In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  He: “I don’t have an answer to that.”

  He published the interview and ended it this way: “You can’t take away from Avrum what he has. You can’t take away his education or eloquence or ability to touch painful points of truth. Maybe for that reason he is so infuriating. A friend and a predator, a brother and a defector.” He marked me and the border between us. He was inside, and I was outside. He was a patriot, and I was a defector.

  On the morning the interview was published I went out as usual to bring in the newspaper. Before the first light of day I had read it. Not easy, but penetrating, sharp, and thought-provoking. With our first coffee, I brought the paper to my partner. She, who doesn’t read newspapers and despises our cacophonous news, read it very quietly. When she finished reading she erupted in bitter tears, crying like she never had before, even in the most difficult moments of our lives. The kids, who were home at that moment, rushed into our bedroom.

  “Why are you crying?” they wondered.

  “I agree with Dad’s every word, but I already see the reactions,” she said with the pain of her experience. “I have no more strength for the hatred, the madness, the evil that is about to pounce on us.”

  Roni, my oldest daughter, thought for a minute and said warmly, “You don’t have to cry, Mom. In fact, you mustn’t cry, there’s no need to cry.” She argued that I was finally expressing what I held to be true, and that this truth is also her truth, of her generation, and that finally someone is speaking to it truthfully. This voice must be preserved, Dad’s voice, she told her. He should be supported, he must be helped, because he is the only hope left here, in this lousy country.

  It was a moment of clarity for the family. Everyone was right. My partner could not imagine how much her prediction would come true, the intensity of the resentment that has since become an inseparable part of our lives. And my daughter was very right in her intuitive assessment. It was the first time that I had confronted in such a clear fashion a generational gap.

  Most of those I lost, or who wanted to do away with me, were of my age group, and their remarks to me and about me recurred in numerous ways: “Avrum, just when we finally have some peace and quiet you bother us with your questions? Leave us alone, for God’s sake!” Their children, on the other hand, didn’t stop coming. First, they came one at a time. Then they invited me to parlor meetings and gatherings, and now I’m also involved in building many of their futures. Many of them understood that along with my criticism of the current reality there is a proposal for an alternative spiritual and moral identity that is positive and constructive. Their message is loud and clear: we don’t necessarily agree with you, but you are one of the few who allow us to ask the absolute questions that trouble us so much. In recent years, the existential and political conversation with them has become something entirely different.

  A YEAR LATER, IN SEPTEMBER 2008, MY DAUGHTER RONI got married. I was flooded with happiness. My first daughter to get married, at home, in a small and intimate circle of friends and loved ones. She and Ariel chose me to officiate and bring them into the covenant of marriage. We went up together to the hill above our small house in the village; we put up a marriage canopy in the Judean Hills, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and were very excited. The day after the wedding, the three of us, Roni, Ariel, and I, flew to Germany to run the Berlin Marathon together.

  It had taken me a long time to return to Germany. I had been there many times, but none of my visits were easy or simple. My first trip abroad was at the end of high school. My parents said to themselves and to me that I must broaden my horizons before joining the army. I traveled to Munich to see the Olympic Games of 1972. The visit was aborted with unforgettable symbolism due to the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in Munich. Years later, I headed a parliamentary delegation to Berlin. We took off at dawn, and when we landed I realized that I was sick, feverish, and weak. That same evening, in the same plane, I returned home, and when I landed I was feeling healthy and hardy—another attempt to reach Germany that came up empty.

  I had been in Berlin many times: during layovers between flights to distant destinations, as a member of Knesset and public figure, as Knesset speaker on the day the Bundestag moved from Bonn to Berlin, as an Israeli with his youngest son following his father and his world that had vanished. But I had never been to Berlin like this. I had never come to Berlin as a pariah at home in my country and I had never come to this defining city in pursuit of my love, running, and with my loved ones. Free of any agenda, liberated from emotions and excessive emotional baggage. So I thought.

  I cried the whole forty-two kilometers. For one-third of them I cried in pain and sorrow. There was Oranienburger Straße, where my father would often pray. And from there you go to Grenadierstraße, where the Gestapo headquarters was, and then we passed very near the Alexanderplatz of the writer Alfred Döblin, and the finish, oh, the finish. Potsdamer Platz, under the boulevard of linden trees, the Unter den Linden, still bearing the imprint of the Nazi architect Albert Speer, through the Brandenburg Gate and the actual finish line. Once upon a time—during the Nazi era—there were other thousands here, they too cheered, but not for me, they too were full of joy for the body and for nature, without me. But then, in 2008, it was my time, and with my whole body and soul I felt that something different was happening here. Every street corner spoke to me, echoed and reflected familiar shadows of a past that I was never privileged to know, of a present that could have been mine. I ran and cried for Dad and for us and for myself and for the history that was, and all those who are no more. For another third I cried because it was hard for me. The kilometers added up, the muscles cried out, and age also asserted its claim.

