by Avraham Burg
The Six-Day War began with fear and depression. During the three weeks leading to the conflict, we felt anew the terrors of the War of Independence and the losses of 1948—the six thousand dead, an incomprehensible number, 1 percent of the Jewish population in the country. (Today, that percentage would be equivalent to seventy thousand Israelis.) We repressed the memories of those incomprehensible losses for the first nineteen years of Israel’s existence, despite the death and bereavement present in every house on every street. Suddenly the memories and emotions could no longer be repressed; everything came out with full force. The hardships of those three weeks seemed to us like the three weeks that preceded the burning and destruction of the Second Temple. There was a feeling of being in a new Warsaw Ghetto. But if the Six-Day War had begun with a grim mood, its ending was unlike anything that had occurred before (or since) in our long history. Many of us interpreted the quick and surprising end of the conflict as a miracle. In those six days, many chapters of Jewish and Israeli history were closed, and new chapters begun, quite different from preceding ones. We perceived those six days as the six days of creation, this time of a renewed Israel. In the six days of war, we erased the humiliation and shame of our past in the diaspora and gained a new sense of pride that countered the legacy of generations of misery. Our generation completed what the founders of the state had failed to achieve: overcoming the exilic mentality of weakness. We were the first generation to fully express Jewish might.
The holiday of Shavuot, which came a week after the war, became something else entirely. Until 1967, we would go every year to Mount Zion and to the ancient compound revered as the tomb of King David. At the time, I was unaware of the industry of religious illusions that touts every local sheikh’s tomb as a Jewish holy place, without much supporting historical or archeological evidence. In the sixties, I believed with all my heart that King David was indeed buried there, under the tombstone and its fabric cover. On holidays when my friends and I went to Mount Zion, within the small Israel of those days, adjacent to the ancient walls, we climbed the roofs of the compound and tried to see the Temple Mount, inventing yearnings we didn’t really have. We greatly enjoyed the experience of being near the dangerous border and were addicted to the sensation of almost touching the walls of the mythical Old City. In those days, we also went to the Abu Tor neighborhood, a different viewpoint at the city frontier of the same yearned-for holy site, and from the corner lookout we barely managed, craning our necks, to see the southern corner of the Temple Mount. Whoever understood the explanations of the teachers and guides claimed that he saw even more: Absalom’s Pillar and the Dome of the Rock, not gold-plated then and yet to become the symbol of Palestinian nationalism. All that was before that crucial war.
On the morning of the holiday, less than a week after the great catharsis, when the air was still rife with that mix of emotions that would never return—fear and pride, bereavement and victory, arrogance and wonder—throngs of people gathered in the square below my childhood home. A true pilgrimage: a mix of older people who had visited the Western Wall in “the old days” before 1948; relatives of the paratroopers, like Aunt Malka and Uncle Zeev, who longed not only for the encounter with the sacred stones, but to meet their mobilized loved ones, our heroes, the liberators of the wall; bereaved families fresh from their mourning period; and masses of young people like myself. A huge group of both regular and occasional worshipers who all felt a need to thank God as close as possible to his official abode. A long, seemingly endless column of frenzied dancers wound its way down to the Valley of Hinnom. Sweating men in prayer shawls, happy children like myself in holiday clothes, curious onlookers, and ordinary folks mingled together. I was short and got sandwiched between the man in front of me, whose shoulder I tried to reach, and the anonymous dancer behind me whose hand lay heavily on my back, pressing me down. This monotonous choreography went on for hours. Songs of religious faith rose from dry throats, and the hoarser the singer, the more righteous he was deemed. The human serpent entered the Old City through Dung Gate and danced up its alleys. I remember the rivers of sweat, the terrible thirst, the aching feet, but the ecstasy carried us onward.
In the afternoon, after many hours, I found myself again in the square below my home, at the starting point. “But where’s the Kotel, the Western Wall?” I asked my neighbor. “Down there, didn’t you see it?” No! I hadn’t. Last week my parents didn’t want to take me there and now, when I could have gotten there on my own, I had failed. The first time that I was allowed to visit the Western Wall, a remnant of the Temple, freely and not at the pleasure of foreigners, as a liberating owner and not as a Jew under occupation, and I missed it entirely. That first missed introduction seems to me the seed of the alienation I have felt since from the paganist cults attached to the place that have turned it into a repulsive focus of all that is primitive, primal, and aggressive in contemporary Judaism. When my intellectual guide, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the most important Israeli public intellectual of the first decades of the state, sarcastically labeled the wall and its cults the “disco-Kotel,” many were angry at him. But I felt that he was describing precisely the defining experience that never, in fact, defined me in my dance to the vanished wall of 1967.
