“You shall be an Israeli, you shall be a soldier” — Borges, Israel, 1969

This poem reads like a prophecy. It was something older — a vocation encoded in a name.

In 1969, Jorge Luis Borges visited Israel for the first time. He arrived as a blind man and left, by his own account, seeing more clearly than before. The trip produced one of his most luminous poems, titled simply Israel, 1969. In it, he imagines what the land demands of every Jew who returns to it — not comfort, not gold, not gardens — but the renunciation of all previous selves, and a single, unambiguous mandate:

…You will forget who you are. You will forget the other you left behind. You will forget who you were in the lands that gave you their evenings and their mornings and to which you will give no nostalgia. You will forget your fathers’ tongue and learn the tongue of Paradise. You shall be an Israeli, you shall be a soldier. You shall build the homeland with swamps; you shall raise it with deserts. our brother, whose face you have never seen, will work beside you. One thing only do we promise you: your place in the battle.

— Jorge Luis Borges, Israel, 1969

Borges was not Jewish. But he was, as he once admitted with a trace of longing, someone who had always felt the pull of that identity: “I have always regretted not being Jewish.” What he captured in those verses was not mere reportage of a young state at war. He captured something structural — a vocation, not a circumstance. A way of being in the world that precedes any particular battle and survives every particular defeat.

The word “soldier” in the poem is a key that opens more than a military door. Borges was drawn to the etymological depths of things. It is worth asking, as he surely did, what the word Israel itself contains.

The Name That Is a Program

The name Israel appears first in Genesis, at the ford of the Jabbok, where Jacob wrestles through the night with a mysterious figure — man, angel, or God — and refuses to release his grip until he receives a blessing. His name is changed: Yisra’el, from the root sara, to struggle, to contend, combined with El, God. Israel means, literally, the one who wrestles with God.

This is not a name that promises victory. It promises engagement. It does not say: the one who obeyed God, or the one who pleased God, or the one who was saved by God. It says: the one who did not let go. The one who stayed in the fight.

If a people takes this name as its collective identity — not as metaphor, but as foundational vocation — then something follows that is both obvious and extraordinary: life itself becomes a form of struggle. Not war, necessarily. Not confrontation. But an active, responsible engagement with the world as it is, in the name as it could be.

The election is an agreement: those who choose this path are chosen because they choose.

Jewish history, read through this lens, is not a series of catastrophes interrupted by calms. It is an unbroken argument — with God, with history, with power, with injustice, and at times with itself. That argument has been conducted in the Talmudic academies of Babylon, in the laboratories of Berlin and Boston, in the dissenting pamphlets of the Haskalah, in the courts of medieval Córdoba, in the kibbutz fields and the high-tech corridors of Tel Aviv. The setting changes. The posture does not.

A Life That Is Not Given, but Taken On

Many peoples understand existence as something received — from nature, from gods, from history — and the good life as living it well within the terms given. Judaism encodes something different: existence as responsibility. Life is not a gift that asks only for gratitude; it is a calling that demands response.

This is not the same as saying that Jewish life is harder, or that Jews suffer more, or are more virtuous. It is to say that the Jewish understanding of what it means to be alive carries an irreducible charge of obligation — toward the other, toward the world, toward the unfinished work of making things better. The Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, repair of the world, is the most familiar expression of this, but it runs deeper than any single doctrine. It is a structural feature of how Jewish ethics conceives of the self: not as a sovereign individual first, but as a responsible agent, always already in relation.

This orientation has expressed itself differently across the great transformations of Jewish history. When the Temple stood, it was ritual and sacrifice. After its destruction, it became text and law. In the medieval world it expressed itself through philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and the creation of dense networks of exchange and mutual obligation across dispersed communities. In modernity it erupted across every field where the world could be questioned, reordered, or reimagined — with a force wildly disproportionate to the community’s size. This is not coincidence. It is the same energy expressing itself through the available channels of each era.

The wrestling........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)