by Avraham Burg
The Jews among my readers as well as travelers to and from Israel know the moment during the flight in which the observant but annoying people try to organize a minyan, ten Jewish prayers needed for the praying ritual. Whenever any of them approaches me on the plane and asks me to join, I ask with mock innocence, “Is this an egalitarian service?” When people try to compel me to complete a random male quorum for prayer, I point to the women around us and ask why they don’t join the group. This revolution in the life of our community took several years and was not at all easy. There was anger and insults. Friendships were broken and new connections made. But in the end, things settled down and calm returned to our lives, or more precisely, to the lives of our friends. Because for me a much larger crisis erupted with the conclusion of the revolution that I’m so happy about. For a few years, I happily attended the common synagogue where I sat with my partner and children—boys and girls together—in the mixed area, satisfied with this rare and special arrangement. But once the physical impediments, the chauvinistic divisions between men and women, were removed in the synagogue we had established for ourselves, I took the time to study the texts of the prayer, and I was alarmed. Those same ancient prayers, wrapped in melodies and tunes that I love so much, are actually texts that I cannot accept under any circumstances.
Sacrifices? The Temple? The chosen people? A gentile faith that is “vanity and emptiness”? The revival of the dead? A God that determines our lives? The messiah? I don’t believe in any of these things. On the contrary, I think that some of them are embarrassingly simplistic and primitive and some are alarmingly dangerous. The day I left politics I swore to myself never to live a life of lies again. I make every effort to reach my deepest truth and live by it as much as possible, whatever the price. That is why I have not gone to my community’s synagogue for many years. I have difficulty with the beliefs and religious content, and I don’t want to start another religious war with my friends and loved ones about the content of their Judaism.
I left the synagogue because I want entirely different content in my Judaism. Dad never gave up his place in the synagogue, especially because he wanted to preserve virtually every jot and tittle of what was and is no longer. From early childhood, I liked synagogue events very much. I liked the gathering, the early morning walk with Dad, a rare moment in our lives, until we met the other worshipers who latched on to him and separated us, as usual. My childhood was spent in two synagogues. One, known as Beit Hillel, was very close to home, attended by students and lecturers, and younger at heart. A lively mix of young and old, children and homeowners. We always sat on the right in the second row. On the left side in the first row sat Professor Akiva Ernst Simon, tall and impressive with his white mane. “He is a real yeke,” we would say with genuine reverence. But despite the supreme compliment in the scale of family praise, neither he, his wife, nor their children were ever guests at our home, nor did we visit theirs, although we lived at opposite ends of the very same street. Something very cold and official stood between him and Dad.
With me, on the other hand, he was very friendly. He always smiled warmly at me, sometimes shook my hand with adult formality after the end of services. Every time I performed a role designated for children in the synagogue he spoke very highly of me. When I made a mistake in pronunciation or chanting a tune he came over to me quietly after prayers and asked with extreme politeness whether he could exchange a few words with me. He was sixty and I was six, but politeness was obligatory. When I agreed to talk with him, he commented very quietly about how a particular word should be pronounced or a particular tune I had sung off-key should be sung. It was between us, while between him and Dad something just didn’t click. Hello, hello, a touch to the brim of the hat as they passed one another on the neighborhood streets, and that was it. They didn’t even cross the street for some small talk. Occasionally something about him would be revealed, like his bravery and the German Iron Cross he was decorated with in the First World War. Like the “frightening” fact that he was a liberal, heaven forbid. And that he had said things that were “best not repeated.” I didn’t care then, nor was I sensitive in the least to these nuances. I didn’t know that he was an important thinker, one of the pillars of German Jewry in the pre-war generation, whose ideas would eventually become part of the organizing ideas of my life.
Our second synagogue was Yeshurun, then the main Jerusalem synagogue. We went there on holidays, on Independence Day, and on special Sabbaths. Dad always had his regular place in the third seat in the first row on the left. “This is the first synagogue I attended on my first Sabbath ever in Jerusalem,” he would repeatedly say with gratitude. On the wall next to us was a commemorative plaque for the Conservative movement, which founded the synagogue, but who knew the difference then between the roiling Jewish streams whose wellsprings were in German Jewry? That was where I was called up to the Torah on my bar mitzvah. It was there that I sat as a boy in the lap of Ruby Rivlin, who later became the Knesset speaker, succeeding me, and a beloved president of Israel. That is where presidents and dignitaries, official visitors and important figures came. Sitting in the rear section of the synagogue, always hunched and sullen, was Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the most significant person in my life aside from my parents and family members. Dad knew him from there as well. But I don’t recall any contact between them. Not even a nod of the head. By then Leibowitz was already a popular teacher. His lessons on Maimonides and the weekly Torah portion attracted throngs. But we never moved in his circles. I always recognized his gaunt and bony figure lurching forward with the old leather bag in his hand. I never said hello to him in the street, and he never showed that he recognized me.
