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Memory and History in Israeli Post-Apocalyptic Theatre Zahava Caspi

Past catastrophes function as primary models for apocalyptic dystopias and as catalysts of imagined retrospection. Their function as paradigms of memory enables them to shed a sobering light on contemporary dangers as well as to trigger desirable change. The relation between memory, history, and post-apocalyptic theatre should therefore be examined with a view not only to the circumstances that give rise to such theatre, but also to the meanings that emerge from the catastrophic historical episodes which function as paradigms of memory. In the following article I shall discuss two Israeli dystopian plays, Joshua Sobol’s The Jerusalem Syndrome (1987) and Shimon Buzaglo’s Black Rain (2007), and their performances in Israeli theatre. I will examine the efficacy of apocalyptic theatre rooted in historical memory, by activating new forms of Theatre (Sobol: Polydrama; Buzaglo: Theatre as a Testimonial Medium) relative to other avenues of historical commemoration, in averting future dangers rooted in a deficient present.

While traditional apocalyptic texts had tended to optimism, with visions of temporary destruction followed by narratives of redemption, modern secular literature-in recent decades in Israel as well-has gravitated towards thoroughly dystopian texts ending in annihilation. Already after the First World War, European theatre witnessed an upsurge in dystopian dramas whose visions of the world's end were linked with the new weapons of mass destruction first employed during the war. Apocalyptic discourse was again on the rise in the wake of the Second World War, with the traumas of Auschwitz and Hiroshima well reflected in the dystopian dramas of the postwar period (Note 2). The reflection in theatre of widespread nuclear anxiety has been established conclusively in Charles A. Carpenter's study on the impact of the nuclear age on American and British drama. Twenty-five dystopian plays, he finds, were written in Britain during the first two decades after the Second World War (1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954)(1955)(1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964), only ten between 1965 and 1980. During the 1980s, a decade of renewed nuclear tensions, no less than thirty dystopian plays were written in as few as eight years (1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989), whereas from the end of the Cold War to the time Carpenter's book was published in 1991 only a single new dystopian play was authored (and even it, Carpenter notes, went unpublished) (Note 3).
A survey of the dates of dystopian apocalyptic works written in Israel shows that here, too, apocalyptic codes in literature and theatre have been the overt symptoms of crisis-in this case, the ontological and epistemological crisis afflicting Israeli society after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Apocalyptic plays ending in dystopia began to trickle out in the mid-1970s, a few years after the war, but became even more abundant in the 1980s in the wake of the first Lebanon War (Note 4). Oscillating between holocaust and redemption, the apocalyptic genre in Israeli drama was thus an acute response to the implosion of Israeli society's foci of collective identity and the collapse of Zionism's original ideals after the 1973 war.
In addition to prompting apocalyptic anxieties, national and global crises tend to reawaken traumatic catastrophes from the historical past, near or distant. The relation between memory, history, and post-apocalyptic theatre should therefore be examined with a view not only to the circumstances that give rise to such theatre, but also to the meanings that emerge from the catastrophic historical episodes which, in dystopian dramas, function as paradigms of memory. Dystopian works often turn to a nation's repository of historical memory for their material, the incorporation of fateful historical episodes at a time of emergency enabling them to shed a sobering light on contemporary dangers as well as to trigger desirable change. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, the needs of the present, especially in times of crisis, shape the remembered past, which thereby becomes an extension of the present moment. Benjamin thus offers an alternative to the traditional view of redemption-one in which redemption occurs not at the terminus of a linear causal process but via the restoration and rectification of a relevant past moment within the present (Note 5). Because the time of redemption, according to Benjamin, is the present, his is a distinctly political conception of redemption; one that aims not to commemorate the past as a given piece of heritage, but to revive it, to retry now what has failed in the past. In Benjamin's view, the ruins of the present can be redeemed via reflection upon the ruins of the past (Note 6). In www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. addition, if reflecting upon the past can help redeem or restore the present, then imagining the ruins of a dystopian future may lead to a similar result.
In what follows, I shall discuss two Israeli dystopian plays, Joshua Sobol's The Jerusalem Syndrome (1987) and Shimon Buzaglo's Black Rain (2007), and their performances in Israeli theatre. I will examine the role played within these plays by the memory of past trauma, as well as the efficacy of apocalyptic theatre rooted in historical memory, relative to other avenues of historical commemoration, in averting future dangers rooted in a deficient present. My claim will be that not only the traumatic past functions as a site of memory, but also an imagined horrific future might act as a memory still unrealized, and can be used as a political instrument in the present, aiming to prevent it from being implemented.

