THE FIRST CHILDHOOD MEMORY I HAVE OF MY FATHER IS linked to the destruction of empires—the collapse of a world order that had once seemed eternal. Dad, whose life spanned nearly 90 percent of the twentieth century, was born before World War I. He spent his childhood in the seemingly stable but actually decaying reality of nineteenth-century Europe. From the window of his childhood home in Dresden, Germany, at Zerre Straße Nummer Zwei, he, the Jewish boy born in 1909, saw the revolutionaries calling for the overthrow of the king of Saxony. With his particular smile reserved for especially vulgar words, he quoted the Saxon king, with a heavy Saxon accent, lashing out at the rebels, “Mach deinen Scheiss allein” (Go deal with your own shit). A continent away, Mom’s childhood was also shaped by terrible upheaval and destruction, wrought by the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929.
My parents’ first and momentous memories are imprinted on me, while my own first memories are small and very personal, much like any child of my generation. The slats of my crib were already loose. My crib was old. My parents bought it used, and then it served my sisters before it became my first bed. The three of us shared a room, and the furniture, like our clothing, schoolbags, and pencil cases, was all hand-me-downs. That crib is my very first memory, in which—like in many moments to follow—I was entirely alone. It was 1957, and I was a year-and-a-half, maybe two years old.
I squeezed out of the crib and walked around the house, beyond the permitted boundaries. I went from my room to my parents’ room, which was a sacred space and not always accessible. In the middle was the tall kerosene stove, warding off the “draft” for Dad. A piece of beautiful cast iron, whose wick only Mom knew how to change and light without creating soot. A large pot with boiling water stood on the stove, to humidify the air and to prepare tea. And I, the fugitive from the crib, bumped into it with full infantile force. The boiling water spilled and scalded my tender back, the first burns of my life.
In those days, I probably attached little meaning to the crib slats and the escape, the fire and the water, the pain and the scar, the deposed kaisers and slaughtered Jews that launched me into the world. My childhood was mundane, not particularly heroic. I lived through twelve of the nineteen first—and last—sane years of Israel’s existence, and although in those distant days of my childhood some vestiges of the excitement of 1948 still lingered, I didn’t know we were making history.
In the sixties, from time to time, new children would join my class, from Morocco, France, or Poland. Children, not waves of immigration. I knew how to mock their foreign accents, but I failed to understand that I was being insulting and not welcoming. Aunt Bertl sent us packages from America full of used clothing that Tziona the seamstress altered for us on Mom’s oversized sewing machine. For me, as I grew up, the Jewish Agency and the United Jewish Appeal were embodied in those packages my family received. Nobody even noticed that there were kids in class who did not have uncles and aunts in America, or uncles and aunts at all, and no one imagined that my worn and fitted striped American pants were actually the start of the social inequality gap. All these small childhood events flowed like tiny tributaries until they became, during the war that changed our universe, a big waterfall that has not stopped cascading since.
During the Six-Day War (June 5–10, 1967), I was neither a brave fighter nor an involved civilian—at twelve, I was barely a concerned citizen. I was just a little Jerusalem boy in transition from childhood to adolescence. Still without whiskers, but with some underarm sweat like the adults. I had a pair of Ata factory jeans and “a real cowboy’s” holster belt and toy gun that Aunt Bertl had sent me in a package for Purim. In June 1967, I had long used up all the caps for my gun, but I still sat for hours on a punctured water tank left in the yard, riding bravely on the tin horse, galloping toward the enemies and driving them off. In that fashion, over many days, I saved Mom and Dad and my two older sisters, Tzvia and Ada, time and again. All by myself, like the cowboys and Indians who were both my father’s childhood superheroes and mine. Our daily routine, Mom’s and the kids’, continued as usual, but nothing was really in order.
Slowly, patiently, the tension grew and became stifling. Fathers went to the army, and vehicles we had never seen before—command cars, light armored vehicles, and other bulky trucks—were on the streets. Private cars were commandeered and covered with mud as camouflage. Occasionally a plane was seen overhead—despite the ban on flying over the city—and that caused a sensation. We, the Jerusalem kids, hardly ever saw planes before and never up in “our skies.” Every day after school we took to the streets to fill bags from the piles of sand left by government and city trucks on every street corner. We painted car headlights blue for a blackout “like in London,” adults said, recalling the blitzkrieg days of World War II. In Mr. Heller’s grocery store Mom bought a little extra toilet paper and some canned food. But she said, “I’m not stocking up, because if they see me stocking up on food then everyone will think they need to prepare.”
I was a sixth-grader in Mrs. Blumenthal’s English class when, on a Monday morning, war came. It began just as they had explained it would: a siren, the lesson came to a halt, and we huddled next to the walls, under windows that looked like woven fabric, crisscrossed with the brown masking tape we had pasted on them with our saliva and little hands. Hundreds of children and a few dozen teachers—female teachers, to be precise, because almost all the male teachers had been called up to the army—waited tensely. Explosions reverberated through the city, Jordanian legionnaires fired sniper shots, there were explosions of shells and mortars from both sides, and the thunder of jets repeatedly broke the sound barrier as they headed beyond enemy lines. It was the first time that I had heard such sounds. The automatic machine-gun fire rang in my ears like a giant metronome. Then there was silence for a few minutes, as if the conductor of an orchestra had ordered all the musicians to stop playing and listen for a moment.
