In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  From there we went on to the Golan Heights. I had my picture taken near the Banias Fall, a twelve-year-old boy with a pioneer’s hat, holding an Uzi submachine gun. My head is tilted jauntily to one side like a tough fighter, as if I were a war hero of those days. With all these places, people, images, and experiences, my spirits soared sky-high. But Dad, it seems to me in retrospect, gradually shrank. On the way back he asked Mom a question that has remained unresolved since: “What will we do with two million Arabs?” But he and his colleagues never made any genuine and committed effort to find a real answer.

  Those who had survived the destruction of their childhood, the destruction of the thousand-year-old Jewry of Europe, those who had the strength to save those uprooted by the Holocaust and were part of the founding of Israeli society, reached the great struggle for the Israeli soul weary and exhausted. Dad surrendered almost without a fight to the rising forces in his movement. The messianic youngsters bested him and dragged him against his will to be one of the builders of the new settlements in the territories, and, as a result, one of the main destroyers of the original Israel that he had established and loved. Today it is clear to me that in order to return to the path from which we strayed so dramatically, we have to destroy as many as possible of the failures of Dad and his partners gracing every hill and mountain in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Actually, all of them, and return to the path Dad had meant to take were it not for those messianic hijackers.

  Like stampeding goats, they stormed his generation, the young against the old, Israelis against diaspora Jews, pioneers against the establishment, radicals against conservatives. It was an epic battle that ended in resounding defeat. Not one of his political maneuvers worked. How can you make a deal with fanatics? What can really satisfy totalitarian people? Nothing. Dad’s worldview was the path of compromise. A complex man, he was able to understand and contain all sides of a dispute and always serve as mediator and problem-solver. But they were simplistic people who saw only one side. They were not interested in anyone but themselves, and took no one else into account. They wanted it all and immediately. All of the promised land, the redemption. Power and rule. He battled in smoke-filled halls and rooms, and they were fighters on the hills and mountains. He escaped by the skin of his teeth from “there,” from the Holocaust, and they won the Six-Day War and liberated the Holy City. They connected directly to convenient parts of the myths and ethos of the early days of Zionism and Jewish settlement and scorned him and his learned, universal sources of inspiration. They stole the symbols and content of the Labor movement and took them to new and bad places, showing arrogant contempt for those who established the state for them. They adopted the external trappings of secularism and loaded them with different, new Jewish content that had never been here before. The same huge moustaches, the same creased sandals and hands, the same coarse and meager language. But inside they burned with the fanatic fire of doctrines of redemption and the end of days.

  The most significant public-opinion molders of the time, a mixture of Labor Zionists, Revisionists, writers, and poets, launched them; people like Nathan Alterman and Moshe Shamir, Haim Gouri and Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi. The younger Rabbi Kook gave them a blessing for the road, and they have never looked back. Traditional conservatives, the religious Zionists, joined with nationalist conservatives, led by Menachem Begin and the Likud movement, along with economic conservatives to embark on their paradoxical path: revolutionary conservatism. I was with them in their first moments; I was born from the womb of religious Zionism. With the insights I gained over the years, I grew very distant from them. We were together in the first chapter, in which Israel was secular, socialist, a budding democracy, whose organizing idea was state authority. Today, when they are at the height of their power, I see them as nothing less than a real and present mortal danger.

  In 1977, the first ever right-wing government was formed in Israel. With this political upset and the rise of the right to power, I went my own way. They became the entrepreneurs of the second Israeli chapter and partners to it, and since then they have made Israel less democratic and more nationalist, capitalist, brutal, and religious. Territory, the complete and sacred Land of Israel, replaced the state for them as the ultimate organizing idea. And I did my best in the opposing political bloc, moving from protest movements to the heart of the establishment. Our movement was in completely opposite directions. They went far to the right to the extreme fringes, and I was becoming more of a peacemaker and working for the separation of religion and state. I was becoming a pluralist, a feminist, opening up to a great degree.

  Today, many of them are doing what they can to move Israel to its third chapter. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, when religious winds are blowing throughout the region, Israel is also growing from the chapter of Greater Israel, with all its associated ills, to the chapter of the Temple and its myriad dangers. For many, too many—nationalists, secular people, and many of my religious relatives—the idea of erecting the Third Temple is the yearning that organizes all political activity. In this chapter of theirs and of a profoundly changed Israel, two things are becoming clear to me. One is that they have gone from being political rivals to bitter enemies, and that bloodshed, a real civil war, is no longer inconceivable if the Temple movement indeed becomes a political reality. The other is that without a complete humanistic, egalitarian civic doctrine that will fight them and replace them and their rule, Israel will be lost.

  In the beginning, the outlines were unclear; the lines separating us blurred. Our general feeling of euphoria lasted a few more years. We called the Arabs names, laughed at their powerlessness and the primitiveness we attributed to them. The “them” and “us” always ended in our favor, and they always accepted the result, which for them was no more than zero. “Arab work,” “Arab army,” or just “Arab” were the most common derogatory terms. Who knew then that this good feeling does not necessarily indicate good health, but is rather a sign of serious illness, the racism that has eaten away the Israeli body and soul? Very few. I wasn’t one of them.

