Some two hundred Hasidim are flying to Israel to attend the circumcision of the firstborn son of their spiritual leader, the Belzer Rabbi.

At the age of six, I myself wore a tallith katan, or scapular, under my shirt, only mine was a scrap of green calico print, whereas theirs are white linen.

God instructed Moses to speak to the children of Israel and to " bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments."

We find our seats, two in a row of three, toward the rear of the aircraft.

And though he is not permitted to sit beside women unrelated to him or to look at them or to communicate with them in any manner (all of which probably saves him a great deal of trouble), he seems a good-hearted young man and he is visibly enjoying himself.

I ask one of the hostesses when I may expect to receive a drink and she cries out in irritation," Back to your seat! "

"We 've got to go out-of our way to Rome for more of their special meals."

The British Airways chicken with the chill of death upon it lies before me.

But after three hours of security exercises at Heathrow I am hungry.

"Will you eat some of my kosher food instead, as a favor?"

If you will eat nothing but kosher food, for the rest of your life I will send you fifteen dollars a week."

This is what has held the Jews together for thousands of years.

Couldn't you get one of those beautiful hats?"

When the Hasid returns to his seat after prayers, I tell him that my wife, a woman of learning, will be lecturing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He says," This I never heard of.

I knew that he was an innocent but I would never have believed him to be ignorant of such a thing.

Do you recognize the name of Einstein?"

Busy-minded people, with their head-culture that touches all surfaces, have heard of Einstein.

In me he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham.

In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity.

We are staying in Jerusalem as guests of the Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the dwellings of serenity.

Mayor Teddy Kollek, irrepressible organizer of wonderful events (some of them too rich for my blood), takes us to dinner with one of the Armenian Archbishops in the Old City.

On the rooftop patio of the opulent apartment are tubs of fragrant flowers.

Below is the church, portions of which go back to the fourth century.

Present are Isaac Stern; Alexander Schneider, formerly of the Budapest String Quartet; Kollek's son, Amos; two Israeli couples whom I can not identify; and the foreign-news editor of Le Monde, Michel Tatu.

The Archbishop, who has himself cooked the eggplant and the leg of lamb, tells the company his recipes.

Schneider recalls a great Armenian musician and teacher (his own teacher) named Dirian Alexanian, editor of Bach's Suites for Cello Unaccompanied and the most intolerant perfectionist

Alexanian said to Pablo Casals after a performance of some of the suites, You made three bad mistakes.

Pale, with black hair in abundance, Tatu is one of those short men who have learned to hold their ground against big ones.

He sits with the ease that disguises this sort of tension.

Besides, Tatu does not have the look of a man whose life is easy and I don't see why I should spoil his Jerusalem dinner for him in his diary it would probably be entered as " An enchanted evening in Le Proche Orient with an Armenian archbishop."

People of real culture do not smoke at dinner tables.

It contains the head of Saint James the brother of John and many relics.

The house of Annas, in which Jesus was questioned and struck, is within the compound.

We inherit our mode of appreciation from the Victorians, from a time of safety and leisure, when dinner guests knew better than to smoke after the main course, when Levantines were Levantines and culture was still culture.

But in these days of armored attacks on Yom Kippur, of Vietnams, Watergates, Mansons, Amins, terrorist massacres at Olympic Games, what are illuminated manuscripts, what are masterpieces of wrought iron, what are holy places?

the Archbishop excuses himself in two languages and tells us when he comes back that he has been speaking to one of his Lebanese friends calling from Cyprus or from Greece.

He sits down, saying that the influence of Yasir Arafat is evidently weakening and fading.

Most of the dinner guests agree that Russia's internal difficulties are so grave it may have to draw away from Syria.

I well remember what intelligent, informed people were saying in the last years of the Weimar Republic, what they told one-another in the first days after Hindenburg had brought in Hitler.

I recall table talk from the times of Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier.

I remember what people said about the Italian adventure in Ethiopia and about the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Britain.

Later, historical studies show that what actually happened was devoid of anything like such intelligence.

It was absent from Flanders Field and from Versailles, absent when the Ruhr was taken, absent from Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, absent from British policy at the time of the Palestine Mandate, absent before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Tolstoi made this clear in the opening pages of War and Peace.

In Anna Scherer's salon, the elegant guests are discussing the scandal of Napoleon and the Duc d'Enghien, and Prince Andrei says that after all there is a great difference between Napoleon the Emperor and Napoleon the private person.

What is still being perpetuated in all civilized discussion is the ritual of civilized discussion itself.