In one of those moments I drummed my fingers on the school’s old wooden table. We all practiced different games to train our fingers to be nimbler. Who knows if it was just a game or an effort to release tension. Nothing I heard until that moment was as frightening as the shouts that followed. That petite and stern-looking teacher, Mrs. Blumenthal, took out her stress on me, venting the terrible anxiety I was protected from as a child, caused by the days of waiting in which we labored to fortify our homes and classroom and endured the absence of the men, including her partner. Poor woman, all her favorite disciplinary measures were denied her. She couldn’t eject me from the classroom and endured because there was shooting outside. She couldn’t send me to the principal because he too was sitting with us in the makeshift shelter. So she made do with a heartfelt groan: “How dare you? Don’t you understand anything?” And the truth is that indeed I did not understand, though not necessarily the things she had in mind.
We went home with the mother of one of my classmates, Yisrael, who at that moment was for me the mother of all Israelis. As a young kid, I had no idea about defense systems, military powers, or diplomatic shields. She—this mom—symbolized for me, then, the fragile protection against the eruption of war evilness and the deepest of fears. We didn’t walk on the main roads to avoid the fire from the Jordanian snipers in red-checked head-scarves who were posted at the top of David’s Citadel. Suddenly everything that had been regularly forbidden to us became temporarily permitted. In those days, parental authority was supreme. A parent spoke, and the child obeyed. But in that moment the roles were reversed, and suddenly I became Yisrael’s mother’s guide. I told her “this way,” and she obeyed. I showed her how to jump over fences, and she followed me silently. In those moments with her we were allowed to vault over roadblocks and go through courtyards that were forbidden to us all year. We passed through the Reform Har-El synagogue and the Baptist church on Narkis Street, which our parents and teachers shunned: the former because the Judaism practiced there was not ours, and the latter because of its missionary Christianity. But in that first time of trouble in our lives, everything was forgotten, and they—the Baptists and Reform Jews in the heart of Jerusalem—became our temporary refuge; the walls and fences of the church and Temple shielded us from the hostile fire, becoming the backroad safe way home, the one we hardly ever dared to take during peace time. That’s life sometimes; places we find terrifying in times of peace can suddenly become safe havens in times of trouble and hardship.
We crossed the yard of the Ratisbonne Monastery, which was usually locked shut. I had always been haunted by the fear that if I passed by the place the priests in their brown robes and rope belts would seize me and send me to the Christian orphanage. But in the face of the demonic Arab enemy, the terrifying Jordanian Legion, everything unfit to eat became kosher, and all the fears became momentary security. The teacher, Yisrael’s mother, and I did not know then that this was the essence of the Six-Day War for Israelis: turning the unacceptable into the appropriate, putting the stamp of approval on everything that was supposed to be absolutely forbidden, making it permissible and even sacred.
I arrived home safely. I clearly remember the sound of exploding shells falling in the yard and my sister’s fear, as well as our surprise at the new, unfamiliar names the radio announcers peppered us with: Sharm el-Sheikh and Quneitra, Nasser and Hussein. Who are these terrible demons? Where are these hellish places?
On Wednesday, it was all over. After much shelling and bombing, endless rumors and news flashes, patriotic music playing on the radio, and families huddling together protectively, Dad returned home from his job at the government and said to Mom, “Get ready, we’re going to the Kotel,” the Western Wall. I didn’t know exactly what this Kotel was. We were never taught at home to yearn for it. We didn’t have a picture of it on the wall, not even a bronze engraving, as was common in so many homes at that time. The walls of Dad’s large library were decorated with photos of Mom’s family from the old Jewish community in Hebron that had been destroyed, and next to them was a lithograph of synagogues from around the world that were no more, from the Jewish diaspora that had been wiped out. But there was nothing to commemorate the Temple.
I will remember Mom’s excitement until the day I die. She was wearing her blue pleated skirt. “Does this look all right?” she asked Dad, as always. “Very much so, Rivka,” he replied, as always, and together they went to the road to board the military transport that had come to pick them up. A dusty, unshaven soldier helped them climb into the command car.
“I want to go, too,” I wailed at the top of my lungs, crying heavy, salty tears whose taste I can still recall. It was the first great outburst of my childhood. Cries of longing and sadness, of fear and disappointment, of a parting much greater than myself. Perhaps I was curious to see the battlefields; perhaps I was just giving voice to all the fears that had built up inside me during those days. The cries of a young boy who was not ready to be left without the security and protection of his parents. But despite my tears, they left without me. When they came back after a few hours, my mother pulled out a small bag from her pocketbook and retrieved from it a few short, squat cartridges from an Uzi submachine gun. “I collected them at the Kotel especially for you,” she said, as she handed the cartridges to me. She wanted to compensate for having left me behind, but she was also entrusting me with a little treasure.
In those last innocent days of the State of Israel, we all had to take a shop class at school. Once a week we left the gray, neglected schoolyard and walked a few blocks to the workshop of the teacher, Mr. Tarshish. In the faded apron of a craftsman from a bygone era, with a booming voice and a ruler he rapped against the table any time he grew angry, Mr. Tarshish taught us all the survival skills we’d ever need. How to fix a short circuit with a special iron wire, how to change a light bulb, how to sand down a rough board and polish metal. To this day, I don’t particularly like manual work, mainly because I’m not that good at it. I am not just left-wing politically; I also have two left hands, far more left than my most firmly held views. I was also never good at conforming to the mold, or copying a template exactly and without variation. Even back then my spirit sought something else, something creative and original. The complete opposite of the strict, precise work ethic of the formidable Mr. Tarshish.
