In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  When I would come home from synagogue services I would chant loudly, like a cantor. I didn’t know and didn’t quite understand the words, and the tunes emanating from my mouth were hard to identify as the traditional prayer melodies, partially because of my paltry musical abilities. The results of my vocal embellishments were very different from those intended by the composers. My mother, who was endowed with a discerning musical ear and impressive, almost operatic vocal skills, took my off-key singing as a mortifying insult. In addition to which, the issue of “What will people say?” was constantly in the air. “What is going to happen?” Mom asked Dad in despair. “The boy will be called up to the Torah and won’t know how to chant. What will people say?” That is the fate of the youngest son who was preceded by two sisters in the days when the role of women in religious ritual was blatantly unequal. The entire burden of our family history was thrust onto my back. “How happy I was when you were born,” Mom would say again and again, “finally, someone who will carry forward the name Burg.”

  With such baggage on my young shoulders it was no wonder that preparations for my bar mitzvah began at age ten. A few times a week I went to a heder to study Torah and Rashi’s commentary with Rabbi Yisrael Lev, an old-time Jew, a Yerushalaymer yid, as Dad would describe him. In addition to this, I went twice a week to the home of my own private tutor, Avigdor Herzog, one of the great experts of our time in the field of Jewish music. He survived the Holocaust as a youth, immigrated to Israel, and eventually laid the groundwork for Jewish musicological research. First, he established the Israel Institute for Sacred Music, and later the sound archive in the National Library. No one less than the leading Israeli expert on ethnic music was fit to teach such a failed talent as me. His patience, along with his ability to deconstruct every note and bring even me to sing it nearly perfectly, remains with me to this very day. He taught me the hidden secrets of the biblical tropes, the marks used to notate the chants sung in synagogue. Once I read somewhere that in addition to his being a musician from childhood, he was also a carpenter. Perhaps a master carpenter like him was required to teach a saw like me to produce melodies.

  And as if all this was not enough for my parents, I crossed town time and again on my own on the way to the Hebron yeshiva, a stern ultra-Orthodox school in the heart of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox district. Dad wanted me to know about the existence of another Torah, different from our Zionist one. I sat there on the hard, wooden bench in my shorts and sandals, with my brash Zionist hairdo, an arrogant forelock. Around me yeshiva boys debated at the top of their lungs, wearing dark, shabby pants, black jackets, and sweat-stained white shirts, a uniform of neglected elegance. I don’t know what I learned there; but aside from the physical, tangible gap between us, nothing from that period was impressed on my memory. There were several more private tutors who prepared me, but what was I actually preparing for? I don’t know. It’s strange, so many years have passed since then, and I simply do not know what all the commotion was about. I wanted a bicycle, because that was the bar mitzvah gift of that time, an expression of maturity, responsibility, mobility, independence, and ownership of property that mattered. I also expected to get a watch, and indeed I received one. I remember it well. “This is a Doxa watch,” Dad told me. I had never heard that name. Michael got a Certina, and Yaakov had a Tissot, and there were a few more watches with familiar names. But Doxa? Who had ever heard of it? To my shame, the shop windows of the silversmiths and watchmakers downtown did not have even one such watch on display to show my friends. “Take care of it,” Dad told me. “It’s an important watch.”

  But aside from the meticulous preparations imposed on me and the exciting gifts I received, it wasn’t my bar mitzvah. It was my father’s bar mitzvah. In the fading photos of my childhood album there are virtually none of my friends, only friends of Dad, photographed endlessly. Menachem Begin and Levi Eshkol, ministers, VIPs, and rabbis. All the people we ran after for autographs in the streets of Jerusalem gathered to celebrate the “Burg Bar Mitzvah.”

  The climax of the festivities was my sermon. I took the stage in the banquet hall—not before Mom fixed my collar and brushed my bangs away from my eyes—and before the greatest orators of the Israeli parliament, I delivered my speech. I have no idea what I said, despite the many months in which I was compelled, despite my begging and protests, to learn the sermon by heart. “We don’t read speeches,” Mom decreed, injecting with that “we” my father’s impressive rhetorical skills into my young life.

