In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  It seems that these two vocabularies also reflect the different values, conceptions, and worldviews of these two nonidentical twin communities. I flitted between Israel and America hundreds of times. I was in Afula and then New Jersey, Sderot and then El Paso. Back and forth. I felt fortunate, because I lived at once in both universes, in Israel and in the diaspora. Here and there. Seventy-eight percent of world Jewry lives in Israel and the United States, and I, lucky guy, got to live in both. I learned to distinguish between our existential definitions and theirs. The Jewish identity of American Jews revolves around the religious axis. If they are somewhat nationalist, it is a very different nationalism from that of their Israeli sister. Public space, communal life, and the Jewish sphere of private life are largely defined by religious concepts, holidays, customs, and traditions: the huge Chanukah menorah in the main square of the big city, or the Passover Seder in the White House. Shabbat is a weekly opportunity to engage with friends and community, and bar and bat mitzvah celebrations are often the first occasion for real engagement with one’s Jewish identity. Israeli Judaism, in contrast, revolves much more around national definitions. The State, an entity that did not exist just a few generations ago, defines, binds, and rallies the Jewish populace in Israel.

  After many years of constant back-and-forth between here and there, I arrived at an impasse. My identity is not defined by the totality of Israel nationalism, but I’ve also learned that the pluralistic, innovative Jewish identity of North American Jews is not enough to fill the void inside me. My late sister was a linguist. Once she taught me that biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of about eight thousand words. In the Mishnaic period, that number doubled, and in the Middle Ages another five thousand words were added to the mix. There are about twenty-five thousand words that have shaped some of the greatest works of human culture. But in modern Hebrew there are two hundred thousand words, and contemporary English has nearly a million. In this gulf between Hebrew and the languages of the New World, I lack a new language with terms, concepts, and an internal grammar, which Hebrew today, and its speakers, cannot provide.

  I REMEMBER VERY CLEARLY THE MOMENT IN THE EARLY 2000s that my national language fell apart. I was sitting in a Jerusalem café with Barbara. I had known her for a long time, always exchanging hellos, but not more than that. Her partner, Phil Pinchas, was for many years the leader of the Conservative Jewish, or Masorti, community in Israel. My children had been members of its youth movement, Noam. I always considered him to be a kind of spiritual pioneer, who had the courage to confront, sometimes almost alone, the powerful establishments of religious conservatism in Israel, with which I had been personally familiar. I sat opposite her, a short woman who spoke fluent scholarly Hebrew with an American accent, and suddenly I felt a powerful current flowing from her toward me.

  She told me about a project she had started in Sweden called Paideia, a one-year program of Judaic studies for young Jews from across Europe. Among other things, she said, “European Jewry was always a body of ideas.” From then on I wasn’t listening to her anymore. I said yes to all her requests, and was transported by her words to the highest heavens.

  I understood. To be precise, I began to understand. Barbara didn’t know that with her powerful words she had opened one of the doors that had been locked for me all my life. I knew that there was a Jewish world much broader than what I was familiar with. I sensed it, but my consciousness refused to acknowledge it. The heart conceals from the mouth, in the words of an Aramaic saying. Until Barbara came and uncovered what was obscured and hidden. For many months I listened and tried to understand my feelings. I listened to the students of Paideia in Stockholm. Young Europeans, looking no different from my children here and my friends and their children in North America, along the universal range between jeans and H&M fashion. Up until the moment when the conversation with them began and the substantive differences emerged almost immediately, they were European intellectuals. Some of them Jews, for whom it’s natural to come and study the Jewish texts and sages, and some not. Their coming to Paideia was understandable given their geographic and spiritual circumstances.

  Like the lawyer, a secular Muslim, a Shiite from Azerbaijan who worked for NATO, who realized that she didn’t sufficiently understand the West and came to study Judaism for that purpose. Or another person of part-Jewish descent who came to study Judaism in order to know and better understand. And a third, a Catholic woman who was studying Yiddish poetry because she wanted to restore Yiddish to its grand and missing place in the fabric of cultural life of contemporary Poland. Every one of them had new ideas, daring and inspiring, regarding European life. Just a few hundred graduates who carried on their young shoulders more than a third of the renewal initiatives of the Jewish communities in Europe. They are living a heritage of ideas, of multiplicity, and not reduction. Of constant expansion made possible, after years of sadness and pain, by the reunion of eastern and western Europe.

  The young people in Stockholm, Jews and non-Jews together, are not only breaking through the European walls that were once there. In their small cultural patch, they are reviving, almost from scratch, parts of European Jewry that were destroyed, along with their conversation with the non-Jewish environment. A Judaism of ideas as an experimental model that can be much broader and larger. They are growing a third Jewish identity, neither Israeli nor American, but European. For them it is natural and normal, for me it is new and exciting.

