by Avraham Burg
NOT ONLY DID THE GREAT HANNAH ARENDT SHOW ME the way to that place “betwixt and between,” my son Natan and my late parents left me signs on the way there. Immediately following the end of his military service in 2005, Natan traveled far away. Like so many of his generation of Israelis he went on a long trip to distant lands, knowing where he was departing from, but not knowing where he would get to. The rivers of the Amazon, the peaks of the Andes, the villages of Bolivia, and the forests of Brazil enveloped him. We didn’t see or hear from him for many months. We were very concerned, but happy for him. We knew that after three years of military service he needed this; he required a long period of purification, internal cleansing, and renewal. Every so often we got regards from him, and in the pictures he sent from the road his face looked different. The tension was gone, the warm smile was a fixture again. When Natan returned from the big trek, a brown official envelope waited for him at home. On the front was a triangular military stamp, whose meaning is clear to any Israeli—you’re being called up for reserve duty! The change in his body language was sudden and unequivocal. The tension returned, and the year-long trip was almost erased.
On his first leave from reserve duty we talked, and he was sadder than usual.
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Nothing. Everything’s okay.”
“Come on.”
“Nothing important. Something came up with some old Arab.”
After a few minutes, his defensive wall crumbled.
“I was at a checkpoint at Tapuah Junction. You know where it is, a crazy place. On the one side Arabs, on the other side the worst possible settlers. And they’re all going at each other all the time. The only thing they have in common is us, the soldiers. During one of our breaks I sat with my colleagues and we made a pot of coffee. We took out some cigarettes and cookies and chatted about our trips abroad. I told them about South America and they told me about India and the East. Suddenly an old Arab came up out of the gulley, about your age.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“Sorry. Anyway, he came up out of the wadi [ravine] and walked up to us. ‘We’re on break, go to the checkpoint,’ we told him. But he didn’t understand. He kept moving toward us and showed us his ID card. ‘No need, no need,’ we told him, ‘mush lazem,’ we added in checkpoint Arabic. But he insisted that we look at his ID, to see that it’s OK. It was like the conditional reflex of a trained animal. He sees a soldier, and takes out his ID card. When I was in South America, I would go to the most remote villages and look for old men like him to tell me about their traditions and identity. I would sit with them and listen for hours. And now I’m sitting, and he comes to me with his ID in hand, you understand. I’m on break and he’s afraid of me. I want to get to know him and listen to him, but there’s no chance that we will ever drink coffee together and have a conversation. And in that moment, I was caught ‘betwixt and between.’”
I could relate to him so much. I’m betwixt and between all the time. His simple human story is typical of so many interfaces in our lives, of our being constantly trapped between our official and meaningful identity, between formality and feeling, between the boy that always remains in me and the old man who insists on crowding him out, between soldier and civilian, between a person and his neighbor. I thought for a long time about this place that is betwixt and between. I asked myself over and over again where I was. On one side? On the other? Between them?
Out of this abyss, the wadi of life betwixt and between, everything comes to me. Colliding, complementing, contradicting, pushing, seeking simultaneous release and refuge, serenity and commotion. A constant duality. And the more this internal tension is strong, tearing apart, the more keenly I feel the fact that I am a Jew. So much so that sometimes it seems to me that whatever is not composed of internal contradiction is not Jewish. This is one of the most important keys that I found on my search.
FOR A LONG TIME I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what exactly this thing called the Jewish people is. It is clear to me that being Jewish is not something that comes from nature, like being a cat or a bird. I was created simply a human being. The kind of human being I became already belongs to other categories. I can’t accept automatic membership, the obliging collective without thinking, without selection, without distinguishing between good and evil. Under no circumstances am I ready to accept the assumption that being Jewish is a genetic phenomenon or divine choice, and that people I have nothing to do with become at the moment of my birth, against my will, my brothers forever and ever. I’m not prepared to be stuck to that collective that Arendt is trying to dissociate from, and that I don’t always manage to connect with. Before my automatic membership in a group I am a private citizen, and in fact I am an accidental Jew. I don’t think that if I had been born to a Tibetan monk I would have chosen to circumcise myself at eight days, or even if I had been the son of Martin Luther King, that I would have asked my father, the Baptist minister, to let me put on tefillin at my bar mitzvah. Birth into a particular cultural environment is very much a matter of chance. The Christian is accidental, the Muslim is accidental, and so am I. But the moment I was born into my culture, it becomes the environment of my life. From it and with it I try to influence the world so it will be better. Judaism and Jews are a comprehensive cultural reality that can bring me closer to people who are very distant from me in their origin, place of residence, and experiences—as long as they are made of the same value materials as mine.
On the other hand, I sometimes gaze at some acquaintances from my own people and cannot understand what we have in common. They are warmongers, and I am a peace-lover and conciliator. True, we share a common weekly agenda that centers on the same Sabbath. True, we speak the same language and draw from the same wells that contain the sources of Jewish identity. But in practice, we are so different, to the point of genuine enmity.