A few months after the war had ended, we prepared a surprise for our parents in honor of Chanukah: we made metal menorahs, the proud work of our own hands. We toiled for days, cutting the brass, bending and joining, shaping the frame and the branches. For me, the high point was taking the Uzi cartridges that Mom had brought me from the Kotel and attaching them to the menorah as candleholders. My souvenir from the remnants of the Temple is inextricably bound up in weaponry, violence, and bloodshed. I was not yet familiar with a Judaism of pacifism, but if I had been, I doubt I would have committed to it. In school, we had not yet read the biblical verse rejecting all violent associations with the Temple and its altars: “And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones, for by wielding your sword upon them you have profaned them” (Exodus 20:25). And thus, the Jewish Kotel and the Israeli Uzi were melded together for me into something new, inseparable.
TO THIS DAY, WE LIGHT THIS MENORAH EVERY CHANUKAH, and I both love it and hate it. Each time my heart is pierced anew—by longing for the childhood I once had and that is no longer, and by lament for the great transformation that has come over all of us. I need that particular menorah not just as a nostalgic link to those innocent bygone days, but also as a tangible reminder of all those things that I still want, and still need, to change in this world.
I always loved Chanukah, more than any other holiday. In the beginning, in my youth, it was because of the mystery of the darkness and the small lights that banish it, and because of the modest little gifts we always received from our parents. I loved those magic moments in which Dad, Mom, my sisters, and I sat on the rug and played with the dreidels, the spinning tops—one of the rare occasions when Dad came down to our childhood level. Perhaps that’s why dreidels became my favorite collector’s item, with thousands of them now decorating the walls of our home. With time, I came to love Chanukah even more, as a unique and special holiday in which Mom had a significant role. Not just as the passive woman who says Amen to all the blessings, rituals, and customs that Dad performed with flair, but also as the one who lit the candles on the nights that Dad was not at home. I loved her in this role—she inspired me to take on my first public position. It was during Chanukah when I was in first grade. I was selected to play the part of the shamash, the candle used to light all the others. Mother ironed my white shirt, made me a cardboard crown with a paper candle on top, and rehearsed with me again and again the line I was supposed to recite in a loud voice in the class play. “To be a shamash is to bear a great responsibility,” she said to me, “and my son needs to be the best shamash there is.” So I tried, for her sake. I wanted to be the best shamash there is.
Since Chanukah is always celebrated in the winter darkness, it is the Festival of Lights, similar to festivals of light in many other cultures, such as Diwali, the Hindu festival. We Jews, who do not worship nature in and of itself, have added more and more layers of religious meaning to Chanukah, as with many of our other holidays. The miracle of the jar of oil, the redemption of the Temple, the victory of the few over the many—the whole deal. Thus, we transformed a festival celebrating the shortest days of the year and the approaching lengthening of the hours of daylight into a religious holiday. Adam’s sigh of relief, as his fears were alleviated when the winter nights stopped growing longer, was transformed into a great, spontaneous joy. The joy of the faithful over the redemption of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Greeks had defiled it with their pagan rites and their military conquest. The Greek empire issued religious decrees against us. Our benevolent God, the master of history, stood by our ancestors in their distress and granted them a “great salvation.” As a sign of gratitude, and as a means of commemoration, the ancient Jews dedicated these eight days to giving thanks to the God who delivered them, and to praising His name.
It was never a holiday about wars and warriors. On the contrary, the mighty ones in the Chanukah story are the Greeks, not us. But that is something that no one told me before I ascended the tall chair of the shamash on Chanukah during first grade. In my black polyester Sabbath pants, which were secured high above my belly button, I sang my lines as loudly as I could: “In our time as in those days, God’s Maccabee redeems always.” I didn’t know that in my cousin Moshe’s secular school down the block, they sang the same song, but with a slight variation: “In our time as in those days, the Maccabee redeems always.” For us, it was still a religious holiday with God at the center; for them, the holiday had already been appropriated by the steamrolling revolution of Zionist consciousness. God was cast aside, and the Maccabee took center stage.
The Zionist revolution dearly wanted to return us Jews to an active role in political history, and it grasped at every symbolic straw it could find. It is natural, therefore, that the heroism of the war and the struggle of the Maccabees became the most important port of call in the Zionist movement’s voyage home. The return to the land and to our memories, to language and history, to the places that once were, and to the glory of the past. And we small children each were the best shamash there is, the caddies of this fantastic revolution. A decade later, in the mid-seventies, we in the army were singing completely different versions of those Chanukah songs. God had disappeared entirely from the holiday, and we marched in unison—left, right, left—accompanied by the hoarse loudspeakers:
We carry lights
Through darkest nights
The paths aglow beneath our feet.
We found no jar of oil
No miracle but our toil
We hewed the stone with all our might—
Let there be light!
With rifles on our shoulders and heavy military steps, we trampled on any religious vestige of the holiday. From a Jew in my parents’ home I became a new Israeli Maccabee. We, my Israeli friends and I, didn’t rely on miracles. Not like all the weak, meek members of our parents’ generation. We took responsibility into our own hands; we were the masters of our own fates. I was transformed from an anonymous little religious Jewish boy from Jerusalem into the conventional Israeli hero, whom none of my parents’ generation or their parents before them ever had imagined.
This popular modern Chanukah song has become associated, in recent years, with the opening ceremonies for Israel’s Independence Day on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. The Hasmoneans (the ancient Jewish dynasty established by the sons of Mattathias the Hasmonean and encompassing Judea and surrounding areas) became retrospective heroes who were enlisted as the inspiration and model for present-day Israeli war heroes, those who “hew the stones.” Through this marching song written for a Zionist Chanukah and played on Independence Day, Chanukah and Independence Day become inextricably intertwined in our consciousness. The modern holiday of Chanukah became a festival of heroism, rather than a festival of lights commemorating the rededication of the Temple. With each Uzi cartridge I fastened to our menorah—any of which may have felled someone near the Kotel in ’67—I unknowingly fastened this new myth to our Israeli narrative.
