EPILOGUE: The View from Mount Herzl

I wrote the chapters of this book in Canada, but I am writing its epilogue in Israel. At the moment I am in Tel Aviv, which more than anywhere else in Israel realizes Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Western city in the Middle East: a bustling and cosmopolitan commercial and cultural center, looking outward toward the Mediterranean and the world beyond, and thoroughly secular (although there are synagogues for those who want them). Tel Aviv takes its name from a biblical phrase that means “mound of spring.” Connoting both archaeological antiquity and contemporary revival, it was the title of Nahum