After my military service, I worked in the College for Jewish Heritage and Leibowitz was one of the admired and important teachers there. In my first week of work, the principal sent me to “organize something” with Leibowitz. I called him, introduced myself only by my first name, and asked to meet him. “Happily, happily,” he invited me with his raspy voice. I came to his house at 63 Ussishkin Street. We spoke for a long while about the planned seminar and its content. A room full of books, and this old and warm man showered me with his spiritual generosity, with more and more of the full galaxies of his knowledge and wisdom.
Every so often he would leap up from his seat, climb a wooden ladder, take down a remote book from one of the upper shelves, and order me to write down a citation. Then he would sit back down and continue lecturing me. Suddenly in the middle of it all, in our first meeting ever, when I knew who he was and didn’t think he knew who I was, he blurted out, “You father was actually a smart man, I wonder why he went into politics.”
That was the start of a great love that I felt for this wonderful man. The moral intellectual, who with his bare hands, with his rare courage, tried to save Israel from its two great ills: the malignant occupation and the incestuous corruption of religion and state.
I returned home and told Dad about the meeting with Leibowitz. “Ah, yes, he’s very smart. We once had many debates in Berlin.” At the time, I didn’t understand the heavy baggage that separated them. I didn’t know that Leibowitz had tried to be a politician and failed, I didn’t know a thing about the debate that tore apart religious Zionism—between Ernst Simon and Leibowitz on one side and the big establishments of religious Zionism on the other. And Dad, who wasn’t very good at making decisions, was torn between them and stuck in place.
In the Germany before they immigrated, in Zionist Berlin, they argued about the image of the State of Israel that they had dreamed so much of founding. In Israel’s early days they continued their debates. A few years before I was born, Simon laid the foundations for the most scathing critique of the religious Zionism of my father and his colleagues. Then came Leibowitz, who improved on Simon’s argument and confronted them with his penetrating philosophical truth. Without mercy or any fear. Simon wrote a weighty essay that wondered “whether we are still Jews.” His premise was that
historical Judaism was catholic, general and encompassing all areas of life. The invasion of secularism and Zionist nationalism into the realms of the old Judaism led to the loss of the historical monopoly of Judaism over the Jews. Suddenly we had new masters of the house: the Enlightenment and progressiveness and secular realms of life that were not at all religious. Following Simon, Leibowitz demanded separation of religion from the state in order to resolve the dilemma for himself and for us. Religion, according to their perception, does not extend to the whole of life. They recognized secularization and created different departments for different behaviors. There is a religious department and a general department, and they do not necessarily overlap.
I know all this in retrospect. The more I think about it, the more I understand why our families were not closer. “They’re not like us, they’re not unsere menschen, our people,” was the immediate and harsh judgment rendered around the Sabbath table, and the case was closed forever. But apparently their seeds were sown inside me already in those distant early days. For many years people have been trying to catalog me. There’s always someone shallow enough to ask me, “But what are you? Religious, Orthodox, Reform, Conservative?” Usually I refuse to cooperate with the desire of that person to make the definitions troubling him more convenient—let him make an effort, let him think. Aside from the fact that this is one of those invasive questions that immediately make me very harsh and unpleasant. But sometimes when the spirit moves me, I reply—and my facetious answer stems directly from Simon’s dilemma—“I am a Protestant Jew.”
I really don’t believe in a central religious establishment responsible for belief and religious law. I am not prepared to accept and do not want these institutions to encompass the entirety of all aspects of my life. On the contrary, I’m ready to fight with everything I’ve got against the religious occupiers who are trying to annex all areas of existence with their quasi-Catholic aggression. They should get out of our pockets and out of women’s uteruses, out of what we eat and out of our souls. I dream of a proper country and society, in which there is a clear separation between religion and state, as well as a commitment to equal citizenship for all citizens, regardless of their spiritual choices or tribal origin. I yearn for a spiritual and cultural life in which the current corrupt reality, where “religion is the mistress of politics,” in Leibowitz’s words, will have disappeared.
Dad wasn’t capable of walking those paths with them. He wasn’t capable and didn’t want to. And from this stemmed his great anger with Leibowitz, who once told me, “A learned person who has no opinion is worse than a carcass.” And I was very insulted on behalf of Dad, who was not explicitly mentioned by the philosopher who was so important to me at most stations of my life. That insult was magnified because I thought there was a grain of truth in his oblique criticism. But only a grain. Because deep down, Dad had faith, not blazing, not burning, not zealous, but very clear. Different than Leibowitz’s in its content and style, but real faith. He believed with all his heart that the State of Israel is “the first flowering of our redemption.” Once, during one of our arguments, I harshly denigrated the chief rabbinate and its rabbis, and he grew red with anger and told me, “But it’s such an important institution, for that we established the state.” And indeed, he had a secret dream of getting out of the religious ghetto he shared with his friends and expanding it to Israeli society in general.
