We have mentioned the students’ occupations; let us now mention their housing. They live in tin huts in Nahlat Achim, two or three to a room. Their beds are flimsy, their tables unsteady, their chairs lame. At night, they go out and learn to handle rifles. You, sir, lie in bed secure, get up the next morning, and sit at your lavish table reading the paper, assuming that mighty Britain is spreading a tabernacle of peace. Actually, it is a small band of fellows with empty tables and flimsy beds — they and other Haganah members — who protect you. Herbst isn’t one of them. He belongs to Brit Shalom, and he used to sit at Brit Shalom meetings devising plans to prevent Jews from victimizing the Arabs. Herbst once went to a friend’s home for a housewarming; he had built a new house in Rehavia. There was food, drink, conversation. Herbst noticed that his friend was sad and asked, “Did something happen to you?” He answered, “The same thing that happened to you, to me, to every Jew who lives in this country. Every Jew that lives here is driving out an Arab, since the land is his.”
As soon as Herbst started to get close to his students, listening to their talk and watching their actions, he began observing the land and those living in it. His eyes were opened, and he saw what most of his friends did not see, for they had found there a place to rest their weary feet, a comfortable and painless livelihood, a place where their sons and daughters would be safe from those evil doctrines that lead to extinction. It was not because of the Arabs that they found what they found, but because of those who formed the yishuv, transforming desolate wilderness into habitable land. They built cities and established settlements, which they defend with body and soul against a desert sword that threatens annihilation. And even these predators exist because of those who built the land. Both sides are governed from above, so no one knows whether to build or destroy.
For some time now, Herbst had in mind to put his views on paper. But he was concerned that his knowledge of the history of the land and its settlement would not provide an adequate base, and Herbst was a professional and a scholar, subject to a thousand research criteria, who would not make any work of his public until it was validated. Besides, this wasn’t the time for research and validation, since Ernst Weltfremdt had asked him to collaborate on a book about those terms in the writings of the contested Church Fathers that are not found in the writings of the true Church Fathers. Nonetheless, Herbst’s views were not wasted. He conveyed some of them in a letter to his elder daughter, Zahara, who belonged to a kvutza. Realizing that he was in accord with those engaged in building up the land, he began to be proud of his daughter, and she became an extension of his ideas about the land and its settlement.
While Manfred arrived at this truth through conversation with his students, Henrietta arrived at it on her own. All those years, living in the Land of Israel, she watched the land being built and saw who its builders were; and that there were others who would destroy it, and who they were. This being the case, to whom does the land belong? To the builders, of course. She objected to those who were cloistered in their homes, buried in their own affairs as if eternal peace had been achieved, who in the event of trouble would be unable to defend themselves and would surely be slaughtered, as was the fate of Jews in Hebron and Safed during the massive slaughter of 1929. She even used to argue with Manfred: any man who volunteered to fight in Germany’s war, who can handle weapons, who wrote an article about the strategy of Emperor Valens — how could he not enlist in defense of his people and his land? This woman, who always fought to protect her husband from any task that might distract him from his work, was demanding this of him. But she didn’t press him. I will now add a small detail, from which one can learn about everything else. When Henrietta rented a house in Baka, it was a ruin filled with garbage rather than a house, and no one would have considered it suitable to live in. Henrietta cleared out the garbage, repaired the house, and made herself a garden with fruit trees, vegetables, and flowers. When the land began to be productive, Arab shepherds appeared with their sheep and cattle, and what she had been tending all year was consumed in two or three days. She hired workers to fence in the garden. What did the shepherds do? They poked a stick in the fence, made openings, and sent their flocks into the garden. Henrietta found an olive tree that wasn’t bearing fruit; she dug up the soil and fertilized it, and it flourished. What did the shepherds do? They sneaked into the garden and pulled off leaves, which they fed to their sheep, or brought in goats to demolish the olives.
During one of those days when Manfred was keeping himself at home, sitting there for hours on end, this is what happened. That day he went out into the garden. The heat was past its peak, and the soil was fragrant. Above the earth, trees and bushes and grasses made a wreath of varied hues — some derived from innate power granted by God, others from His power being renewed all the time, at every moment. Just then, in fact, the skies were testing all the hues to determine which was most suited to the moment, shifting from hue to hue and back again.
Manfred looked around and saw Henrietta getting up from the ground, a bunch of flowers in her hand. His senses drifted back to a time when they were both young. He, a student at the university, and she, a clerk in a music store, used to meet in the evening, among rows of flowers in a park in Berlin. Not that evenings there were like this one; nor were there flowers such as these. Still, the scents and after-scents of those flowers wafted from the shadows of those vanished evenings. Manfred’s heart began to throb, as it had in those days of his youth when he used to run to those parks and see Henrietta walking through rows of flowers, waiting for him with a bouquet in hand. God-who-is-good-and-renders-good, man’s spirit lives not only in the present but in every good memory of days long past. His eyes were moved to tears, and he whispered, “Let’s sit a minute.” Henrietta heard him and said, “We can sit, if you like.” She repeated, “Yes, let’s sit.”