From: War and Peace
Canadian Jewish News – August 17, 2006
 
Even in the thickness of the dark clouds that seem to have returned to the Jewish horizon, it is important to be reminded that there is still a unique, resilient, unimaginably strong vibrancy to life in the tiny Jewish country that fiercely defends its right to exist, the proof of which is ubiquitous.

For example, during the height of the fighting some days ago, I telephoned Eva Etzioni-Halevy, professor emeritus of political sociology at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, and a newly emerging author.

I had just finished reading The Song of Hannah and was so impressed with the force of its courage and imaginative leaps that I wanted to speak with its author.

An observant woman, Etzioni-Halevy decided to write a book about the two wives of Elkanah, the father of Samuel, one of the prophets of our Bible.

In fact, the title of the book derives from the Bible, from the story we read during Rosh Hashanah. Hannah is Samuel’s mother. Her heart-rending outpourings concerning her childless condition before her son is born form the centrepiece of the Haftarah reading.

But Etzioni-Halevy imagines herself as both Hannah and Elkanah’s other wife, Peninah, and describes the lives they might have lived in pre-Davidic Israel. “The book was written from a feminine but not a feminist perspective,” she told me.

It is daringly sensual.

“I wrote a ‘racy’ book based on the Bible. It has many suggestive passages that are authentic to the times of the Bible and to human nature. Human nature is much the same today as it was then. In that way, we are very close to the people of The Book. Even our prophets were human beings. The essential message is one of tolerance for human beings. No one is perfect.”

Etzioni-Halevy has imagined a complicated, but ultimately loving relationship between Hannah and Peninah. The book was thought-provoking and enjoyable both as a distraction from the war Israel has been forced to wage and as an affirmation of the creative life force that infuses Israel, the tiny and only Jewish state on earth.

Mordechai Ben Dat