Playwright Yoav Rinon: “I’m Ready to Throw Punches If Necessary”

"The unholy trinity of king, queen and prince is built on the king. Once it collapses, everything collapses with it," says Yoav Rinon about his new play, "The Leeches" (Tesha Neshamot), which too closely resembles Israeli reality. "In the end it explodes, but until it explodes it takes a long time." His new play depicts an indulgent, detached royal family, and takes place in a kingdom undergoing disintegration and moral decay. There are flattering advisers called "Fungi," leeches stealing from the state treasury, and worms forced to make do with what remains. The allegory is quite clear.

You chose to write a comedy, not a tragedy. "Because that is the model from antiquity. Dikaiopolis, my hero, is a character in Aristophanes' anti-war play 'The Acharnians.' Tragedy is a genre of stagnation, it teaches us to accept what cannot be changed. It is דווקא in comedy that there is potential for change, revolution. That is what Aristophanes did, he wrote anti-war plays while most citizens of Athens supported the war. Connecting to him creates an analogy between that war and what is happening here now, to Israeli megalomania. Athens wanted to be an empire and lost everything because of greed. As long as they fought Sparta they could somehow win the war, which lasted 27 years. The thing was that they also wanted Sicily. They opened another front, like we opened one against Iran. Athens fell under the spell of demagogues, the failure in Sicily was total and as a result they lost the war. In Israel now too, instead of leaders there are demagogues, and everyone else suffers passively."

Twenty-seven years of war, like Athens and Sparta, is a long time to wait. "We are in the midst of a hundred-year war. Either the war will end or we will end. We will not last here as a dictatorship, because this is a messianic dictatorship and it is completely disconnected from reality. It is a dictatorship that thinks we can manage without the United States. We do not have resources like Russia or China or Nazi Germany, where the population is large, the territory is large. We do not have all that. High-tech alone cannot sustain an empire."

"Creating is more dangerous than researching" Rinon, 62, is a unique figure in Israel's literary and academic landscape, an engaged intellectual. A popular lecturer who is also a writer, playwright, translator, and even performs in the plays he writes. He is a professor of literature and classical studies at the Hebrew University, and head of the School of Ancient and Modern Languages and Literatures at the university. He was born and raised in Tel Aviv. At 17 he came out, but along the way he married, became the father of a daughter, and divorced. He studied literature at the Hebrew University, wrote his doctorate on the Marquis de Sade, and published it in the book "Sade's Chamber of Death." He also published the nonfiction book "The Crisis of the Humanities," which sparked public debate, and translated from Ancient Greek Aristotle's "Poetics" and from Italian Dante's "Inferno" from "The Divine Comedy." A few years ago he published "Eros and Melancholia," a play that protested nepotism and the appointment of relatives and caused a stir at the university. Beyond that, it was an extraordinarily erotic and passionate play: it told the story of Yoav, a literature lecturer who has an affair with one of his students, and years after that affair ends, the student takes revenge on him.

You work in two channels, academic research and creation. Doesn't that clash? "It's like bilingualism, it exists in separate channels. In my experience, being a creator is much more dangerous than being a researcher. Okay, I wrote about the Marquis de Sade, that already says something about me and cowardice is not my thing, but still it is much more protected than creation. Even in class I am fairly exposed, because what I teach exposes me. But 'The Leeches' is much more dangerous, physically. It invites violence. We live in a world of incitement to violence."

Maybe deep down you want to throw a few punches on a political background? "I want to influence reality and I am ready to throw punches if necessary. I doubt we will be able to hold a launch event for the play, or find a venue willing to stage it. If it happens, I think I will play the king, the roles of the bad guys are the best. On stage you can indulge in sadism, in real life you cannot. I was never fascinated by Netanyahu's hollow charisma, part of his appeal is that he does not care about anything. There is something in the totalitarian personality that is a model, because if he is all-powerful, maybe we are all-powerful too? It's a lot of fun."

"I Am in the Army for Democracy" You end the play with an appeal to the audience and a call for change. "It is a structural element I took from antiquity, the poet speaks his mind. We are not yet under a dictatorship and we do not have a royal family, people are not being executed here yet, this is not Russia or Iran, but we are on the way there. We need to wake up and do what we can, otherwise we will become worms, which is the worst thing there is. You lose your backbone."

You are a political person, not afraid of confrontation. "Cowardice now is a luxury. All my wars come from a survival experience, that if I do not do what I can, my life and my family's life are in danger. I know I will not move somewhere else to live, I will stay here until I die. By the way, being a gay lecturer in Jerusalem is already a political statement. In general, living in Jerusalem is a political act."

You have a fondness for breaking boundaries. In academia you call for bringing political discourse into campus. This year you taught the course "Wars Then and Now," half of it about the war between Athens and Sparta and half about the war in Gaza. "Here I feel like I am in the army for democracy. I do not feel like a boundary-breaker. MK Almog Cohen, who entered a lecturer's classroom in Be'er Sheva, is the one who crossed the line, and I need to defend myself from him. Li Mordechai and I taught the course on Gaza, and we also met with the students in the evening at a pub in Jerusalem so they could let off steam. There were people who came from reserve duty to the pub, they said it helps them be left-wing in Gaza."

How much do you believe in the ability to influence through what you teach or write? "If the play goes up in the theater, then there is an ever-growing audience watching it and talking about it, the impact continues. I want a quote from the play, like 'The salvation of Bibi in an instant,' to catch on and stay in people's heads during the upcoming election campaign as well. Writing is an optimistic act, and I believe in education. In the end, what will determine the elections is enough people in Dikaiopolis's clear-eyed position."