Someone told me once that Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in one of his sermons that the Dalai Lama has a place of honor in heaven even though he never believed in the Holy Trinity or Jesus the savior. And that anyone who doesn’t think so belongs to “a different Christianity,” a real idolater. On so many occasions I find myself so close to Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama that I want to touch and hug them like my wife, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my children. In contrast, I am all too many times embarrassed and sometimes actually hostile to the positions, actions, and existence of some of those who are defined as my Jewish brothers and sisters. My Judaism, like the Christianity of Tutu, is open, conversing, granting, and receiving. It is the complete antithesis of the alienated insularity that characterizes most of contemporary Judaism, especially its Israeli version.
Precisely for that reason I can’t but wonder at what is there in my small and restless nation, in all its components, that has roiled the global agenda for thousands of years. I wonder what the Jewish DNA is. Not the biological one, the composition of cells and genetic chain, but the cultural genome that brings Jews time and again to the forefront of the world stage.
There are so many peoples active in different arenas of the world. Most of them are much larger than us. Many have long and distinguished histories like ours. But only a few of them receive the attention, both positive and negative, that the Jewish people receive. If there is a nation admired across borders, it is my people. And if there is a nation that has received heaps of scorn, anger, resentment, and fear, it is the very same people, mine. The easy solution is to cast blame on the opponents, haters, anti-Semites, and critics of Israel. The fascinating challenge is to dig deep into the Jewish universe and find there, in the bowels of identity, the fertilizing and disrupting materials that characterize the Jewish people and its relations with itself and with the nations and cultures within which it is active.
The simplistic explanation on which I was brought up in the general and religious schools of my childhood was “the chosen people.” God chose us, and therefore the jealousy of other people is almost built in to the
process that distinguished, chose, and set us apart from all the rest. I fear the perception of chosen-ness and reject it. The twentieth century saw the chosen race in Germany, the chosen class in the Soviet Union, and the enmity of many people across the world toward us, the “chosen people.” Every such chosen-ness has so far caused far more harm than good. The chosen race was vanquished, the chosen class collapsed. The time has come to also calm down the chosen people. I don’t believe in being chosen; I don’t accept the assumption that God chose me or anyone in general, in order to elevate him above any other person or above any other people. I would add that during my long years of acquaintance with the ills of Israeli democracy I learned that under no circumstances is it possible to maintain full democracy for all citizens equally and fairly as long as one population—the Jews—is convinced that God chose them and raised them above everyone. Because equality and chosen-ness stand in painful contradiction.
So, if it is not being chosen by God, what still distinguishes Jewish culture so much and makes it, and us, so prominent in the global conversation? A good part of the explanation is in simple history. What happened to our previous generations positioned us in a special place in the fabric of human histories. Not divine chosen-ness and not our own special history. That is how things happened. And at the end of the process we were transformed from a people and communities who were outside many other societies into an icon of relevancy.
When I once asked—in a café in Berkeley, California—this question of the historian Yuri Slezkine, he referred me to a passage from his book, The Jewish Century: “There is a special closeness between the Jews and the modern era. No matter what the measure—rationalism, nationalism, capitalism, professionalism,… literacy, democracy, hygiene, alienation, or the nuclear family—it appears that the Jews were there first, did it first, understood it best.… The identification between the Jews and the forces shaping the modern world was one of the few things that most European intellectuals… were able sometimes to agree on.”§
Benjamin Tammuz, one of the most accurate and eloquent Israeli narrators and documenters, compares the Jewish existential tension in one of his stories to people sitting in a plane, when suddenly the pilot tells them over the PA system:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have engine trouble and we can’t land in the neighboring airport because of fog, and we have about half an hour’s worth of fuel. If we’re lucky we’ll get to the nearest airport, and if not, pray and ask for God’s mercy.” And then, ladies and gentlemen, in that moment on the verge of annihilation, of farewell, people will appreciate the one value that has no name, that alone makes life worth living. At that moment people will touch the margins of culture. And for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, I reiterate that the Jews were closer to this divine spirit more often, and they hold on with more strength to the edge of the spirit. Because the Jews have been travelling in this very plane for three thousand years. A people in the sky, literally. More than any other nation they hear the voice of the pilot saying: be prepared, your moments are numbered. There is no place ready to accept you, and you are suspended in midair. There is no place that wants you, you are strangers, aliens, condemned to die, abandoned between heaven and earth. You are about to die.
