THE TRANSITION FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TO HIGH school in 1969 was not easy for me at all. Actually, it was terrible. Everything that was stable, familiar, and loved fell away and vanished all at once. My parents enrolled me once again in a boys’ school. It was the flagship of the religious Zionist movement, the Eton of the high school yeshivas, but I, then as now, was never a brilliant student fit to study in the finest educational institutions. But “people like us study at the Netiv Meir yeshiva,” I was told at home, and that ended the discussion that never began.
It was a yeshiva with a dormitory in the heart of Jerusalem. That is, my house with my mother and sister—along with my toys and collections, the yard behind the house, the hiding places and nooks and crannies of the neighborhood—suddenly became a distant homeland. A forbidden and unattainable home, beyond the pale of exile imposed on me. At the yeshiva, we lived four boys to a room, and from the first moment I felt alien. I was a persistent failure. My grades dropped, and the good little boy became a rude and unruly teenager. I talked back, I made friends with boys who were completely different from my former friends, I learned how to lie to adults, I cut classes, went on long hikes without permission, and never told my parents the truth about any of this.
I really didn’t like the new me. A deep and grave sadness gripped me in everything I did in those four years. I didn’t know what to do with my distress. Though I was born into this reality of elitism firmly established and arrogant in its religiosity and customs, I felt deep and frustrating alienation from it. Mom and Dad never succeeded in reaching beyond their circle of friends, who were exactly like them. Very good people, positive, delightful, full of good will, and enthralled by the Israeli enterprise that far exceeded their expectations. They were religious Zionists, a smug bourgeoisie, who at the same time had a sense of structural inferiority. Our home was the place I loved more than anything, and in its anachronistic way it loved me back.
At the same time, I never felt entirely at home in my parents’ cultured household. For me, a boy looking for other pastures, their orthodoxy—with all their sensitivity, openness, and tolerance—was a coercive and compulsive system. I was a young Israeli looking for pastures that did not belong solely to “our” goats and to people “like us.” During my army service, when my social circle was secular, Sabbaths became a source of deep discomfort. While my friends were hiking the trails of the Judean desert—boys and girls together, without any partition—I had to stay home either in my room or at the traditional rites. Each Shabbat in which I was on vacation from the army, my father would wake me with the loud call, “Avraham!” which meant only one thing: time for synagogue services—a time for men without women, a time of coercion. I might have been a different person had my launching pad to adulthood not been the Dickensian institution in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood. I will never know.
That social environment was mostly harnessed to the ethos of the yeshiva. The more I felt disconnected from the studies in the small and crowded rooms, the less I understood the Talmudic world of ancient Babylon and the ideas of its rabbis, the more I flourished outside of class and school. Together with other “naughty boys” like me, casual or temporary friends, I embarked on adventurous night hikes, imagining myself to be a mythical hero of the 1948 War of Independence. We crossed the Judean desert in solo hikes; twice we hitchhiked to dip in the beautiful streams of the Golan. We bragged about being students at the most prestigious institution. We failed to see and understand the way things really were: the moral corruption of controlling the life of others on behalf of “Jewish Values,” the lack of religious tolerance, and the explosive potential of redemptive messianic politics. It sufficed for us that people said we were the best, that we were the latest embodiment of the ancient Jewish spirit. From this yeshiva and others, from the friends of my youth, from me and others like us sprang the new driving forces of Israel, those that changed and in fact slayed the original Israel. Our generation effectively eliminated our parents’ generation and their heritage.
Those were the hardest four years of my life. I didn’t understand a thing. I failed all my classes over and over, even gym. Everything I wanted was suppressed, and everything they—the rabbis and the strict educators—wanted depressed me. Boring archaic texts, demanding studies, no “spirit”; just memorization, meaningless religious demands, and enforced sanctimonious behaviors. I was alone. There were many classmates, but not a single soul mate. I barely had any real friends. The sad fact is that I now have no contact with the person who at the time seemed like my best friend. We swore, as teenagers do, to never part. We misbehaved and joked and dreamed together. In the end, he became an ultra-Orthodox rabbi with a long beard, and I was and remain an irrepressible liberal. I was disruptive in class, my parents were called in, I was reprimanded and punished. I wanted them to deal with my great despair, the frustrations, the slippery walls I wasn’t able to climb, but the response of the system was different. I wanted to leave that place so badly. I wanted to go home, but “people like us don’t leave such a school.”
