When asked to write this article Shamir had reservations about our ability to comprehend the relationship of the founding generation of Israel to Judaism. In regards to Alterman specifically she notes that at present there are two schools of thought: the first is that he was completely alienated from Judaism and the second that he was a mystic greatly influenced by the Hassidic tradition and the Kabala. Both approaches she feels are exaggerations and falsifications.
She notes that Alterman was a modernist – rational and scientific in his approach to life – but recognized that there are things in this world that reason and science alone will never be able to understand. Yet his family heritage, as with others of his generation, was rooted in Hassidut and thus many of his poetic allusions and metaphors reflected the language of this tradition. But his religiosity was (like Einstein) that of a man of science – wonderment at the ineffable essence of existence itself – and not the religiosity of a man of religion. But at the same time the attempt to divorce him from his Jewish roots is also a falsification.