  In the last third I cried for joy. I was living in the most amazing Jewish generation ever. There was never a generation like this before. Jews running? Marathons? Jews running a marathon as equals? As athletes, not objects of persecution? There was no difference between me and the Danes and the Dutch and the Germans and the British and all the others around me, just as happy as I was. We were really all equal. Each one according to his ability, each one according to his wishes. Where was my dad, why wasn’t he here waiting for me in the expanses of the Tiergarten, to see me grinning? Happy and believing in the happiness of my children? Dad, you were right, there is a different Germany, but Dad, you didn’t know, there is also a different Israel.

  All my life is a race, an endless marathon. I have come from an ancient history and I am focused on eternity. Meanwhile, I’m trying to grab some moments of reality and current events and understand them, to decipher the meaning of things. Now I’m on the Judeo-European track. So complicated and complex. So much potential and achievement, along with endless disappointments and innumerable victims. I’m not one of those who think that in the Holocaust saints were killed by animals. It was a horrific and unnecessary war and a brutal annihilation of people with no reason or purpose. People murdered people. The murderer was a German person, and he can’t be relieved of responsibility as if he were a mad, mindless dog. The murdered Jew, gypsy, and homosexual was a human being, who must be remembered as such.

  This is how it happened: the arrogant individual, full of feelings of inferiority, was pushed to immortalize his superiority through evil violence and the elimination of the one he saw as lowly and inferior. The first thing this violent human virus attacks is the concept of equality of all people. And the minute that one individual is worth less, the way to his elimination is easier. It happened to us in Germany, and it can happen to any nation, anywhere, in any situation.

  It didn’t only take me time to get to Germany; it took Germany time to get to me. I saw the fears and hesitations of the German interviewers and of other friends. “Herr Burg, it is difficult for us,” they admitted to me. Only a few reached the last leg of my journey, the end of the marathon, the proposal to go together, Jews and Germans, sacrificers and sacrificed together, to all the places where people are still tied to
the stake, bound to the altars of cruelty. To raise our voices together and say: “‘Never again’ is not only for the Jews. Never again! For any murder and destruction of any human being, whoever he may be.” Because that is the universal lesson of the tragic relationship between the Germans and Judaism that we are trying to make a turning point. From “our Holocaust” to a better world, healed and humane, for all human beings in the image of God, in which there will be no Holocausts—for anyone. A different Germanism, Judaism, and humanism is my key to making a few necessary corrections in this world.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A TALE OF TWO MEETINGS

  IN MY LIFE I HAVE MET THOUSANDS, MAYBE EVEN TENS OF thousands of people. Important and ordinary, well-known and anonymous. I remember many of them, and some of them might remember me. I met people who were talented, wealthy, foolish, brilliant, good, strange, wonderful, and bad. In the years when I was an important and powerful person, I didn’t know how to enjoy this wonderful human wealth. In virtually all these meetings I was introverted, defensive. Trying to preserve an imaginary treasure that someone was trying to loot. That life was a large-scale barter bazaar. Sometimes I entered the rooms of others and wanted something from them, and sometimes they came to me and wanted something from me. Either way, I almost never had pure meetings; everything was tainted by interests.

  Today I have different meetings. Not only are most of my meetings, contrary to the past, encounters that I want to have, but I am also much more relaxed, less defensive. I have much less to give, and I’m happy to share what I have. I’m much less threatened, and therefore more open and attentive, and thus able to receive more. Today I can also reconstruct many of the previous encounters and derive from them after the fact what I wasn’t able to obtain in real time.

  Of all those past encounters, two were doubtless responsible for the organization of my new life. The first became one of my exit points from the tough cynicism of political life, and the second was an entry to new worlds where there is still more darkness than light.

  AT THE START OF MY TERM AS KNESSET SPEAKER IN 1999, I received a surprising letter. It contained a description of the sad fate of the contemporary Tibetan nation and a review of the non-violent doctrine of the spiritual leader of all Tibetans, ending with a request: “The Dalai Lama, leader in exile of Tibet, is coming to Israel. Would you agree to meet him?”

  The entire letter was written in meek and apologetic language. How can you say “no” to this man? A representative of a small nation facing an aggressive giant, whose spirit, along with the spirit of his people, is far greater than all the spirits of his enemies and oppressors. Is there anything more Jewish than that? This was the most “Jewish” person I knew of—an optimistic exile, tormented but never in despair.

  I gave my OK, and my staff started putting in motion the hidden cogwheels that turn a directive into reality. Plans, coordination, agreements, and logistics. Just a few hours after this agreement, the waters were muddied. As always in this life, what’s good for one person is bad for another. I pushed the good button, and someone received a bad and unsettling electric shock on the other end of the Jerusalem halls of power.

  “Someone wants to speak to you,” my chief of staff told me.

  “Tell him that I’ll call back in the evening.”

  “He says it’s really urgent.”

  “Put him through.” The director-general of the foreign ministry was on the line.

  “I must meet you immediately,” he said.

  “Come over.” And he came. At his second sentence I was already sorry that I had agreed to meet him.

  “You must cancel the meeting with the Dalai Lama,” he demanded.

  “Why not receive the Dalai Lama?” I wondered.

  He: “You can’t.”

  “Why?” I continued.

  “It’s contrary to Israel’s foreign policy.”

  “Why?” I asked, pushing back.

