In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  At first, she said what a daughter always says in these moments. Delicately, painfully, with the longing that had already permeated our lives, even though the deceased had yet to be brought to his final resting place. And then she raised her eyes, looked at the crowd, and took from her pocket the piece of paper on which she had written the things that Dad had dictated to her. The last earthly message with which he wanted to bid the world farewell: “When I sat next to his bed, Dad asked that I speak at his funeral, and expounded his view that the most important revolution of the last century, the greatest of revolutions, is the entry of women into the world of action and creation. This is a greater revolution than the French and Russian revolutions, because as a result the world gained full partners in action and creation. In every place that this revolution was accomplished, society gained another 100 percent of human beings who became partners in social life. Dad added that he feared that not all parts of our society are aware of the importance of this revolution.”

  Because this was the funeral of a beloved man, and because I was not only circumstantially saddened but deep in my heart as well, I couldn’t break out two smiles that threatened to spread across my face. One smile at the sight of the astonished faces of the throngs of mourners, Jews who advocate the separation between women and men, the exclusion of women and male superiority, the very same Israelis who are still not aware of “the importance of this revolution.” It turns out that we had grown up our entire lives in the shadow of a complete feminist, and we didn’t know that he had led them in this spirit, and they also had not been aware of it.

  His last words were the most courageous I had heard from him during my entire life. Words that made me want to smile the second smile that has not left my face since, the smile of liberation and disclosure. Many friends tell me that only after the death of their aged parents do they dare do and believe in things that they could not as long as their parents were alive, if only out of respect. In our home, there were no real limits on thoughts and words. And still, this new ideological freedom was the last and greatest natural gift that a father could give his son, leaving him alone in the commotion of life. From the brink of his grave, Dad challenged Orthodox thinking in our time and in the future. I remember well the thought that struck me through the pain of bereavement: this is Dad’s legacy, this is his spiritual last will and testament, the will of equality and justice. There I must go.

  VERY FEW TIMES, IF AT ALL, DID DAD TALK TO ME ABOUT God, about his belief in the Creator. This issue was a constant, a driving force that we almost never discussed, and we never doubted its existence. There was always water in the faucet, electricity in the sockets, Mom’s frozen food in the freezer, Dad at the head of the table on one end, and Mom at the other end facing him, and God. We accepted them all automatically and did not spend time on them. The whole house focused on people, God’s creations. Creation and creatures without a Creator, results without causes. That is why our door was always open, that is why the house was full of books packed with the views of wise men from all cultures and all generations, that is why there was not a speech in which Dad did not cite such a man, one of our sages, or one from another nation. Every day, Dad was a Jew among Jews, but sometimes his ideological and spiritual windows would open up, and through them he was revealed as a great universalist. And between the “Jew” and “universalist” he was not God’s Jew.

  I often thought that after the Holocaust he must have stopped talking to God and devoted all his energy to conversations with the creatures of that God who turned out to be false. Just like music. He had a very musical ear, and in his youth he knew how to play bourgeois and Jewish instruments, like piano and violin. But I never saw him really playing or singing. Some trauma at some point put a sudden and complete halt to that.

  With the completion of my father’s cycle of life it became clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that despite everything, my Judaism is like my parents’ Judaism, and my feminism also comes from them. When people ask me, with a look of smug self-satisfaction on their faces, “And what would your father say about you?”, and when their cowardly brothers lash out at me with anonymous trolling such as “You are a discredit to your parents,” or “Your father is turning over in his grave,” I tell them in my heart the story of Dad’s funeral, and I know that the civilization that I believe in and am trying to develop is a Judaism of complete equality between people, whoever and wherever they are.