Someone observes that the Church is a worshiper of success and always follows the majorities.

Rather, says one of the prelates, he would stay in Rome and become Party secretary.

The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment were decidedly anti-Semitic.

I asked which of the two attitudes would prevail in twentieth-century France the century of the Dreyfus affair and of the Vichy government.

The position taken by Foreign Minister Maurice Jobert in the October War of 1973 was that the Palestinian Arabs had a natural and justified desire to " go home."

Eugene Ionescu gave the editors one copy of it; another was handed to them by Manes Sperber, the novelist.

Since 1973, Le Monde has openly taken the side of the Arabs in their struggle with Israel.

A recent review of the autobiography of a fedayeen speaks of the Israelis as colonialists.

On July 3, 1976, before Israel had freed the hostages at Entebbe, the paper observed with some satisfaction that Amin," the disquieting Marshal," maligned by everyone, had now become the support and the hope of his foolish detractors.

On July 12, after the raid, Israel was accused of giving comfort to the reactionaries of Rhodesia and South-Africa by its demonstration of military superiority and its use of Western arms and techniques, upsetting the balance between poor and rich countries, disturbing the work of men of good will in Paris who were trying to create a new climate and to treat the countries of the Third World as equals and partners.

But European approval of the raid would endanger the plans of France for a new international order.

The delicacy of the light also affects me.

The color of these is that of the ground itself, and on this strange deadness the melting air presses with an almost human weight.

The universe interprets itself before your eyes in the openness of the rockjumbled valley ending in dead water.

Shahar leads me down from the Mishkenot Sha'ananim, which stands on a slope and faces Mount Zion and the Old City, to the Gai-Hinnom (Gehenna of tradition), where worshipers of Moloch once sacrificed their children.

It acts queerly on my nerves (through the feet, as it were), because I feel that a good part of this dust must be ground out-of human bone.

Gray and sunken, in the thoughts of Mr Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses.

The Wolfson Foundation of London has paid for the planting of gardens, and Arab kids are kicking a soccer ball in the green bottom of the valley.

East Jerusalem toughies of fourteen are smoking cigarettes and stiffening their shoulders, practicing the dangerous-loiterer bit as we pass.

The American firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton lent one of its specialists, Miles Copeland by name, to the State Department, where he was in 1955 a member of a group called the Middle East Policy Planning Committee, the main purpose of which was, in his own words," to work out ways of taking advantage of the friendship which was developing between ourselves and Nasser."

In 1947 Copeland had been sent to Damascus (" by whom is not stated," Kedourie says) " to make unofficial contact " with Syrian leaders and " to probe for means of persuading them, on their own, to liberalize their political system."

Frustrated, the Americans decided for the best of reasons, as always, to make a heavier move:

This was not considered particularly bizarre; other American ambassadors and ministers in the Arab world were entirely in favor of " genuine " revolution to overthrow old landowners, rich crooks, and politicians.

"What was wanted was an elite to underpin the rulers, themselves in turn supported and buttressed by a population which presumably understood, approved, and legitimated the aims of such an elite.

Whoever knows the Middle East will agree that such a quest was the political equivalent of the search for the philosophical stone."

Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA " met a number of officers who were involved in the conspiracy which led to the coup-d'etat of 22 July, 1952."

The Americans wanted the new regime to make the populace literate, to create " a large and stable middle class a sufficient identification of local ideals and values, so that truly indigenous democratic institutions could grow up."

James Eichelberger, a State Department political scientist who had been an account executive for J Walter Thompson, one of the world's largest advertising and public-relations firms," was sent to Cairo where he talked with Nasser and his confidants and produced a series of papers identifying the new government's problems and recommending policies to deal with them."

One of these papers, written by Eichelberger himself, was translated into Arabic," commented upon by members of Nasser's staff, translated back into English for Eichelberger's benefit."

This document, called " Power Problems of a Revolutionary Government," went back-and-forth, according-to Mr Copeland," between English and Arabic until a final version was produced.

The final paper was passed off to the outside world as the work of Zakaria Mohieddin, Nasser's most thoughtful (in Western eyes), reasonable deputy, and accepted at face value by intelligence analysts of the State Department, the C.I.A.and, presumably, similar agencies of other governments."

"The police should be politisized, and should become, to whatever extent necessary, a partisan paramilitary arm of the revolutionary government "?

Or," The nerve center of the whole security system of a revolutionary state (or of any state) lies in a secret body, the identity and very existence of which can be safely known only to the head of the revolutionary government and to the fewest possible number of other key leaders."

