This week, one of our greatest living authors delivered Jewish Book Week’s keynote speech. Howard Jacobson’s address argues for a new positivity towards Jewishness and Israel. Today, the JC publishes it in full.

If asked to name what Jews were best at, I used always to say “argument”. Disputatiousness is our element, I insisted, but I don’t expect you to agree with me.

Today, less glibly, I’d say something different. Today I’d say that what defines Jews essentially is disappointment. Disappointment, the non-fulfilment of expectation, is the mournful poetry of the Jewish soul. Not only what we’re good at, but what explains — what helps explain, at least — how it is, to the disappointment of others, that we are still here.

I am not a scholar of Jewish thought, unless being an old Jew makes me one. I am a novelist: I read a bit, listen a bit, and make the rest up. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once told me he thought I’d make a great rabbi. I told him I thought he’d make a great novelist. We were only half-joking. Jews only ever half-joke. Which is a subject for another lecture. So I’ll add “rabbinic potential” to the list of what qualifies me to give this one.

The subject of my novel this evening is the story of ourselves we’ve been telling since we let God down at the dawn of time, five or 6,000 years ago by the Jewish calendar, an approximation that might be on the short side but is still long enough for disappointment to have become a habit.

It was more recently, while reading a reprint in the Jewish Quarterly of the great Israeli novelist David Grossman’s 1998 essay, which at one and the same time celebrated and mourned Israel’s 50th birthday, that the centrality of disappointment to our people, not only as an emotion but as a tool of thought, dawned on me. To Grossman, Israel’s achievements are almost miraculous. But its failures, its missed opportunities, its discordance, fill him with despair. “An evil wind is blowing through the country,” he wrote.

“Try living here, David,” I wanted to say.

You don’t argue with David Grossman about Israel. He has lived all his life, enjoyed esteem and happiness and suffered great tragedy there. I have only ever been a visitor and most of those visits have been in my head. I can’t forget that Israel was once the collective noun for the Jewish people.

My Israel, anyway, is a series of moments in Jewish history, still unfolding. I don’t say one moment of Jewish history is much like another, but we tell a remarkably consistent story. When, even for the most ardent Zionist, hasn’t a wind of discord been blowing through Israel? The joke we like to tell about ourselves is that we agree over nothing. Why should Zionists be any different?

To its enemies, of course, Israel didn’t disappoint expectations, it confirmed them. What else but genocide and apartheid was to be expected of a people who kept company with the devil and drank the blood of Gentile children? But Israel’s enemies are not my subject tonight. Who needs enemies when you have friends like us?

MORE, MORE

When giving interviews about his novel To the End Of the Land, Grossman spoke movingly of the disappointment he shared with an Arab friend, the disappointment of a people who had a common dream and who saw it evaporate.

But isn’t that what dreams do? And since no two dreams are ever identical, what chance was there that a Zionist dream could ever have unfolded to the satisfaction of more than one Jew at a time, let alone an Arab?

With so much anticipation of failure on the part of its foes, and so much dissension among its friends — this one wanting more religion, that one wanting no religion — it’s a miracle that Israel has succeeded to any degree at all. And my question is this: can there ever be any satisfying a Jew’s hopes? Or any assuaging a Jew’s disappointment when those hopes are dashed?

The first people conceived by the Jewish imagination were too new to life to have anything to dream about.

We arrived in the Garden as blank slates: innocent, unwitting, and, God hoped, obedient. So unlikely was it that we’d stay like that, what with snakes in the trees, incipient sexual politics and irresistible temptation (for you cannot tell even the first humans that there’s something they must not do and expect them not to do it) that we must wonder if disappointment in his creatures was intrinsic to God’s plan.

Did He know that in order for us to be human, we would need to go astray and then wish we hadn’t?

Barely two pages after God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good, he looked again and, behold, it wasn’t. If you want a paradigm of disappointment, here it is. The gates to Paradise no sooner open than they close, and cherubim with flaming swords bar the way back.

Those cherubim made a great impression on me as a boy. They stand guard in my mind still, whenever I let high hopes or low temptations get the better of me. “Back, Jacobson,” they order.

Monotheists have to be careful which god they choose. They only get one chance. Jews wanted to be judged harshly and found the God to do it. How we relish his enumeration of the punishments Adam and Eve brought down on us.

