In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  WHILE WRITING THIS BOOK I FELT THAT I HAD TO GO TO Hebron again, to clarify a few things for myself. It didn’t happen immediately, nor easily. It began with my son, Dan. During his army service in 2003, he was posted in Hebron. He knows every nook and cranny there, every street, and he’s familiar with nearly every Jewish rioter among the settlers. We talked several times about his service there. For him it was a long and unpleasant experience. An endless confrontation between his personal value system and the world of the Israel Defense Forces.

  We, the Israelis, like the adage that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world.” I very much hope that’s true, though it isn’t at all clear to me who has checked, what the criteria were, and who was in the control group. Besides the fact that the army is just a political tool, and a tool is not supposed to have a conscience, especially when the policy and the politicians directing the army are devoid of morality. In any case, what he saw and experienced there hurt him very much, scarred his heart, and was completely immoral. The terrible tension between his value system and what he was compelled to do was too much to bear. He had grown up, like his brothers and sisters, to be a humanist who loves people, all people, but the orders that molded his most significant encounter with the state as a citizen were patently immoral. Like breaking into a house in the dead of night and taking away a father or his son in front of the wife and children; manning checkpoints and letting Jews through while Palestinians are delayed and harassed; guarding illegal, remote Jewish settlements; enforcing racist separation on the streets of Hebron so a handful of Israeli zealots can carry on with their lives normally in the heart of throngs of Palestinians for whom normal life has been denied for years.

  He served in a combat unit, sharing heavy responsibility for good and bad, including the injustices committed by the army. An infantry soldier, like I was at his age, a pawn on a board much bigger than us all. Military service was not good for him. With his heightened sensitivity, he couldn’t bridge the gap between military rhetoric and his natural humanistic values. He was discharged from the army with great unease in his heart, a heavy load. He traveled far away, eastward. The simplicity of the Indian subcontinent suited him well, a life very close to its existential foundations. He returned more open, with greater coping skills, and very attuned to his inner truth, though the burden of the previous years and experiences was still evident. His sadness was wrapped in a great silence.

  On his own initiative, Dan contacted Breaking the Silence—an organization of army veterans that collects testimonies from soldiers who have served in the territories since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. Through the testimonies, the group tries to raise consciousness about the daily reality in the territories in order to create a public conversation about the moral price of ruling a civilian population. Many of the soldiers returning to civilian life, like my Dan, are frustrated and pained by the gap between the reality they encountered in the territories and the indifference and silence about it in Israeli society. Together they break the conspiracy of silence and make the voices of the soldiers heard, doing everything they can to get Israeli society to recognize the monstrous reality we have created with our own hands. Their activities include trips to Hebron and other cities in the West Bank.

  In 2012, I went back to Hebron with Breaking the Silence and with my son in order to meet his memories. He went back to the places where he served as a soldier, and I returned to the deep and painful sources of my family and where I too had served.

  After this first loaded and liberating visit, in which we both faced our private military and historic demons, I visited this tortured city many more times. One such visit, with a friend and partner to values and peace—Gertraud, the secretary general of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. I wanted to share with her my family’s “killing zone,” which became the launching pad for my aspirations for peace.

  We started the visit at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I hadn’t been there in many years. I climbed the stairs slowly, remembering Mom’s excitement when we visited right after the Six-Day War. Until the capture of the city by Israeli forces in 1967, Jews were not allowed into the sacred tomb complex. They were permitted only up to the seventh step, no more. I remember her tense, emotional expression when she put her foot on the eighth step, the ninth, and all the rest. I hadn’t been very excited at the time. What did I know at age twelve about the weight of history? They were just steps, right?