  We will not shed blood; on the contrary, we must wage a constant, all-out war against any manifestation of subjugation, violence, occupation, or discrimination. With the power of my father’s spirit in life, and in his will from the grave, we are mobilized for a still-unfinished struggle for equal status for women and others discriminated against by society. Dad was absolutely right in his very last words: “Not all parts of society are aware.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OF ISAAC AND ABRAHAM

  MY NAME IS AVRAHAM—ONE OF THE MOST ANCIENT Jewish names. I never liked it. So old-fashioned, moldy with antiquity. But what choice did I have? I was named after my late grandfather who passed away in Germany in the dark days on the eve of World War II and was buried under a large granite tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Dresden. For many years, when the Iron Curtain still separated East and West, guests would occasionally come to the house and bring us pictures of that cemetery. In the center of the picture there was always a shiny black tombstone, on which was inscribed: “Avraham Burg, of blessed memory.” And the more he was of blessed memory, the more I had to be alive. I was the bearer of the dreams of previous generations and of the hopes that bubbled up from so much despair of my parents and their generation. I always wanted a much more Israeli name. A name of nature and landscape, of the Land of Israel and its memories, of beautiful and revived Hebrew. Once I wanted to be called David, a name of bravery. Another time Nimrod, like the statue of Yitzhak Danziger. I also thought Uri was a nice name. I started with Avraham, and became Avrum, the shtetl version, to my friends.

  With the years and the accumulating names of my children and grandchildren, I think a lot about a person’s name and the baggage it carries. Sometimes I try to find characteristics of people or wonder about their cultural and spiritual condition that stems from their name. I have no religious friends called Nimrod, nor observant friends named Hagar. These are revived names, names of the Zionist rebellion. There is no Jew today who answers to the name Ishmael, though the ancient Rabbi Ishmael should have been a model for contemporary Judaism, and not his rival, Rabbi Akiva. It seems to me that only a few ultra-Orthodox towns have streets named after him.

  Rabbi Akiva was the most destructive and dangerous messianist up to the rabbis Kook, father and son, and their contemporary successors. His doctrine and students were directly responsible for the destruction and catastrophe of the second century. Grand self-destruction that was inflicted by them, not the Romans. The fact that the Bnei Akiva youth movement is named after him reflects the threat of destruction emanating from it no less than from the original Akiva.

  Sometimes, in a person’s name, in the algorithms of his identity, I manage to see the expectations of his parents, and his place. “Every person has a name,” wrote the poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (1914–1984), and every name has far greater meaning than a calling card or information sticker or doorbell.

  Over the years, it has become clear to me that there is a very strong relationship between my character and the essence of my ancient name. When I think about the name given to me by my parents, I try to be attentive to the voices of the official, established contemporary Judaism of Israel. It’s very hard for me to connect with most of those voices, whether they come from the visible or hidden Judaism. “This Judaism, it’s not mine,” as one of my children told me in one of our many discussions on identity. At the same time, I miss the beautiful, honest, and pure elements of the core identity my parents brought me up on, though it wasn’t mine at the time. Dad and Mom’s Judaism was humanity at it
s best. A love of people woven with love of the hidden God. A fabric of faith with open and attentive positivity. An identity so different than the ocean of Jewish negativity through which my children have to swim on their way to their own identities. My name, that antiquated Avraham, is a lifeboat, or at least the straw on which I try to cross the ocean of our common identity.

  Our patriarch Abraham, the father of the nation, was a man full of energy. In the eighth decade of his life, our eternal mythology tells us, he discovered God, converted men and supported his wife, who converted women, smashed the idols and beliefs of his father, rebelled against King Nimrod and his authority, and founded the new faith: monotheism. Without a doubt, an astonishing record. And at precisely the time when everyone else would have retired, withdrawn to his home, reveled in his achievements, followed the results and consequences of his life’s work, and enjoyed the respect reserved for the few great men of the world. True of others, but not of Abraham. He founded the Go Forth doctrine, a worldview, a psychology of constant restlessness. The Abrahamite, a person walking in the footsteps of the founding father, will never bask in his previous achievements. From the moment they are achieved, he is already taking on the next mountain, the peaks that await, the challenges he has yet to meet. This Abrahamite is always a radical, a traveling revolutionary, spreading the seeds of his ideas wherever his spirit may carry them.