THAT WAS THE POINT AT WHICH I BEGAN TO DIVERGE from my parents’ path. It was no coincidence that each one of us encountered the Western Wall differently that week. In my view, there is no objective sanctity of places, people, or things. I have no idea if there is a God in heaven, if there is a Creator. Moreover, it is difficult for me to believe—to say the least—that this God, whose existence is not entirely clear to me, indeed announced something to one of us, or took the trouble to designate by Himself certain places as more sacred than others. It is all man-made and the fruit of our imagination, and I greatly respect that. The only sanctity in my view is that which people attach to things. If people appreciate, respect, and prefer a certain law, then it is superior to other normative systems that people do not appreciate and respect as much. For example, most people I know do not cross the street on a red light; they respect red lights as part of a legal system that protects the sanctity of life. Had there been traffic lights at Mount Sinai, maybe they would have become sacred, if only because they guided traffic at the foot of the mountain. Who knows? On the other hand, I have trouble seeing any value in foolish laws. On my first official visit to the British parliament I was told, in utter seriousness, that there is a law that bans dying in parliament. I never checked whether this law actually exists. But such ridiculous laws can be found in many law books, including our own scriptures.
The Bible and the five books of the Torah that it contains are for me a wonderful human creation, complex, challenging, and valuable. I don’t believe that they were given by God to man, but I respect and therefore venerate the devotion of the generations before me to these books and their content. After all, they drove immense human movements.
My parents had much simpler beliefs, very basic and very traditional. Every Saturday morning my father would choose one of the books he would read and study during prayer services. His choice was always the second book, because the first, which was always with him, was a Bible commentary titled Torah Temimah, by Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein. It was something of an iconic symbol of my father’s perception of the Jewish Torah as innocent of artifice and deception. In many respects the naïveté of my parents’ faith and their way of life was a total contrast to the sophistication and wisdom that dominated other aspects of their lives. Dad—and Mom always at his side—could not have survived so many years in the Israeli political leadership, in so many Israeli governments, and particularly in his difficult and malicious party, had he tried to act with the same naïve and faithful honesty that characterized his religious belief. In practice, he maintained an emotional separation between religion and state, though unfortunately it was not the right separation. My parents separated their religion, which was simple and folksy, from the sophisticated, cun
ning, and virtually sacred state—“the harbinger of our redemption”—of which they were a part.
In the early eighties, I suffered serious back problems. I had been injured in a parachuting accident, and my battered back did not hold up under the strain I was subjecting it to. After many hospitalizations and treatments, it was decided to operate on the spinal cord and solve the problem once and for all. I vaguely remember the moment of opening my eyes after the surgery. Sedatives were still circulating in my body, but my eyes were open and I was conscious, waking up and trying to connect. Near the bed were my beloved wife, Yael, and Mom. The first words Mom spoke to me were: “Dad went to the Kotel to put in a note.” I didn’t have much strength in those first few moments, but what I wanted to shout still echoes inside me. What? My father putting notes in the crevices of the Western Wall, like the rest of the Jewish idol worshipers? I was taken completely by surprise, because this was so unlike him. Apparently, something hidden had emerged from deep inside him in the moment of crisis and overwhelmed his Germanic rationalism. I don’t have anything like that inside me. I cannot imagine a situation, even one of extreme trouble and hardship, that would lead me to write a note and place it in the cracks of an archeological relic, built by flesh-and-blood people just like myself, and which had been destroyed by other human beings like me. I have never in my life prayed to God to come and save me. He (or she) is simply outside all my life’s reckonings.
There was one other time, at least one that I know of, when Dad went to the Western Wall to try his luck with forces beyond his own. When my older sister became ill and was on the operating table, suspended between here and there, Dad went to plead for mercy in the place where Jews have always begged for mercy, at the Kotel. I don’t know what he achieved there, because apparently his prayer was rejected outright. My sister passed away after great suffering, and yet he carried on with his cultish customs. There, on my sickbed, when I was still woozy, the next point of disagreement emerged, and with it a clear line of difference. The ideological abyss between us was our complete disagreement about the relationship between church and state. Much time passed before these small cracks widened into a full-fledged dispute, not only over the flawed religious arrangements in the country, but also over the essential clash between religion and state, God and man.
We talked very little about politics. From the outset, we understood that these disagreements are deep and unbridgeable, so why make the effort and fall into that yawning abyss. The danger of falling in was greater than the chance of circumventing the potholes and remaining in the circle of family love, whose flame was never extinguished. There was only one time when things came out into the open. During one of the election campaigns for chief rabbi of Israel, in the early nineties, embarrassing accounts circulated about sexual relations between one of the candidates and a very particular woman. “Did you hear the news about the rabbi?” Dad asked one Friday, as my children played with my wife, Yael, and Mom, while he and I were having our weekly father-and-son talk. With a thin smile, the kind that in our family serves as a prelude to the cynical understatement to follow, I asked: “Who do you mean, Dad, the rabbi of Tel Aviv and its suburbs?” At any other time, Dad would have relished the Hebrew double entendre: the word bnoteha, meaning “girls” of the city, and its suburbs, in modern speech—“daughters” in biblical Hebrew. But Dad, in atypical fashion, turned very red and lashed out at me: “How can you talk like that about the Rabbi? He is about to become the chief rabbi of Israel, our greatest achievement.” His references to “our” almost always meant the party, the movement, religious Zionism. We did not discuss the issue again. Over the years, I became keenly aware that this is the main, essential difference between me and the legacy of my parents’ home.