  And indeed, it was a sermon that was entirely his. Meaningless Talmudic and halachic hair-splitting, a sweeping review of Jewish sources, setting up false disputes between rabbinic scholars of generations past and resolving them with one clever-sounding statement. This was a tribute to the world of classic Jewish argumentation, which sharpened the Jewish mind to the point that it became the signature organ of our existence. I understood nothing, and didn’t want to understand anything about it.

  Not long ago I found the yellowing pages of the speech, typewritten, full of corrections in my father’s distinctive and unreadable handwriting. From a distance of fifty years I read the words that were supposed to mark the conclusion of my childhood, and lo and behold, nothing has changed. I still do not understand. Today I have no problem tracking the tortured path of the halachic argument, which dealt entirely with the relation between the prayer shawl and tefillin. But I have difficulty connecting with the message my parents wanted to convey to me on the most important day in the youth of a Jewish boy. What in fact did they expect of me? To become a young scholar like in days of yore? A brilliant and sterile debater? To grow up and become the Yankele of Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, the subject of one of the melancholy Yiddish lullabies that Mom sang to me at bedtime? It was a sad song about a little Jewish boy whose teeth have all grown in, and with a little luck—his mother dreams—he will go soon to the heder to study Torah and Talmud. “A yingele [the little boy] who will grow up to become a scholar.” That yingele was me.

  Where did they hide modernity, progress? Where was the new Israeli identity tucked away in the verbiage of that old Jewishness? Nowhere. It was simply not invited to my bar mitzvah. I think that my dear father and teacher celebrated himself on my birthday. He pictured a Jewish boy of the nineteenth century standing before the Torah sages of eastern Europe and impressing them with his arguments, his proficiency, and his sharp intellect. Riding the back of my bar mitzvah, he traveled back in time to his vanished childhood. He tried for a moment to revive yearnings that, in fact, had never really gone away. I was his atonement and replacement. Only when my children were born did I begin to understand. Along with my closeness to them, which has deepened over the years, I understand the unbridgeable distances between Dad and me, between Dad and us. And I also understand the foundations he laid for me, for the bridges across Jewish histories.

  The gap between me and Dad was not age—the forty-seven years he had reached in my year of birth. Dad was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in a world that still followed the conventions of the nineteenth century, the century of great changes and human optimism. He grew to adulthood in Germany between the wars and reached his personal and public pinnacle in Israel after the Holocaust. At least three world orders stood between us. When I celebrated my bar mitzvah in Jerusalem of 1968 he thought about his Galicia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany that went up in the smoke of the crematories. We spoke only Hebrew, but he thought first in German. We, the first generation born in Israel, were as prickly as cactuses, and he was as soft as a diffident central European gentleman. When I reread that speech he wrote for me, my heart went out to him for the yearnings from which he never recovered, the spiritual limbs he lost and the place where he lost them, which he anguished over, the phantom pains of spiritual worlds felt long after they were amputated.

  When I finished reading, I suddenly thought of that watch he gave me. “Doxa” is a Greek concept that means “belief.” The defining concept of
modern religion, orthodoxy, was derived from it: “true faith,” the right worldview. Dad had at least two watches. One that showed the actual hours, shared by everyone, and a watch that beat and ticked off Jewish time. At their bar mitzvahs all the boys received brand-name watches made by famous companies—a watch in order to be on time, to get to school on time, to not be late coming home in the evening, to not miss the appointment with the doctor or the bus. I received a Jewish watch—Doxa. While preparing for my bar mitzvah, my parents revealed to me the hidden mechanisms operating this ancient watch, the two elements it comprised: progressive and groundbreaking actuality, and anachronistic conservatism with the most petrified customs. “Take care of it,” Dad said. “It’s an important watch.” And in my own way, I’m still taking care of it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A RAY OF LIGHT IN THE DARK (1969–1977)

  THE TRANSITION FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TO HIGH school in 1969 was not easy for me at all. Actually, it was terrible. Everything that was stable, familiar, and loved fell away and vanished all at once. My parents enrolled me once again in a boys’ school. It was the flagship of the religious Zionist movement, the Eton of the high school yeshivas, but I, then as now, was never a brilliant student fit to study in the finest educational institutions. But “people like us study at the Netiv Meir yeshiva,” I was told at home, and that ended the discussion that never began.