I HAD TWO LOVES AT THE TIME. I LOVED MY CHILDHOOD sweetheart, who later became my wife and the mother of our children, and I was madly in love with the sports field. That’s where I went when I got up in the morning, and I chose my clothes to match the games planned for the day. There I met my fellow sports enthusiasts, and there I was exposed to the lives of others. In one summer vacation I was accepted to a special camp for outstanding volleyball players. I wasn’t that talented, but I wanted to be. My ambition made up to a small degree for the shortcomings and flaws I was born with. For the first time in my life I left the familiar closed circles of home, family, community, school, and encountered the world. Secular people, cigarettes, tentative talk about girls, international sports, and personal fulfillment. I learned more about life there than I had learned in my closed, stern, and tough yeshiva.
The effect was immediate. At the start of the new school year I joined a religious sports club that had a volleyball team. In order to participate in practice, I needed permission from the yeshiva to be absent once a week from afternoon classes. Secular studies, of course, because missing religious studies was inconceivable. I saw my dream coming true. I fantasized about rolls and saves. I jumped repeatedly to gain strength. I set up strange contraptions for myself with a ball and net to improve my spikes, serves, and saves. I was mentally ready, though my body wasn’t built like the perfectly sculpted bodies of the superstars. But I so wanted it with all my heart and soul. Because then, like today, will was the strongest engine of my life. And then the worst thing happened to me. One of the rabbis, who wasn’t even my teacher, forbade me to join the club. With a sickly sweet smile on his face he informed me that I couldn’t play volleyball because it was “idolatry.”
How scary, idolatry is one of the three prohibitions for which a Jew is commanded to sacrifice his life, to be killed and not transgress. Needless to say, that rabbi, his god, and his tradition lost me that day, at that precise moment. How could a boy be faithful to a good and beneficent god if this abstract and strange deity views volleyball as an enemy with equal powers, deserving destruction, and what’s more, sentences me to death? If these are his enemies, how can you believe in him, this petty one who is supposed to run the world? I didn’t know then that there is no real connection between the abstract god and his tangible charlatan rabbis. And now that I know, it’s clear to me that some of them, maybe most, are idolaters who believe in the stars, astrological signs, and superstitions, against whom an all-out war is supposed to be waged at all times. This hostile train of thought, with my endless prayers for revenge against that unctuous man, was cut off by a terrible tragedy. One of his daughters was killed in one of the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem.
In those days—1978—of bereavement in Jerusalem I didn’t really believe anymore in God, certainly not in the conception of God held by that rabbi: a kind of heavenly entity, a supreme accountant calculating every one of my actions with personal oversight, exacting prices and dispensing grants. And still, for a long time I couldn’t stop obsessively wondering, was his God punishing him with cruel pettiness because of the many childhoods like mine that he took part in destroying?
AS THE YEARS WENT BY, TIME AND AGAIN I RECALLED that experience of understanding. The way that primitive rabbi saw me made it clear that this refined and noble ballgame was so sacred to me that it became the center of my being, taking up my entire reality. My shoes were volleyball shoes, my walk mimicked that of volleyball players I admired, though I don’t even remember their names today. I always had a ball in my hand, the game was a constant subject of conversation. And when such a totality captivates someone, that rabbi thought, there is no room for God. So, he waged a religious campaign against me to eradicate the plague of idolatry from my body. A local exorcist, speaking in Hebrew and Yiddish and with a sanctimonious smile. Anything to make space in me for God.
Thanks to him much space was made; I lost both God and volleyball. I probably would not have become a real athlete, but thanks to him I learned a lesson in Jewish skepticism. I learned what I was not. I am not him. In his wrong, violent, and self-righteous way he did me a valuable service, completely contrary to his original intention. He fought the spirit of sports that seized me in order to return God to the center of my being. And since then I have been fighting to push him away, because his absolute, zealous God is not my God. God is not a fact, just as she (yes, she) is not a ball. As a youngster, I felt intuitively what I can today easily express: God doesn’t compete at volleyball because sports are sweaty and tangible, and God—if he or she exists at all—is far beyond the physical that can be detected by the senses. He or she is an idea, abstract, unattainable. And anyone who tries to conceptualize him will never reach him. In prayer services, we sang “He has no body or image of a body,” and I remember pondering, the thought needling me, “Could it be that the rabbi’s god is jealous of me for having a body?” The abstract Jewish divine is all that stands beyond the tangible, and the moment God is positioned beyond what can be comprehended with the human senses, a different, wonderful belief is born, completely different from the brutal faith of that gloomy teacher. The skeptical belief.
