In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  A few years before the highly anticipated Y2K, I began by looking for an answer to a very personal, really microscopic question posed to me by a boy settler. I was on a visit to the land of the settlements south of Hebron. It was Chanukah time, and the tour began in one of the kindergartens in the historic region. One of the toddlers, with long sidelocks and blue eyes, beautiful as a divine angel and wearing an oversized kippah, fixed me with a stare.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Avraham,” I replied.

  “And what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I came to visit you,” I answered.

  “Why?” he queried.

  “What do you mean, why?” I said, almost insulted.

  “You want peace with America and the Arabs. You are a Hellenizer! You eat pork at home? Why do you wear a kippah?” he lashed out at me.

  At the time, I didn’t answer him. And I had never answered myself. Now the time had come.

  When I studied in elementary school I met an unusual person, a wonderful teacher named Meir Bakshi. Smart, sophisticated, and with a healthy sense of humor. He would call me up sometimes to the front of the class, take the kippah off my head, knock on my skull, and say with feigned satisfaction, “the Dome of the Rock.” He was the best at such puns. Both a head hard as a rock and a holy place like the one liberated by the brave Israeli soldiers last year. There was no typical kippah then for schoolboys. Everyone brought what he had at home. The school kippah was not knitted. Every boy had a different kippah: made of felt or cloth, a “Jerusalem good boy” kippah or a black rabbi’s kippah. The kippah was mandatory in school, but not really required at home or during play. Everyone did in his free time what was customary at home. I came to school every day with a big Swiss skullcap. My everyday kippah had decorations of white flowers, the edelweiss of the Alps, and my Sabbath and holiday kippahs also had a woven tail and a pastoral embroidery of Swiss cows. I have no idea why my parents decided that this was the appropriate look for me, their only son.

  I can imagine myself then. A small Jerusalem boy with slanted bangs in the style of the sixties, wearing the giant skullcap of cow herders high up in the Alps. What were they thinking? I ask myself. The wonder increases even more when I think about my parents, who made every effort to avoid falling prey to the gossip around us. “What would they say?” was the motivating motto of our lives.

  In Israel’s early years—during the fifties and sixties—the weekly HaOlam HaZeh (a news magazine published in Israel between 1937 and 1993, famous for its highly unorthodox and irreverent style) was at the peak of its power. It was virtually the only voice in opposition to the chorus of the establishment and the national consensus. This daring and courageous paper combined brave and consistent exposure of the political reality that the establishment wanted to hide and cover up, along with pornographic nudity in the style of those modest days. The ideology of the paper was “without fear or favor.” A black bar covered the eyes and private parts of the weekly beauties on the back cover, and naked and unrestrained politics filled its inside pages. A political person, like my father, could not function in the roiling Israeli arena without this uncensored information, without knowing what was actually going on in the real world, the one not reported in partisan publications and the slavish media. Which is why we would get HaOlam HaZeh every week.

  My mother, on the other hand, could not live in this world with the knowledge that, God forbid, someone would know that something so abominable was entering our home. I was the point of contact between these colliding worlds. One of my official jobs at home was to take out the garbage. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, I was sent with the family refuse to the local garbage can. A ritual that repeated itself every day, except the day in which we threw out HaOlam HaZeh from the previous week. There was a set drill. I took the garbage and went downstairs. I knew exactly where Mom’s sing-song voice would reach me, “Avraham.” As an expert courier I would return, and Mom would open the garbage bag, look for the old copy of HaOlam HaZeh and make certain what she had already made sure of five times before at home—that the embarrassing back page was folded inside. “So that if God forbid someone pokes around the garbage of the Burg family…”

  They were very modest people. Until their last days, the house contained the used furniture they had bought right after their wedding. We never spent extravagantly on ostentatious events. On the contrary, my father was a minister in many of Israel’s governments, and during most of my childhood years he was eligible for an official car and a driver provided by the government. The driver, Baruch Vessely, was a member of the household. A friend. His children were my friends. We grew up together, similar and equal and different in the same way all human beings are different from one another. One difference was visible. Every morning Baruch took his son to the school in which we studied, and I was forbidden to get into Dad’s car, not even on rainy and snowy Jerusalem days, because of “what would they say?” That is why, when I think about the kippah they put on my head, I wonder where those fears had gone. Then additional questions come up: Why this kippah? And why a kippah at all?

  The kippah is a symbol, and perhaps the institution, that has accompanied me more than anything else in my life. From the time of my childhood until today. Before I knew how to read and write. Before I led synagogue services for the first time. The kippah was always there. A kind of basic instinct. You don’t go out of the house without a kippah. You don’t walk out on the street without a kippah. I remember the first times that I ran without a kippah on the streets of Jerusalem. I didn’t have too much hair left on my head by then, and there was nowhere to pin on the kippah, so I was compelled to run bareheaded. What a strange feeling. It would have been easier for me to run stark naked than to run without a kippah. Someone once taught me a joke, a vitz based on a Hebrew wordplay, according to which a kippah, unlike socks, shoes, and a belt, is worn by compulsion. I was never compelled to wear a kippah. It was simply there.

