by Avraham Burg
Today, gazing back from the keyboard over time, I think a great deal about my status and my positions in those days. Usually I was more thoughtful than I had been that day. Many people came to me to consult, to share, to take advantage of my experience or connections. It seems to me that all of the advice I gave then, or at least most of it, was good… for me. Like that empty statement to the LGBT activists. Today I am entirely the opposite. When I’m asked, I try to reply with the most accurate truth I see before me, even when it is entirely contrary to my interests.
A whole generation has passed since then, and when Gal and Moshe approached me and asked that I marry them, I agreed. I was grateful to them, because I felt that they were challenging my Jewish conventions and theirs. For many months, we studied—together and separately—Jewish sources on marriage and the wedding ceremony, sexuality and same-sex relationships. In the end, we developed a complete ceremony that integrated ancient Jewish content with their unique same-sex familial bond.
At their wedding, I felt that there were two other people standing with us under the chuppah, my late mother on the one side, and Brian on the other. In the moments of silence, always part of the intimacy of the chuppah, I imagined Brian whispering to her quietly, “Yes, Mrs. Burg, there are Jewish homosexuals.” But while I didn’t manage to imagine her response, I know there are questions that people like her, of her generation and upbringing, would never leave unanswered. Johnny’s warning against being mugged in broad daylight was right on the mark, because in many respects, which have increased over the years, he and Brian mugged me in broad daylight, stealing the limited identity with which I had arrived in San Francisco. But in their spiritual generosity, unlike other thieves in my life, they granted me far better alternatives than those I came with to my first meeting with them.
Not long ago, an Arab partner and I interviewed a candidate for a job. She was a young Arab woman from a Muslim home and a lawyer by training. “Let’s assume,” my Palestinian Israeli colleague asked her, “that tomorrow you could choose the citizenship you want, Israeli or Palestinian. Which would you choose?” She thought for a moment and answered, “The one that I think will safeguard as many of my rights as possible as a secular woman with equal rights.”
It will take more time before there is equal treatment in all aspects of our lives for women and every individual, like my daughters, the job candidate, and the brides I married. But this revolution can no longer be turned back. The issue has been decided, though victory has yet to be declared. In every place that I fearfully see and hear Jewish fundamentalists who devote themselves entirely to exclusion of women, homophobia, and xenophobia, I know that we are taking another step closer.
Because the more women are liberated, earning a living, important and equal, the more men’s hegemony is threatened and hence their harsh and violent response. The recognition of the equal value of all people is penetrating deeply everywhere, and it is especially threatening to those of religious or traditional persuasions. And the more they are threatened, the more extreme and strident they become. That is why their extremist move to the dark side is evidence of the gains made by our brighter side. And because in recent years they have been very vociferous and aggressive, I know that they will be defeated.
IT TOOK ME MANY YEARS TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE place of women in society—any woman in society—is the litmus test for the degree of equality in that society. The boys-only schools in which I had studied, the male combat units in which I had served, and the long years in local political life in which there are few women—all these environments gave me plenty of opportunities to understand and express my commitment to the equality of women and their status, a commitment whose basis is so simple: a society in which women are discriminated against is a flawed society, and an egalitarian society—among all and for all, not only for women—is a proper society. That is how we raised our girls and boys together. We didn’t want our boys callous and insensitive, and we didn’t expect to have fragile and needy girls who have no active role in building the world.
During the nineties, in the years before my children’s bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah celebrations, we sat down every Sabbath and studied together. Every child chose his or her topic, and from the broad and deep study, the speech on the festive day emerged. Not an incomprehensible and inexplicable speech like mine, dictated by father to son, but their own words, expressed as they wished. To this day, ideas are still sprouting from those seeds. Equality, freedom, justice, sensitivity, environment, vegetarianism, and a great deal of brotherhood. Roni wanted to learn about “the status of women in Judaism.” At age eleven, when we started these studies, she was already a veteran of the feminist wars. In the religious public school where she studied, the principal wanted to forbid the girls from coming to school in pants. She confronted him, launched a school movement named “Modest in Pants,” studied Jewish sources, prepared a sharply worded petition, got male and female students to sign, and had the decree rescinded.
Before her bat mitzvah, Roni expressed a desire to read her weekly portion from the Torah in synagogue. Together we studied the traditional melody and the Torah trope. At first it was a bit strange for me because I had never heard the Torah read and sung with a woman’s voice. In my ancient, primitive consciousness, the Torah belonged to the male world, and its sounds were somewhere in the area of the bass and baritone. But with her help it became more natural. In alto or soprano, the Torah sounds so beautiful, new, fresh, and right. We studied every Sabbath, and each time I would witness her wonderful progress. As our studies progressed, the complexity of the topic deepened.