“Unto the woman, He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” and “Unto Adam he said… cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee…”

More, more: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…”

More, more: “For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return…”

Yes, it’s masochistic, but masochism is only a twisted branch of ethics.

The life of hardship God visits on us we deserve. “My punishment is greater than I can bear,” cries Cain when God consigns him to a life of wandering. It’s a piteous cry, yet somehow noble by virtue of not questioning its justice.

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” wrote the poet and divine John Donne. Jews don’t hold with any of that three-person’d stuff, and we’d be loath to use Donne’s erotic vocabulary of beating to describe the pleasure we take in God’s wrath, but we slink from that Garden with battered hearts, without essaying a word in our own defence. Henceforth, we are a fallen species in our own eyes, never mind God’s.

But we have further to fall yet. Three or four chapters of who-begat-whom later, we are on the point of extinction. “And it repenteth the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

So suddenly and unexpectedly does this expression of profound disenchantment fall from God’s lips that it’s easy to miss how extraordinary it is. God repenting!

Aren’t we the ones who should be doing that? It’s as though we’ve confused who’s who here. In eliding our self-chastisement and God’s, we are admitting the degree to which the God of Genesis speaks with our voice.

Would we had never been born! Amen to that, sayeth the Lord, who proclaims: “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth…”

That would indeed have been that, had it not been for Noah, who, exceptionally, “found grace in the eyes of the Lord”. And so it goes on, in book after book of the Torah. We murder, lie, fornicate, follow false Gods, backslide and betray.

And in book after book, God does what we invented him to do and visits his vengeance upon us, staying his hand only when another Noah appears to save us.

EVERY DOOR IS CLOSED

The Deuteronomy Curse, the most terrifying curse ever pronounced by any God on any people in any place anywhere, begins, sedately, with a promise.

“And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God,” that I will do the following for you.

"We needn’t list the benefits on offer. Trust me, if you’ve forgotten, you’d want them. But then comes what happens if we break the covenant, of which let the following stand as examples: “The Lord shall smite thee with madness and blindness and astonishment of heart; and thou shalt grope at noonday… Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look and fail with longing for them all the day long… And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night…”

It’s important to note that this is not what God does, only what he says he will do. And not because of something we have done, but because of something we might do. None of this is happening in the now. Nor is it exactly happening in the future. The grammatical terrain of the Deuteronomy Curse is the future conditional.

Grammatically, it is the mirror image of Dayenu, that great song of gratitude we sing at the Pesach table. Composed in what we might call the Judaeo-hypothetic-past-preconditional tense, Dayenu imagines everything that could have gone wrong had God not helped us.

“Yes, but he did,” a sympathetic non-Jew might interject. “Yes, but he might not have,” we retort.

In this way, Dayenu gives us access both to the punishment and the reward. Let no one stand between a Jew and his comeuppance.

“Masochism,” the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik explains, “is not characterised by the pleasure in discomfort, but by pleasure in the expectation of discomfort.” The Deuteronomy Curse is one long wail of anticipated agony. Between this and Dayenu, between remembering and anticipating, you might ask whether Jews have ever really managed to live in the present.

The strange grammar of the Jewish imagination enables us to exist in a state of permanent apprehension. First the blessings: “And the Lord shall make thee plenteous… blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.” Then the Curse: “Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shall thou be in the field…”

Why the change of heart? Because of what might happen, if it should come to pass “that thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord”.

If, should, wilt, shalt; the syntax of God’s conditional payback lurches so violently beneath our feet that we can barely stand.

“What could have been” dies in the very imagining of “what will be”, rubbing salt into our wounds. Not only will we sup on sorrow, we will remember how we might have lived in joy. In this way, the Deuteronomy Curse enshrines disappointment as the precondition of existence.

The Curse comes towards the end of the Fifth Book of Moses, as the children of Israel stand on the brink of entering the land of milk and honey; re-entering it, we might say, since Eden was the prototype of all Promised Lands. Have we earned the right to return? The question is dodged by transferring it to Moses. We can enter, while he, after all those years of leading us through the desert, can’t.

“And the LORD spake unto Moses that selfsame day, saying, Get thee up into this mountain Abarim and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people. Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, thou shalt not go thither unto the land which I give the children of Israel.”