  It was a yeshiva with a dormitory in the heart of Jerusalem. That is, my house with my mother and sister—along with my toys and collections, the yard behind the house, the hiding places and nooks and crannies of the neighborhood—suddenly became a distant homeland. A forbidden and unattainable home, beyond the pale of exile imposed on me. At the yeshiva, we lived four boys to a room, and from the first moment I felt alien. I was a persistent failure. My grades dropped, and the good little boy became a rude and unruly teenager. I talked back, I made friends with boys who were completely different from my former friends, I learned how to lie to adults, I cut classes, went on long hikes without permission, and never told my parents the truth about any of this.

  I really didn’t like the new me. A deep and grave sadness gripped me in everything I did in those four years. I didn’t know what to do with my distress. Though I was born into this reality of elitism firmly established and arrogant in its religiosity and customs, I felt deep and frustrating alienation from it. Mom and Dad never succeeded in reaching beyond their circle of friends, who were exactly like them. Very good people, positive, delightful, full of good will, and enthralled by the Israeli enterprise that far exceeded their expectations. They were religious Zionists, a smug bourgeoisie, who at the same time had a sense of structural inferiority. Our home was the place I loved more than anything, and in its anachronistic way it loved me back.

  At the same time, I never felt entirely at home in my parents’ cultured household. For me, a boy looking for other pastures, their orthodoxy—with all their sensitivity, openness, and tolerance—was a coercive and compulsive system. I was a young Israeli looking for pastures that did not belong solely to “our” goats and to people “like us.” During my army service, when my social circle was secular, Sabbaths became a source of deep discomfort. While my friends were hiking the trails of the Judean desert—boys and girls together, without any partition—I had to stay home either in my room or at the traditional rites. Each Shabbat in which I was on vacation from the army, my father would wake me with the loud call, “Avraham!” which meant only one thing: time for synagogue services—a time for men without women, a time of coercion. I might have been a different person had my launching pad to adulthood not been the Dickensian institution in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood. I will never know.

  That social environment was mostly harnessed to the ethos of the yeshiva. The more I felt disconnected from the studies in the small and crowded rooms, the less I understood the Talmudic world of ancient Babylon and the ideas of its rabbis, the more I flourished outside of class and school. Together with other “naughty boys” like me, casual or temporary friends, I embarked on adventurous night hikes, imagining myself to be a mythical hero of the 1948 War of Independence. We crossed the Judean desert in solo hikes; twice we hitchhiked to dip in the beautiful streams of the Golan. We bragged about being students at the most prestigious institution. We failed to see and understand the way things really were: the moral corruption of controlling the life of others on behalf of “Jewish Values,” the lack of religious tolerance, and the explosive potential of redemptive messianic politics. It sufficed for us that people said we were the best, that we were the latest embodiment of the ancient Jewish spirit. From this yeshiva and others, from the friends of my youth, from me and others like us sprang the new driving forces of Israel, those that changed and in fact slayed the original Israel. Our generation effectively eliminated our parents’ generation and their heritage.

