdad – even Jerusalem, yearning toward the sublime. The question, then, is not only whether there is a sea, but whether one sees a horizon.
And what of Israel – where the mythological lack of a sea became an existential one? Is it a society that lives beside the sea, or a society at last ready for an odyssey?
A brave odyssey must include a voyage of discovery toward the self – a deep, unsettling, unclothing acquaintance with who we are. For we will never be able to “be ourselves,” let alone “love ourselves” (still less to love our neighbor) – if we do not “know ourselves.” And this is perhaps a knowing in the biblical sense but turned inward: an intimacy of soul out of which we might give birth to ourselves anew.
If we set out on this stirring voyage, we will discover, like Odysseus, a string of trials and perhaps monsters too – some outside us, some deep within. After all, the name “Israel” itself means to wrestle with God – with angels, and with our own demons. If Israel seeks an odyssey of its own, it must be not only a journey of inquiry into who we were, but a reckoning with who we have become, and a true vision of who we are capable of becoming – for the odyssey is not merely a journey home; it is a journey in which home, and the one returning to it, are themselves transformed.
The change is generational, too. We were the Wilderness generation (דור המדבר): a people of walking, of survival, of waiting. We were also the Flood generation: Holocaust, destruction, trauma – and now the Al-Aqsa Flood as well. In recent years we are becoming, more and more, the generation of the Split (דור הפַּלָּגָה): a society of tribes, of camps, of fractures. But perhaps the Split can still be turned into the Sail (דור ההפְלָגָה): not a people torn into camps, but a setting-out together into uncertainty. To those who seek it, the sea hints: “Take your instruments of navigation – a map to know where you are, a legend to make sense of what you see, and a compass to decide where to go; and better not to set out alone.”
Such a shared voyage, almost needless to say, is not merely a romantic metaphor. It is also a political question: who holds the helm, who sets the course, how one keeps sailing even when no one can promise land – and who is entitled to say the captain has lost his bearings. It is striking that one of the first modern laboratories of genuine democracy – and perhaps the most intriguing – was, of all things, the pirate ship, which rejected imperial hierarchy in favor of a different political order, one in which the sailors all made decisions together. Perhaps it was precisely because the ship is no safe land that it became, in itself, an invitation to a fascinating political experiment (and more on that another time).
And here, far from the Caribbean isles, beneath Mediterranean skies, in a land flowing with milk, honey – and blood, the people is a wait, a weight, and a way: a story still waiting to be written, a heavy responsibility for a shared fate, and a movement together toward an unknown future. If we Israelis – Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, right and left – can find the wisdom to set out on our odyssey, we will need courage in abundance as we look into the abyss and onto the horizon alike, only to find the latter more frightening still. The abyss spreads terror, but it is at least stable, and therefore “safer.” The horizon, by contrast, dizzies and frustrates, because it recedes the closer you draw to it. That is why it is so hard, and so important, not to turn our back on it – to look at it with hope, and to weigh anchor.
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