Introduction to "The Night Archer"

By Michael Oren

I am committed, as always, to bringing you the most up-to-date and clear-eyed insights into the fateful issues facing Israel and the Jewish people today. Occasionally, though, I’d like to invite you to step outside our current challenges and join me in a thought piece—about music, human relations, and literature. I’d like to do so now by sharing with you my thoughts—my ani ma’amin—about the connection between creativity and limitations, between freedom and law.

It’s strange, reading today, five years after its publication, the introduction to my short story collection The Night Archer. Strange, because the events of the past half-decade——COVID and the Middle East war—fly in the face of the introduction’s theme of freedom. For much of that period, I was either confined to my apartment or consigned to its safe room. Defending Israel diplomatically and in the media left little time for imagination or taste for the belletristic.

Yet, on further reflection, the forward is all the more meaningful in light of the limitations that followed. After all, my thesis is that true freedom is impossible without law—a lesson our people learned at Sinai and then gifted to half of humanity. Fiction in general, I argue, and short fiction especially, are inherently Jewish—what is the Torah but a collection of sketches, epics, and novellas?—infused with what I call the freedom-limit paradox.

The revelation is not, of course, entirely unique. Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace, and Anwar Sadat in his memoir, In Search of Identity, both concluded that they were never so free as when they were imprisoned. The late Israeli novelist Amos Oz once likened writing to stepping hard on the gas and hard on the brakes at the same time. But the Night Archer’s introduction stresses the Jewish origins of the idea and its relevance to Israel. It’s about the paradox’s impact on my own artistic and Zionist life.

How much greater has that influence become during the last five years of restriction? The Night Archer contains fifty short stories and, since its publication, I’ve written nearly fifty more. They’re posted, one story each month, on my second Substack, called The Memory Man. Read them and recall that there is indeed no true freedom without law and no creativity without constraint.

Night Archer Introduction

Wicked Son, Published 2020

Coming home from school one day when I was twelve, sitting at my desk and pulling out pen and paper, I suddenly discovered freedom. It came in the form of a poem, “Who cries for the soul of the pigeon?” What freedom! But while reveling in it, I also encountered a truth. That poetry was not a ramble of unbridled thoughts, but a vision bound by structure, meter, and rhyme. Real freedom, I internalized even then, was only attainable through limits.

That paradox has generated friction, even conflict, throughout much of recorded history and is still destabilizing today. But controversy cannot detract from the timeless need to counterbalance liberty with law. Overly fettered freedom is tyranny, but untethered freedom is chaos. And as in society, so, too, it is with art. A symphony, a novel, or a sculpture becomes transcendent precisely by remaining within its framework, its tempo, genre, and space.

As a beginning poet, I understood that writing free verse meant first mastering form. Many years would pass, though, before I realized that achieving freedom through confinement was more than just a method. Rather, like monotheism and universal morality, it was an eminently Jewish idea.

It is an idea enshrined in Exodus, the story of the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. No sooner do we escape then we lapse into debauchery and golden calf-building. Not until Moses receives the law on Mount Sinai and imposes it on our people is our freedom fully guaranteed. Consequently, the Jews dedicate an entire holiday to freedom—Passover—but celebrate it with strict ritual and dietary rules. For that reason, the Hebrew language has as many words for freedom (hofesh, herut, dror) as it does for law (hok, din, mishpat). For Jews, mitzvah means both commandment and blessing.

The freedom-limit paradox can be confounding but also intoxicating. A friend who was born Jewish but hated his heritage accompanied me once to synagogue. It was the holiday of Simchat Torah, marking the conclusion of the year-long Torah reading, when Jews dance and sing while embracing the scrolls. My friend was flummoxed. “They’re celebrating a book that tells them all these things they can’t do?” he asked. “I don’t get it.” For days he walked around bewildered, unable to grasp the contradiction. Finally, in desperation, he began to study the Bible and then the Talmud, and eventually became observant.

The paradox was yet another Jewish gift to civilization. It deeply influenced the Founding Fathers who hardwired it into their Constitution and the system of checks and balances. Along with proscribing absolute power and protecting the weak—two more Biblical concepts—it laid the basis of American democracy. But it also informed Zionism. While aspiring to transform the Jews into a “free people in our own land,” as we sing in Israel’s Hatikvah anthem, Zionism also worked to curb that freedom with statutes. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to Israel at the same age that I began to write poetry. I wanted the dizziness of freedom along with its sovereign responsibilities.

In Israel, I indeed found freedom but also accepted limits, paying taxes and obeying the national rules. I continued to write poetry and fiction, and, with increasing frequency, history. Writing history, I found, could be a liberating experience, provided it complied with the standards of accuracy and notation. The best compliment I received for my history books was that they read like novels.

But Israeli life often restrained my freedom. For years, I was a soldier, carrying out orders, unable to do or even dress as I chose. And then I entered government service, first as an ambassador and later as an elected official. I forfeited not only my independence but the right to speak my mind entirely. Israeli law, much like its American counterpart, forbids certain representatives from publishing books while in office. Yet nothing prohibited me from writing, and I did so virtually every morning before work. Much of this collection was written then, as a personal assertion of freedom.

If, as a preteen, poetry was my gateway to expression, now I found the same route through stories. Much like verse, short fiction imposes draconian strictures on the author, necessitating constant discipline. A writer must present fully-drawn characters, a developed plot, a resolution and meaning—within as little as a single page. But while relentlessly confining, stories afford a vast creative scope. I could be anywhere—on a New England beach, an Asian jungle or a spaceship. I could be a homicide detective or a Holocaust survivor, a conquistador or a hitman, a human or an animal. I could be an adult or a child, woman or man, living today or thousands of years ago. What exhilarating freedom!

But what control. The result is stories which aspire to be both concise and audacious, structured yet wild. They are American in their candor and Israeli in their zeal, yet always, paradoxically, Jewish. They are my way of celebrating the end of slavery but also of accepting the law. They are the way I embrace limitation while dancing and singing unchained.