(JTA) — From Mount Scopus, Rabbi Akiva, with three other sages, gazes down at the destroyed Second Temple. A fox, fulfilling Jeremiah’s dismal prophecy, pokes its head from the ruins. Jewish history has reached its end.
Akiva laughs. According to the Babylonian Talmud, the other sages stare at him, incredulous: History has testified to the obsolescence of the Jewish people. Their story is sealed; the book is closed.
But Akiva sees a different ending to the story: Just as the prophecy of a destroyed temple came true, the prophecy of a restored Jerusalem would also be fulfilled to the letter. Akiva laughed amidst the ruins because he knew the story wasn’t over.
Two thousand years later, and days before the Tisha B’Av fast that marks the destruction of the Second Temple and other historical calamities facing the Jewish people, we understand Akiva’s laughter — not a light-hearted “ha-ha,” but anguish and defiance in a single breath.
I feel this acutely as a purveyor of Jewish stories that continue the saga the destruction of the temple failed to end. Like so many others, I was distressed when, last week, the president of PEN America, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned — not over a censored book or a jailed writer, but in protest of his organization’s report on the exclusion of Jewish and Israeli writers and artists. In a blog post earlier this month, the organization described events cancelled, invitations withdrawn — an unofficial, but well-orchestrated, international ghosting.
Those stories didn’t appear to move Mengestu. Instead, he rebuked PEN America for not standing with those who would boycott Israel. Boycott, said the head of an organization founded to fight boycotts, “is a form of dialogue.”
Novelists rushed to applaud him. One called the report “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces.”
Here on the ground in Israel, PEN America’s report was greeted as validation: An institution founded “to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression” testified to the exclusion we have been living with for almost three years. As Meg Keene reported in these pages, book deals with Jewish or Israeli authors have fallen more than 80% since 2023. She also cites the pernicious influence example of “Is your fav author a zionist???” — a color-coded blacklist of Jewish writers.
PEN’s report also cited Writing on the Wall, the non-profit we founded after Oct. 7, among the “new outlets for Jewish writers” attempting to break the publishing chokehold. It also named my co-founder, Ronit Eitan, a novelist forced to hold back her own manuscript because, as she said, “nobody wants to hear my voice.”
In the first weeks of the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks, there were no classes at Bar-Ilan University, where I teach. But my students kept showing up — writing for a future that seemed impossible. In the impromptu workshops that I ran, they chose creativity over despair. Those sessions became Writing on the Wall. Writing on the Wall created the magazine, BALAGAN – Hebrew for a kind of controlled chaos, because that is the name for what we are living through. We published artists and voices while others were being told to disappear. We did not know, at the time, that this was what we were doing. It was only when PEN America named us that we understood we had been part of the story all along.
Amidst the ruins, Akiva rereads the book the sages had declared closed and in doing so, remakes it for the future. In his rereading, the destruction is the guarantee of the return. The Temple in ruins, what they see in front of their eyes, is just part of a continuing story: a future redemption remains on the horizon. This future requires understanding paradox: we are without consolation, exiled, lost; nevertheless, we are God’s chosen people, courageous, still here.
So we begin where Akiva began: not only by answering our enemies — Rome then, the writers and publishers applauding our exclusion now — but by refusing to be silenced.
A people is carried through history not only by its armies but by its songs and its arguments. David was Israel’s greatest warrior and poet. Our writers and artists create out of the conviction that we must do justice to our suffering, to our losses. That we must create a future for which we have already sacrificed so much.
We make that future not by waiting for the cultural gatekeepers to readmit us, but by refusing to let them hold the pen. When the international community attempts to close the book on us, our defiance is to author our own reality.
Today, we are all Rabbi Akiva, laughing not because we have found the bright side, but because, like Akiva, we refuse to let the story end. We do what Jews have done since Rabbi Akiva: After destruction, we create.