  Since my parents never did anything without meaning it, I’m trying today, with the perspective of time, to understand their hidden intent, the distant message they sent me from my early days to these years of my maturity. The contours of the landscape are distant, blurred, the Israeli value system has changed unrecognizably, and their old world, the world of yesterday, which combined a strong diaspora consciousness with an almost sacred joy of independence, has been replaced with a tough local cynicism. The delicate complexity made up of equilibrium and balances has grown tired and worn, giving way to a totality of positions. “Keep it simple,” we say in spoken Israeli and run into trouble time and again. Members of the complicated, complex-ridden generation are no more, and I have no one to ask.

  Dad bought the kippahs in Switzerland, in Zurich. Always Zurich. The bourgeois, respectable, quiet, and orderly Swiss city became over the years a city of refuge for my parents. My father went abroad often. There was something in him that embodied both supply and demand. He knew how to speak in so many languages that instead of sending three emissaries to three different places, he alone would be dispatched. In the morning in English in London, in the afternoon in French in Paris or Brussels, and in the evening in German. And in between, informal communication in Yiddish or any other European language. He could talk about politics and policy, about the weekly Torah portion and general philosophy, about contemporary literature as well as “The Song of the Nibelungs,” the thirteenth-century epic German poem. He had a cultural supply incomprehensible to today’s Israeli, like myself, limited to our cultural confines in the here and now. But he also had demands. He wanted to travel, he loved it. Or to be more precise, he needed it. He had what to offer, and he asked for something in return. Every time he traveled somewhere in the world, he always asked to go through Zurich. To the Far East through Zurich, to the far West through Zurich. It was such a fixture in the family landscape that we never talked about it. Once, in his old age, I asked him, “Dad, what’s the story with Zuric
h?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked evasively, using his usual acrobatics with me to buy some time to compose an answer that wouldn’t get him in too much trouble, refusing to commit even in his final moments.

  “Why did you always travel or return through Zurich?”

  He needed a long time to reply and in the end, he groaned and said limply, “I couldn’t live without it.” I waited. After a while he continued.

  “I actually never took proper leave of Dresden. The beautiful city, the city of my happy childhood. I escaped it in a hurry. I left behind an elderly mother to die, and wonderful, precious memories. I was never allowed to mourn, to bid farewell and recover. Zurich is a bit like Dresden. A cultured European city. Not too big and not too provincial. With a train station—the Hauptbahnhof—a river, a main street, and shops that have always been there. A city where things change very slowly, if at all. In Zurich, I found consolation. In Zurich, I was always refilled.”

  Once we were together in his beloved Dresden. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the three of us traveled—Mom, Dad, and I. Three adults, experienced and astute, going back in time to one of the important points of departure of their lives. We toured the city and its restored landmarks, and in one place, a wonderfully aesthetic local pastry shop, Dad blurted, “Ah, just like Zurich.”

  When he confessed this non-Zionist deviation to me, I was reminded of a story from the family mythology. Thirty-five-year-old Dad brought twenty-three-year-old Mom to meet his German immigrant friends. Members of his group were regulars at one of the cafes on Ben-Yehuda Strasse in Tel Aviv, playing chess, chatting, saving Jews with mere speech, fighting the Germans or the British with words and theses, and establishing a state in their dreams. Probably all in high German mixed with heavily accented Hebrew. And suddenly someone else shows up and breaks into the circle rooted back in Germany, the painful, longed-for phantom. Dad introduced her to them, with her rabbinic and Hebron pedigree, and after she went on her way one of the friends asked him, “Was, Yosef, mit einer asiatischen Frau?” (What, Yosef, with an Asian woman?) I reminded him of the story and asked him if there was a connection. “Very much so,” he replied. “It’s not easy with you Asians, natives of the country. I need to occasionally go back and recharge, to go back and remember the forces that positively drew me to Zionism and the belief in the State of Israel.”

  After one of those many visits he returned with a gift for his boy, a large Swiss skullcap. It’s not clear to me whether he gave me a present or built himself a monument on my head, so that every time he looked at me he saw the unseen. In Zurich, he had thought of me, and when he looked at me he thought of Zurich. As he gazed at what was above my line of sight, something apparently percolated from the Swiss cap he gave me into my consciousness.

  WHAT IS THIS KIPPAH, ANYWAY? WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE, like the boy settler, berate me in anger: “Take that kippah off already”? And why do so many sympathizers who identify with my words end up asking me, “So why is it that you wear a kippah? You’re just like us”? Many years ago, when my eldest son was a mischievous boy in kindergarten, he crossed the line one day. I don’t remember the precise incident, but we gave much thought to the correct educational way to deal with it. In the end, we told him, “Tomorrow you’re not allowed to go to kindergarten with a kippah. A kippah is a symbol of good behavior, and you don’t deserve it.” His distress was touching, really heart-rending. He wept bitterly for a long, sad day. Until now, years later, when he no longer wears a kippah on a regular basis and is raising his children in his own wonderful way, that event is still mentioned in family conversations with a smile. Since then I have done a lot of thinking about the place of the kippah in our family and the place of the kippah on my head.

