First, I would like to thank you for the great honor of being
awarded an honorary doctorate from your university today. This
is far from the first honorary doctorate I have received, but
I accept it with the same sensation that I always do: with deep
shame. Because of my rather sporadic education, I suffer from
feelings of unworthiness , and so I accept this degree as a strange
gift, a continuing source of bewilderment. I can easily imagine
a familiarlooking gentleman appearing at any moment, snatching
the just-obtained diploma from my hands, taking me by the scruff
of my neck and throwing me out of the hall, because it has all
been just a mistake compounded by my own audacity.
I'm sure you can see where this odd expression of my gratitude
is leading: I want to take this opportunity to confess my long
and intimate affinity with one of the great sons of the Jewish
people, the Prague writer Franz Kafka. I'm not an expert on Kafka,
and I'm not eager to read the secondary literature on him. I can't
even say that I've read everything Kafka has written. I do, however,
have a rather special reason for my indifference to Kafka studies:
I sometimes feel I'm the only one who really understands Kafka,
and that no one else has any business trying to make his work
more accessible to me. And my somewhat desultory attitude about
studying his works comes from my vague feeling that I don't need
to read and re-read everything Kafka has written because I already
know what's there. I'm even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did
not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I would have
written his works myself.
What I've just said may sound odd, but I'm sure you understand
what I mean. All I'm really saying is that in Kafka I have found
a large portion of my own experience of the world, of myself,
and of my way of being in the world. I will try, briefly and in
broad terms, to name some of the more easily defined forms of
this experience.
One of them is a profound, banal, and therefore utterly vague
sensation of culpability, as though my very existence were a kind
of sin. Then there is a powerful feeling of general alienation,
both my own and relating to everything around me, which helps
to create such feelings; an experience of unbearable oppressiveness,
a need constantly to explain myself to someone, to defend myself,
a longing for an unattainable order of things, a longing that
increases as the terrain I walk through becomes more muddled and
confusing. I sometimes feel the need to confirm my identity by
sounding off at others and demanding my rights. Such outbursts,
of course, are quite unnecessary and the response fails to reach
the right ears, and vanishes into the black hole that surrounds
me. Everything I encounter displays to me its absurd aspect first.
I feel as though I am constantly lagging behind powerful, selfconfident
men whom I can never overtake, let alone emulate. I find myself
essentially hateful, deserving only mockery.
I can already hear your objections that I style myself in these
kafkaesque outlines only because in reality I'm entirely different:
someone who quietly and persistently fights for something, someone
whose idealism has carried him to the head of his nation.
Yes, I admit that superficially I may appear to be the precise
opposite of all those K.'s Josef K., the surveyor K., and Franz
K. although I stand behind everything I've said about myself.
I would only add that, in my opinion, the hidden motor driving
all my dogged efforts is precisely this innermost feeling of mine
of being excluded, of belonging nowhere, a state of disinheritance,
as it were, of fundamental nonbelonging. Moreover, I would say
that it's precisely my desperate longing for order that keeps
plunging me into the most improbable adventures. I would even
venture to say that everything worthwhile I've ever accomplished
I have done to conceal my almost metaphysical feeling of guilt.
The real reason I am always creating something, organizing something,
it would seem, is to defend my permanently questionable right
to exist.
You may well ask how someone who thinks of himself this way can
be the president of a country. It's a paradox, but I must admit
that if I am a better president than many others would be in my
place, then it is precisely because somewhere in the deepest substratum
of my work lies this constant doubt about myself and my right
to hold office. I am the kind of person who would not be in the
least surprised if, in the very middle of my presidency, I were
to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy
tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks. Nor would
I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake
up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed
to tell my fellow prisoners everything that had happened to me
in the past six months.
The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher
I am, the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.
And every step of the way, I feel what a great advantage it is
for doing a good job as president to know that I do not belong
in the position and that I can at any moment, and justifiably,
be removed from it.
This is not intended to be a lecture or an essay, merely a brief
comment on the subject of Franz Kafka and my presidency. I think
it is appropriate that these things be expressed here in Jerusalem,
at the Hebrew University, and by a Czech. Perhaps I have put more
of my cards on the table than I wanted to, and perhaps my advisers
will reprimand me for it. But I won't mind, because I expect it
and deserve it. My readiness for the anticipated reprimand is
just another example of what an advantage it is for doing my job
when I am prepared at all times for the worst.
Once more, I thank you for the honor, and after what I've said
here, I'm ashamed to repeat that I accept it with a sense of shame.
Translated by Paul Wilson