And for this reason, I go as far as to say: since the Jewish nation had a greater connection to the spirit than any other nation, there is no reason in the world that prevents me from drawing the following conclusion: anything that is spirit and anything that is culture is actually Jewish. And for this reason, Mozart is Jewish, as well as Bach and Rembrandt and a few more good people too numerous to name.**
There’s a great deal of sad humor in Tammuz’s allegory, but it also has kernels of truth about the passion of the Jews, holding fast to life and not willing to let go. And all this is done with a great deal of melancholy, cynicism, and common sense. The Jewish encounter, like the encounter of the passengers of the crashing airliner, is a very purified encounter between man and his essence. And the Jewish people—Tammuz says through the mouth of the protagonist—has been at this moment so many times that it has become the most refined and precise collective. All of life is temporary, and for the Jew this is eternal temporariness. Creativity and lust for life stem from it, the constant frenetic motion, with waves of paranoia, from Woody Allen to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Heard through the conversation of many Israelis, the Israeli reality appears fairly shallow, one whose complexity is disappearing. There are designated “bad guys” and automatic “good guys.” Most people think the same about most important issues. Israeliness has greatly simplified Jewish complexity. Judaism through the generations lived its whole life in a complicated duality, full of serious internal contradictions that were fertilizing and fascinating raw materials. A nation of the world spread out wherever there were people, and still aspiring to concentrate together. Individuals and communities that adjusted to the boundless wealth of the societies in which they lived, while preserving a separation and difference from those same societies. Many languages, and one holy tongue. Prayer for complete redemption, and utter passivity when it came to promoting it. Moderation and extremism, openness and insularity, assimilation and conversion. All these tensions created a lively and up-to-date culture, attentive to itself and conversing with its external environment. Many of these elements passed away with the Israeli revival. And that is precisely what I seek: the fertilizing middle ground between the poles.
The Jewish culture that was is that kind of culture. A culture whose secret was its will and ability to contain internal contradictions as a worldview. In the place where I grew up there was only one correct worldview, and I never connected with it, though I never knew how to formulate properly for myself my repulsion from orthodoxy. Ever since childhood I sensed that there were other worlds, other opinions and truths, but I was not permitted to touch them. Across the street there was a “different” synagogue, Conservative, but “we don’t go there.”
Once I was suspended from the yeshiva where I studied because I lost my schoolbag and told the teacher that “even God doesn’t know where it is.” “God is omnipotent,” I was scolded, and sent home with a stern note to my parents. And I knew then already that it simply can’t be, that there must be other thought about the place of God in the world, one that doesn’t impose on him the petty management of the scattered schedule of a fourteen-year-old youth. The expression “people like us” became a restraining and restrictive framework that defined our family’s attitude to the world of others and completely contradicted the spirit of intellectual curiosity that my parents fostered in us from the day we were born. Everything was permitted except changing religious outlook. “That’s the way it is” was a binding worldview. “That’s the way it is” is not an offhand response of a parent to a particularly annoying child. “That’s the way it is” is a complete outlook with binding axioms regarding matters and issues that have no other explanation. I learned it almost from my first moment in the worlds of thought.
“But Mom, ‘that’s the way it is’ is not an answer. You always say that to me.”
“Right, son, but ‘why’ is not always a question.”
I assume that such exchanges exist in every home in which there are misunderstandings between opinionated adolescents and parents with a worldview and outlooks like my parents’. “When Dad gets back he’ll explain it to you.” That was the secret weapon in their arsenal. Mom worked on the tactics, and Dad was responsible for the strategy, she for blocking my erupting youth, he for channeling the defiance to channels of knowledge and curiosity. She dealt with the here and now, he with the long-term and historical. One day Dad came home and taught me one of the most beautiful Talmudic lessons, which is with me almost every day of my life. This lesson fixed our culture as a culture of disagreement, a culture of constant contradictions, betwixt and between.
For three years there was a dispute between the school of the scholar Shammai and the school of the scholar Hillel, the former assertin
g, “Jewish law is in agreement with our views” and the latter contending, “The law is in agreement with our views.” Then a divine voice declared: “Both views are the words of the living God, but the law is in agreement with the rulings of the school of Hillel.” Since, however, both are the words of the living God, what was it that entitled the school of Hillel to have the law fixed in agreement with their rulings? Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of the school of Shammai, and were even so humble as to study the words of the school of Shammai before theirs. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin, Folio 13b)
For many years, that dispute divided Jewish society, including the Pharisees of the Second Temple era. Three years without a decision, which exacted a price of blood from the disputants. Human tribunals could not reach a decision and recommendation on whom to favor: the traditional, precise, and stricter school of Shammai, or the more lenient, though not lightweight, school of Hillel. Finally, the narrative says, there was no alternative to divine intervention. A “divine voice” declared: “Both views are the words of the living God.” I don’t know what that voice is, and whose voice it is, but it is clear to me that the narrator meant an intervention and decision by the highest authority, which asserts: “Both views are the words of the living God.” That is a wonderful sentence, a verdict like no other. If there is one God and he has one truth, how can it have more than one real interpretation? Isn’t there only one truth, and no other? Unless there’s a God of multiple truths and contradictions, which means that there is no one correct and straight view that is God’s view, but several. God is multifaceted, with a truth that has several legitimate interpretations. Only together are they a complete spiritual and pluralistic reality that assumes that the truth, wherever it is, has more than one authentic and credible source.