  “Because the week after the Dalai Lama’s visit, the president of China is arriving in Israel.”

  “So what?” I still did not understand.

  “The Chinese visitor is threatening to cancel his visit to Israel if you, as Knesset speaker, receive the Tibetan leader.”

  It turns out that the Dalai Lama, whose people were slaughtered and expelled by the Chinese communists, travels the world and tries to arrive everywhere ahead of the Chinese president or other senior officials of that superpower. Everywhere he goes, he tries to mobilize public opinion and raise consciousness of the injustice done to his people and homeland. Everywhere, Chinese diplomacy tries, in the name of the billions of Chinese, to threaten the host countries not to provide a platform for the high priest from Tibet. The Knesset podium seemed too big to them, echoing from Jerusalem to Washington.

  “You must cancel the invitation,” the man demanded gruffly. I was furious, but, still, I took a deep breath as befitting a person of my position, I counted to ten, and I replied in the calmest demeanor I could muster.

  “The visit will take place, and I will try to publicize it as much as possible at home and abroad,” I said. “If Israel’s foreign policy is based on the interests of arms dealers doing business with the murderers of Tiananmen Square, I will not be a part of it. Though I didn’t intend it, I would be the happiest person if the Dalai Lama’s visit with me at the Knesset would open your minds a bit.”

  The quarrels and exchanges of letters went on until the last minute, but in the end life is stronger than everything. The Dalai Lama honored the Israeli parliament with his conciliatory and peace-seeking presence, and the international publicity was amazing. A week later the Chinese president visited the Knesset, as planned, and the foreign ministry was flooded by a wave of protests. And lo and behold: what was the official response that Israeli representatives abroad were directed to give to all the critics of the state that had invited the Chinese dictator? Don’t forget to emphasize that a week before the Chinese visit, the Dalai Lama received the highest honor in Israel, a visit to parliament.

  I frequently recall that meeting. Outwardly it was a meeting of two politicians, two public servants, one Tibetan and the other Israeli. Inwardly it was a tremendous collision between my Israeli and Jewish sensibilities. There were many people in the room. Parliamentary employees and Knesset members stood outside wanting to catch a glimpse of this iconic figure. I don’t recall the content of the conversation, it was so formal and publicized, and there was no time in it for a heart-to-heart talk. But the atmosphere surprised me.

  I expected someone submissive with bowed head, in keeping with his image. But there was no calm at all in the room. There was great aggressiveness, or, more accurately, power. He was well aware of the meaning of the image he projected, he understood the meaning of the visit, as if he had been briefed by the aforementioned director-general of the foreign ministry. He pressed all the buttons he had planned: Jewish history, morals as opposed to interests, he spoke to me and addressed Israeli public opinion. From Jerusalem, he sent ballistic messages to Beijing and Washington. There was a great deal of power in his weakness. A frail deference whose every move projected the same message: “I cannot be broken.” In the intervals between his slow and measured words and those of the translators I was reminded of the annual school trip to Hula Lake, the freshwater lake stemming from one of Jordan’s river sources in the northern part of Israel. Israel’s early pioneers drained it as a “swamp” in 1951 and rechanneled the water to the faraway Negev desert. At the time, it was a fantastic Zionist achievement, which turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

  It was in 1964 or so, we were little children, and we were very excited when the nature teacher showed us the cedar of Lebanon. “This is the tree from which the Temple was built,” she said, adding some theology to the botany. “Once there was a swamp here,” she added, piling on Zionist mythology. “But we drained it. The water was taken from here in the national water carrier to the Negev desert. That was Zionism! For generations, since our exile
, this land was uncultivated because there were swamps here and the Negev soil went unplowed because there was no water. Then we Zionists came, drained the excess water and transported it there, and both places became a green and flowering paradise.”

  No one told that teacher and us that a few years later it would turn out that the frenetic Zionist effort to defeat nature—as well as human nature—would lead to environmental damage that would require generations to overcome. “Here is the lake and here is the reed. Maybe this is the primeval pond. You call it a bulrush. Who can tell me which is stronger: the reed or the cedar?”

  “The cedar,” we all replied in a chorus of shouts, as expected.

  “Not at all.” The teacher beamed with a smile that was all pedagogy, common sense, and the victory of her knowledge over our childish ignorance.

  “Here comes a strong wind, an exceptionally stormy wind. And it blows and sweeps away and uproots everything in its path. And the cedar stands firm. Hardly moving. Stubborn and straight and proud. He is rigid, and the wind blows. Finally, from the heights of its upright position, it topples over, uprooted, and dies. And the reed in the lake, so small, humble, and devoid of arrogance,” she said poetically, “bends in any wind, ordinary or exceptional. And the wind goes to other places, hurrying to meet the cedars that are right for it. And the reed straightens up and goes on with its life as if there had never been a wind in the area. So, who is actually stronger—the reed or the cedar?” And not one of us answered. Certainly not with a shout. “And that,” the teacher said, returning to her favorite theological element, “that is precisely what the prophet asks: ‘Is this the fast I desire? A day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Lord is favorable?’”

  Oh, what a fine victory for the teacher, nature, and the Bible, so Jewish and also so educational.