Maybe there is personal oversight and perhaps not, maybe this is our God and maybe he belongs to others, maybe he is male or perhaps she is female, maybe there is a Creator and maybe not. I will probably never know all these things. That is why I make do with my natural skepticism as an engine that is constantly working and helping me reach new thoughts and ideas. In the end, with time, my painful loss in those days became a very big gain, which shaped the foundations of my character. I gained two important things at the time: I learned to survive even while swimming against the tide, and I became a creative skeptic.
Those were sad, gray years. My oldest sister had already left home, Dad was busy and far away, somewhere at the height of his career, most of my childhood friends were immersed in the new religious enthusiasm—stirring, total, and all-encompassing. That’s how they all were, similar boys from all across the country living the dorm life. And me? I didn’t want to be absorbed and drowned in that sticky stuff, I didn’t know that Freud had already invented psychology and that you have to talk about issues. So I internalized things and kept quiet.
“Er izt pushet hungarik” (He’s simply hungry), Dad and Mom would reassure themselves when confronted with the mute anger of their youngest son and his adolescent problems. I was indeed very hungry, but for something entirely different. I read all the books by Hermann Hesse with avid interest. I became Demian and Steppenwolf, torn like them between contradictory and raging forces. Narcissus, the wise priest, and Goldmund, the creative and mending artist, were my real rabbis and advisors. My parents had sent me out onto life’s path much too early, and the social and educational world was no more prepared for me than I was ready for it.
The years of my youth became a giant battleground between my soul that wanted to fly to freedom and the official jailers who did all they could to imprison me in the seductive place called “like everyone else.” I had only one corner of human refuge at the time. My girlfriend, my partner in love, who was the one and has remained the only. Just then—right after the Six-Day War—she moved to Israel with her parents from France. I met her on her first Sabbath in the country, when she came to the local branch of our youth movement. I fell in love with her immediately, like all the boys. Foreign, pretty, new, and mysterious. I proposed to be her boyfriend near Falafel King, but it wasn’t so simple. “Are you crazy? I don’t know you!” she protested in her French accent, which was very pronounced at the time. More time and stubborn effort were needed, and ever since then she knows me better than anyone. And the craziness? It’s still there.
We made furtive appointments on the streets of the religious neighborhood. I skipped classes to see her, even for a minute. She was the only ray of light in that darkness, and for those years of devotion I will be eternally grateful to her, to my last day. We were counselors together in the youth movement. One evening we returned home, and as young lovers do, we chose the longest and darkest route to walk, trying to take advantage of every minute together before she went back to her house and I returned home or to the dorm. After taking leave of the entourage of friends who went their separate ways, we wandered off in the dark in the narrow, wild paths of the Valley of the Cross. The large multilane road that now crosses the valley had yet to be paved. I can’t remember if the new Israel Museum on the opposite hill was already lit up, but we sat on the dark and romantic slope and held each other with all the force and love and hopes of that age.
We were youngsters during the transition from the sixties to the seventies, and we wanted to experience some of the feelings and thrills felt by many of our generation in the West. Suddenly, out of the darkness, we were caught in a shaft of light. We were startled, scared; we had been caught. One of the young members of our youth group had pointed his flashlight at us. He shined a light, and we were plunged into deep darkness.
Overnight, we became easy prey for everyone. Self-righteous disapproval and institutional hypocrisy swirled around us. People demanded our dismissal from our posts as counselors. Some threatened to tell our parents, teachers, and worst of all, that the episode would be published in Hatzofeh, the official newspaper of religious Zionism. Were it not for the human and civic courage of the counselor in charge, things would have ended very badly. She, like us, was a religious girl on the brink of adolescence, on the cusp of modernity. She courageously backed us up, blocked our dismissal, talked with us, and calmed everyone down, both gossips and zealots. She turned that courage into a way of life. Many years later our paths crossed again, when she was one of the greatest supporters—with wisdom, experience, and resources—of the establishment of Israeli civil society. And that was the way she acted to her last day, which came prematurely and after great suffering. But then, in my early moments of youth, it was a great and tremendous embarrassment, too big for children. Real distress that only with time matured into broader insight.