  EUROPE WAS ONCE IMPORTANT FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD. Today it is somewhere on the sidelines. Its tourist sites are still breathtakingly beautiful, its cuisines admired, and its landscapes well kept, but still, something is missing. It isn’t as important as it was in the past and it does not lead the world. The West talks a great deal about its decline, about the rise of other forces in the East and the Far East that will replace it in coming human history. Every time I go into a bookstore in the United States, I’m amazed by the huge abundance of writing and thought about the end of the West, the collapse of the United States and Europe, or just musings about the end of civilization as we know it. But for me, Europe is still an attractive and interesting place with a great deal of potential. Because new opportunities can spring from the place where all was broken. It is a continent composed of societies and communities that have known how to reinvent themselves time and again, reborn for the future. Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but I see what doesn’t exist. At the same time, the Europeans themselves, especially those who are pessimistic and melancholy, can’t see what outsiders like me see.

  “Fifty-two percent of the students in Amsterdam schools are not originally Dutch,” a Dutch friend of mine said, struggling to come up with clean language for what she saw as a faulty reality, using a politically correct euphemism.

  “Which means?” I asked.

  “Which means that in a few more years more than fifty percent of the residents of Amsterdam will be Muslim. We’ve already lost Rotterdam,” she blurted. Unlike her right-wing, Islamophobic partner, she traditionally voted for the social-democratic party. She was thinking about Amsterdam, which for many years was called the “city of freedom,” and I was thinking about the demography of Jerusalem, “the holy city,” and I wondered if it too was lost.

  “Malmö has long been part of the Middle East,” a Swedish travel agent warned. “And Israel is no longer Europe,” I responded.

  “The Germans control Europe again, nothing has changed. We just wasted two world wars,” claimed a French intellectual in a research institute where I am a fellow.

  “No one has the courage to stand up to Russia, it is waiting for our downfall,” was the gist of a discussion there about the future of relations between the new Europe and the new Russia.

  There are Europeans who see their own half-empty glass better than anyone else, and sometimes when the atmosphere is conducive to it, and I feel that people are listening, I tell them an anecdote from my parliamentary past.

  One day, in the nineties, when I was still
a member of the Knesset, I learned an important lesson. There were only a few Knesset members in the plenum. Charlie Bitton, a very kind person, though a very angry Knesset member from the Black Panthers, a social protest movement of Sephardic Jews, lashed out at the finance minister, who stood at the podium. Bitton was dark-skinned, short, and energetic, and the minister was fat, light-complexioned, and almost indifferent. The day’s topic was yet another boring deliberation about the government’s budget. The minister—from my party—was very satisfied with his budget proposal, but Bitton, the social activist who knew poverty and human needs, was not at all.

  “Charlie, why don’t you see the glass is half full?” I shouted at him, in a support for “my” government policy.

  He turned to me, his eyes blazing with anger. “Burg, you Ashkenazi shit, have you ever tried drinking from the empty half of the glass?”

  It was so biting and painful a retort that I shut up, silent and embarrassed. In the struggle between my smugness and his suffering I realized that he was right and I was wrong. I respected him then and have liked him since. For his directness, dedication, and courage to go against the flow of where he had come from. As a lesson, I tell my European friends and partners, “You are in such a unique position in history, you are not the Bittons of the world, so why are you so depressed? You have the most wonderful empty half of the glass. Drink from it.” Yes, there are difficulties in your (our) European utopia; racism has not yet fully surrendered, ultranationalism is shocking the foundations of continental solidarity, new hatreds (xenophobia, Islamophobia, and more) join the bad old ones (like anti-Semitism). But still it is such an amazing achievement. The blood-soaked continent has once again renewed itself almost to the level of the biblical prophecy of Isaiah (2:4): “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So be careful but happy, pay attention, and celebrate it.

  MANY YEARS AGO, ON THE EVE OF ROSH HASHANAH, I sat in my car stuck in a typical Jerusalem traffic jam. The air conditioning in the car didn’t work, and the open windows let in only heat and exhaust from neighboring cars. In the car with me were my father and Itay, my firstborn son. The radio report said that the jam was caused by a suspicious object downtown. “You and your Arabs,” my adolescent son snapped at me, the child who knows better than any of them how to cut with laser-like accuracy to the core of my soul. As I was thinking about my answer, my elderly father took the reins of the conversation from the back seat.

  “Yingele,” he said with the nickname reserved for me when I was a child. “Everything going on between us and the Arabs is nothing compared to what happened between us and the Germans, and lo and behold, we’re riding in a German car.” It was a battered Volkswagen station wagon. “And with the new Germany we have wonderful relations. The Germans did much more to us than the Palestinians ever will, or than we will do to them. Don’t be angry with me, but in your lifetime, there will be peace between you and them.”

  Dad meant it when he said “between you and them,” excluding himself. Until his last day, he was at least half European, contrary to us Asians. His European half saw much larger pictures than just the Holocaust, Jews, and Germans. He had just returned from his first visit to East Germany, to Dresden, his beloved and sad native city. He had seen and understood where it was all going. “The new Europe is a prophetic story,” he would tell me repeatedly, sharing his comprehensive historical perspective. “Who would have believed that Europe, the most violent continent, in whose fields everyone shed everyone’s blood for a thousand years, would one day lay down its swords and become the ultimate continent of peace?”