“You have a holiday, again?” a non-Jewish friend asked me. “Which is it this time?” When I patiently explained it to her, I realized how hard it is to avoid the feeling that, for us, holidays and disasters are inevitably intertwined. It seems that there was always some disaster about to happen, always with a great villain involved, and we were always miraculously saved. That’s why we have so many holidays and we celebrate happily with plenty of commentary and food. On Passover, we are threatened by the Pharaoh and we eat matzah as a culinary reminder of our ancient misery. On Purim, it’s the wicked Haman, our classical anti-Jewish biblical antagonist, who was a vizier under King Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes I), and we eat hamantaschen pastries, shaped like triangles to remind us of the evil one’s ears.
One of my daughters asked me once, “What does the sesame on the burekas [poppy seed–filled pastries] commemorate?” One of my sons came home from kindergarten one day and asked, “Dad, who’s the villain of Shavuot?” But the sesame is just sesame and the Shavuot holiday never had a “villain.” In my childhood, Shavuot was a very low-key holiday but nevertheless quite a happy one. Though brief compared to Passover and Sukkot, it was heavily freighted with symbolism and meaning. On Shavuot, we went to the synagogue as Jews, as religious people. There we celebrated the giving of the Torah, according to our traditional customs. But on the streets and in schools, we were Israelis first, and as such we celebrated the other aspect of the holiday—the first fruits of the harvest.
As little children, we would march to the headquarters of the Jewish Agency in the Rehavia neighborhood, bringing first fruits. We wore white, put baskets of fruits and vegetables on our small shoulders, and walked slowly up the hill from the kindergarten to the Jewish Agency compound. The children of Jerusalem, festively dressed, trailed behind the kindergarten teacher, who carried a tambourine, her assistant with a triangle and cymbals, and all of us singing at the top of our small voices an old song of Levin Kipnis, the Zionist holiday poet.
That was our Zionist activity at its best. Blue-and-white youth in Israeli sandals—two brown straps and a hard leather sole—and white socks. In the streets, we celebrated the country and its districts, the land and its fruit, which we, the new Jewish generation, carried on our shoulders. And there I was, Avraham Burg, four or five years old, from 6 Ben-Maimon Street in Jerusalem, not my grandfather with the same name who is buried in Dresden. Me, the little Israeli, marching proudly in “our” streets and bringing the first fruits of the land—that is, fruit that Mom bought at the Mahane Yehuda market—to the headquarters of our new national institutions.
I was eventually elected chairman of those institutions, the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization in 1995, when I was thirty-nine years old. The struggle to get elected to the post was long, difficult, and ugly, a global struggle that pitted the official representatives of the Jewish world who wanted me for the job against Yitzhak Rabin’s more suitable candidate. (The officials were a mix of Jewish world leaders and philanthropists, and some Israeli political hacks who were concerned that my “young Turk” energy might put at risk the conservative stability of the organization.) It was neither the first nor the last time that I would face Rabin. A national hero when he was killed, Rabin was a man I intensely disliked and did not respect during his lifetime. In fairness, the feeling was mutual. He did not really like me, justifiably in his view. He was a famous military man and a war hero, and I was one of the founders of the protest movement against war. He was the embodiment of the Zionist establishment and I was not, and no longer am.
On my first day as chairman, I set out for work on foot from my parents’ house. I walked through my old kindergarten, which is still standing, and walked up the street to the national Temple where we had brought first fruits as children. What was a difficult march for a three- or four-year-old was only a few minutes’ walk for an adult. That day my journey took me across the phases of my life to that point. A leap across many years. A moment before I went through the door to assume my official appointment as chairman, I looked back down the street from which I had come. It was a quiet Jerusalem afternoon. I looked for little Avraham, but he wasn’t there. I thought I was witnessing the closing of a circle, but I didn’t know that nothing had been closed. Nothing. In fact, everything was about to open, and the path ahead of me was longer than anything I had ever experienced. The natural flow of childhood—with the naïve images of a national utopia as a way of life and the childish optimism that replaced the hardships of all the generations before us—changed in 1967.
The sense of relief and liberation after the Six-Day War was indescribable. Few wars end “well.” Often the first days of the war are heady—mass enthusiasm and the bravado of leaders—but they end with great disappointment. I had read much about the high morale of nations going to war, and I had listened closely to the personal stories of German Jewish immigrants of Dad’s generation (they would become the first members of the Israeli peace camp) when they talked about the enthusiasm that swept over them when they went off to fight in World War I. Like them and the rest of us, my enthusiasm in June 1967 knew no bounds. Like them, over the years and after gaining perspective, I would never feel the same way again. Since then, I have never again felt stirred or inspired by any of Israel’s wars. In the first days of every operation, I’m always afraid, concerned, and critical. That is why in the closing days of each of these wars I am never disappointed, unfortunately, because the grim reaper always comes to claim his price. All wars have a dark, sad end, full of loss and grief. So many of my friends are buried in this soil that it seems to me that a very high price has been exacted for the hope that has yet to be delivered.