Perhaps because I first read this in an illustrated children’s Bible which showed Moses leaning on his staff on a mountain top, his robes flowing, looking out forlornly into the land he would never enter, I shed a small boy’s tear. The sadness of exclusion — out of here, out of there, and never certain of return — is built into the consciousness of a Jew. We are an exiled people in our hearts still. And there are Jews who want us to stay that way. A favourite song when I was growing up was Where Can I Go, sung by Leo Fuld.

“Tell me, where can I go?

There’s no place I can see.

Where to go, where to go?

Every door is closed for me.”

I owned the record and played it over and over in my melancholy bedroom, trying not to cry in case my parents heard and wondered what the hell I was doing in there. “Where to go, where to go? / Every door is closed to me.” Words I would recall, years later, every time I couldn’t get into a disco.

WOLVERHAMPTON POLYTECHNIC

Moses struck a rock intemperately and for that he had to remain behind? Was that not petty? The best justification is that different leaders are needed for different causes. Moses was the right man to deliver the Law, but not to lead his people into battle.

Our greatest prophet was not a soldier. That said, he was 120. Couldn’t he have crossed into Canaan, sat in his tent, drunk weak tea, and, like other doddering ex-leaders, written his memoirs?

In his diaries, Franz Kafka wrote: “He is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death.

"This dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life; incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life was too short, but because it is a human life.”

Which, as always with Kafka, tells us everything and nothing. But might we interpret his interpretation this way? We must accept the limits set on our humanity. We must rein in our expectations of grandeur and continuance because the life of even the greatest of us is subject to rejection and failure. To be human is to be let down.

I have frequently told the story of my mother’s reaction to a letter I received when I was 17, telling me I’d won a place at Cambridge. Forgive my repeating the story but it has a place here. My mother brought the letter to me in my bedroom where, when I wasn’t reading Reveille, I was still crying over Leo Fuld.

I tore the letter open and said, “I’m in, Ma.” Instead of embracing me or throwing open the window and telling the whole street, my mother gently took the envelope from my hand, saying, “just let me make sure that this is really addressed to you, darling.”

Darling, notice. She wasn’t checking because she believed me to be underserving. Rather, she wanted to protect me from mistake.

Better I discovered the mistake now than turn up at Cambridge with my suitcase, only to be told: “Howard Jacobson? No. Never heard of you. There must be some mistake. Try Wolverhampton Polytechnic.”

If my mother had one aim in life as a parent, it was to save her children from disappointment. The experience of our people was imprinted on her imagination. Moses not making it into Canaan was just an allegory for me not making it into Cambridge.

In fact, she needn’t have worried. I was a Jew. I thought the envelope was for someone else, too.

That some things are too good to happen. Believing that the Lord will never make plenteous my basket and my store, or at least keep it plenteous for long, is a sensible philosophical precaution.

But you’d think the inevitable outcome of such a precaution would be giving up on God altogether. How are we to explain the Jews’s intense loyalty to Him no matter how often he repudiates them? Is it that we are a people who cannot take no for an answer? Or is this a mystery only to be explained by the twisted logic of the masochist, who gets his way by being denied it?

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE YEARNING

It is generally agreed that the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century could easily have caused a fatal rift in relations between Jews and their God. The Temple was destroyed, the city laid waste, an alien ruler installed, and thousands of Jews led into exile in Babylon.

What did this say about the all-powerful God of the Jews and His promises to make His people holy and their enemies to go in fear of them? After Nebuchadnezzar, these were empty words.

Who could have blamed the Jews if, disillusioned, abandoned, defeated and ashamed, they had ripped up their prayer books and switched allegiance to more successful deities? Yet this the defeated Jews did not do. Schooled to expect the worst, they made poetry out of it.

“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations… how is she become tributary. She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her…” So begins the book of Lamentations.

I was not a great shul-goer as a boy — I had other ways of being a Jew — but when I did go and heard the cantor sing, I came to the conclusion that Lamentations would do as a title not just for the small collection of poems bewailing the destruction of Jerusalem, but the entire Hebrew liturgy. One long lamentation for what we had lost in the beginning and what we were losing still.

The rabbi bored me, the congregation of old bald men telling me to shush frightened me, I dreaded being called up to perform an arcane ritual involving touching and kissing, but the cantorial music lifted me up and away.

If I were ever going to believe in God, this was the music that would lead me to search for Him and not find Him. In a voice torn by loneliness and disappointment, the cantor sang of an unrequited, holy love.

