Leave your parents' house

Bernardo Sorj combines biography and history, adventure and reflection in a narrative that takes a journey into his past. "Leave Your Parents' House"—a biblical injunction in which God tells Abraham to leave his home and his native land—recounts personal and collective adventures and offers reflections on illusions, mistakes, successes, and, above all, the richness of a time when young people believed a radical transformation of society was possible. Sorj recalls memories of an Israel where the struggle for peace united young Latin Americans, Arabs, and Israeli Jews, and of an encounter with Darcy Ribeiro in Uruguay, when the exiled anthropologist expressed his fascination with a Brazilian movement of young Zionist revolutionaries that, through its own efforts, was spreading to other countries in the region. In some passages, he sheds light on the Jews' view of themselves. "Unlike religion, which most young people distanced themselves from, Israel became a shared value between parents and children. There were certainly differences. For parents, the existence of the State of Israel was experienced as a miracle, a quasi-religious phenomenon. For most young people, Zionism was a secular ideology, an alternative to the religious and resigned worldview (...)," reports Sorj. The Uruguayan-born author teaches us that "The Bible tells us that the beginning of the history of a people, in this case, the Hebrews, begins with leaving their parents' home. In the biblical text, God commands Abraham: 'Go out (lech lecha) from your land, from your native environment, and from your father's house.' A possible translation of Lech lecha is 'go to yourself,' go find yourself. Every beginning of a new path requires a break with the home where one was born. But every break, however radical one might like to imagine, is nonetheless full of continuities, even if only for the simple fact that it is constructed as a reaction to the past."