History in the Service of the Present
The Jerusalem Syndrome revisits a particularly traumatic chapter in Jewish history, the fall of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., in order to retrace the destructive suicidal urges that precipitated this catastrophic episode-urges which, in Sobol's view, still fester in Israel's contemporary national identity and against whose renewed outbreak he warns. The city of Jerusalem is the common space bridging the play's two historically disparate temporal settings. One series of events takes place in an unspecified future: Jerusalem is ravaged by a brutal war, burning and besieged, beset by famine and by the general collapse of law and order. In the midst of this delirium of torment, a troupe of would-be actors-in reality the inmates of a mental asylum-rehearse for the production of a play written and directed by one of them, a faux history professor. The fragmentary plot recounts the events of the Great Jewish Revolt of the Second Temple era via the period's prominent historical figures, portrayed by the "actors" (Note 7). This play-within-a-play is based on Flavius Josephus' historical account of the revolt, History of the Jewish Wars, direct quotes from and references to which permeate the proceedings (Note 8).
At the time, he was writing The Jerusalem Syndrome, Sobol was searching for a new form of socio-political theatre capable of depicting 'mass psychosis' onstage. Linear narrative theatre, he felt, was not up to the task; only simultaneous theatrical forms, which violated the Aristotelian unities, could effectively realize this goal. Sobol's avowed aim was to create a novel genre-the "polydrama"-with its own theatrical language, one in which several events occurred simultaneously in different spaces, allowing each viewer to traverse the various locations and choose on which events to concentrate. Any separation between the space of the dramatic action and the space of the audience, Sobol claimed, was artificial; the theatrical space must include the audience as an immanent part of the scenery.
This conception was only partly realized in the Haifa Theatre's production of The Jerusalem Syndrome.
The audience was not required to navigate different spaces; the traditional relationship between stage and auditorium remained largely unchanged. Nevertheless, some of the principles indicated by Sobol were put to practice. In the written play, conventional acts and scenes were replaced by fifty three The dramatic form of a play-within-a-play, with a troupe of fictional actors performing for a fictional on-stage audience, is hardly a new theatrical ploy. What is less common, and what both plays share, is the identity of the fictional actors-in both cases asylum inmates-and of the onstage audience, which in both plays consists of figures of authority: a military sergeant (and probably an asylum staff member) in The Jerusalem Syndrome, the asylum's director and his family in Marat/Sade. Delegating the action to those whom "healthy" society deems insane-those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, locked up, excluded from society, consigned to its margins-is a ploy Sobol and Weiss use ingenuously to interpret the condition in which they find their respective societies (Note 12 the play-within-a-play) is his own mouthpiece fashions Sobol himself as a mad sage, out to pronounce the harsh truth in the tradition of biblical prophecy. Meanwhile, as fellow spectators, the on-stage viewers are meant to evoke the real viewers' identification in order to help them internalize the dramatic action and comprehend its real-life relevance. In both plays, however, the real viewers' natural identification with their on-stage counterparts is a trap, set by the playwrights to align the real viewers with precisely those figures of authority (the sergeant, the asylum director) who are responsible for excluding and isolating the prophetic speakers of truth. Ensnared in this dialectical situation, the real viewers now face the same arrows of criticism they had aimed at the representatives of power, as they are now implicitly required to acknowledge their own ethical responsibility for the similar realities rampant outside the theatre walls.
Despite these similarities, however, The Jerusalem Syndrome and Marat/Sade belong to essentially different genres. Weiss's play is an instance of a dramatic genre in which history is "performed" onstage; its perspective is therefore backward looking, directed at a historical past from which it attempts to derive lessons about the present. Though it combines widely disparate time registers-1808, in which the framing narrative takes place; 1793, in which the play-within-a-play occurs; 1964, the year of Brook's production-all these belong to the (historical or fictional) past relative to the time of the performance, requiring the audience to engage in retrospection. The Jerusalem Syndrome belongs by contrast to the essentially forward-looking apocalyptic genre, its understanding of the present inflected by a vision of the (utopian or dystopian) future. Even when the playwright relies on a historical paradigm, as does Sobol in The Jerusalem Syndrome, that paradigm's chief function is reflective: though the play's reliance on historical events is inevitably an occasion for retrospection, such retrospection serves an anticipatory role, allowing the audience to reflect on the future consequences of their own present condition.