It was Jefferson who said that the tree of liberty must occasionally be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

We must now believe that the same romantic conviction has been alive somewhere in the offices of J Walter Thompson.

Or is there in the world by-now a natural understanding of revolution, of mass organization, cadres, police rule, and secret executive bodies?

Of-course the paper written by Mr Eichelberger and his Egyptian collaborators states that the purpose of the Nasser seizure of power was " to solve the pressing social and political problems which made the revolution necessary."

to advance the cause of universal equality;

to be a mover and shaker, a shaper of destiny or perhaps, surrendering to fantasies of omnipotence, to be the nation-making American plenipotentiary, at work behind the scenes and playing confidently even with Bolshevik fire.

Mr Kedourie doubts that he needed " to call on the resources of American political science for such lessons in tyranny?

What does remain most puzzling," he says," is why it was thought that the imparting of such lessons could advance the interests of the United-States, or even contribute to the welfare of the Egyptian people."

Whence the passion for social theory among these high functionaries of the advertising world?

How did executive types ever learn of such things?

"Land of the kike home of the wop," says Compson to himself when he buys a bun from a small Italian girl.

Returning to it next day, I found Faulkner guilty of no offense.

It 's possible that people at the turn of the century were saying " land of the kike " and that Faulkner didn't borrow it from Cummings.

As-if America's two-hundred-year record of liberal democracy signified nothing.

But then, to its more severe leftist critics, some of them Jews, Israel is not the " democratic exception " it is said to be.

Gossip traces the worst of the Israeli financial swindles to the most observant of Orthodox Jews.

These North African and Oriental immigrants are blamed for bringing a baksheesh mentality to Israel; the intellectuals are blamed for letting the quality of life (a deplorable phrase) deteriorate.

I speak of this to Shahar.

In Jakov Lind's interesting brief book on Israel, Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying," The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await them.

At times I suspect that the world would be glad to see the last of its Christianity, and that it is the persistency of the Jews that prevents it.

I say this remembering that Jacques Maritain once characterized European anti-Semitism of the twentieth century as an attempt to get rid of the moral burden of Christianity.

And what is it that has led the Jews to place themselves, after the greatest disaster of their history, in a danger zone?

"Wouldn't it be the most horrible of ironies if the Jews had collected themselves conveniently in one country for a second Holocaust?"

It is accompanied by the further reflection (partly proud, mostly bitter) that we Jews seem to have a genius for finding the heart of the crisis.

The Valley of Jehosaphat, with its tombs.

A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone.

The municipality of Jerusalem is planning to build a new road and will tear the Jordanian one up.

The armies of the dead in all directions, interminable.

A fine thing to obsess yourself with, burial and lamentation and lying about under the walls of Jerusalem waiting for the Messiah's trumpet to sound.

Parties of American girls come down the slope in their dungarees, with sweaters tied by their sleeves about the waist.

Just beyond, the Garden of Gethsemane.

Now pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus trees grow there below the domes of the Russian Orthodox church.

"Rode from Ramlah to Lydda," Herman Melville wrote in his travel journal of 1857.

A mounted escort of some 30 men, all armed.

Curvetting & caracoling of the horsemen.

And a-few days later, on the barrenness of Judea," whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape.

Village of Lepers houses facing the wall Zion.

They sit by the gates asking alms, then whine avoidance of them & horror.

Wandering among the tombs till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils."

An indignant librarian, a middle-aged woman whose face is so hot it is almost fragrant with indignation, demands of me in a superdistinguished all-but Oxonian accent," How do you account for it! "

These visitors are sometimes treated as-if they were the heroes of an Arabian Nights' tale.

We will be full of emotion and the visitors will be correspondingly full of emotion, and after they have been wined and feted and dined and toasted and televised and paraded and clapped and the supplying of loans and atomic plants and military hardware has been discussed they will love us.

I trust that they will give us better love than they are getting from us, for ours is a very low-quality upward-seeping vegetable-sap sort of love, as short-lived as it is spontaneous.

But it did not give me the time of day.

The New-York Times is sure to have it, but the Times as I see it is a government within a government It has a state department of its own, and its high councils have probably decided that it would be impolitic at this moment to call attention to Sadat's admiration for Hitler.

I tell the lady that I have sent a copy of a eulogy of Hitler written by Sadat in 1953 to Sydney Gruson of the Times and also to Katharine Graham of The Washington Post.