Now that I am more moderate and not angry at all—when Dad is gone and I miss him so much—I know how wrong he was. How much most of Israeli society, following his wisdom and weakness, adheres to the past and fails to understand what is growing before its very eyes, afraid to decide. “Whoever makes a change loses,” he would say, defending himself with an old Talmudic saying, and he was defeated. I, on the other hand, haven’t the slightest doubt that the renewed Jewish meeting of religion and rule, faith and power, zealotry and nationalism, are leading us to perdition, to the destruction of the third Jewish sovereignty. That is why I, knowing them so well, their internal language and their real intentions, must confront them, offer a comprehensive alternative to them, and if there is no other choice, fight them with all my might.
My parents needed a very long time to find their exact place along these complicated continuums. By 1968, by the time Dad had finished being German in Mom’s view, an existential decision much bigger than them was made in the Six-Day War. In that cursed war, Israel erased the borders surrounding us externally as well as all internal boundaries. Our reality became entirely limitless. There is no limit to our gall and occupation, no limits to anything. And even the few distinctions between religion and state have been totally erased. In 1948, my parents were active and enthusiastic partners in the establishment of a secular and socialist state. In the twenty-first century, my grandchildren were born into a completely different Israel: Orthodox, capitalistic to the point of brutality, and nationalistic to the point that it sometimes doesn’t realize how chauvinistic it is. The Israel of my parents failed, and my grandchildren are being born into it. And when all the borders were erased, Dad also erased his borders between religion and state and became a Jewish Catholic who would never again leave the house for any purpose without a very big kippah, too big, on his head.
In the mid-2010s, I was supposed to appear on a television program. The researcher for the program questioned me at length about my opinions and positions, about everything. I answered her at length, patiently, and finally she said, “Can I ask you one more personal question?”
I replied, “Of course.”
“So, by what right do you wear a kippah?” she asked, her anger evident in her effort to control her voice.
Does that belong to you? Do you have entitlement to my appearance? Or a monopoly over permission to wear a kippah? Or a religionometer to accurately determine those who are qualified and those who aren’t? In the past I would have thrown all that in her face and not come to the program, but the past has settled down.
“Can I ask you an intimate question?” I wondered.
“Uh… yes, please,” she replied.
I asked. A very personal and intimate question. There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“See you Monday at the studio,” she said and quietly hung up.
The next week I came to the studios and was interviewed. After the program, I stood alone in a room and removed the makeup. “Can I bother you for a minute?” a woman staff member asked me.
“Why not,” I replied.
“I’m the researcher. I wanted to answer you,” she said. “Yes. The answer to your question is yes. But I understand. I’m sorry I asked, I shouldn’t have invaded your privacy and intimacy.”
In the following year, I officiated at her wedding. A Jewish ceremony for all intents and purposes, without the coercive framework of the chief rabbinate. It was worth restraining myself. And I still wear a kippah.
It is difficult for me to take it off, but I think that I have no choice. The kippah on my head—I explain to those interested—is my antidote to the arrogance that has brought so much pain and suffering to humanity in recent generations. The kippah is my border. It reminds me how small and limited I am. That’s a nice, original speech. A surprising argument that leaves others silent. But it is hollow. At best, I wear a kippah for others, because “it’s important for us to know that there are also religious people like you.” Though to tell the truth, the kippah on my head is just a remnant of the religious existence of my previous incarnation. Today I am not a religious person. I am secular, enthusiastically soaking up Jewish culture. I don’t think that Judaism is a belief system or petty observance of commandments, and I’m not prepared to play this game anymore with these players. Judaism for me is a cultural civilization, of which religion is one element but not necessarily the most important component. And the religious element needs deep and comprehensive reform in concepts and texts, particularly a dramatic shift from the total “Catholicism” that today organizes all of Israeli l
ife, to a much more Protestant concept in which there are clear divisions between religion and the state, between the general secular realm and private areas of identity and content. In the West I have many liberal partners, progressive and pluralistic—Jews and non-Jews. In Israel, I sometimes feel like there’s no one to talk to about these things.
As time passes, I understand that the kippah on my head is a kind of illusion. As if I’m still somewhat connected to those worlds. But that’s so untrue. I left political religious Zionism even before joining it. I turned my back on Dad’s Catholicism and followed Leibowitz almost the whole way, except for his stubborn Orthodox dogmatism. I can’t connect with my friends’ traditionalism because of the troubling texts underpinning this tradition. And the kippah we all share, the knitted kippah that is there all the time, in every situation, on my head, is the last imagined link with the world of which I am no longer a part. Because the kippah, like so much traditional garb, is ultimately meant to set apart. To create distinctions between those who are “like us” and those who are not part of our solidarity. But I don’t believe in this sweeping “us.” My world is not divided into Jews and non-Jews. My division is completely different. I divide the world into good people and bad people. Whoever is good is my brother or sister, and I don’t care what their faith is, their race, or cultural affiliation. And anyone who is bad is my enemy, even if he or she speaks Hebrew, wears a kippah, and observes the Sabbath. I have no automatic, racial patriotism that favors all Jews, even the worst of them, over the gentile, even if he is the finest human being. On the contrary. And because of that, I don’t want anything that will differentiate me as a person from the community of the rest of my humanistic partners, regardless of their faith and culture.