Sobol's focus on the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Second Temple stems, he says, from his recognition that what transpires during a nation's formative years continues to exert its influence surreptitiously throughout its history, that the past endures within the present in the form of suppressed impulses which emerge in critical historical junctures (Note 13). Supporting this view of history are Pierre Nora's reflections on the workings of collective national memory. In Nora's view, prototypical past events perceived to recur perpetually provide the foundations of national memory. National memory is thus not to be found in history books, libraries or archives, but precisely in the symbolic and material traces left by the past. Such "realms of memory" serve a special role in constructing the idea of the nation, but also expose transformations in a people's perceptions of its national past (Note 15).
Artistic representations of historical episodes from a nation's past thus always reflect the ethos deeply rooted in the group's national identity. In Sobol's theatre, with its repeated examination of episodes from Jewish history based on extant historical documents (the best-known instance being 1984's Ghetto, based on historical records, diaries, and memoirs of life in the Vilna ghetto), I see a "realm of memory" of this sort, one that tracks the traumatic traces left by past events in order to give them long-term consequences for the nation's subsequent history (two millennia of exile), is thus conscious and deliberate. The memory of destruction, still alive in the national consciousness of independent modern Israel, serves Sobol to offer a corrective to the narrative of historical devastation, to present the historical facts "as they really were". Yet The Jerusalem Syndrome's ultimate aim is not historical knowledge for its own sake. Sobol's analogy between past and future, between the Second Temple and Israel's future prospects, is rather used to illuminate the dangers posed by present-day religious-messianic fundamentalism. The play's ominous vision of a futuristic Israel thus rests on the lessons of the national past.

The Angel of History: Between the Historical Past and an Apocalyptic Future
Two of Sobol's earlier plays-the never-produced The Woman from Masada, and The Jewish Wars, produced by the Khan Theatre in 1981-share with The Jerusalem Syndrome the same historical setting.
In an interview with Yotam Reuveni, Sobol explained that for him the Second Temple period was a model case of a devastation-ridden society, one he invoked as a warning to contemporary Israeli society (Note 14). The Jewish Wars was meant as a "didactic play", designed to expose Israeli audiences to historical facts concealed or underplayed in Israeli school curricula on the Second Temple period. To this end, the play took the form of an actual, physical excursion taken by the viewers. Their first stop was the archeological excavation at the Tower of David in Jerusalem, where audiences were exposed to the diverse, pluralistic culture that had thrived in Jerusalem on the eve of the Great Revolt. The excursion then continued through a subterranean tunnel, a claustrophobic experience meant to give the viewers a personal taste of the ways in which "self-destructive forces took the form of Jewish ultra-orthodoxy, religious puritanism, and xenophobia, until they completely took over the masses and led them to national destruction". (Note 16) Though The Jewish Wars and The Jerusalem Syndrome share Flavius' historical text as their basis, they differ in significant ways. In the six years separating the two plays, Sobol says, his faith in the public's ability to learn from the past, whether near or distant, was eroded, forcing him to stress more explicitly in the later play the analogy between the circumstances that had led the Jews to destruction in the past and the realities of present-day Israel. This he did by mixing and juxtaposing scenes from Jerusalem circa the destruction of the Second Temple and during the imaginative "fall of the Third". (Note 17) In an interview with Dan Urian, Sobol explained that the main impetus for the writing of The Jerusalem Syndrome was his anxiety that the fate of the "Third Temple"-modern-day Israel-might one day replicate that of the Second.
Historical consciousness is a necessary condition for understanding and rectifying the present. In Walter Benjamin, we find an appreciation of the importance of historical consciousness as a site of catastrophe and destruction. In Benjamin's view, each present moment presents us with an opportunity to reexamine this landscape of devastation and extract from it the historical episodes pertinent to our existence. In doing so, we "establish a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time". (Note 18) By relating the present to some definite historical episode, the latter can be "redeemed" within the present; the historical past thus holds a covert key to redemption. At the same time, "to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'"; rather, "it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".
(Note 19) The historian is thus always obligated to view the past from the perspective of his own contemporary realities, responding to the demands posed by the political circumstances of his present moment. (Note 20) Benjamin's theoretical outlook was put into performative practice in the production of The Jerusalem Syndrome. By forcing the viewers to reexamine the devastated landscape of the past, both by gazing at the wreckage onstage and by following the historical plot, Sobol hoped to enable them to see the destruction of the Second Temple as a still-relevant bit of the past-a "time of the now"-at this present-day moment of national danger.
