by Avraham Burg
This is a characteristic I learned from my father’s giant library. Our entire house was full of books. In every room, in every corner. He arranged them according to an order and logic clear only to him. In every book there were paper notes with associative remarks, lines marked with a thick pen, and pages folded like Jewish origami during reading on the Sabbath, when writing and marking were forbidden. With his photographic memory, Dad documented every page and every note. But that didn’t help him in his constant arguments with Mom. She was a Hebron native and he was the formal yeke, or German immigrant, but when it came to putting things in order, cleaning, and being on time, she was the actual yeke of the family. “You have two options,” she would always say, giving him an ultimatum, “arranging the books by size or by color.”
“But Rivka,” he would beg and stick the books where he wished. He would mix, and she would organize. And so it was their entire life together. From the day he died she didn’t touch the library. She froze his logical disorder as it was. A monument that stayed that way until she died and the house was emptied of all their memories.
A few years ago, I received from my wife and children a wonderful gift for my birthday. A professional librarian arrived at the house without my knowledge and tried to arrange my library. She worked and labored, put up and took down, switched and placed, and ultimately gave up. My library remained in its perfect state, just the way I like it, half ordered and half jumbled. Over the years, it would become more jumbled, requiring the further intervention of a professional, and so on.
This life, which appears to be in disarray, among the shelves, suits me well. There are people who live “in between,” willingly confined there, because that is the place where they don’t have to do anything. Others on both sides decide everything for them. For many people being in the middle is parking in the world’s most convenient parking lot, the place of rest for those without an opinion. I too am today in some kind of middle, but my “in between” is completely different. It is not a comfort zone, but a churning whirlpool, a constant struggle. I am between worlds, but outside them. Time and again I find myself challenging and being challenged by more than one world. I am addicted to this complexity. Sometimes I’m worn out and get tired, but mostly I argue and debate in all directions with the hope that these disagreements will produce totally new creations for me and my adversaries. This life, between worlds, did not begin in Dad’s library. Because its core was in the “big room,” the bourgeois living room, which we were forbidden from entering on Sabbaths when respected guests arrived, those who could not be invited for a cup of black coffee in the small kitchen. In honor of these people Mom would spread a nice hand-embroidered or lace tablecloth in the salon, and place on it a silver serving plate shaped like a trio of delicate cloverleafs. In one section were homemade sugarcoated peanuts, in the second a mix of almonds and raisins, just like in a sad Yiddish song, and in the third cookies that she called strudel, which were unique and tasty, the likes of which I have never tasted, though they had nothing in common with Viennese strudel.
This was the place of the adults, a temple inaccessible to children. That is why when guests came, we found shelter with friends and neighbors. We went to play outside. The outside of my childhood home was an entire world. The house still stands, elegant as always, and my beloved sister carries on the family tradition there. You enter through the heavy art-deco gate and climb the wide staircase. Before turning left, toward the once-filled goldfish pools, or right, to the small garden, you see an alcove and above it a stone inscription in Gothic letters: “Villa Lea, 1 May 1934.” The story of the house was never hidden from us, though in those days it was an embarrassing tale.
It was built by a lawyer by the name of Nasib Abcarius Bey, the source of its popular name, Abcarius House. Abcarius Bey was a Christian lawyer, Greek Orthodox, a native of Egypt, who arrived here with the British occupation. He was one of the most successful and respected lawyers in the country, an energetic operator who concocted a few real estate deals between the Greek Orthodox church and the Zionist movement, deals that facilitated the establishment of the important neighborhoods of Jewish Jerusalem outside the Old City walls. During the years in which he lived in Jerusalem and came in contact with the Jews, he fell in love with a Jewish woman from the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, whose name was Lea Tennenbaum. The city was atwitter, but he was resolutely in love and built her a house, far from crowded Mea Shearim and its malicious gossip.
I think that it was the only non-Jewish home in the Rehavia quarter, the neighborhood of pioneers and intellectuals of the 1920s. All the homes in the neighborhood, except ours, were Jewish homes, unlike the houses across the street, in the neighboring Talbiyeh neighborhood, which almost all belonged to rich Arabs, mostly Christian. Our house was built from the start “in between,” between the Jews of Rehavia and the Christians of Talbiyeh, between the Christian man and the Jewish woman. The home of a gentile who lived with a Jewish woman who chose him over a proper arranged marriage in the ultra-Orthodox collective where she was born. Later she pauperized him with her wastefulness, and he became impoverished less than two years after the house was dedicated. She left him for other, more financially established lovers and he was compelled to abandon the beautiful home he had built for the two of them. The house is built in the Bauhaus or international style, and as my childhood home, my Kinderstube, it was not just an architectural style. It was the human “in between” style in which I grew up, a Jerusalem Bauhaus child.
