In the summer of 1972 I spent two months teaching horseback riding at Camp Alonim, the children’s camp of the Brandeis Camp Institute in southern California only forty miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The large property includes 3000 acres of undeveloped land populated by oak, pepper and eucalyptus trees, a large cactus garden, an orchard of oranges, grapefruit and avocado, open wheat fields, meadows and canyons, grazing cows and horses, all resembling the terrain of the Land of Israel.  

As a member of the barn-staff, I rode a 7 year-old Rhone mare named “Princess” and led the campers on 4 rides daily – 2 each morning and 2 in the evening, except on Shabbat. At times, I took Princess out for a run on my own. She loved to gallop at full-speed, and her gait was so even that it felt as if I was floating with the wind.

          This is me on Princess – Summer of 1972

This past Shabbat I picked from my home bookshelf an old paperback called Modern Hebrew Stories – A Bantam Dual-Language Book (NY: Bantam Books Inc., 1971) that I had read more than 50 years ago in Jerusalem during my first year of study for the rabbinate at the Hebrew Union College (HUC). Dr. Ezra Spicehandler, a Professor of Hebrew Literature, was my teacher and the Dean of HUC. He was the editor of the collection of stories.

One story that especially moved me, though I had forgotten it entirely, is called הנמלט  – The Runaway by Yizhar Smilansky (1916 –2006), known by his pen name S. Yizhar. The story focuses on the experience of a beautiful white stallion who breaks free from his boorish master’s farm and simply runs.

S. Yizhar was an acclaimed and talented prose writer in the first generation of Israeli authors. Born and raised in the agricultural settlement of Rehovot, he was awarded the Israel Prize for fine literature in 1959.  He served as an intelligence officer in the Haganah during the 1948 War of Independence and as a Member of the Knesset in the Mapai Party of David Ben-Gurion from 1949 to 1967. He was a senior lecturer of education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a full professor at Tel Aviv University.

As S. Yizhar described his story’s magnificent runaway horse, I recalled Princess, the immense joy I took in her, and I ruminated over the wider significance of the Jewish people’s return to the Land of Israel and the freedom from oppression that the white horse’s liberated run represented mythically in the history of Zionism. More specifically, I considered how this story, though written in the first half of the 20th century, carries meaning today in the midst of this awful war against Hamas.

I was so moved by S. Yizhar’s writing that I wanted to share some of the story with you so you can also experience the joy of unrestrained liberation that the writer projected onto his magnificent stallion, an ecstasy that I felt riding Princess when she would take off into the wind. 

On a personal level, taking the time to read this story on Shabbat offered me a reminder not only of my beloved Princess, but that all of us, I think, need to be able to find the means to transcend the burdens that so often oppress us and a measure of release from the torments that weigh down our hearts and spirits – as this war most certainly does for the people and State of Israel.

At the end of the story, this magnificent beast “with a flame flecked tail” that had escaped his autocratic and mean-spirited master, was found, returned to the farm and secured more tightly than ever to prevent his escape again.

S. Yizhar’s name came to be associated with a political position that morally objects to expelling Arab inhabitants from the Land of Israel-Palestine – a theme that is still poignant, especially in light of today’s extremist, supra-nationalist, messianic, Israeli settler movement that gathered this past week in the thousands in Jerusalem’s large Binyemai Ha-uma auditorium to celebrate wildly and without regard to the somber mood of the nation during this ongoing deadly war, when the hostages are still missing, and so many Israeli soldiers’ have lost their lives and been injured and Gaza is in ruins with many dead civilians. This movement of Jewish extremists claims that it will do a tikkun, a “corrective” to the 2005 unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza. They intend, if given the power, to expel all Arabs from the Gaza Strip and resettle it only with Jews. S. Yizhar’s story is mythic on one level but also a real-world warning not to forget that the Land of Israel-Palestine is the Homeland not only of the Jewish people, but of the Palestinian Arabs too, and though a two-state solution seems so very far away, still the dignity of those Palestinians who are not murderous towards us Jews requires our respect as we require their respect for us as a people and nation.

Here is a portion of the story as translated from the Hebrew by Yosef Schachter (1901-1994), an Austrian rabbi, philosopher and educator who immigrated to Palestine from Vienna in 1938:

“…the runaway got away…wherever he was running. The sun had risen quite high by now, and the sea breeze was blowing in strong playful gusts. But nothing stirred; everything remained motionless, purposeless, but out there, where we couldn’t see from here, something was running. Whatever was not stirring here was running out there, running like a deer, running like a lion, like the wind, running free. And on account of him, everything had stopped dead here.