The Six-Day War began with fear and depression. During the three weeks leading to the conflict, we felt anew the terrors of the War of Independence and the losses of 1948—the six thousand dead, an incomprehensible number, 1 percent of the Jewish population in the country. (Today, that percentage would be equivalent to seventy thousand Israelis.) We repressed the memories of those incomprehensible losses for the first nineteen years of Israel’s existence, despite the death and bereavement present in every house on every street. Suddenly the memories and emotions could no longer be repressed; everything came out with full force. The hardships of those three weeks seemed to us like the three weeks that preceded the burning and destruction of the Second Temple. There was a feeling of being in a new Warsaw Ghetto. But if the Six-Day War had begun with a grim mood, its ending was unlike anything that had occurred before (or since) in our long history. Many of us interpreted the quick and surprising end of the conflict as a miracle. In those six days, many chapters of Jewish and Israeli history were closed, and new chapters begun, quite different from preceding ones. We perceived those six days as the six days of creation, this time of a renewed Israel. In the six days of war, we erased the humiliation and shame of our past in the diaspora and gained a new sense of pride that countered the legacy of generations of misery. Our generation completed what the founders of the state had failed to achieve: overcoming the exilic mentality of weakness. We were the first generation to fully express Jewish might.
The holiday of Shavuot, which came a week after the war, became something else entirely. Until 1967, we would go every year to Mount Zion and to the ancient compound revered as the tomb of King David. At the time, I was unaware of the industry of religious illusions that touts every local sheikh’s tomb as a Jewish holy place, without much supporting historical or archeological evidence. In the sixties, I believed with all my heart that King David was indeed buried there, under the tombstone and its fabric cover. On holidays when my friends and I went to Mount Zion, within the small Israel of those days, adjacent to the ancient walls, we climbed the roofs of the compound and tried to see the Temple Mount, inventing yearnings we didn’t really have. We greatly enjoyed the experience of being near the dangerous border and were addicted to the sensation of almost touching the walls of the mythical Old City. In those days, we also went to the Abu Tor neighborhood, a different viewpoint at the city frontier of the same yearned-for holy site, and from the corner lookout we barely managed, craning our necks, to see the southern corner of the Temple Mount. Whoever understood the explanations of the teachers and guides claimed that he saw even more: Absalom’s Pillar and the Dome of the Rock, not gold-plated then and yet to become the symbol of Palestinian nationalism. All that was before that crucial war.
On the morning of the holiday, less than a week after the great catharsis, when the air was still rife with that mix of emotions that would never return—fear and pride, bereavement and victory, arrogance and wonder—throngs of people gathered in the square below my childhood home. A true pilgrimage: a mix of older people who had visited the Western Wall in “the old days” before 1948; relatives of the paratroopers, like Aunt Malka and Uncle Zeev, who longed not only for the encounter with the sacred stones, but to meet their mobilized loved ones, our heroes, the liberators of the wall; bereaved families fresh from their mourning period; and masses of young people like myself. A huge group of both regular and occasional worshipers who all felt a need to thank God as close as possible to his official abode. A long, seemingly endless column of frenzied dancers wound its way down to the Valley of Hinnom. Sweating men in prayer shawls, happy children like myself in holiday clothes, curious onlookers, and ordinary folks mingled together. I was short and got sandwiched between the man in front of me, whose shoulder I tried to reach, and the anonymous dancer behind me whose hand lay heavily on my back, pressing me down. This monotonous choreography went on for hours. Songs of religious faith rose from dry throats, and the hoarser the singer, the more righteous he was deemed. The human serpent entered the Old City through Dung Gate and danced up its alleys. I remember the rivers of sweat, the terrible thirst, the aching feet, but the ecstasy carried us onward.
In the afternoon, after many hours, I found myself again in the square below my home, at the starting point. “But where’s the Kotel, the Western Wall?” I asked my neighbor. “Down there, didn’t you see it?” No! I hadn’t. Last week my parents didn’t want to take me there and now, when I could have gotten there on my own, I had failed. The first time that I was allowed to visit the Western Wall, a remnant of the Temple, freely and not at the pleasure of foreigners, as a liberating owner and not as a Jew under occupation, and I missed it entirely. That first missed introduction seems to me the seed of the alienation I have felt since from the paganist cults attached to the place that have turned it into a repulsive focus of all that is primitive, primal, and aggressive in contemporary Judaism. When my intellectual guide, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the most important Israeli public intellectual of the first decades of the state, sarcastically labeled the wall and its cults the “disco-Kotel,” many were angry at him. But I felt that he was describing precisely the defining experience that never, in fact, defined me in my dance to the vanished wall of 1967.
THAT WAS THE POINT AT WHICH I BEGAN TO DIVERGE from my parents’ path. It was no coincidence that each one of us encountered the Western Wall differently that week. In my view, there is no objective sanctity of places, people, or things. I have no idea if there is a God in heaven, if there is a Creator. Moreover, it is difficult for me to believe—to say the least—that this God, whose existence is not entirely clear to me, indeed announced something to one of us, or took the trouble to designate by Himself certain places as more sacred than others. It is all man-made and the fruit of our imagination, and I greatly respect that. The only sanctity in my view is that which people attach to things. If people appreciate, respect, and prefer a certain law, then it is superior to other normative systems that people do not appreciate and respect as much. For example, most people I know do not cross the street on a red light; they respect red lights as part of a legal system that protects the sanctity of life. Had there been traffic lights at Mount Sinai, maybe they would have become sacred, if only because they guided traffic at the foot of the mountain. Who knows? On the other hand, I have trouble seeing any value in foolish laws. On my first official visit to the British parliament I was told, in utter seriousness, that there is a law that bans dying in parliament. I never checked whether this law actually exists. But such ridiculous laws can be found in many law books, including our own scriptures.