The bat mitzvah date drew near, and the question grew more urgent: how can we have a shared family prayer when my parents, especially my father, were never part of the religious egalitarian revolution? “I’ll talk to Grandpa,” the young revolutionary said with determination. After a week, she came back with an arrangement. On Independence Day of that year we celebrated with her—the whole family together—the day of her entrance into the circle of Jewish responsibility. She read from the Torah and Dad, for the first time in his life, joined a mixed, egalitarian service. She and I completed the journey, and my father, in his eighties, embarked on his own path.
My sisters and I turned out very differently from what we witnessed in our home. The division of labor among my parents was classic for that generation: Dad was the breadwinner, and Mom was the homemaker. He was outside, she was inside. He was the representative, and she was with the children and at parent meetings. It turns out that precisely there, at the place furthest from what I consider the proper model for relations between a couple, that the seeds of that model were sown in me.
I don’t think that Dad knew how to do any of the household chores himself. At the end of the family Sabbath meal everyone would mobilize to clear off the table, clean and wash the dishes, take out the garbage, arrange everything again in the refrigerator, and set the table for Sabbath morning. We all worked, each with an assigned task. Mom cleaned the pots, my sisters shined the glasses—“don’t forget to hold it up one last time to the light to make sure there are no stains”—and I cleared off the dishes, shook out the tablecloth—“outside please”—and threw out the garbage. Dad had one task: to remove the salt and the challah knife. He treated the chore with dead seriousness, walking slowly with the light load in his hands and loudly declaring, “Achtung, vorsicht.” German words of deterrence and warning that he was familiar with, automatic language he retreated to when he encountered situations outside his control. And that was it. He did nothing else.
In her old age, Mom was once out of the house—abroad or in the hospital—I don’t remember exactly. And my father, who was always cold, felt an even greater chill because of the absence of his love. With uncharacteristic determination, he went by himself to the biggest and most expensive electric appliance store in town and bought himself a heater, because he had no idea how to run the heating system at home. On the way back he stopped at the ne
arest grocery and bought a giant jar of coffee, a spoon, and a cup, because he simply did not know where all these were in his own home. Never, until that moment, did he ask himself how his coffee appeared in the morning, precisely when he wanted it, and how the cup refilled, seemingly by itself, next to him at his desk. That was how dependent he was on Mom’s work at home. In short, a real man.
Whoever was familiar, even in the slightest, with their relationship discovered mutual admiration that did not fade with the years. She admired his wisdom, he her earthiness; she, his worldliness, he, the fact that she was a native; she, his sophistication, he, her common sense. If a jigsaw puzzle had been formed in their image, it would be impossible to know where he ended and where she began, and vice versa.
So, this feminism of mine was something new in my life, an egalitarian rebellion against all the inequality that my mother experienced. All her life, I was saddened and almost angered by her refrain, “I gave up my career as a teacher in order to raise you.” Or, “I could have been something else, but I promised Dad that I would support him and his political activity.” And the worst of her sayings: “All my life I’ve belonged to somebody. I was the daughter of… and the sister of… and then the wife of… and now I’m the mother of…” And I always wanted her by herself, not through the prisms of all the others who, I believed, she thought defined her.
In short, from such a home—a mother who sacrificed herself and a father who spent most of his hours and years outside, a home in which he was the breadwinner and she the manager, in which he studied the daily Talmud page every night, while she was in the kitchen, responsible for cooking and cleaning—from a home like that nothing could grow that resembled the ideal of equality to which I am committed. No wonder that I never attributed these foundations of my values to her, or to them.
I learned my feminism from my partner, who is better than me at everything, while developing our relationship as a couple at home and the ways to raise our children. Later, when the fruits of our tree of life began ripening, and our children became independent, I received much more from them, especially from my daughters. For many years, I thought I had not learned this from the home where my sisters and I grew up, an old-fashioned home. I was wrong. Again, it turns out that the ancient Jewish Aramaic saying, psychological before Freud, is practical and relevant to this day: “The lessons of childhood are not forgotten.” I understood these roots of childhood only at the last minute, next to my father’s deathbed.
He wrote the first words of that saying on my wall a few years before he passed away (in 1999, at the age of ninety-one). But I didn’t really notice their power. That happened in one of the rare times in our public lives when we were officially together on the same stage. He was in his traditional role of presiding judge at the international youth Bible quiz, and I, as chairman of the Jewish Agency, also had some official role there. I was asked, ex officio, to say words of welcome to the Jewish youngsters from abroad.
“What do you want to speak about?” Dad asked me a few days ahead of time.
“About the idea of equality in the Bible,” I replied.
“In three minutes? You won’t have the time.”
“I’ll have to try, Dad, I’ll try.”