  In contrast with the Abrahamic model is the Isaacian model. Most of my Israeli friends are Isaacs, bound up, victims of their mentality and fixed in their ways. We will never know why and what exactly happened there on the altar on Mount Moriah. In our historic memory two have remained, the father and son, who have taken a vow of eternal silence. All that we have left of those earth-shaking moments is the akeda, which literally means “binding.” Abraham bound his son on the altar. Symbolically, Isaac remained much more tied. This is not the place to decipher the terrible meaning of the culture of human sacrifice that is at the basis of Judaism. We, the late readers of the ancient story, learn that the manifest pinnacle of Isaac’s life is not the binding on Mount Moriah, but his immovability in the Land of Israel, always and unconditionally.

  Isaac is the only one of the three patriarchs who never left this place. I have cousins like that—like him, they were born in the land of Canaan, they will die in it, and never leave its borders. Isaac is the archetype of all the bound-up Israelis. The further his father goes, in his wanderings and revolutions, the closer and more connected he is. Tilling the soil, planting, and harvesting. Digging wells and trying very hard to deepen his roots here, in the land cherished by his parents. Abraham is the river churning forward, and Isaac is the mountain always standing in place. The world apparently needs both—one to surge forward, the other to remain. One who will change what has decayed, and one who will preserve what deserves to be perpetuated. Perhaps that is why we are named after Jacob-Israel, who was a combination of the two. Native-born, but a wanderer; restless, but longing. In short, the original Israeli was… pretty Israeli.

  I’m not an Isaac type, but a restless Abrahamic wanderer. Wandering in the fields of spirit and consciousness and refusing to be tied down. I see my Judaism as a continuing interface with other cultures, an equal human being, not chosen by God. In that sense, the name of the founding father, Abraham, carries a personal commitment for me. “And you shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:5). It would be highly presumptuous of me to make the empty claim that “I’m like that,” but I aspire to be that way.

  The Abrahamite sees himself as a parent—a father—not just to us, but to a multitude of nations, to all members of the human race who desire to be part of it. And without patronizing and condescension, and with no coercion and violence. The Isaacs, on the other hand, view their identity through national prisms and are constantly fearful for themselves, their fate, and the one place where they are rooted: here in this land and in the State of Israel. It’s not that one concept is right and the other is wrong, kosher or unkosher. Both are legitimate; both have a basis in history, in the sources and in consciousness. It’s a question of connection. The Israel of today, and most of the Israelis in it, connects much more to the Isaacian element in our past, and I think that Isaacian Israeliness is limited and is condemned, as it was in the past, to destroy itself. In my view, the time has come to go back another stage to Abrahamism, and thus to effectively move another step forward.

  No wonder that I’ve lost so much of the popularity I enjoyed during all the years I followed the false consensus. To be an Isaac is to be a conservative, and to be an Abraham is to be avant-garde. And now I very much like my old name, and I’m committed to it. What I miss is the universal Jewish voice, not only calling for fighting and killing and being killed for nation and country, but a voice that defines Jews as “the nation of the world,” part of a great universal responsibility for all of humanity wherever it may be. I feel that Israeliness alone is not enough for us and for me. We need more.

  By “more” I mean this, for example: “The Jewish element had been largely dominant in the revolutions of thought and sensibility experienced by Western man over these last one hundred and twenty years.… Without Marx, Freud, or Kafka, without Schoenberg or Wittgenstein, the spirit of modernity, the reflexes of argument and uncertainty whereby we conduct our inner lives, would not be conceivable.”*

  This Abrahamic element is sorely lacking for me in Isaacian Israeliness. I hear the whole range of Israeli voices—from those fearful for the future of the place to those who are self-confident, without doubt or consideration—and I ask myself, Where are the Jewish voices that embody creative doubt and thoughtfulness? I see a lack of Israelis who are involved in the global conversation, not only in ours. The standard Israeli Isaacs that I know ask almost no questions. And whatever pondering they do is about us and our problems at home. I can barely remember any debates here on essential issues that go beyond us. It seems to me that out of the broad scope of Jewish culture, my parents could not have chosen a more appropriate name for me than the name of the first revolutionary, the original Jewish radical. Because my Abrahams are never satisfied with the answers they receive and achievements they have already attained.