My parents were the children, and later the leaders, of religious Zionism. Mom imbibed it from her father in Hebron before the riots, and Dad was active in the movement in Germany between the two world wars, and became its leader at the height of his political career. For me he was just Dad. The best father I had, the best father I could have asked for: warm and wise, gentle and profound, hovering and touching, diving deep and flying high. All at the same time, all the time, in all matters. I loved him very much, and I miss him endlessly. To this day, so many years after his death, that feeling remains. I sometimes find myself near the telephone, wanting to call him and ask, “Dad, what is this…?”
But to the wider public, as well as his colleagues in the movement, he was “Dr. Burg.” Sometimes when people would ask me, “What’s your father’s name?” I would answer, “First name: Doctor, surname: Joseph Burg.” The “doctor” was a public figure present in the lives of many during the first and defining decades of the establishment and existence of the state. They saw him differently, and I knew him through an entirely different prism. A multifaceted man. To his great credit, it should be said that he was just as large a presence at home as he was outside. That is why I couldn’t help but laugh when my old mother, my sister and her family, my wife, children, and I were invited to the naming of a square after my father. Many political and municipal speeches were given in his memory, paying tribute to him, as is customary in such moments. One religious Zionist party hack outdid them all, saying, “Dr. Burg was the leader of a movement, so we thought that the most appropriate way to commemorate him would be to name an island in moving traffic after him.” I saw Dad’s beaming face floating in space and grinning with pleasure. Indeed, a traffic island, words that in Hebrew can also mean “non-movement.” They had meant a sliver of land surrounded by a sea of vehicles, but he would have probably heard the pun like me. Because by the time he died his movement had become a vast nothingness compared to what he had dreamed and worked for his entire life.
The story of the rabbi and the lady represented something much bigger that divided us: not only the corruption of the hedonistic rabbi, but the spiritual corruption in the very existence of the institution of chief rabbinate.
“How can you not see,” I asked Dad while discussing the case of the rabbi and the girls of Tel Aviv, “How can you not see where this is going? How religion is taking over the state. How the Jewish project is expelling the Israeli project from here. How even in your own movement the followers of the messiah and messianism are pushing you, the rationally religious, out of any framework of possible agreement?” But Dad did not see, because he was blind when it came to the movement, even when it changed direction and funneled the energy of religious Zionism in a direction completely opposed to his own value system. He saw delicate, balanced connections between religion and state, and I see terrible dangers in any overlap between them. He believed he could control the raging bulls, and I dearly wanted then, and even more so today, a restraining separation between these two systems.
The state I want to live in must be no more than a tool in my hands, in the hands of every citizen like me. I really don’t want it to have its own content. I need it only as a tool by which we—the political collective living in it—will organize our lives. The state is a vital instrument to better the economy, improve education, defend our security, drain our sewage, and build and manage physical infrastructure. All the rest, all the baggage of my identity, must remain my sole responsibility. Because I’m not a lone wolf, but a social and communal animal, I will assert my identity within the realm of the existence and activity of my community. I want to live in a place where there is a full, defined, and clear separation between religion and the state. My religion, our state. I’m not bothered by, and even respect, people who organize for a politics of religious values, which they seek to enact in the public sphere. That’s what defines them. Provided, of course, that they don’t exploit their democratic rise to power to enforce values that annul democracy. The minute the effort—by religious or secular people—is directed beyond promoting interests, and the state itself, the tool, takes on religious meaning, salvational or divine, I start to worry. A state that is defined by terms and content not taken from the world of
government, that has goals that are not political, is something else. Ultimately at the end of Dad’s life, one thing became clear. To my great regret, I was right and he was wrong; he was misled and he misled others. His partner-adversaries won a tremendous victory over him and us all. Israel became a country in which the Jewish-religious component is dominant, and the state does not control it.
Back to ’67. After the war, I had my bar mitzvah, perhaps the first event in which the yawning gap between me and my parents received concrete expression. I loved them so much, I dearly miss them every day, all day, and still, I’m not sure I ever really understood them or whether they understood me and the realities of my existence. All my childhood companions celebrated their bar mitzvah, put on the ritual straps and scroll boxes known as tefillin, were called up to the reading of the Torah in synagogue, recited the traditional blessings, chanted a few verses, and delivered a sermon. Preparations for all this take several months. That’s how it was with everyone else, but not with us. Mom and Dad stuffed all their former worlds, now destroyed and gone, into this traditional celebration meant to mark the transition from childhood to religious commitment, adulthood, and responsibility.
