Just As I Thought by Grace Paley Page B

go anywhere near a synagogue, although he allowed me to take my grandmother on holidays. On the other hand, we were clearly and peacefully Jewish, so there we were. I don’t know in what direction my Judaism would have gone were it not for that moment.
    I move from that to tell another story, or midrash, which I have talked about on various occasions. For those who grew up within that family there was, I suppose, a certain amount of feeling about being Jewish. I had a certain vanity about being Jewish. I thought it was really a great thing, and I thought this without any religious education. But I also really felt that to be Jewish was to be a socialist. I mean, that was my idea as a kid—that’s what it meant to be Jewish. I got over that at a certain point, and so did a great many of my family members who were my age. But all this brought me to the story that I think of again and again. I don’t understand why this story isn’t told more often, especially in Israel. Or maybe it should be thrown away.
    The story I’m referring to is about the judge and prophet Samuel (I think it’s in Kings I). Samuel goes to speak to God and he says that the people want a king.
    God says, “No no, that’s wrong, it will be terrible for them if they have a king. They’ll have this king, and they’ll have to give up their vineyards and their concubines. They’ll have a lot of trouble with this king, and they’ll lose a great deal more than they’ll gain.”
    So Samuel goes back, and he talks to the people. He tells them what God has said. But the people say, “No, we already told you what we want. We want a king.”
    So Samuel goes back to God and he says, “You know, they really want a king, but I think it’s partly because they don’t like me.”
    And God says, “No, that’s not true; it’s me they don’t like.”
    Well, Samuel goes back to the people and tells them again that they really don’t want a king. This time the people say, “Look, we want to tell you something. This is what we want. Listen: we want to be like all the other nations and have a king.”
    God hears this, and He understands they really mean it. And He sends Samuel on his way to look for Saul. So that’s who they get: they get Saul.
    I think of those lines again and again: “We want to be like all the other nations and have a king.” And I think: We want to be like all the other nations and have great armies; we want to be like all the other nations and have nuclear bombs. I’ve told this story to other people, and asked them, What does that mean? We want to be like all the other nations and have these things—what does that mean? They say, “Why should Jews be better?”
    I keep going back again to an idea, and it’s a somewhat sentimental idea, but I’m stuck with it. And I’m entitled to be sentimental, since I’m already old, which you can tell because I’m up here. I had this idea that Jews were supposed to be better. I’m not saying they were, but they were supposed to be; and it seemed to me on my block that they often were. I don’t see any reason in being in this world actually if you can’t in some way be better, repair it somehow, and I think most of the people here feel something like that. So to be like all the other nations seems to me a waste of nationhood, a waste of statehood, a waste of energy, and a waste of life.
    I want to say just two more things. First, I want to describe an experience I had in Israel about a year and a half ago. We visited a kibbutz, and we stayed a couple of nights with people there. All the members of this kibbutz were South African. They had come to this very kibbutz about thirty years ago. We found them interesting because they had come from South Africa. At one point I was talking with our hosts about what was happening in Israel, and this was a year and a half ago, not last week. Having lived on this kibbutz all these years, having raised their children there—their daughters now in