strangers

Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), we’re told, is “based on real events” but that should probably read “very loosely based on real events.” That was relatively clear when the movie was released but has become incontrovertible as time has gone by. I don’t want to get into any of that, though; indeed, I don’t want to get into anything about this mediocre film — except its last scene, which is fascinating. So, obviously, spoilers ahead.

Avner (Eric Bana) has been an assassin in a deep-undercover mission for Mossad. He has killed several Palestinians who had been named to him as participants in the 1972 killing of Israeli Olympians in Munich; he has come to question the morality of his job, and has left Mossad and moved with his wife and child to Brooklyn. But this move has not brought the peace he had hoped for: he thinks he is being watched and that his family is in danger. He goes in a rage to the Israeli consulate, from which he is forcibly removed. Soon thereafter he gets a visit from his former minder, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush, in the film’s best performance). Ephraim tells Avner that he and his family are in no danger, and that the people Avner killed really were murderers — but the main thing he wants to do is this: plead for Avner to return to Israel. He doesn’t belong in America; he belongs in his homeland — he is a sabra, born in Israel, raised in a kibbutz. He owes everything to Israel. (The whole point of Israel, David Ben-Gurion always said, was to give the world’s Jews a home to come to — thus the Chok HaShvut, the Law of Return.) For a sabra to leave Israel is, in Ephraim’s eyes, both an unnatural act and a betrayal.

To this plea Avner responds with the beginnings of a shake of the head, a gestural No — but he arrests that movement. Instead he says, “Come to my house for dinner tonight. Come on, you’re a Jew, you’re a stranger. It’s written somewhere that I should invite you to break bread with me. So, break bread with me, Ephraim.” Ephraim is a stranger (ger) in New York City, a phrasing which strongly suggests that Avner is not a stranger there, that he has made a home there. Like Abraham in Genesis 18, Avner is practicing hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of gerim. It is one of the essential mitzvot. But it seems to me also that by suggesting this meeting, Avner is deferring his refusal; he is giving Ephraim a chance to persuade him.

The historical context here is vital. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, a number of Israelis, feeling that their country would never be safe, decided to leave. The coming of the world’s Jews to Israel was commonly called aliyah, or “ascent”; departure from Israel came to be called yerida, “descent,” and those who depart named yordim. In 1976, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin spoke of the yordim with utter contempt, calling them nefolet shel nemushot — a metaphor from the harvesting of wheat that means something like “the leftovers of the weaklings,” the rejects of the rejects. The worst of the worst. It’s worth noting that this meeting between Avner and Ephraim occurs right around the time of Rabin’s statement and the controversy it caused in Israel. Though Ephram doesn’t use the phrase, he clearly thinks that Avner is among the nefolet shel nemushot — he is weak, he is worthless. Ephraim has no bond with such a person.

After Avner extends his invitation, Ephraim looks at him for a moment, then says simply: “No.” And he walks away.

P.S. The controversy over yerida has continued. I just learned about this:

In 2011, Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption created a now-infamous ad campaign, hoping to guilt Israelis abroad into coming home. In one of the ads, a little boy, done with coloring, turns to his father. But Dad is asleep in an easy chair, an Economist draped over his chest. “Daddy?” the boy calls, to no avail. A pause. He tries again, this time in a whisper: “Abba?” Dad’s eyes open at once. The artwork is admired; hair is affectionately ruffled. The scene fades, and a narrator says in Hebrew: “They will always remain Israelis. Their children won’t. Help them return to the land.”