God had stopped listening long ago. This was yearning for the sake of it. Yearning was one of my favourite words then. It still is. Year-ning. You can hear the passage of the years in it. It was on account of this anguished yearning, anyway, that I felt I became Jewish.

By a similar logic, whether in exile in Babylon or weeping in the wastes of Jerusalem, the abandoned Jews renewed and even reinvigorated their faith. If ever blind belief beat the evidence of a people’s eyes, it was now.

Look at it this way: however great the catastrophe that had befallen them, it was not, after all, something they were entirely unprepared for. For what else was it but the Deuteronomy Curse, released from its future conditional tense and made active in the now, delivered almost word for word as God had promised it would be?

“And the Lord shall bring a nation against them from afar, a nation of fierce countenance…” In the very fulfilment of the Curse, the Jewish people found a superb consolation.

"After all, their God was only doing what He’d warned them He would do. It was He, The Lord their God, not some tin-pot Babylonian god of thunderstorms, who was the author of their suffering.

“And the Lord shall bring a nation against thee.”

Far from vanishing, He remained in control of events. Their agony was the very proof that they were still His chosen people.

And why had He brought a nation against them? Because they had broken His commandments.

Thus understood, the Babylonians were nothing, mere vassals in the enactment of God’s justice. The God of the Jews was all-powerful after all. And the Jews themselves were more than instrumental in their own defeat; they had comprehensively beaten themselves.

Thus, at a stroke, they removed the terrible events from the arbitrariness of nature or even history, acknowledged the workings of divine justice, however harsh, and renewed the covenant between themselves and God.

In extremis, the Jews invoked obedience to moral law and began to restore themselves in their own eyes. Wherever God was, however silent, they trusted Him. An absent father was still a father. They had made themselves agnostic-proof.

JESUS AT KING DAVID HIGH

I say “they”, but not everyone was prepared to leave it at that. In the fullness of time, others wanted more tangible proof of God’s love.

It seems reasonable to assume that if the shock of exile and the destruction of the Temple paradoxically strengthened faith, it also stirred those apocalyptic expectations that would lead at last to that Messianic fervour out of which Jesus Christ emerged.

I have to confess, I rather like Jesus. I said as much, many years ago, to a class of fifth formers I was teaching at King David High School in Manchester. It didn’t go down well. The fifth formers told their parents, who told the headmaster.

I was called into his office. Was it true I was a spy for Jews for Jesus? I told him no, I hated Jews for Jesus and believed Jesus would have hated them too.

How did I know that? I just knew. The fact that I was offering to speak for Jesus made the matter worse. Was I a covert Christian? I laughed. Having spent the first half of my life as a covert Jew, I wasn’t going to give up the second half to being a covert Christian.

So what was it I liked about Jesus, the headmaster asked? The Jewish part. But hadn’t he tried to destroy Judaism? No. That was made up after his death. Alive, he said: “I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” The headmaster recoiled from my words. This would have been the first and the last time the voice of Jesus was heard in his study.

Just to be clear, I was not a covert Christian. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks might have told me I’d make a good rabbi, but the Archbishop of Canterbury never told me I’d make a good priest.

There is, I suppose, perversity in saying I like the Jewish Jesus. Since every version of him we possess comes to us through Testaments, it isn’t easy for a Jew to admire or trust him.

Nietzsche called the attempt to glue the New on to the Old Testament and make one book out of it, “perhaps the greatest audacity and ‘sin against the spirit’ that literary Europe has on its conscience”.

How it is that a Jewish Jesus can pierce the anti-Jewish mood-music of the Apostles takes some explaining. I suppose it’s akin to Tolstoy being Tolstoy even in a poor translation.

A distinctive idiom, like a distinctive vision, can never be muffled. The American literary critic Harold Bloom heard and liked the Jewishness of Jesus’s voice in the first Gospel in particular, with its “unanswerably rhetorical questions, and fiercely playful outbursts that edge upon a frightening fury”, very much like Yahweh, the Jewish God.

I would rather, in my own pursuit of a non-divine, non-Christian Jesus, not have him likened to God. Could we not say that in his reported conversations and addresses, in his quickness of temper, in such actions as his driving out the money-lenders from the Temple, he calls to mind such heroes of the Old Testament as Abraham and Moses and Ezekiel?