The Bible and the five books of the Torah that it contains are for me a wonderful human creation, complex, challenging, and valuable. I don’t believe that they were given by God to man, but I respect and therefore venerate the devotion of the generations before me to these books and their content. After all, they drove immense human movements.
My parents had much simpler beliefs, very basic and very traditional. Every Saturday morning my father would choose one of the books he would read and study during prayer services. His choice was always the second book, because the first, which was always with him, was a Bible commentary titled Torah Temimah, by Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein. It was something of an iconic symbol of my father’s perception of the Jewish Torah as innocent of artifice and deception. In many respects the naïveté of my parents’ faith and their way of life was a total contrast to the sophistication and wisdom that dominated other aspects of their lives. Dad—and Mom always at his side—could not have survived so many years in the Israeli political leadership, in so many Israeli governments, and particularly in his difficult and malicious party, had he tried to act with the same naïve and faithful honesty that characterized his religious belief. In practice, he maintained an emotional separation between religion and state, though unfortunately it was not the right separation. My parents separated their religion, which was simple and folksy, from the sophisticated, cunning, and virtually sacred state—“the harbinger of our redemption”—of which they were a part.
In the early eighties, I suffered serious back problems. I had been injured in a parachuting accident, and my battered back did not hold up under the strain I was subjecting it to. After many hospitalizations and treatments, it was decided to operate on the spinal cord and solve the problem once and for all. I vaguely remember the moment of opening my eyes after the surgery. Sedatives were still circulating in my body, but my eyes were open and I was conscious, waking up and trying to connect. Near the bed were my beloved wife, Yael, and Mom. The first words Mom spoke to me were: “Dad went to the Kotel to put in a note.” I didn’t have much strength in those first few moments, but what I wanted to shout still echoes inside me. What? My father putting notes in the crevices of the Western Wall, like the rest of the Jewish idol worshipers? I was taken completely by surprise, because this was so unlike him. Apparently, something hidden had emerged from deep inside him in the moment of crisis and overwhelmed his Germanic rationalism. I don’t have anything like that inside me. I cannot imagine a situation, even one of extreme trouble and hardship, that would lead me to write a note and place it in the cracks of an archeological relic, built by flesh-and-blood people just like myself, and which had been destroyed by other human beings like me. I have never in my life prayed to God to come and save me. He (or she) is simply outside all my life’s reckonings.
There was one other time, at least one that I know of, when Dad went to the Western Wall to try his luck with forces beyond his own. When my older sister became ill and was on the operating table, suspended between here and there, Dad went to plead for mercy in the place where Jews have always begged for mercy, at the Kotel. I don’t know what he achieved there, because apparently his prayer was rejected outright. My sister passed away after great suffering, and yet he carried on with his cultish customs. There, on my sickbed, when I was still woozy, the next point of disagreement emerged, and with it a clear line of difference. The ideological abyss between us was our complete disagreement about the relationship between church and state. Much time passed before these small cracks widened into a full-fledged dispute, not only over the flawed religious arrangements in the country, but also over the essential clash between religion and state, God and man.
We talked very little about politics. From the outset, we understood that these disagreements are deep and unbridgeable, so why make the effort and fall into that yawning abyss. The danger of falling in was greater than the chance of circumventing the potholes and remaining in the circle of family love, whose flame was never extinguished. There was only one time when things came out into the open. During one of the election campaigns for chief rabbi of Israel, in the early nineties, embarrassing accounts circulated about sexual relations between one of the candidates and a very particular woman. “Did you hear the news about the rabbi?” Dad asked one Friday, as my children played with my wife, Yael, and Mom, while he and I were having our weekly father-and-son talk. With a thin smile, the kind that in our family serves as a prelude to the cynical understatement to follow, I asked: “Who do you mean, Dad, the rabbi of Tel Aviv and its suburbs?” At any other time, Dad would have relished the Hebrew double entendre: the word bnoteha, meaning “girls” of the city, and its suburbs, in modern speech—“daughters” in biblical Hebrew. But Dad, in atypical fashion, turned very red and lashed out at me: “How can you talk like that about the Rabbi? He is about to become the chief rabbi of Israel, our greatest achievement.” His references to “our” almost always meant the party, the movement, religious Zionism. We did not discuss the issue again. Over the years, I became keenly aware that this is the main, essential difference between me and the legacy of my parents’ home.
My parents were the children, and later the leaders, of religious Zionism. Mom imbibed it from her father in Hebron before the riots, and Dad was active in the movement in Germany between the two world wars, and became its leader at the height of his political career. For me he was just Dad. The best father I had, the best father I could have asked for: warm and wise, gentle and profound, hovering and touching, diving deep and flying high. All at the same time, all the time, in all matters. I loved him very much, and I miss him endlessly. To this day, so many years after his death, that feeling remains. I sometimes find myself near the telephone, wanting to call him and ask, “Dad, what is this…?”
But to the wider public, as well as his colleagues in the movement, he was “Dr. Burg.” Sometimes when people would ask me, “What’s your father’s name?” I would answer, “First name: Doctor, surname: Joseph Burg.” The “doctor” was a public figure present in the lives of many during the first and defining decades of the establishment and existence of the state. They saw him differently, and I knew him through an entirely different prism. A multifaceted man. To his great credit, it should be said that he was just as large a presence at home as he was outside. That is why I couldn’t help but laugh when my old mother, my sister and her family, my wife, children, and I were invited to the naming of a square after my father. Many political and municipal speeches were given in his memory, paying tribute to him, as is customary in such moments. One religious Zionist party hack outdid them all, saying, “Dr. Burg was the leader of a movement, so we thought that the most appropriate way to commemorate him would be to name an island in moving traffic after him.” I saw Dad’s beaming face floating in space and grinning with pleasure. Indeed, a traffic island, words that in Hebrew can also mean “non-movement.” They had meant a sliver of land surrounded by a sea of vehicles, but he would have probably heard the pun like me. Because by the time he died his movement had become a vast nothingness compared to what he had dreamed and worked for his entire life.