  Group pictures of previous members of parliament hang on one of the walls in the Knesset corridors. During all my years in the Knesset I passed through those halls thousands of times. I never stopped for a minute to look at those pictures. The only time I did, I had one of the big surprises of my life. There was a picture of my father and teacher, who served here as a minister and member of the Knesset from its inception until his retirement in 1988. But alas, in every one of his pictures in the first five elected parliaments, he is photographed without a kippah. My father, the leader of religious Zionism, an Orthodox rabbi by training, who prayed three times a day, who never missed morning prayer or afternoon services, had his picture taken without a kippah? I went to the Government Press Office to look for the original print. The estimated date, according to the assessment there, was early December, 1951, when he had been a minister for a month and a half in the third Israeli government. I assume that a secretary received a request, a directive to tell the minister to go to the Government Press Office and have his picture taken, so that there would be an official photo of the Israeli health minister for anyone who might need it. What a picture! The one and only, in black and white, and still so colorful. A three-piece suit, the finest attire at the time. The dotted tie not quite centered, and the left collar flap of the white shirt a bit too prominent. Handsome, stylish glasses. He’s so serious, in his early forties, younger than I am today, but when I look at him, he is so respectable and adult, an elderly Jew—he looks like he could be my father… I looked at what was left of his thinning hair, which quickly became his wonderful signature shiny bald pate, and indeed, there was no kippah. None. Simply none. I turned the picture over to the other side, and there was no kippah there either.

  I immediately called Mom. I had to get to the bottom of this. And she said without hesitation, “Yes, it’s possible. Then he was still German.” A year and a half after the founding of the state, six years after the opening of the iron gate of Auschwitz, twelve years after he was ordained as a rabbi, my father, an Israeli minister under Ben-Gurion, remained a “German” for my mother. Her perception was that he did not become an “Israeli” until after the Six-Day War, because only from then did the kippah become a fixture on his wise head, in official pictures and in daily reality. Many pieces of the puzzle fell into place then. The more I think about it, the more I know: You were wrong, Mom. Dad’s exposed bald pate in the official picture, like the heavy kippah he wore during the rest of his history, was the pure Israeliness that he wanted us all to inherit, and which changed before our eyes on his big head.

  Many people approach me to this day and tell me that my father was their teacher at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. Judging by their number, little Tel Aviv would have had at least ten million residents at the time. These people have a kind of pleasant glow on their faces. They talk about a beloved teacher, a teacher of life. About that period, Dad told me, with real admiration, that David Shimoni, the fiery national poet, was with him on the teaching staff of the gymnasium, and that “Shimoni taught literature bareheaded, and the Bible with a hat.” Once he told Dad that at a fairly young age he had stopped putting on tefillin, but after the pogroms in Ukraine in 1920 he resumed wearing them. “He told me, ‘I have complaints against the Almighty, and I can lodge them only when I put on tefillin. Otherwise I just complain…’” This made a strong impression on Dad. “This shows a depth of feeling and thought,” he would say.

  Today I ask myself if that same depth of feeling and thought can be attributed to Dad’s admission: “I taught history bareheaded, which was not the case with Talmud.” When he taught history, he taught it as an ordinary person, so he stood in class without a kippah and without any head covering. And when he taught Talmud, he wore a kippah and taught the essence of rabbinic Judaism in the heart of the secular stronghold of Tel Aviv as a Jew for all intents and purposes. It seems to me that many of his students then, elderly Israelis today, miss that duality, the value system that can take in such contradictory worlds, like modernity and roots, reconciling them in a harmony between ideological garb and external clothing.

  My trajectory in life was the opposite of his, and our kippahs, along with our religious outlooks, are evidence of the reversal of directions.
In the world he was born into there was a clear separation between the Jewish space and the general environment. I don’t accept the thesis that the Jews of Germany walked without kippahs in order to avoid attracting attention. There was a much broader worldview at work here than just fear.

  Anyone who was around my dad knew he was Jewish. In school, he didn’t write and wasn’t tested on the Sabbath, on the street it was known that his father was a wine merchant whose stock included strictly kosher wines brought from the new wineries of the settlements in Palestine, and at the university in Leipzig it was known that he was not only a doctoral student, but also a student in the rabbinical seminary. So, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the separation was a separation in essence. There are areas that are Jewish realms of activity—tradition, religion, customs—above which the kippah is displayed. And there are areas and realms that are not Jewish, and they are bareheaded and have broad horizons. There is and must be a separation between general life that belongs to everyone and the unique life of those who choose it.

  We—my wife, our children, and I—have lived more than half of our lives in a small community on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A community whose members come partly from religious homes and partly from secular homes, and there is no tension between us. An example of what Israel could have been had it really wanted to take a different path. Over the years, we established a very special synagogue for ourselves, a place of gathering and consideration for others. It doesn’t have the classic separation between men and women, and is meant for women, men, and families. There is a mixed area for those who want it, like us. The service is also virtually completely egalitarian. Since this prayer group was founded I refuse to take part in any religious or cultural activity that is not completely egalitarian.