  Now, after decades in which I hadn’t been to the place, not since my army service, I went up again to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I wanted to see the place of my boy’s testimony and pain, and I found myself bearing the full weight borne by my mother. Gertraud and I went slowly up the stairs, talking about history and archeology, local politics, and prospects for peace. In front of us an elderly man walked with difficulty, slower than us, supported on two sides by two strapping young men wearing kippahs. We passed him and kept going. I heard a weak call from behind me: “Avraham, Avraham.” Few people call me by that name. Mom and Dad did, and a few family members, that’s it. I didn’t turn around immediately, I didn’t understand that the call was directed at me. And again: “Avraham, Avraham.” This time I turned around. I needed a minute to absorb what I was seeing. The slow and fragile old man whom we had just passed was none other than my cousin Shlomo. The two-year-old saved from the Hebron massacre, the orphaned son of the late Eliezer Dan, the last surviving family member from those distant days. We had lost touch. He’s closer in age to Mom than to us. They grew up together, a fraternity of orphans, in the home of my other aunt, who adopted and raised them like a young mother.

  “Shlomo,” I said with excitement, “what are you doing here?”

  “And what are you doing here?” he replied with a smile, answering with a question, in Jewish fashion.

  I explained to him that I was there with a guest, that I had come to show her the city and its complex history and politics.

  “And I’m here,” he replied, no longer smiling, “because today is the memorial day of the massacre. The yahrtzeit. So, I came to pray a bit for their souls, to read Psalms, and say the Kaddish prayer in their memory.”

  Because I follow the Gregorian calendar, and I’m not always aware of the traditional Hebrew date, I didn’t know that this particular day was so symbolic. After we parted, we continued our tour of the city. We saw the security apartheid, discriminating racially between Jews and Arabs, approached destroyed Arab shops, and crossed neglected alleys and checkpoints meant to harass the local population. Hebron today is an unpleasant place, a pure distillation of everything that is wrong with the Israeli occupation.

  At the end of the day, with the last rays of the setting sun, we climbed up one of the hills in the city, Tel Rumeida, an ancient mound that has become another provocative Jewish neighborhood. Its residents are extremist and violent settlers, and it is entirely surrounded by soldiers, fortified positions, and sophisticated warning systems for protection. At the edge of the neighborhood, among some ancient olive trees that have survived the evil hands of the Jewish zealots, stands Issa’s home. Issa is a young Palestinian activist who believes in nonviolence and civil disobedience. He invited us to eat dinner with him and his friends, an iftar meal, breaking the day-long fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

  What a strange moment it was, in the most fortified neighborhood in the Middle East. Soldiers patrolling, security cameras swiveling constantly. Jews who had come to the city for the memorial day peered into Issa’s private yard, as if it were a cage in a zoo. And inside, Issa sat with his friends, Gertraud, Yehuda, the director of Breaking the Silence, and me. An impossible mix. And the conversation flowed, dealing with everything, life and hope, prospects for nonviolent civil disobedience, the occupation’s harassment of masses of Hebron residents trying to maintain their daily routines.

  Out of the settling darkness that enveloped us, two more people arrived: Abu Shaker’s grandchildren, whom I had asked Issa
to invite and introduce me to for the first time in my life. God, what a day. I had come for the politics, I met my distant surviving cousin, and now here they were with me. We ate local hummus, fresh vegetables, and hot pita bread from the oven in the yard as we talked about our common past. Suddenly everything fell into place. Their stories about those distant days were like a mirror image of our stories. About Shaker, who always suffered from bad lungs, about their grandmother, who nursed little Treyna, Aunt Malka. About the grandfather who was in the vineyards during the massacre, about hiding the rabbi and his children in the house, about our visit in 1967.

  On a clear Hebron night, all Mom’s repeated stories became proven facts. But to one of their questions I didn’t have an answer. “Why didn’t you call earlier? Why did you come only now? Where were you all these years?” Why indeed. I was at fault. I’m the occupier, I’m the strong one. I should have looked after them during the many years that I could, and I had failed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL IDENTITY

  UNTIL RATHER LATE IN LIFE I NEVER THOUGHT THAT FOR an Israeli born in Israel there could be any other model of Jewish identity aside from an Israeli one: dogmatic, absolute, and homogeneous. This identity, which seemed so attractive during a certain period of my life, became complicated and embarrassing during other periods. It was very well-suited to the Orthodox lifestyle into which I was born. There is only one truth, and all secondary principles are derived from and subsumed within it.