Ah, there’s so much space for running over there! What would you know about that? If only you knew, you wouldn’t stay on here another moment; you’d be twitching to tear away at a gallop. It’s so wide open for galloping out yonder, away from this place here. Ah, yes, just to gallop, plain and simple. There’s nothing simpler and more straightforward. No obligations whatsoever, no need to arrive anywhere, nowhere particular you have to get to, no duties to perform, or what they call “objectives,” no time limit, nothing at all like that. Can’t you see what that means? Don’t you realize? No? Well look here: after all…everything’s wide open on every side, to the right and to the left and straight ahead and all around, and this sense of being free encompasses you totally, the warmth and the blue and the gold. What more can one wish for? Always there’s this gentle breeze coming in from the sea, fluttering like a lively girl’s dress even if it’s a bit dusty. Of course, but it’s a fragrant dust, with the grasses and shrubs nodding their heads in approval as it puffs by and skips away, charged with the warm, bluish oxygen. Out there at last, you can start galloping to your heart’s content, to the full stretch of your imagination, and you no longer have to follow any set path or road, keep to any rut or groove or anything of that sort. There’s nothing to stop you: it’s just wide open, open and warm and vast. You don’t have to get anywhere, reach any place; all you do is just gallop. So go galloping, young man! Gallop, son! No restraint and nobody to stop you. No accounts to render and no regrets. You just live your running to the full. You become everything you have ever wanted to be deep down inside you. Out there, whatever has been quivering inside you, whatever you have ever longed to be, to attain, comes into being in that wondrous running. Nothing to stop you. You won’t stop in the noonday shade of a thick-branched sycamore to rest among the heat-weary sitting underneath it; you won’t crouch down to munch green grass, or sip a drop of water; you won’t encroach on your neighbor’s plot or whinny to your mate. There’s only you, wide open to run your race under God’s warm sky stretching before you in utter perfection. And beneath that sky, the earth stretches in warm, dusty reaches, and at last there is breathing space for anyone who craves to breathe freely. That’s all there is: a running field that is boundless, a vast openness, shoreless like the sea, the ocean, the sky, like the limitless sky itself.

I don’t know what else there is to say, and there’s no need to either… why all the talk?… It’s only that he is out there racing, he is out there running, singing as he runs, singing out to the world, and maybe he’s not singing at all, and it’s his running that’s singing his song to him, as he swallows up the distances, his drumming hooves stirring up a light dust in the gold of the warm fields under the warm golden sky out there, outside, outside, outside…

Ah, do you know what it means to run! If you’ve never run you can’t know what it’s like. Just like somebody who’s never been swimming can’t know. Once someone has run he knows how it feels and he keeps hankering for more. How all of a sudden you are in the open. All of a sudden you’re in it. Wide open, and everything is permitted. Wide open and you’re in it. All of you inside the possible. Suddenly you are lifted into the possible like… what shall I say?… like someone plunging into the sea and he’s in it, surrounded and swallowed up by it. All of him becomes what the sea is. All self becomes the sea’s self. All that’s specifically he becomes one with the vast specific, which encompasses him effortless, endlessly. If you understand what I mean. I myself understand it. One moment I do and the next, I don’t. It isn’t at all something you can understand or not understand. Hell. No. It’s being rather than understanding. That’s it. Like… I don’t know… actually it’s like being in the sea with water all around you, and you breathe the water in, battling to keep afloat on your back whether you want to or not. And it’s all the same to the sea – your caring or your not caring doesn’t affect it the least big; it remains changeless, not even scratched, not every the faintest smile. But you care. Oh yes, to you everything matters. Your heart beats are now absolutely different. All those heartbeats of if-only-I-were change into heartbeats of here-it-is-at-last, and this-is-it. THIS IS IT. And you say: O God, let it go on, don’t let it stop! (Because deep down within you there are always those shadows flitting across your heart, shadows of doubt and disbelief. It can’t be–they say to you–you’ll see it can’t be, it can’t last, you’ll see it won’t last, you’ll pay for it before long, you’ll see how soon you’ll pay for it–and they give you a thousand reasons why, those hovering shadows. It would be much better if you could look away from them before they get a hold on you and effect you. Come, let’s ignore them). And what now?

What now? You keep running, of course. O Lord, at long last here it is. This is it, and you – incredibly – are in it my son, part of the running, swept along by the if-only-I-could which you have always yearned for. Do you know what that means? What if it means to get there? But it isn’t getting there-that I am talking about!–on the contrary, you never get there. There’s no such thing as a point or line you arrive at, that your reach and stop at, as if “there” is a kind of place you come to and say, “So far” and no further!” Nothing of the sort. There’s no such thing out there. On the contrary: yonder’s the place where there is no destination. It’s the place where everywhere you are is your point of departure, the place you start out from. It’s just like…how do I know?…it’s as if somebody had run out of dry land and had come to the sea, and one starts anew. You cross over and start from the beginning. And you’re in the new, and in what is beyond it: in the different, the newly begun, the beautiful with an air of this-is-the-first-time, in the all-encompassing, the flowing.

O Lord, how he broke loose and ran! Ran like the best of dreams. Ran, broke free, free as the fullness within him, leaving everything behind – all of us: me, you (you too, my friend!), everything, the old, the necessary, all that is held to a single plot of land, the commonplace which comes and goes mechanically, dented and used. All the “this-is-not-what-we-imagined” which has vanished. All that has been left behind and saws away as it pleases – but now, finally the beginning starts, the opening – that isn’t as yet that is just now starting off and will be and will arrive and is all involved in the possible, amen, all in the “maybe, yes,” in the maybe this time. O Lord, why not, perhaps this is the time; perhaps this is the possible. Perhaps yes. Perhaps yes. Maybe we can do it now, O my God, maybe yes.

…You must know, realize it to the depths of your soul, that such a place does exist, and it’s not beyond the mighty hills, either; it’s there for anybody who wants to go there. Away from all the highways and byways. There’s the real wide world, rich and beautiful. The whole wide world rather than some measly road…

…To be alive and not sluggish. Free and not bound. To be like the dolphin slithering through the wind-tossed sea, or soaring free of heart like the falcon into the wind, with the blue airy abyss below. To be at one with the incessant chirping of the cricket,… to be swept along in this flowing movement, this running, to be carried aloft, to beat upward and fly–beyond all fences and all enclosures and all allotments, and the duties and obligations, out into the wide open. Ah, yes.”