  Those were the hardest four years of my life. I didn’t understand a thing. I failed all my classes over and over, even gym. Everything I wanted was suppressed, and everything they—the rabbis and the strict educators—wanted depressed me. Boring archaic texts, demanding studies, no “spirit”; just memorization, meaningless religious demands, and enforced sanctimonious behaviors. I was alone. There were many classmates, but not a single soul mate. I barely had any real friends. The sad fact is that I now have no contact with the person who at the time seemed like my best friend. We swore, as teenagers do, to never part. We misbehaved and joked and dreamed together. In the end, he became an ultra-Orthodox rabbi with a long beard, and I was and remain an irrepressible liberal. I was disruptive in class, my parents were called in, I was reprimanded and punished. I wanted them to deal with my great despair, the frustrations, the slippery walls I wasn’t able to climb, but the response of the system was different. I wanted to leave that place so badly. I wanted to go home, but “people like us don’t leave such a school.”

  I HAD TWO LOVES AT THE TIME. I LOVED MY CHILDHOOD sweetheart, who later became my wife and the mother of our children, and I was madly in love with the sports field. That’s where I went when I got up in the morning, and I chose my clothes to match the games planned for the day. There I met my fellow sports enthusiasts, and there I was exposed to the lives of others. In one summer vacation I was accepted to a special camp for outstanding volleyball players. I wasn’t that talented, but I wanted to be. My ambition made up to a small degree for the shortcomings and flaws I was born with. For the first time in my life I left the familiar closed circles of home, family, community, school, and encountered the world. Secular people, cigarettes, tentative talk about girls, international sports, and personal fulfillment. I learned more about life there than I had learned in my closed, stern, and tough yeshiva.

  The effect was immediate. At the start of the new school year I joined a religious sports club that had a volleyball team. In order to participate in practice, I needed permission from the yeshiva to be absent once a week from afternoon classes. Secular studies, of course, because missing religious studies was inconceivable. I saw my dream coming true. I fantasized about rolls and saves. I jumped repeatedly to gain strength. I set up strange contraptions for myself with a ball and net to improve my spikes, serves, and saves. I was mentally ready, though my body wasn’t built like the perfectly sculpted bodies of the superstars. But I so wanted it with all my heart and soul. Because then, like today, will was the strongest engine of my life. And then the worst thing happened to me. One of the rabbis, who wasn’t even my teacher, forbade me to join the club. With a sickly sweet smile on his face he informed me that I couldn’t play volleyball because it was “idolatry.”

  How scary, idolatry is one of the three prohibitions for which a Jew is commanded to sacrifice his life, to be killed and not transgress. Needless to say, that rabbi, his god, and his tradition lost me that day, at that precise moment. How could a boy be faithful to a good and beneficent god if this abstract and strange deity views volleyball as an enemy with equal powers, deservin
g destruction, and what’s more, sentences me to death? If these are his enemies, how can you believe in him, this petty one who is supposed to run the world? I didn’t know then that there is no real connection between the abstract god and his tangible charlatan rabbis. And now that I know, it’s clear to me that some of them, maybe most, are idolaters who believe in the stars, astrological signs, and superstitions, against whom an all-out war is supposed to be waged at all times. This hostile train of thought, with my endless prayers for revenge against that unctuous man, was cut off by a terrible tragedy. One of his daughters was killed in one of the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem.

  In those days—1978—of bereavement in Jerusalem I didn’t really believe anymore in God, certainly not in the conception of God held by that rabbi: a kind of heavenly entity, a supreme accountant calculating every one of my actions with personal oversight, exacting prices and dispensing grants. And still, for a long time I couldn’t stop obsessively wondering, was his God punishing him with cruel pettiness because of the many childhoods like mine that he took part in destroying?

  AS THE YEARS WENT BY, TIME AND AGAIN I RECALLED that experience of understanding. The way that primitive rabbi saw me made it clear that this refined and noble ballgame was so sacred to me that it became the center of my being, taking up my entire reality. My shoes were volleyball shoes, my walk mimicked that of volleyball players I admired, though I don’t even remember their names today. I always had a ball in my hand, the game was a constant subject of conversation. And when such a totality captivates someone, that rabbi thought, there is no room for God. So, he waged a religious campaign against me to eradicate the plague of idolatry from my body. A local exorcist, speaking in Hebrew and Yiddish and with a sanctimonious smile. Anything to make space in me for God.