  My mother, for example, didn’t really care if her granddaughters married men who were professionals, what they looked like, or what opinions they held. The only question she ever asked was “Does he put on tefillin?” She didn’t have comparable questions for her grandsons’ brides, because her Orthodox Judaism did not regard women as having any significant binding religious identity in their own right. In the Orthodox world I formerly inhabited there could be no Orthodox Jew who had more than one pair of tefillin, more than one truth, more than one definition, one question, or one answer. Our Orthodoxy was not limited to the religious realm alone; it was an organized worldview that extended out to everything else.

  My total Israeli Orthodoxy limited my own truth, as well as my Jewish and universal truths, to a very local worldview. The Israeli truth took captives, and the Jewish truth was held prisoner. But no longer. “My soul still longs for freedom,” as the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky wrote. I wish to bring this freedom of the soul from every end of the earth to all my relatives, to an Israeli reality that is so tortured and complicated.

  My daughter Avital and her partner Yonatan have lived in New York for several years now. She is completely secular, and she has nothing but disdain and scorn for all the religious institutions and rituals in Israel. “We,” she and her partner announced, “will never get married. We love each other, and we don’t need any institution to authorize us to build a family or to bring children into the world.” I appreciate their purely principled stance, and I agree with them. And so, it’s hard to describe my shock when I learned that they had begun attending synagogue and participating in various communal activities in New York.

  “Why, Avital?” I asked her, perplexed.

  “Because here no one is judging me,” she responded. “Here it’s just fun. No one remarks on when I show up, or why I wasn’t there last week. No one cares if I walk to synagogue or take the subway. No one dares to stick their nose into my spiritual affairs. No one measures the length of my skirt and my sleeves. Here I’m free.” I understood, and I was even a bit jealous.

  In New York, where she discovered an alternative to the Israeli way of life, I discovered running. I spent a lot of time outdoors. I loved that blend of the city and the greenery within it and around it, and I was inspired by the multitude of runners who fill the parks and gardens. I started running myself, perhaps to feel part of this phenomenon. I came back to Israel from one trip with leggings—tight running pants to avoid chafing, the latest thing in athletic technology. One of the local papers published a paparazzi photo of me, with the caption, “Avrum Burg was seen running vigorously around the Knesset in tight leggings. What, him too?” In the United States, running was a sign of a healthy lifestyle, but here, in lower Jerusalem, running in leggings awakens all the homosexual demons from their slumber.

  As the years went on and I took on various public roles, I again and again encountered these deep gulfs in the spiritual make-up of Jewish life. In the West, if you declare, “I believe in democracy, I’m bound by the Constitution, I fight for the legal equality of all citizens—men and women, believers and atheists—I support the separation of religion and state and advocate for an equitable distribution of common resources,” you are essentially a run-of-the-mill democrat. If you make those same statements in Israel, affirming those very same values, you are a traitor, an unpatriotic fifth column, and the rest of those derogatory terms. In Israel, they never informed me that there could be any kind of Jewish soul other than ours. But there, in the Jewish community in North America, I learned a completely new Jewish vocabulary.

  JEWS AND WORDS WERE BORN TOGETHER LIKE CONJOINED twins. But sometimes they are conjoined in uncomfortable places. I’ve sat in many meetings about ways of improving the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Each time a zealous Hebraist took his turn to speak—and there was always someone—he would put forth the same proposal, dressed up exactly the same way: “We need every Jew in the diaspora to learn a hundred words in Hebrew, because Hebrew is what we all have in common.”