That he would have rejected as unJewish the idea that he was the Messiah I have not the slightest doubt.

I have said that we have saviours in the Old Testament — figures who might temporarily intercede on our behalf — but a saviour from the consequences of being human? No, that is ethically too frivolous a concept for a Jew. The Curse must be laid and only we can lift it.

TAKE AN EARLY LUNCH

A great menorah sits in the forecourt of a shul at the corner of Bury old Road and Leicester Road in Manchester. Behind it, a billboard proclaims that “Moshiach Is Coming”. Do I know a single Jew who thinks that likely or even remotely desirable?

Some years ago (it must have been about 1994), I was filming in Crown Heights in New York. The then Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, was dying. I filed through his synagogue to receive the tsedake dollar from him and yes, the light was all but gone from his eyes. Not much longer to wait. Moshiach was coming.

Out on the streets were posters and handbills preparing the community for the end of the world. People were stocking up on bagels. Others were selling apocalyptic CDs from the boots of their cars.

There was rhapsodic singing. Jews who seemed to be of another age were wailing and davening. To say it felt like the Middle East 2,000 years ago doesn’t do justice to the foreignness and the fervour. How, I wondered, would these Jews who were Jewish in a way none of the sceptical ironical, Jews I knew were Jewish, going to cope when the Rebbe died and the world did not end?

As it turned out, much as the Jews did after Jesus’s crucifixion, before the Apostle Paul made a gantse megillah of it. People shrugged, packed away their CDs and posters of the Rebbe, took an early lunch, and made preparation for the next coming of Moshiach.

The fact is, Jews don’t do messiahs. We might have conceived them but we want them to remain a concept.

Anything else would be too literal. It would destroy the poetry of waiting. Built into the concept of a messiah that will not come, as in a God who will not answer, is a conviction of eternal and impregnable disappointment. Not a small, deferred disappointment, which consoles with the thought that we might get what we want if we keep asking, but a permanent longing which is both profoundly poetical and profoundly ethical.

There will and never can be a messiah for the Jews because the job messiahs are expected to do, Jews must do themselves. That is the condition on which God gave us our humanity.

Not truly wanting the messiah ever to come is the guarantee of our ethical seriousness. Is there something here that will help shed light on the strange phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism? Is Israel, too, the realisation of a messianic longing, which Jews of a certain temperament would prefer to have stayed a longing?

Some Strictly-Orthodox Jewish groups insist that until the messiah comes, Jews have no business returning to the Holy Land. They, too, attach a mystical significance to the hanging on.

The return to Zion waits upon God’s revelation of his intentions for us. To have gone back before we have been redeemed, by force of political will and strength of arms, is sinful, not because of any harm done to people with whom we share the country, but because it is determined by mundane considerations rather than divine ones.

“It is a terrible and awful criminal iniquity,” said the Satmar Rebbe Yoel Teitlebaum, “to seize redemption and rule before the time has come."

Though these Jews often give succour to anti-Zionist protestors — and no doubt Jeremy Corbyn has had his picture taken with them — their views are not such as would be approved by the anti-Zionists who teach in our universities.

If the messiah were to turn up tomorrow, the anti-war coalition would not be on the first El Al flight to Tel Aviv with the Satmar Rebbe.

PARADISE FOR SOMEONE ELSE

But is secular anti-Zionism more closely related to this Strictly-Orthodox version than it knows? When I say secular anti-Zionism, I mean Jewish secular anti-Zionism, since that’s the more intriguing question.

Non-Jewish anti-Zionism is not in the slightest perplexing. The reasons for it long predate the modern State of Israel and are easy to mistake for basic Jew-hating. Those who say we shouldn’t conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism should give up employing the language of Medieval-Jew-hated to vilify Israel.

Jewish anti-Zionism, though, of which there are many examples that also predate the State of Israel, are more complex.

To a cosmopolitan Viennese Jew like the writer Stefan Zweig, it simply put Jews back into ghettos; wasn’t the life he enjoyed contingent on the freedom of mind and body the diaspora provided?

To his friend and superior writer Joseph Roth, a State of Israel would bring war and bad repute to the Jews. Religious Jews feared the secularism a Jewish state would bring. Secularists feared the religion.

Many turned their eyes from the European pogroms and didn’t see the necessity of a safe haven. And of those like Gershom Scholem, who embraced Zionism warmly at first for its promise of a regeneration of Jewish faith, many lost heart when no such regeneration transpired.

