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long and passionately as an idea before descending to hard history. When Elie Wiesel's mind drifts to the Holy Land, his expressive face grows radiant. ''We live in biblical times,'' says Wiesel. ''Think of all that has been accomplished in 40 years.'' A national home for every Jew in the world, an ingathering from more than 100 countries -- although, of course, 9.3 million of the world's Jews remain in the Diaspora. The resurrection of a dormant language, Hebrew, for everyday use, a constantly renewed and invented tongue that has helped compose a functioning society, and democracy, out of the disparate characters and cultures that have come to the Promised Land from Poland, Morocco, Ethiopia, Mexico, everywhere. The earlier Zionist settlers had paved the way over several generations, but Israel from the moment of its beginning in 1948 was an act of collective will and courage, a valor that arose in part out of desperation. A flourishing culture. Universities, clinics, industries, social welfare, housing, an agricultural system watered by a complex national irrigation grid, the world's largest diamond-polishing industry, defense industries. A going concern. One of the best armies in the world. Miraculous. But also the result of an infusion of about $43 billion in American Government aid over the years, and millions more contributed privately by Jews in America and elsewhere. ''The Israelis have produced a modern country -- doorknobs and hinges, plumbing fixtures, electrical supplies, chamber music, airplanes, teacups,'' Saul Bellow has written. ''It is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provision for everything . . . These people are actively, individually engaged in universal history. I don't see how they can bear it.'' Still, as Israel turns 40, it seems unhappy, agitated and exhausting. The idealistic founding energies have matured into certain disillusions of middle age. The moral discrepancy in the original ideal has come home to roost. Israel's political leadership is divided and essentially stagnant, taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising, paralyzed by the dilemma of the territories. Public opinion is splintered between hard-liners who want to keep all the land and those willing to take the chance of giving some of it up for peace. On neither side, in Israel, is the matter as theoretical as it might be elsewhere. Apocalypse is a possibility always. People live with it. They listen to the news almost obsessively. Israelis have traveled a distance from the Leon Uris version of themselves, from the romanticized pioneer days when kibbutzniks drained malarial swamps by day and danced the hora by firelight. After Ben-Gurion came to Palestine in 1906, he wrote a letter of anticipatory nostalgia to his father in Plonsk, Russian Poland. The son was laboring hard. ''But who is to complain, to sigh, to despair? In 25 years our country will be one of the most blooming, most beautiful and happiest: an old-new nation will flourish in an ancient-new land. Then we shall relate how we fevered and worked, hungered and dreamed.'' Israel seems now a nation in a state of strange suspension. In the Dead Sea, one cannot sink, so dense is the water with minerals. Nor can one swim without difficulty. The water is heavy and bitterly stings the eyes. The body floats in uneasy weightlessness in the blue-green metallic sheen, and one looks off across