In those days, we weren’t actually taught anything about life itself. In class we studied Talmud, debating loudly. We were told that Talmud develops the mind, and we felt that we were intellectuals and very smart. We meticulously parsed the details of religious law, we reviewed verses and commentaries, and we argued passionately about strange legal realities. We went through the motions of general studies, but they had no real importance in the hierarchy of yeshiva priorities. In our free time—of which we did not have very much—we were heavily preoccupied with utopias, repaired worlds, establishing settlements, and yeshivas. We sang patriotic songs and marched in paramilitary parades with deafening drumbeats and flaming, inflaming torches. We sang: “Let us spread the great light, the light of the Torah.” We yelled at the top of our lungs: “God is the lord of vengeance,” and we commanded him, “Lord of vengeance, appear!” We were not taught about the basic components of human life and human society. In the yeshiva, we were prevented from exposure to the existence of non-Jews in the world, to the existence of the secular world around us and its meaning, and more than anything, efforts were made to block out the very existence of women, girls, friends, and lovers. A world of boys without gentiles, secular Jews, and girls. And as a counterweight to this ignorance and restriction I was lucky; the sole stroke of luck of my youth was that I had a girlfriend. She was the one who led me through that gloom, gave me a hand, and had faith in me in the days when I didn’t have any faith in myself.
That ray of light in the darkness of night led to my first public crucifixion, shedding some light as well on the sanctimoniousness that permeated our Bnei Akiva youth movement and our entire generation. The debates that divided us then were so naïve. Mixed dancing or not. Western dancing or only hora dances. Nylon stockings and makeup for girls—heaven forbid. But this didn’t last long; the questions were replaced with answers, and the question marks became unequivocal and one-dimensional exclamation points. The circles of boys and girls were consistently moved farther and farther away from each other. The girls’ skirts grew longer and thicker. My mother and sisters never routinely covered their hair. Today? Woe to the woman who walks uncovered and with her hair showing in a religious neighborhood, in a settlement, or on the city streets. Woe to the young woman who still lacks the modest head-covering of marriage. In general, modesty has become one of the obsessions of this community, a loaded and somewhat sick term, trying to limit and restrict the most complex human relationship—between the sexes.
All the signs of illness of those days have become complete madness in recent years. Excluding women from public spaces, members of parliament seeking to ban female performers from official ceremonies in the Knesset, neighborhoods with separate sidewalks for women and men, buses with places reserved for women (in the back, of course). Soldiers and commanders of military units refusing to hear the sound of a woman singing because “a woman’s voice is nakedness,” religious decrees prohibiting women from running for parliament because that would violate modesty restrictions, and even a prohibition on participation in parlor meetings “because these are immodest public events”—these things no longer surprise anyone. After all, “this mixes men and women like salad.”
When I read the writings of these religious and ultra-Orthodox moralizers or hear their sermons—in Judaism and other faiths—I feel that these are sick people and a community of followers and believers who are no less ill. The preoccupation with rules of modesty, sex, and sexuality is itself a kind of permission to engage in pornography in reverse. There’s something demonic in their attitude toward women. They feel so threatened by their very presence, as if women were sex machines endowed with nothing other than seductiveness. That is why they are thoroughly obsessed with every exposed and covered inch of a woman’s body. As if their whole purpose in life is to hide the witch inside her. “Mom, are you a witch?” I once asked my mother after a synagogue lesson on the phrase in the Sayings of the Fathers: “The more wives, the more sorcery.” “No, yingele,” she replied. “I love you, and witches can’t love.” I calmed down.
We were never allowed to ask the questions raised by this approach to the world. I had a girlfriend who introduced me to the great spirit of women. Together we got to know ourselves and our relationship, and that was enough for me. From a distance, I can draw some distinctions between those who had girlfriends in their childhood, a sweeping, permitted love like mine, who became committed to sexual and gender equality, and many of my friends at the time, who unlike me learned the laws of marital relations in distorted theory books, primitive volumes of Jewish law, from a ritual bathhouse attendant and bridal counselors provided by the rabbinate. They became blind zealots, following a Judaism of discrimination and exclusion.