The story of the rabbi and the lady represented something much bigger that divided us: not only the corruption of the hedonistic rabbi, but the spiritual corruption in the very existence of the institution of chief rabbinate.
“How can you not see,” I asked Dad while discussing the case of the rabbi and the girls of Tel Aviv, “How can you not see where this is going? How religion is taking over the state. How the Jewish project is expelling the Israeli project from here. How even in your own movement the followers of the messiah and messianism are pushing you, the rationally religious, out of any framework of possible agreement?” But Dad did not see, because he was blind when it came to the movement, even when it changed direction and funneled the energy of religious Zionism in a direction completely opposed to his own value system. He saw delicate, balanced connections between religion and state, and I see terrible dangers in any overlap between them. He believed he could control the raging bulls, and I dearly wanted then, and even more so today, a restraining separation between these two systems.
The state I want to live in must be no more than a tool in my hands, in the hands of every citizen like me. I really don’t want it to have its own content. I need it only as a tool by which we—the political collective living in it—will organize our lives. The state is a vital instrument to better the economy, improve education, defend our security, drain our sewage, and build and manage physical infrastructure. All the rest, all the baggage of my identity, must remain my sole responsibility. Because I’m not a lone wolf, but a social and communal animal, I will assert my identity within the realm of the existence and activity of my community. I want to live in a place where there is a full, defined, and clear separation between religion and the state. My religion, our state. I’m not bothered by, and even respect, people who organize for a politics of religious values, which they seek to enact in the public sphere. That’s what defines them. Provided, of course, that they don’t exploit their democratic rise to power to enforce values that annul democracy. The minute the effort—by religious or secular people—is directed beyond promoting interests, and the state itself, the tool, takes on religious meaning, salvational or divine, I start to worry. A state that is defined by terms and content not taken from the world of government, that has goals that are not political, is something else. Ultimately at the end of Dad’s life, one thing became clear. To my great regret, I was right and he was wrong; he was misled and he misled others. His partner-adversaries won a tremendous victory over him and us all. Israel became a country in which the Jewish-religious component is dominant, and the state does not control it.
Back to ’67. After the war, I had my bar mitzvah, perhaps the first event in which the yawning gap between me and my parents received concrete expression. I loved them so much, I dearly miss them every day, all day, and still, I’m not sure I ever really understood them or whether they understood me and the realities of my existence. All my childhood companions celebrated their bar mitzvah, put on the ritual straps and scroll boxes known as tefillin, were called up to the reading of the Torah in synagogue, recited the traditional blessings, chanted a few verses, and delivered a sermon. Preparations for all this take several months. That’s how it was with everyone else, but not with us. Mom and Dad stuffed all their former worlds, now destroyed and gone, into this traditional celebration meant to mark the transition from childhood to religious commitment, adulthood, and responsibility.
When I would come home from synagogue services I would chant loudly, like a cantor. I didn’t know and didn’t quite understand the words, and the tunes emanating from my mouth were hard to identify as the traditional prayer melodies, partially because of my paltry musical abilities. The results of my vocal embellishments were very different from those intended by the composers. My mother, who was endowed with a discerning musical ear and impressive, almost operatic vocal skills, took my off-key singing as a mortifying insult. In addition to which, the issue of “What will people say?” was constantly in the air. “What is going to happen?” Mom asked Dad in despair. “The boy will be called up to the Torah and won’t know how to chant. What will people say?” That is the fate of the youngest son who was preceded by two sisters in the days when the role of women in religious ritual was blatantly unequal. The entire burden of our family history was thrust onto my back. “How happy I was when you were born,” Mom would say again and again, “finally, someone who will carry forward the name Burg.”
With such baggage on my young shoulders it was no wonder that preparations for my bar mitzvah began at age ten. A few times a week I went to a heder to study Torah and Rashi’s commentary with Rabbi Yisrael Lev, an old-time Jew, a Yerushalaymer yid, as Dad would describe him. In addition to this, I went twice a week to the home of my own private tutor, Avigdor Herzog, one of the great experts of our time in the field of Jewish music. He survived the Holocaust as a youth, immigrated to Israel, and eventually laid the groundwork for Jewish musicological research. First, he established the Israel Institute for Sacred Music, and later the sound archive in the National Library. No one less than the leading Israeli expert on ethnic music was fit to teach such a failed talent as me. His patience, along with his ability to deconstruct every note and bring even me to sing it nearly perfectly, remains with me to this very day. He taught me the hidden secrets of the biblical tropes, the marks used to notate the chants sung in synagogue. Once I read somewhere that in addition to his being a musician from childhood, he was also a carpenter. Perhaps a master carpenter like him was required to teach a saw like me to produce melodies.
