This is plainly not a season that invites calm reflection. Too much is in play, the agenda is crowded with controversy, new possibilities tantalize but have yet to come into clear focus. The ritual “yes . . . but,” which actually plays more commonly as a “but” – here are the elements of the down side – followed by a “yes” – let us not forget all that has been achieved, has become too familiar a cliché. (But, like most clichés, it is grounded in truth even if it does not invite repetition.) Instead, we are inundated with talk of “competing narratives” and with disquisitions on the “culture of corruption,” the growing controversy over the role of Israel’s Supreme Court, income disparities and ethnic disparities and all the rest. It is so easy to get lost in these things – and “these things” have become so much the focus of not only the daily news but of Israel’s story itself that the disposition to celebrate has come to feel insensitive, requiring a prefatory apology. But a celebration that must be shrink-wrapped in an apology is no celebration at all.
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