  IT WAS 1973, AND I WAS PREOCCUPIED WITH OTHER anxieties. The culmination of every yeshiva high school student’s educational experience is the matriculation exam in Talmud. I couldn’t sleep. I had been absent from so many classes over the years that I didn’t have the slightest idea of the material. The little I knew, I didn’t really understand. I was a long way from the Talmudic exchanges between the great sages Abayey and Rava. They were discussing gittin—Jewish divorce documents—and I was dreaming of my love, Yael. They were debating the laws of Shabbat observance, and I just wanted to be back home for my mother’s chicken. To this day I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because “tomorrow is the matriculation exam in Talmud,” and I don’t know anything. A mix of castration fears and performance anxiety that never leaves you.

  Over the long course of those days of study, each of us tried to pave his own way to his future. Many went to continue their studies together at the college-level yeshivas and in the army units comprising mainly students from the same yeshiva. This was a special arrangement, known as hesder, for religious young men, combining the yeshiva and army settings. And I, as in all the previous years, continued without them—alone and lonely.

  Over the course of my final year of study, my rabbi, the one with the television in his closet, tried to persuade me to enroll in a college-level yeshiva instead of signing up for military service. He held out lots of sticks, and a few carrots. The sticks were the destiny of the Jewish people and my own personal responsibility as the scion of an elite religious Zionist family. He assailed me with all this during every one of our conversations. Like everyone else in those days, I was always trying to stay fit. I lifted weights, I did push-ups, and I hoisted myself up again and again over the chin-up bar. But this weight was already too much for my fragile religious frame.

  The rabbi’s biggest carrot was my final grade on the matriculation examination cons
idered most important of all—the exam in Talmud. This grade was calculated by averaging the final exam grade with that given by the school, which assessed and weighed my accomplishments during all my years of study. “If you will go on to yeshiva, you’ll get a very high grade. And if not… then not,” he kept repeating to me. Obviously, I wanted the highest grade, and over the course of that year I led him to understand that his wish would come true, and I would indeed continue my Torah studies. I gave him what he asked for in order to get what I wanted. But it was an empty promise in exchange for a hollow grade. Most of my friends didn’t hesitate about the decision at all. They planned to continue learning Torah at the various institutions suggested to them. Only a handful of the 120 in my grade informed me, with heads held high, that they intended to go into the army as soon as they finished their studies. The majority simply went with the flow.

  It was strange that, despite the constant presence of the army in our lives, and in spite of the crowns of glory and the miracles we associated with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), they—the various governmental agencies, educators, and army recruiters—did not prepare us at all for army service. It always loomed before us, but we didn’t exactly know what it was about. Our rabbis and educational role models put tremendous pressure on us to continue our studies in the college-level yeshivas. From their perspective, it befitted their pedagogical efforts, their investment in us. They sent us for a “yeshiva week” in various institutions of higher Torah learning in order to give us a taste of the intellectual paradise they would offer us. That was the last thing I needed, more of that terrible thing that had destroyed all the beauty of the last few years. But to say that aloud also was the last thing I needed, because it would come at the expense of my final grade.

  Quietly, almost clandestinely, I began the official process of enlisting in the army, like most other Israelis my age. I had no one to consult. My parents didn’t know anything about the subject, my schoolmates were in the thrall of another world, and I didn’t really have other friends. And so, two parallel channels were dug beneath the puddle of my life. The rabbi dug his, and I dug mine, and they were heading in opposite directions. His, the rabbi’s, was heading toward my yesterdays, and mine was heading toward my own tomorrow. The army officials, in those pre-computer days, the days of copy paper and pencils stuck behind the ears of bored clerks, didn’t notice that I was registered on two lists: the rabbi’s, which was for a deferral of army service, and mine, which was about immediate enlistment.

  Signed up on both lists, I walked into my exam. Two stern-faced rabbinic examiners sat with my rabbi and asked me a few questions. I didn’t fully grasp their questions, but suddenly there came to my aid—for the first but not the last time in my life—my father’s prodigious memory. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that I had inherited this quality from him. I began quoting extensively and flawlessly from the text in which the concept they were asking about appeared. They spoke out of deep understanding, and I spoke in quotations; they asked learnedly, and I responded by rote. But I passed the terrifying exam, and with a high grade, which they told me then and there. “One last question,” the examiner said to me, when my hands were already pushing against the door. “What are you doing next year?”

  It was a moment of truth, a decisive moment. “Next year I’ll be a paratrooper,” I responded forthrightly with the answer I had not even given myself yet. It was as if the clouds of the last four years had suddenly parted to reveal a sun that shone right on me. The sun shone in one place, but night fell in another. It gave me pleasure to see the shadows pass across the examiners’ faces, and my rabbi’s face, livid. He yelled at me, “But you said you were going to yeshiva—otherwise I would not have given you such a high mark. You would have scored much lower!” But it was too late.

  * Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 100.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SOLDIER IN WAR, ACTIVIST IN PEACE (1973–1982)

  IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1973, THE LAST SUMMER OF MY innocence. The Yom Kippur War broke out in the autumn. A pin burst the balloon of my pride that had steadily inflated those last six years. People I knew well, peers, friends from my youth movement, others who were in my year at school, counselors, and other acquaintances, were mobilized, were wounded, were killed. Almost every home was touched by death. One friend from our synagogue, like me the son of German parents, was taken captive, and for many days we did not know what had become of him, until the relatively good news arrived that he was a war prisoner in an Egyptian jail.

  I spent the Yom Kippur War far from home, at a kibbutz in the Beit She’an valley. I was there for nearly two months, preparing with other young men and women for the Nahal infantry brigade. During those years, my beloved brother-in-law, who never judged me and always accepted me as I was, helped me find an entirely new social circle where I could try to reinvent myself. I didn’t know anyone, because all of the friends with whom I’d finished school a few months earlier had gone elsewhere. Some to yeshivas, some to the army, and many to the combined service of the hesder yeshivas. I didn’t want to go with them. I wanted a clean break from those dismal yeshiva days. They went their ways, and I went mine. And suddenly, out of the quiet of the holiday and the debilitating heat of the Beit She’an valley, another war broke out. Unexpected and unplanned. And this time—just six years after the Six-Day War—I was no longer a little boy seeking shelter behind his mother’s pleated dress.

  I have only scraps of memories from the day of my induction, which came just a few weeks after the official end of the war. Years later, when my own children were inducted into the army, I wept bitterly. I wept for the end of their childhoods, and for my own childhood that had been abruptly cut short. I wept for the accursed fate of the Israeli parent, who has to ascend with his child to the national sacrificial altar, and who is expected—as I was expected—to do so with pride. As each of my children enlisted, other forgotten aspects of my own enlistment floated to the surface of memory. I don’t remember where my mother was, but for some reason only my father was there as I left home and set off on my way. He wasn’t fully dressed. He walked me to the door and said goodbye. No hug or kiss. Not even a word of advice or a parting blessing. I know that deep in his heart he was terrified for me. And I know, too, that he loved me, but that he didn’t know how to give hugs or kisses. I felt the great, heavy door of my parents’ home close behind me, and in that moment, I did not know that it would remain closed forever. My father, who did not understand me while I was a schoolboy, was not able to take leave of me when I went off to the army. If he had known what to say, he would have spoken to me; if he had known how to hug, he would have wrapped his arms around me. If he had kisses on his warm, smiling, wise lips, he would have kissed me goodbye. But he didn’t know how, and he didn’t have them. With the closing of that door, my childhood came to an end.

  I was in the first round of basic training following the Yom Kippur War. My base was at Pardes Hanna, the mythic Camp 80, in the center of the country. The first army joke I heard—and after that I heard many others, none more tasteful—was, “Who will stop the Syrians on the borders of Camp 80? The Egyptians.” What was going on? Moments ago, I was a self-assured young man fresh out of high school, who could never be defeated or humiliated, certainly not by those Arabs. Now I was a soldier in the midst of defeat and degradation, of a resounding, painful blow, the humiliating Yom Kippur surprise of 1973.

  Maybe that was the reason why I loved the life in the barracks. Coming out of my failure in my teenage years I learned how to run. I returned to my body, which had withered and been struck dumb when my love of volleyball was stifled. I was a good military recruit. I tried to be all that I could be: disciplined despite my rebellious spirit, diligent despite my natural laziness, orderly and organized despite my inclination from birth to be messy. I wanted to succeed, to escape that feeling of being a loser all the previous yea
rs. I felt the tremendous power of the army as a place that socialized, democratized, and granted wonderful opportunities to all those who had missed out on life until that point. I didn’t quite feel at home, but I felt good about myself, and about my uniform and my dog tags and my rubber-soled boots and my heavy gun.

  I had planned to continue on the same track with the friends who had enlisted with me in the Nahal unit, to combine kibbutz life with the best of the paratrooper tradition, but that war upended everything for me. Even before the end of our basic training, some of my comrades and I were put under tremendous pressure from our superiors to go to noncommissioned officers training. Many junior commanders in the IDF had been killed or wounded that past autumn in the Yom Kippur War, and the army, like every army, needed to replenish its ranks. We needed to take their place. I was happy. Finally, I was being recognized for my achievements. The noncommissioned officers course was the continuation of my basic training, but with new people and more substance. The training program included the first take-away lessons from the war. Our direct commanders had been in the war and thus had far more authority than their official ranks would indicate.

  In the middle of the grueling course we were granted one Saturday night off. I had waited a long time for it. It was not as sweet as a furlough, but it was a calm evening on the base before the exhausting week that lay ahead. In the lecture hall, they screened The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman. I had never seen movies like that, so explicit—at least as far as movies dared to be back then. I sat there fascinated and aroused in the darkness, pretending I was indifferent and experienced when from time to time they turned on the lights to switch the film reels. Then suddenly, in the middle of all the excitement, there was an announcement: “Company A, attention! Fall out in ten minutes.” The movie lost its magic, and we returned to life with a sweaty scramble. I never saw the end of the movie because we were catapulted into another movie—the movie of our new Israeli lives—whose end, too, was not yet known.