  At first, I listened raptly. After all, words are the foundation of human civilization. And there’s no reason for the Hebrew language not to be the foundation for a renewed Jewish civilization. Back then I had still not mastered any language; I knew how to communicate and express myself, but not how to listen. And even when I listened, it was just for my own needs, not to really pay attention to the voice of the other. So, I didn’t understand that these Hebraists too were trying to impose their Israeli sensibilities and were not prepared to listen to the different sensibilities of millions of Jews who are not Israeli and often not Zionist. Their identity is diasporic and not necessarily Zionist. Their Judaism is comprehensive, but not bound to this place. It is fully independent and liberated, though not sovereign and ruling. During my first years in public life I could not conceive of a worldview that was not Israeli, or a Jewish tradition that was not sovereign, but rather diasporic, full, interesting, deep, tolerant, pluralistic, and almost entirely unapologetically so. I’ve since learned a thing or two.

  Beginning in 1982, my adult life unfolded on the flight paths between Israel and America. The scope of America captivated me. I acquired many key life skills there. My English is very American. In America, they are fully accepting of those with imperfect language and communication skills. You don’t need to know the complete writings of Mark Twain in order to participate in the American conversation. It is enough just to watch television and read newspapers and contemporary literature in order to engage with them.

  It was in America that I taught myself public speaking—how to stand before an audience. And here I must make an important distinction: I learned there how to open my mouth and declaim, but not how to open my ears and listen.

  Every time I traveled to North America, I made every effort to be there on a Sunday. I was addicted to the evangelical channels, to the orations of charismatic preachers who saturated the American media. I sat for hours glued to the screen, hypnotized. I tried to learn from them how to stand before a crowd of thousands of impassioned believers in stadiums, rousing them with talk of miracles and ancient texts, like the ecstatic communion of the preacher with his disciples. Their ministers’ words, however, seemed as trite and simplistic as the hollow words of Torah taught by many rabbis in Israel.

  On the other hand, the blend of mass fervor and individual charisma, of television and stardom, was staggeringly new for me. Instead of a television in the closet—like my yeshiva rabbi had—here
was someone just like him, appearing on television himself. I’m embarrassed to say that it was there that I learned how to be a modern Israeli politician, speaking in a way that could not be more different than the sterile sermons of the study hall and casuistry of my teachers and parents’ home. To this day, whenever I stand before an audience, I often suddenly find myself using techniques I learned there—energetic movement across the stage, dramatic pauses, raising the voice and whispering, moments of humor to break up the monotony, and excited flourishes to rouse the crowd.

  There was one televangelist in particular whose techniques were spellbinding—Jimmy Swaggart. When he sensed that his audience was not 100 percent with him, because he had either aimed too high with his fervor or exaggerated his dramatic flourish, he would stop for a moment, as if he couldn’t think of the next word. He’d ask the thousands of people out there, “Wait, how do you say that again?” and the whole audience would join in to help out its floundering icon. The term “transitional word” took on an entirely different meaning with him. It linked him with his followers, powerfully and intimately, like my parents, who would ask each other the same question: “Wait, how do you say that again?” And then Swaggart would go back to raging and roiling.

  It was a magnificent technique, intended not just to bind the audience to him, but also to slow himself down from time to time, to adjust his pace, to breathe, to swallow, to reflect on his next words, which would in any case roll off his tongue like an avalanche. And his manipulative question, “How do you say that again?” sensitized me to the gulf between Israeli Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew. Each time I asked an American Jewish audience, “How do you say that again?” I was surprised once again by the breadth of their vocabulary. They knew Hebrew words that very few in my Israeli community would ever dare to use. The zealous Hebraists in Jerusalem wanted—and perhaps still want—every Jew living abroad to know a hundred words like “table,” “chair,” “hot dog,” “bus,” “government,” “nation,” “boy,” “girl,” and “soldiers.” But the Americans knew words from my mother’s Hebrew, Hebrew words derived from Yiddish. Words like: “repairing the world,” “righteousness,” “charity,” “loving-kindness,” and “justice.” Our Hebrew is practical, useful, applied. Their Hebrew, which came straight from Jewish tradition, was a language of values, morals, and Jewishness. Many of our words are very new; many of their words are very old. And one’s vocabulary is a testament to one’s mental state.