On the appointed day, I ascended the big stage in Jerusalem. I began, as customary when my parents were present, by acknowledging them, and then continued:
With your permission I would like to welcome you, the contestants, and pray for the Torah’s triple blessing of love. The blessing contained in the commandment, “You shall Love the Lord your God,” is entirely equivalent to the requirement to love my neighbor like myself, and there is no difference between them and the eternal requirement to love the stranger, the other among us, the one different from us. And remember this—all these equated loves, love of God and his worship, love of the neighbor and love of any person, even a stranger, is not applicable to men only. Because in the great revolution in Egypt, the one whose call, “Let my people go,” still echoes to this day, Moses tells Pharaoh explicitly, “We shall go with our young and old, with our sons and daughters, because we must observe the Lord’s festival.” Moses represents there, before Pharaoh, an entirely different inner truth: in his view, worship of God is not only man’s worship, but of believers from both genders, “our sons and daughters” together. If that is how it is between human beings and God—all the more so between people, and between Adam and Eve.
The whole message took no longer than three minutes. Very little—if any—applause came from the hall, which was packed with Bible buffs, most of them equality-challenged Orthodox Zionists. Of all the dignitaries on the stage, only Dad, who I could see from the corner of my eye, applauded. In the evening, I called him to see how he was doing and ask how his day had gone. “You indeed did not exceed three minutes,” he answered, without elaborating. A warm German Jewish compliment. Who could ask for more?
A few minutes later he called me in the car. “Where are you?”
“I’m with the kids on the way home.”
“Can you arrange for everyone to hear me?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ll put on the speaker.”
“I wanted you to know,” he told me, “that you said very important things today. They didn’t understand you, but I understand. In the revolution of equality for women, the Jewish people doubles itself in one stroke. Humanity doubles itself. And not just a doubling that duplicates the same thing, but something entirely different, much better. Like your mother, not like me,” he added with affectionate cynicism. “The Jew discovered the one God. That is the main pillar of Jewish thought. But the Jew also discovered humanity. And humanity is the entire human race, including women. That is the real meaning of the revolution in Egypt. An end to slavery, an end to subjugation. That is the source of Maimonides’s vision of the end of days, ‘without subjugation by other authorities.’” With that, he ended his short phone lesson.
Two years passed, and his strength was sapped. We all sadly felt that these were the last days, and that his body would no longer renew itself. Dad, like the good, organized German Jew that he was, planned his funeral to the last detail. Who would come, who would escort his single sister from New York, what would be inscribed on the tombstone, and who would speak. Those moments were so special. Some so sad they would move us to tears, and some funny, because we always laughed at home. Delicately, suggestively, but right to the heart. During his preparations with us he said, “After my death I no longer owe anything to the chief rabbis, right? So maybe they don’t have to speak at the funeral, right? Let them read a chapter of Psalms, that’s enough for them.” That was the way my wise and gentle father transmitted his message. Truth hurt him, and honesty required him to acknowledge reality. His attempted revolution had failed—there is no official rabbinical authority in Israel, at least not one he needs to bow to, on his last day. Something happened to religious society in its meeting with modernism, freedoms, and democracy. So maybe saying Psalms will save it.
In his life, Dad knew these things and kept them inside, because he saw his role in life as a preserver and protector of past glory. A representative of the conservatives. Only before his death did he loosen up and reveal something to us of what he really felt. Next to his grave, when his body was lowered into the pit, another surprising and penetrating truth of his rose up to the heavens. It had started a few weeks earlier.
In the last weeks of my father’s life, my sister and I gathered every day near his bed, fluffing up the pillows, asking how he was, shaving him, putting on his tefillin, wrapping him in his beloved prayer shawl, continuing to prepare for the inevitable. One day he said, “Let’s talk about eulogies.”
“You,” he said with a smile always reserved for me, “you never listened anyway when I told you what to say, especially what not to say. I know that I can’t tell you what to say. So at least say it well.” Then he turned to my sister. They always had a deep understanding, tremendous appreciation, and a rare love reserved
for the two smartest people in our family.
“You,” he told her softly, not out of a desire to hurt her, God forbid, “you are a woman of action, not words like us. But I would like you to say a few words at my funeral.”
“Of course, Dad, whatever you want,” she said, kind as always.
“Do you have a paper and pen?”
“Yes.”
“Then write please.” And he dictated his request.
A few weeks later, he closed his eyes forever. His funeral took place at the plaza of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, with which he was very involved to his last day. Throngs of people, thousands, gathered in the big plaza. National leaders, ministers, rabbis, and intellectuals, and with them thousands of the ordinary people he loved so much. And they, the masses, returned his love. He saved some during the Holocaust, he supported others with personal charity, the mother of one was his student in the Herzliya Gymnasium, and with others he had studied in the rabbinical seminary in Berlin before everything went up in smoke. Many took the podium to deliver eulogies. All men, including me, maneuvering between my role as eulogizer of my father and my role as a public figure. After the rabbis and politicians, my sister took the podium. A lone woman eulogizer among the men.