  In many respects, being an Abraham is being liberal, open, and attentive. He was determined to fight for justice, not only for his family, but for the people of wicked Sodom, even at the price of defying God (Genesis 18:25: “Far be it from you! Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?”). Could it be that the patriarch Abraham was a leftist? The first to have the land promised to him and the first to offer a partition plan to his cousin Lot? At least that’s how I portray him to myself. All my adult life I identified as a leftist. That is how I perceived myself, that is how I educated my children. In politics, I was always a natural part of groups on the left, attending peace rallies, enlisting in political initiatives, representing these ideas on every possible Israeli stage at home and abroad. With time, it has become clear to me that I was a leftist Israeli-style, not someone who really fits the definition of “left.”

  THE LEFT-RIGHT DIVIDE IN ISRAEL RUNS SOLELY ALONG the political issue: the left is supposed to be for diplomatic agreements, while the right is opposed. We’ve almost entirely forgotten the other layers that make a person a member of a genuine leftist camp. The desire of most of the left for peace or a political settlement does not necessarily stem from conceptions of justice and morals. “I want peace so the Palestinians will get out of my face” is not the crude statement of a gruff man in the street, but the political strategy of many of my influential friends. The absence of concepts of equality and justice as the organizing ideas of the leftist political camp is one of the main reasons I feel that all these years I was a hollow leftist, and that I belong to a camp that is mostly ideologically empty.

  The left in the world I have gotten to know in recent years stems from a full and complete worldview, whose most basic el
ement is the uncompromising belief that all human beings were born equal and have to live their lives that way: in equality between men and women, the majority and the minority, members of different religions and faiths, and people of various sexual preferences. Everyone has the right to realize themselves and their abilities in full equality at the starting line, with no “buts.” Together we are a political camp that is committed without compromise to secularizing public space, fair and just distribution of public resources, and complete constitutional protection of citizens and their rights. In our country the political issue, the conflict, the occupation, and the rest of the malignant diseases of modern Jewish nationalism have taken over our lives and eaten up almost all of the healthy cells. That’s why peace in our country is talked about as an interest, not a value; that’s why people want a political settlement, because “it’s good for us,” not because it’s right or moral. The talk is about the costs of peace, not the rewards—about the risks, not the opportunities. The more these thoughts go through my head as I write, I sense that they were always there, but I didn’t pay attention to them. And then I go back to the two moments of Yitzhak Rabin, the pinnacle of his life and the climax of his death.

  When Rabin informed the public about the Oslo accords in 1993, I was overjoyed. I let go of all the anger—personal and political—that I felt toward him. I forgot that I called him repeatedly the “minister of war” during the first Palestinian uprising. I uprooted from my consciousness all his anti-democratic statements. It was part of the outburst of joy and euphoria that swept up many of us, that erased borders and resentments and turned the despair of previous years into a very great hope. In that wonderful wave, there was one sound that I found discordant. Rabin made every political and parliamentary effort to pass the Oslo accord in the Knesset with a “Jewish majority.” But democracy belongs to all its citizens, and equality is an idea bandied about by everyone; the heads of the Labor Party poetically called it “the morals of the prophets,” no? So where did all this equality go precisely at the moment of peacemaking? From where did this ethnicity come into our democratic life? I couldn’t bear those statements, turning me into part of the mechanism of tribal Israeli democracy. Of course, I was for the agreements, but my eyes were downcast. Because I had been humiliated. I tried to think of parallels in other countries, about Churchill seeking to go to a world war, supported solely by a Christian majority in parliament. Or Truman seeking to end World War II without “the Jewish vote.” But at the time, in all the exhilaration, there was no one to talk about it with. Not even with myself.