Villa Lea is not just a grand Jerusalem house; its human history is just as fascinating. When Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, was granted political asylum in Israel after Italy conquered parts of his country on the eve of World War II, he moved into Abcarius House. (Abcarius Bey did not live there anymore, and his house was transferred to the property administration of the British mandate government.) When we were little and we were told, “A king once lived here,” we thought it was just a legend, like other fairy tales that parents tell their children. Only later did we learn that in this Jerusalem there are true fairy tales.
After the founding of Israel, the house and its courtyards were transferred to the property administration of the fledgling Israeli government, and the new elite of Jerusalem and Israel gathered there. Before us, Moshe Dayan lived on our same floor. Then the floor was divided, and we shared it with Chaim Herzog, then a senior officer and the son of the chief rabbi, before he became president, and with many more that came afterward. The first finance minister of Israel, Eliezer Kaplan, who died before I was born, lived above us. His scary widow continued living there with her childless daughter and son-in-law. On the top floor lived Avraham Kidron, who later served as the Israeli ambassador to several countries and as director-general of the foreign ministry. In the pre-state era, he was an investigator and judge in the scandalous treason trial—the Tobianski trial—which ended with the only death sentence pronounced in the country by Jewish judges and carried out (except for the sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, but that’s a different story). A house that was totally establishment, secular people, soldiers, socialists, and us.
Until age six I didn’t know the differences among them all. From my first to last day in the Israeli education system I was in an environment of religious boys. Today it seems to me that my parents wanted to encourage this duality. I encountered everything denied me in the religious education system at home and in the playground. I grew up in between. Between my parents and their social circles and the house and its other residents who were very different from us. Between the new Israeli street and my parents’ library that held worlds now vanished.
FROM THE DAY I LEARNED HOW TO READ AND WRITE, THE written word was always there at my side when I searched for my convictions. I read a great deal, but I didn’t write enough. For many years I wondered, even angrily, about my late father. So talented and eloquent, full of knowledge and memories. “Dad, why don’t you write?” I would ask him, and he, with his natural a
ffability, would evade me time and again. I was mad at him, and it didn’t occur to me to think: and why don’t you write, Avrum? Only when I started writing myself and felt the scathing self-criticism of the end result did I understand him.
It’s very difficult for a person who is a talented speaker—which my father was, an exciting speaker, a sharp debater, a gifted teacher, and a fascinating preacher—to change his mode of connection with the public from speech to writing. They are not the same. The speaker is in constant and immediate associative contact with his followers and listeners. He reacts to their body language, argues when necessary, and flatters when required. And most importantly—the words of the speaker go into thin air. They are almost never firmly fixed or embedded. They can be changed, denied, sidestepped, added to, or diluted. Which is not the case with the written word. The black on white, the documentation that can no longer be altered, always confronts you as a constant reminder that cannot be denied. A monument to your words, a commemoration of the truth that was yours at the moment it was written. Writing is a commitment. A speech, on the other hand, especially a political one, flirts and floats, but only seldom does it give a commitment from which there is no return. And Dad, who right up to the last minute of his ninety years was busy with survival, was not ready to commit to anything, not even in the face of the grim reaper or his life’s memories.
The increased reservations about my political mission came with thoughts, doubts, and complex comprehensions about our modus vivendi. Far beyond the Israeli collective Zionist paradigm I was born into and function in. My thoughts led to the 2004 decision to break away from active political life. I understood that I wanted to bequeath these thoughts to my children. I will never have property and wealth for them. But I don’t want to hoard my thoughts and values like a miser. I write for my children so they will have starting points for life and the directions they choose, if they want them. My generous mother always encouraged us to take different things from her. Cake and leftovers from the Sabbath, an extra stainless steel pot that was on sale at the supermarket, a giant roll of plastic bags that she found as a “bargain.” “Why do I need you to wait until I die to get these things? Take them now and be happy I’m alive,” she would say with a joyful smile. And in that sense, I want to be like her, in generosity of thought and openness of writing.
WRITING AND RUNNING HAVE TAUGHT ME TO TOUCH MY soul and spirit and express them, because they provide paths that enable me to search for the deep roots of what interests me. One of my most important and deepest teachers of the soul of running is Nahshon Shohat, a fantastic runner, brilliant legal mind, and the best “running intellectual” I ever met, who tells me sometimes that I don’t run to mark the attainment of a specific objective; I look for meanings in the running. That’s why I called my running blog A Man Runs Inside Himself. Because that’s where it begins and that’s where it reaches, inside the self. I write for the same reason. In order to reach the chasms and sinkholes that have opened in my internal spaces and to fill them. To read a book and discover my thoughts, not those of others. And go on with them to the furthest places inside me. Since retiring I have published a few books, a great many articles, and endless words; I have run marathons, shorter races, and tens of thousands of kilometers; and through writing and running, I have reached truths that were hidden and imprisoned inside me without hope for rescue. Through hard physical and spiritual work, I developed the stubborn patience of a marathonic personality.
