by Yisrael Rutman

Question: What’s black and goes knock-knock?

Answer: The Future.

That’s a joke going the rounds in Israel these days. It sums up pretty neatly the apprehensive attitude in some circles. There are stories, too, of closed-door briefings in which high-level politicians have been treated to a detailed scenario of a projected “next war” involving Israel and its neighbors prepared for them by the military-security apparatus. It is said to be a chastening experience, presumably the kind that inspires knock-knock jokes about the future.

It recalls the joke that I think was a popular cartoon in the dark days prior to the Six Day War of June, 1967, when Israel was poised for imminent war with Egypt and Syria and people were terrified that Nasser and company would make good on their threat to “drive the Jews into the sea.” The cartoon depicted an empty Ben Gurion Airport and a sign on the wall saying: “Will the last person out of the country please turn off the light.”

Those were the days when the Israeli authorities gave the order to set aside a large burial plot in Tel Aviv ready to receive the anticipated mass casualties of the war—10,000 or more. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol appeared to have an emotional breakdown during an address to the nation during the crisis; and the IDF was on high alert for weeks, draining the economy and the nerve ends of the nation.

Nonetheless, studies have shown that Israelis (at least in recent years) have a more positive outlook on life than other countries, despite multifarious existential threat. (Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael B. Oren, counts seven of them in his article in Commentary on the subject.)

The War and Peace Index, conducted monthly by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, found in 2009 that 80% of the Jews polled defined their personal status as “very good” or “good,” 90% said they think Israel is doing “very well” as a nation; and 81% said they were “very optimistic” or “optimistic” as to the nation’s future.

“Social confidence” among Israelis increased by 17 percent in 2010, according to the Taub Center’s Index of Social Confidence. Israelis’ confidence was at its highest rate since the center began its index in 2001 with a nine point increase from the previous year. The Index measures such confidence-challenging matters as fear of unemployment and exposure to violence.

Compare these figures with a Rasmussen Reports survey of March 6, 2011 which found “just 27% of voters in the United States who say the country is heading in the right direction. The Pew Research Center said in 2006 that just a third (34%) of adults in the US say they’re very happy. Another half say they are pretty happy and 15% consider themselves not too happy. These numbers have remained very stable for a very long time.”

How to reconcile the numbers? Are Israelis hearing fate knocking at the door? Or do they feel okay?

One possible answer is, that aside from the usual statistical margins of error, such studies should not necessarily be taken at face value. After all, it depends essentially on the self-description of the respondents to questions put to them by pollsters. It could be that Israelis are merely better trained than others in the manners of optimism, insisting that the situation is “good and getting better” no matter how dire they may actually be. It’s not that they’re in denial; for once the outsider has gone they’re perfectly willing to admit to themselves and their friends how dire the situation really is. Rather, it may be understood as a survival mechanism. You dare not show weakness to outsiders, lest word get out to your enemies, and one way of showing weakness is to admit pessimism or anxiety about the future, even though it’s not pegged specifically to enemy activity.

Indeed, an optimistic outlook is part of Jewish tradition. As the Talmud records King Chizkiyahu told the prophet Isaiah, “I have a tradition from my ancestors: Even if a sharp sword be held to your neck, never give up hope.”

So when Steinmetz or Taub come knocking at the door, the automatic response is “optimistic” or “very optimistic.”

The story of the Six Day War teaches the lesson well. For in retrospect we know that the expectations of national wipe-out at the time were erroneous. What loomed as Israel’s holocaust turned out to be a few days later its most stunning victory in modern times.

Likewise, we should not take the dire security assessments being promulgated these days as being imbued with prophetic authoritativeness. After all, these are the same people who were caught completely off guard by the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. Why should we think that the picture of regional menace they are purveying today is any more accurate than the stability they conveyed a few weeks ago?

The story of Passover is much the same. The Jews in Egypt were far from impervious to feelings of anxiety and fear about the future. Amram, a leader of the generation, divorced his wife Yocheved because he didn’t want to bring children into a world in which Pharaoh’s soldiers would seize them and throw into the Nile.

But their daughter Miriam convinced him that he was in error: Pharaoh had issued a decree to kill all the male newborns among the Jews, which was bad enough. But if others followed Amram’s example, it would mean a whole generation, female as well as male, would be denied their life.

After hearing Miriam’s argument, he remarried Yocheved. As it turned out, it was his own child Moshe, born after that, who was destined to deliver the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery.

The Jews in Egypt presumably had their own knock-knock jokes about the future. But they were wrong. And so is this one.

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