In his Performing History, Freddie Rokem claims that history is perceivable only when encapsulated in the form of historiographical or artistic discourse. The past is recapitulated in an organized manner when historical events, chaotic by nature, are placed within an aesthetic framework. (Note 21) In this respect, the artist and the historian enjoy equal standing as makers of representations of history. This, Rokem claims, is especially true in theatre, whose intense energies can bestow special validity on the historical authenticity of the events shown onstage, and whose truthfulness may for this reason surpass even that of the historical text. Playing an important role in presenting history onstage are, according to Rokem, not only the playwright and the director but also the actors, whom Rokem calls "hyper-historians," and who also serve as witnesses to the events shown onstage. (Note 22) In keeping with Benjamin's conception of history, Rokem claims that when theatre "performs" history it attempts to overcome our sense of separation from the past, to constitute a community for which past events could regain their meaning. By enacting scenes that connect the present with the past, theatre performs two actions simultaneously: it cites the past in order to enable the viewers to see their own historical past in a new light, while erasing the traces of that same past in order to let the viewers apprehend the full meaning of the present. (Note 23) Apocalyptic plays, which refer to past events, are marked, I think, by particular temporal complexity, because the history to which they refer engenders a dual analogy in the viewers' mind: not only between the present and the past, but also between that past and the future that awaits us if the lessons of the past remain unlearned. Confronting live audiences with a dual apocalyptic vision, that of the past and that of the anticipated future, is thus a way to raise their consciousness, not only of the failures and the destructive forces of the foregone, unchangeable historical past, but also-and more history is crucial not only to the "redemption" of its past and the rectification of its present, but also to the very meaning of its collective identity, for national identify is "a blend of past and future: memories and [past] impressions on the one hand, hopes and wishes on the other, all closely interconnected"; every people must both "look back with eyes wide open" and "know whence it is coming, whither it is going". (Note 24) When the apocalyptic playwright makes use of an historical paradigm, as Sobol does in The Jerusalem Syndrome, its primary role is reflective, with retrospection mainly serving as an anticipatory framework, envisaging the future in light of the implications of the present. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even the Soviet gulags are apocalyptic not in virtue of their being instances of total destruction (which they are not) but due to the complete rupture with the past that they represent. (Note 28) It is this rupture that makes them paradigmatic events, studying the symptomatic consequences of which can provide a better understanding of current sensitivities to apocalyptic events and their representations. It is for this reason, Berger claims, that the perspective of post-WWII generations can accurately be described as post-apocalyptic. (Note 29) Because past catastrophes function as primary models for apocalyptic dystopias and as catalysts of imagined retrospection (that is, of retrospection from the vantage point of the imagined future apocalypse), memory's role as an effective deterrent of future catastrophe is a central theme in Black Rain. In our time, historical memory is transmitted via three main channels: institutions (libraries, museums, statistical records, etc.), the media (the press, the electronic media, in particular television, and so on), and the arts. Let us consider each as they are presented in Black Rain.  challenged to use the traumatic memory of the past-a past replicated in the theatrical present-as a catalyst of action in order to prevent similar events from recurring in the future in real life.

Memory, Amnesia, and Archive Fever
Two of the settings in Black Rain, the library and the museum, are what Pierre Nora calls "realms of memory". In his view, only modern society, which has lost its capacity for "living memory", is in need of such sites that provide it with "secondary" or "prosthetic" memory. (Note 31) Our interest in these sites of congealed memory, Nora claims, stems precisely from our acute awareness of a rupture with the past, from our realization that in modernity natural memory has been replaced with a classificatory, reconstructive "history" which acts with the force of a "vanquishing, effacing tide". (Note 32) In the play, as already noted, one such modern "realm of memory" is the library where the librarian and the young American meet. The latter comes to the library in search of a book on the American postwar occupation of Japan. He finds it in the iconography section, where it is catalogued by virtue of its photographs, not its historical subject matter. The library's cataloguing system is perfectly ordered, though subject to its own inner logic which is unrelated to the laws of reality. Certain claims made by impedes the archive's desire to return to the arche, the beginning, the original past event. As a site of accretion where memory is accumulated, the archive does not allow us to place ourselves outside of it, to decide on our own how things really happened or what they truly mean. (Note 35) It is precisely this problematic that infects the librarian's obsessive memorization of Second World War statistics, in particular casualty numbers by nationality. For him, they constitute "a memorial, abstract sculpting against forgetfulness". (Note 36) Yet it is precisely these images of "memorial, abstract sculpting" that expose memory's detachment from the concrete event, subverting the librarian's claims about the need not to forget. Though he ostensibly devotes his entire time to the task of memory, the mechanical compulsive act of memorizing casualty numbers turns out to provide a merely prosthetic memory, a poor substitute for living memory, which only contributes to the librarian's repression and forgetfulness of his own role during the war. It is only towards the end of the play, when he is revealed to be a former scientist who had helped to develop the atomic bomb and confesses his erstwhile secret desire to see the bomb used ("because that's the dynamics of it: when you've got a bomb, you want to use it" (Note 37)) that his protective shield cracks and he can no longer remember the casualty numbers he has worked so hard to memorize.