For me, running is returning to the most basic foundations of our existence, to the moment before things were spoiled. I look at my grandchildren learning to walk, and I am moved. I learn each hesitant step with them, the hand reaching for help; I accept with great love the smile that comes with great achievement; I embrace the fall and disappointment and do it over again. And now they’re running and moving away from me. Where are they going? Like toddlers but with moments of grace, as adult runners connect to the simplicity and innocence of their early days. Paradoxically, the more the technology of the shoes, clothing, and gear improves, the more runners can reach their own (pretechnological) foundations. This is a sport of return to the natural, return to the self. Every small child and toddler knows how to run. First, they crawl, learn to walk, and immediately run. Later, with the careful consideration, social passivity, and other antiphysical patterns of the contemporary era, the modern individual becomes a cumbersome lump. Our parents’ generation viewed a potbelly and slow walk as evidence of gravitas, respectability, seriousness, and personal abilities. We, on the other hand, invest in diets and body sculpting, much more than the entire Western world invests in eradicating hunger in developing countries.
During one of my campaigns for another respectable public position, one of my supporters in the Knesset plenum told me, “Avrum, you don’t stand a chance.”
“Why?” I wondered.
“Because you’re too thin,” he replied. “Israelis like their leaders fuller.” When I looked at the rest of those present in the plenum, I had to agree. When the contest was over and I was elected to the post, it turned out that some of the members of the electing body were Jews from abroad, who preferred me to other candidates because “a slim man is disciplined and restrained.” In time, I realized that I wanted to be opposite things at the same time: slim and unrestrained.
Very early in my life I was swept up in the fascinating vortex of relations between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Every time I was attracted anew, like a butterfly to a warm and friendly fire, to the spiritual pluralism of American Jewry. I saw how the health trend was growing there. People exercising, eating right, and in their spare time running and walking. I too tried to shake off my automatic aversion to sports imposed on me in the far and dark days at the yeshiva, an aversion that was a combination of the values of the Torah world, which despises the Hellenistic culture of the body, and the legacy of the army, which turned every sports activity into torture and hazing. I began slowly and modestly, and since then I run a lot. Most years, the hour of running was my vital break. The only moments I had to myself, alone. Without phone calls or tasks, without inquiries from the public or any disruptions.
Today I run for meditation. I run to the lost kilometers. To the sublime peak of the run, which is like a moment of nirvana. A serenity of being utterly clean. A reality in which the mind, thoughts, and obsessions vanish, and you run as if by suggestion. It happened to me for the first time in the Tiberias Marathon in 2003. I meticulously tracked all the data: pulse, breathing, drinking, the energy gels, and the kilometers marked at the side of the road. I turned around at Ein Gev, ran another kilometer, and suddenly I was in Tzemah. Wait a minute, how did I get here? Where did the last kilometers go? I don’t know. I wasn’t there, I was somewhere else. I was swallowed up in the infinity of the serenity, and in the words of Rachel, the poetess of the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings, it seemed as if I were absent. Since then I have tried to re-create that feeling every time. There are practice sessions in which I manage to erase a few hundred meters, sometimes even more, and the more I get to the vanished kilometers, the better my run and the calmer my life is. I still haven’t found the formula and mechanisms to get there of my own volition and in control. Sometimes it happens, and many times it doesn’t happen at all. Thoughts run in all directions. Indeed, this is not foot running, not even cardio running. It is the running of thoughts, or more precisely, the thoughts that you do not try to control and take control of. The minute the head is freed and capable of soaring, the body, as well, reaches the lost kilometers. The most beautiful, meaningful, and calming kilometers of life. I know, I was there, after Ein Gev on the way back to Tiberias. Those were the most enchanting kilometers of my life. And when I returned from eternity, I had my first book in my head, the whole book: beginning, middle, and end.
THE THOUGHTS WERE NESTING THERE FOR A WHILE. I heard the new rhetoric of Jewish and Muslim preachers getting louder and full of negativity; I listened to American politics and to the impa
ct of Christian demagoguery on President George W. Bush. I find it difficult to distinguish among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious fundamentalism. And I realized that with the turn of the century, the incoming twenty-first century would be much more religious than the outgoing secular twentieth. All of these thoughts and voices around me found their way into my first book, God Is Back. It was written about the religious dimension of the twenty-first century. In it I described the central Israeli structure—the distorted relations between religion and state. I identified the erosion of Western secular conversation and the similar erosion that is happening in Israel. In the book’s pages and chapters I tried to look at life through two lenses: through the Hubble Space Telescope I peered with curiosity at distant galaxies of the humanity of our time, and with the electron microscope I examined the minute details of the realities familiar to me that threaten us. That is our era: you can see the farthest and biggest, and at the same time see the near and small. I wrote about global manifestations of religious fundamentalism and shameful local expressions of Jewish paganism. With the telescope, I tried to decipher the tremendous religious forces that drove President Bush, and I examined what lies behind the people attacking abortion clinics and women seeking the right to choose and have control over their bodies. At the same time, I wanted, through writing, to examine my religious identity.