A word about disappointment: If you expect things to go wrong and they do, can you truly count yourself disappointed? If disappointment is the dashing of expectation and you had no expectation, aren’t you getting exactly what you expected?

Or can disappointment have a less precise meaning and describe an all round wariness of disposition, a habit of disenchantment, a default position of despair even?

By which definition, isn’t the reason for Jewish anti-Zionism not primarily a distaste for the way Israel governs the occupied territories but a temperamental unwillingness to believe that Jews can, or should, change the nature of being Jewish?

How else do we account for that commonly expressed resistance to the Israeli Jew on the grounds that he is not like us, not filled with diaspora compunctions, cleverness and cowardice?

Will the regenerated Jew dreamt of by the first Zionists be too far from Portnoy for our liking? Portnoy couldn’t function as a physical man when he went to Israel.

Many of us are Portnoys in our soul still, afraid we can only be our best, incorrigibly funny neurotic Jewish selves when we are under someone else’s heel. Did the Babylonian exile teach us to fall in love with dispossession?

Gershom Scholem called it “deferred hope”, this hanging on for God’s appearance before entering onto the great public stage of life. Such waiting — such withdrawal, we might call it — is lethal.

What if we are never ready to join the world? But it has a fascination. It heightens the religious life and has a comparable effect on the irreligious, creating a culture of mournful mirth in which ineffectuality appears a virtue. I delight in that culture myself. I take an arrogant, self-punishing glory in being doomed to alienated irrelevance.

But I understand why some Jews in the years before Balfour, and why Israelis endeavouring to lead full lives in Tel Aviv today, don’t see the attraction.

They have no truck with all our Paradises Lost and Paradises Postponed and Paradises for Someone Else. The God of Eternal Disappointment said, stay right where you are, Moses: remain forever exiled on the threshold of promise, but they preferred to go in. They lifted the Curse.

ALL DREAMS EVAPORATE

To Jewish anti-Zionists who wish to be taken seriously as ethical beings, I say this.

Be disappointed, as we are all to a degree disappointed, that the great, adventurous ambitions of Zionism, to avert imminent catastrophe, to rejuvenate a too long confused and slumbering faith, to chart a course between aggressive assimilation and timorous isolationism, to live in peace with neighbours, have not yet, in all instances, achieved their goals.

But don’t allow the disappointments of now to distort the ambitions of then. Just because iniquity appears sometimes to be its fruit does not mean that Zionism was iniquitous in its planting.

It is in the tragic nature of dreams to evaporate. For which we weep. The grander the vanished dream, the more copious our tears should be. And to those who will not weep, who would rather march, protest and boycott, I say: “You are among those who wanted to see the dream blighted in the first place.”

We who do weep have been here before. Transfixed by the exquisite mournfulness of Jewish poetry, forever exiled, forever denied, forever blaming ourselves.

And here’s the problem for me. I too am transfixed. I, too, love the music of sorrow and loss and self-blame. We are — to our glory — a people incapable of living in peace with ourselves. But the idealistic, tirelessly self-critical Jew is not the same as the ashamed Jew who believes every malevolent anti-Jewish whisper he hears.

It’s our proud boast, after the horrors of the last century, that we are still here. Next week will be Purim, when we remember Haman, another in the long list of those who failed to do away with us. We will laugh and eat Hamantaschen and celebrate our survival.

But couldn’t we still be here in some other way? Israel isn’t only the name of a country; it is an idea, a memory, a promise. We must not allow that name to be just one more staging post along our journey of perpetual atonement.

Forgive the plethora of metaphors, but how about cutting ourselves down from that frayed rope of disappointment from which we’ve swung, like victims of our own lynching, for so long?

“Genug iz genug,” my father used to say when he found me in my bedroom, crying over Leo Fuld. “Go out and enjoy yourself.”

‘Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings’, by Howard Jacobson’, is out now (Jonathan Cape, £10.99). His keynote lecture was delivered on Sunday February 26, 2023. Jewish Book Week runs until Sunday March 5 at Kings Place in King’s Cross. To browse the programme and book tickets for remaining events, featuring figures like Jonathan Freedland, Anthony Julius, Natasha Hausdorff and Simon Schama, visit jewishbookweek.com