The process of amnesia is even more acute in the media, a problem incisively described by Jean Baudrillard. In contemporary times, Baudrillard writes, much of our collective memory has taken the form of media images, most of them visual, which detach actual events from their concrete socio-historical context, redeploying them in the media as "floating signifiers." (Note 38) The image no longer invokes in our consciousness a reality richer, more detailed, more complex than itself; rather, the real thing is gutted of its content, leaving a poor substitute in the form of a schematic image. Instead of creating meaning, the information conveyed by the image devours its own content. (Note 39) The media, primarily television, turn the past into a bank of images for repeated and arbitrary use, negating its concrete history. It is in just this manner that watching the devastation of Hiroshima on television serves the librarian in Black Rain as an alibi for his refusal to visit Hiroshima itself: Their encounter with the young American is standard tourist fare, the megaphone-equipped guides delivering a steady flow of facts, dates, and statistics, just like their U.S. counterpart, the librarian.
Having arrived in Hiroshima to witness the traces of devastation with in his own eyes, the young American is soon sucked into his current status as a tourist, "seeing" the restored Hiroshima through the camera lens. Even after four visits to the Peace Museum, he has not yet really saw Hiroshima: Young Japanese Woman #2: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. The dazzling museum reconstruction, the perfect urban restoration, the library, the archive-all turn out to be mere substitutes, failed attempts at an authentic representation of the original events. Their precise reconstruction and the overly perfect illusion it provides, as well as their flawlessly rational organization, serve to conceal the trauma instead of making it tangible. The tourists' tearful reaction is likewise a sterile cathartic effect, substituting tears over the past for genuine future-oriented action. The The survivors are witnesses in virtue of their being the ultimate victims of the events in which they had been involved, therefore their perspectives are personal and subjective. Theatre audiences, by contrast, keep a certain distance between themselves and the events; they can thus simultaneously be witnesses confronting the suffering other "face to face", but also external spectators capable of critical reflection.

Young American
It is this latter feature which generates the ethical action -action taking place outside the theatre, after the show ends. Moreover, the very act of representation takes us from a past-oriented ethics, which largely consists of empathic listening to the witness, to a future-oriented one which urges us to act ethically in the realm of politics and transform the real world. The unique circumstances provided by theatre make possible a moral awakening that reaches beyond our usual geographical, ideological, or cultural environments. It is in theatre that we encounter the unfamiliar witness, the one we rarely Why, however, did an Israeli play look so far afield, to the historical catastrophe of a foreign nation and culture? Wouldn't the contemporaneous Holocaust have been a more "natural" subject matter, one more readily accessible to Israeli audiences? More than any other historical event, the Holocaust requires that we attune ourselves to a new ethical orientation, and for many artists and thinkers after the Holocaust the question "How did this happen?" has been inextricably tied to the question "What can we do to prevent it from happening again?" But while the poetics of Holocaust testimonials tends to engender, first and foremost, a past-oriented "ethics of listening", the play's use of Hiroshima serves to stress the fact that the development of nuclear weapons has never ceased-on the contrary, nuclear weapons are now in the possession of more nations than ever before-and that its relevance to Israel is now greater than ever, especially in light of the recent developments in Iran. The use of the metaphor of nuclear holocaust in Black Rain relies on the memory of the past but derives much of its power from the threats of the present and from the effort to look to the future. From this point on, only the viewers can assume responsibility and take real action.

Conclusion
The main conclusions of the survey of those two plays is that the Post-Apocalyptic theatre does not seek to present the historical events as an end in itself. Rather, it uses historical past as a bank of events and images rooted deeply in the national or international traumatic memory, as warnings of their possible recurring. The main concern of the authors is to bring a change in the political behavior in the present, in order to prevent this horrifying prophecy from happening. We may say that their study-case is the past; their perspective is the Future; but the necessary actions to be activated are rooted in the political present.