You may be seeing Amos Oz, perhaps Israel’s most esteemed novelist, mentioned often these days. The celebration of his seventieth birthday this year is providing an occassion for reflection on his life’s work as novelist and public intellectual.
In a recent New York Times’s article, Oz is quoted as relating both of his callings to the same source: empathy for the “other.” Since that source is at the heart of the work of multifaith engagement(and hence of this blog), I thought it worth quoting the article directly.
“‘I never mix them up,’ he says {of the political essays and the novels}. “One is to tell the government to go to hell. The other is to tell stories…’ Both usher from the same source, he says — empathy. Both are about imagining the other…. ‘I get up in the morning, I drink a cup of coffee, I sit down at my desk and I start to ask myself: ‘What if I were him? What if I were her? How would I feel? What would I say? How would I react?’ ”
May Oz continue to exercise his powerful gifts of empathy –as storyteller and political visionary–for many years to come!