And as if all this was not enough for my parents, I crossed town time and again on my own on the way to the Hebron yeshiva, a stern ultra-Orthodox school in the heart of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox district. Dad wanted me to know about the existence of another Torah, different from our Zionist one. I sat there on the hard, wooden bench in my shorts and sandals, with my brash Zionist hairdo, an arrogant forelock. Around me yeshiva boys debated at the top of their lungs, wearing dark, shabby pants, black jackets, and sweat-stained white shirts, a uniform of neglected elegance. I don’t know what I learned there; but aside from the physical, tangible gap between us, nothing from that period was impressed on my memory. There were several more private tutors who prepared me, but what was I actually preparing for? I don’t know. It’s strange, so many years have passed since then, and I simply do not know what all the commotion was about. I wanted a bicycle, because that was the bar mitzvah gift of that time, an expression of maturity, responsibility, mobility, independence, and ownership of property that mattered. I also expected to get a watch, and indeed I received one. I remember it well. “This is a Doxa watch,” Dad told me. I had never heard that name. Michael got a Certina, and Yaakov had a Tissot, and there were a few more watches with familiar names. But Doxa? Who had ever heard of it? To my shame, the shop windows of the silversmiths and watchmakers downtown did not have even one such watch on display to show my friends. “Take care of it,” Dad told me. “It’s an important watch.”
But aside from the meticulous preparations imposed on me and the exciting gifts I received, it wasn’t my bar mitzvah. It was my father’s bar mitzvah. In the fading photos of my childhood album there are virtually none of my friends, only friends of Dad, photographed endlessly. Menachem Begin and Levi Eshkol, ministers, VIPs, and rabbis. All the people we ran after for autographs in the streets of Jerusalem gathered to celebrate the “Burg Bar Mitzvah.”
The climax of the festivities was my sermon. I took the stage in the banquet hall—not before Mom fixed my collar and brushed my bangs away from my eyes—and before the greatest orators of the Israeli parliament, I delivered my speech. I have no idea what I said, despite the many months in which I was compelled, despite my begging and protests, to learn the sermon by heart. “We don’t read speeches,” Mom decreed, injecting with that “we” my father’s impressive rhetorical skills into my young life.
And indeed, it was a sermon that was entirely his. Meaningless Talmudic and halachic hair-splitting, a sweeping review of Jewish sources, setting up false disputes between rabbinic scholars of generations past and resolving them with one clever-sounding statement. This was a tribute to the world of classic Jewish argumentation, which sharpened the Jewish mind to the point that it became the signature organ of our existence. I understood nothing, and didn’t want to understand anything about it.
Not long ago I found the yellowing pages of the speech, typewritten, full of corrections in my father’s distinctive and unreadable handwriting. From a distance of fifty years I read the words that were supposed to mark the conclusion of my childhood, and lo and behold, nothing has changed. I still do not understand. Today I have no problem tracking the tortured path of the halachic argument, which dealt entirely with the relation between the prayer shawl and tefillin. But I have difficulty connecting with the message my parents wanted to convey to me on the most important day in the youth of a Jewish boy. What in fact did they expect of me? To become a young scholar like in days of yore? A brilliant and sterile debater? To grow up and become the Yankele of Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, the subject of one of the melancholy Yiddish lullabies that Mom sang to me at bedtime? It was a sad song about a little Jewish boy whose teeth have all grown in, and with a little luck—his mother dreams—he will go soon to the heder to study Torah and Talmud. “A yingele [the little boy] who will grow up to become a scholar.” That yingele was me.
Where did they hide modernity, progress? Where was the new Israeli identity tucked away in the verbiage of that old Jewishness? Nowhere. It was simply not invited to my bar mitzvah. I think that my dear father and teacher celebrated himself on my birthday. He pictured a Jewish boy of the nineteenth century standing before the Torah sages of eastern Europe and impressing them with his arguments, his proficiency, and his sharp intellect. Riding the back of my bar mitzvah, he traveled back in time to his vanished childhood. He tried for a moment to revive yearnings that, in fact, had never really gone away. I was his atonement and replacement. Only when my children were born did I begin to understand. Along with my closeness to them, which has deepened over the years, I understand the unbridgeable distances between Dad and me, between Dad and us. And I also understand the foundations he laid for me, for the bridges across Jewish histories.
The gap between me and Dad was not age—the forty-seven years he had reached in my year of birth. Dad was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in a world that still followed the conventions of the nineteenth century, the century of great changes and human optimism. He grew to adulthood in Germany between the wars and reached his personal and public pinnacle in Israel after the Holocaust. At least three world orders stood between us. When I celebrated my bar mitzvah in Jerusalem of 1968 he thought about his Galicia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany that went up in the smoke of the crematories. We spoke only Hebrew, but he thought first in German. We, the first generation born in Israel, were as prickly as cactuses, and he was as soft as a diffident central European gentleman. When I reread that speech he wrote for me, my heart went out to him for the yearnings from which he never recovered, the spiritual limbs he lost and the place where he lost them, which he anguished over, the phantom pains of spiritual worlds felt long after they were amputated.
When I finished reading, I suddenly thought of that watch he gave me. “Doxa” is a Greek concept that means “belief.” The defining concept of modern religion, orthodoxy, was derived from it: “true faith,” the right worldview. Dad had at least two watches. One that showed the actual hours, shared by everyone, and a watch that beat and ticked off Jewish time. At their bar mitzvahs all the boys received brand-name watches made by famous companies—a watch in order to be on time, to get to school on time, to not be late coming home in the evening, to not miss the appointment with the doctor or the bus. I received a Jewish watch—Doxa. While preparing for my bar mitzvah, my parents revealed to me the hidden mechanisms operating this ancient watch, the two elements it comprised: progressive and groundbreaking actuality, and anachronistic conservatism with the most petrified customs. “Take care of it,” Dad said. “It’s an important watch.” And in my own way, I’m still taking care of it.