Book readers evidently haven't got the passionate intensity of sports fans."

He quotes from Dostoevski's The House of the Dead a conversation between the writer and a brutal murderer, one of those criminals who fascinated him.

And the murderer, speaking to one of the geniuses of the nineteenth century, answers," Because you are so simple that one can not help feeling sorry for you."

Dostoevski, no mean judge of such matters, thought there was much to be said for the murderer's point of view.

Now-and-then history treats us to an interval of freedom and civilization and we make much of it.

We forget, he seems to think, that as a species we are generally close to the " state of nature," as Thomas Hobbes described it a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom.

If Hobbes is too nifty an authority, let us think of the social views of Jimmy Hoffa.

Or of the Godfather.

Or of Lenin, as Navrozov accurately characterizes him.

Nota held the rank of captain in the Russian army and fought the Germans until 1945.

He has, besides, the gold crowns of Russian dental art.

"Most striking is the disappointing performance of Soviet foreign and domestic policy since the late 1950s," they wrote in 1972.

"In the foreign policy field the Soviets have had an almost uninterrupted series of defeats and disappointments.

For fifteen years the Soviet-Union has been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their proteges and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel.

I copy this out for my own entertainment a specimen of illusionless American political analysis.

All of the staff at Hudson have contributed in some way to this work, as have the thousands of people with whom we have discussed these issues at meetings, seminars, and briefings at the Institute and other locations around the world."

One of the finest Israeli writers, A B Yehoshua, speaks about this in an excellent book of interviews, Unease in zion, edited by Ehud ben Ezer.

Nor can you attain the true solitude that is a condition and prerequisite of creation, the source and its strength.

Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather-than by any external compulsion, because you live from one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by-now you are completely built to react that way and to live in tension.

Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are pre-determined.

Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense, and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity."

But today, unable to see the end of war, he has lost the sensation of being borne upon any such wave.

The feeling of being swept along and of uncertainty as regards the future prevents you from seeing things in any perspective whatsoever.

You live the moment, without any perspective, but you can not break free of the moment, forget the moment.

Our media make crisis chatter out-of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the UN, the financial collapse of New-York.

Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so huge and so terrible), can be screened out.

The study of literature is itself heavily " politicized."

A cafeteria lunch in New-York actually refers to a meeting in Canada between Churchill and Roosevelt, and a tussle with a drunk in the hallway of a rooming house corresponds to D-Day.

She thinks that it is sly of me to deny this.

E E Cummings, locked up by the French government, finds his aesthetic paradise in the detention camp of Ferte Mace.

The bravest of modern writers are the Mandelstams and the Sinyavskys.

Before he died of cold, hunger, and exhaustion in Siberia, Osip Mandelstam recited his poems to other convicts, at their request.

Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics.

I had been warned that as I grew older the difficulty of forming new friendships would be great.

Even on a sunny morning the stone buildings of Jerusalem chill your hands and feet.

But I can see that the big current of his suffering has begun to run heavily.

He has returned from a voyage, he is out in the sun shining from the hills of Moab, he is drinking aquavit with a dear friend, looking over at Mount Zion.

John somehow obtained Polish seaman's papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters.

His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again.

For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among the Germans, death of wife, death of son.

Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz.

North of Naples they had bad weather and engine trouble, but they reached their harbor and anchored near two Japanese ships.

A community of about twenty thousand people had traffic jams worthy of Rome, cars as a matter of course rushing into the reserved bus lanes, screwing everything up and honking madly.

Part of the American Sixth Fleet was anchored nearby.

The aircraft carrier John F Kennedy, with its helicopters, reminded John of the death of his son.

One of the boys was from Oklahoma, near Tulsa.

He had heard of Israel, but only just, and he was not especially interested.

When the ship passed Stromboli at night, there was a streak of crimson lava flowing from the volcano and the sailors wouldn't leave the television set to look at this natural phenomenon.

One of the young sailors carried it down.

He spoke as a Jew to a Jew about Jewish powers of speech.

In flight, if the door of your plane comes open you are sucked into space.

Here in Jerusalem, when you shut your apartment door behind you you fall into a gale of conversation exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophecy.

from friends who let themselves go, passionate speeches, raging denunciation of Western Europe, of Russia, of America.

The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a-few decades.

the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute.

But in the domestic ceremony of passed dishes and filled glasses thoughts of a destructive enemy are hard to grasp.

What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you can not take your right to live for granted.

They seem to think of themselves as a fixed power, immovable.