  I thought about him not long ago when I was driving on the highway in Austria and saw a giant billboard encouraging young people to join the Austrian army. What? Austria has an army? It turns out that in western Europe there are at least twenty-seven armies, with twenty-seven chiefs of staff and an identical number of air forces, headquarters, and nattily attired military bands. What do they need them for? It turns out that young people are joining the armies of Europe in order to serve in peacekeeping forces, on missions of rescue, mediation, and separation of forces in the most violent conflict zones in the world. The ways of the world are strange. Until recently, Austrian troops were divided between Israel and Syria. I would have never known about it were it not for a newspaper article that dealt with the difficulties faced by the Austrian logistics units. They were having trouble transporting the traditional portions of pork and Christmas trees to their brave soldiers because of the opposition of Jewish rabbis on one side and Muslim imams on the other. It was as if the messiah had come: Austrian soldiers bodily separating Jews from their enemies.

  MY FIRST MEANINGFUL PUBLIC MEETING WITH EUROPE went badly awry. I was the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization from 1995 to 1999. With two close friends, the late Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and his secretary-general, the wonderful and fascinating Israel Singer, we declared war on the Swiss banks who had hidden in their safes dormant accounts and concealed treasures of European Jews from the Holocaust period. For months, we clashed with them in all the international media. We mercilessly hammered away at them with the demagogic rhetoric of those who know that the other side cannot respond. The Swiss bankers made every possible mistake. They denied, lied, contradicted themselves, and could not understand where this Jewish avalanche had come from. It was the mid-nineties; the Soviets and Communists were no longer the international bad guys. Fundamentalist Islam had still not made its presence felt in the international arena. The media gleefully pursued the story we had provided about the Swiss bad guys.

  I liked this struggle. I took part in meetings in Zurich, where I was accompanied by local bodyguards. The newspaper headlines called me “an enemy of the Swiss public,” and the threatening letters kept coming. I discovered the international political stage and I thought it was right for me. This contest was also rooted in my own desire to understand the Holocaust and deal with it. All I knew was that this was the opportunity of my generation, and maybe the last chance to get a measure of accountability for the survivors and the victims. I had two motivations: the first, to right past injustices despite the time that had passed; the second, to uncover all the information about the economic aspect of the Holocaust. How did the Jews live? What did the grocer in Chenstokhov do with the money he had saved? Who were the beneficiaries of Grandfather and Grandmother’s old insurance policies? What happened to the wedding presents of couples who never raised a family? And where were my grandmother’s earrings?

  At some point, at the height of this tremendous struggle, everything went wrong and I retreated. What had been a demand for justice and uncovering the whole truth ended up with me and my colleagues haggling over money. And this realm of Jews and money was precisely everyone’s comfort zone. The bankers understood money, greedy lawyers in the United States filed astronomic class-action lawsuits, Jewish organizations drew up generous budgets, and the anti-Semites enjoyed seeing us fall in line with their stereotype. Without saying a word to anyone I stopped coming to the meetings. I distanced myself. I didn’t have the resolve to come out publicly against my colleagues, but I felt bad inside. Jews and money is a Shakespearean play. It might have fit the diaspora mentality, but not my Israeli perception of the new Jewish identity. It would be almost another decade before I returned to Europe.

  THE EUROPE I’M NOW GETTING TO KNOW OFFERS A wonderful model of kaleidoscopic identity. A new patriotism that doesn’t need bloodshed and militaristic violence to preserve and express its patriotism. A Europe struggling to find and preserve all its identities and communities, together with those of its recently arrived new immigrants. The United States of America is an empire that erases identities. True, everyone there is proud of his or her particular roots, but the collective citizenry does not allow or tolerate any nationalism other than the American one.


  This America always reminds me of the ancient kingdom of Judea. At its core was the hegemonic tribe of Judah, which swallowed its neighbors and turned the sons of Shimon, along with the Canaanites and the Philistines, into Jews. Today this tribe of Judah lives across the Atlantic Ocean. The kingdom of Judea of North America assimilates everything. In contrast to the United States, the changing and renewed Europe seems to me very similar to the ancient kingdom of Israel, a society of differences. An alliance of the rest of the Israelite tribes that was the bitter rival of Judea. It was not given an adequate place of honor in our collective memory, perhaps because the history we are familiar with was written by the historians of the kingdom of Judea, which outlasted it. But precisely that kingdom can be the ideological basis for a federation of the different. The kingdom of Israel of Europe is a federation with many expressions, pluralistic and varied in its culture and content, mainly because of the experience of its people, who are going through a wonderful metamorphosis. Once when I would think about Europe, it was always two-dimensional: Dad and the gentiles, Israel and the Holocaust. Today it is entirely different.

  “Look at this room, look around you,” the late Zygmunt Bauman, one of the great sociologists of our generation, told me. We were in Vienna, at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, the year was 2012, before Brexit and the refugees, prior to Trump’s era. “What do you see?”