So it is regarding women and secular Jews, and even more so when it comes to conversation with anyone who is not Jewish. I think that until I was seventeen I hadn’t set eyes on a real gentile (I don’t mean a local Arab or one under occupation, which somehow fits in a different category, but a gentile like Dad’s gentiles and his friends from “there,” the perished Jews of Europe, with their colorful Jewish stories). In 1972, I traveled abroad for the first time in my life. I landed at the Amsterdam airport on the way to Munich and the Olympic Games. On the way from the airport to the city there was a small traffic jam, and the bus came to a halt. By the side of the road local laborers worked at laying a pipe in a ditch they had dug. Every so often the blond head of one of the workers would pop up from the ditch, and I stared at him as if I were hypnotized. A blond laborer? I had never seen such a thing at home in the Israel of the fifties and sixties. We didn’t have many blond people at all at the time, and all the workers I had seen until then were black-haired and dark-skinned. I think he was the first gentile who made an impression on me.
My experience in later years taught me that precisely conversations with those who are not like me, not like us, are the most enriching. As a collective, we sanctify the stultifying narrative of “a people that dwells alone,” clinging to any manifestation of anti-Semitism as a justification for our isolationist existence, talking only with ourselves about ourselves, completely unaware of the great missed opportunity of our life: the wonderful richness of conversation with the other, someone different.
IN THE MID-NINETIES, I WAS INVITED TO VISIT JAPAN. IT was the first time in my life that I spent a few days outside the boundaries of monotheistic civilization. Until that trip anything I knew about the world was processed through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tools. I wasn’t aware that far beyond the monotheistic half of the globe there is a parallel world, no less deep, complex, aesthetic, ethical, and wise. The pain I felt during that visit surfaces every time I encounter the limited thinking of an interlocutor who is not prepared to genuinely recognize the truth and beauty of the other, of someone who is different. These are the limits of the victim of monotheism. The blind followers of the one God are systematic problem-causers, because in a place where believers can entertain only one truth, making room for only one God and only one brand of faith and commandments, there is no room for others. Ultimately it comes down to “yours” or “mine.” In the eyes of the religious monotheist, there can’t be room in heaven or earth for two or three Gods: Elohim, God, and Allah together. Therefore, the potential battle between them is constantly joined, until Armageddon and the victory of “the true God.”
In distant Japan I was exposed to a different approach. We were a group of Israelis from several walks of life. In Kyoto, in a very old traditional tea house, we had a meeting with an elderly Buddhist monk. We all sat around a low table, very close to the floor, kneeling and waiting for the traditional tea service, as is customary. After five minutes my knees were about to collapse. I writhed, asked for a chair, got up, sat, walked around, and got back down on my knees before repeating the process. Very undignified and disrespectful. And he, the old monk, sat there calmly, gaunt and erect. Not a movement. He had translucent skin and a soft smile on his face. We talked, through an interpreter, about everything, but mostly about faith and its principles, about the traditional way of life and the customs derived from it. About human duty and duties of the heart. I sensed that I was having a conversation with a partner who understood me. At that moment, I wanted to leave everything and stay there with him as long as he was alive.
During that entire sensitive meeting, a phrase from the Jewish morning prayer flashed deep inside my head: “to understand, to learn, to listen, to study and teach.” I wanted to know much more, to understand and to learn. I was avidly ready, there of all places, to listen, to hear and learn from someone older and wiser than me.
At the end of the evening, the Buddhist monk gave me a book of Buddha’s sayings in Japanese, with English translation. The book was wrapped in delicate silk paper, in the finest origami style. I felt like my hand had been scalded. “Idol worship, idol worship,” all my rabbis from that narrow-minded yeshiva shouted at me from my inner darkness. All the epithets hurled at the New Testament, at the “idolatry” of other faiths, scorched my palms. Three times a day we would all pray devoutly, “they bow to nothing and pray to a god who will not save them,” and the stricter ones among us would spit—during prayer—on the floor while saying these words.
Once we went, as a group of children, to one of those places that were called “missionary,” a distribution point for Christian missionary messages. We asked them, as a complimentary gift, of course, for copies of the Bible and the New Testament bound in one volume. Each one of us received a copy, and together we went to one of the empty lots in town and used their profane pages to make a large bonfire. We didn’t know then what burning books meant. We hadn’t been taught that Jews had burned the philosophic wisdom of Maimonides, and we had not learned about the burning of the Talmud in the Middle Ages. And we had no idea that only a few decades earlier the Nazis built a large bonfire in the bustling center of Berlin, in the opera square, before its name was changed to Bebel Square, and burned tens of thousands of books, the finest world literature written by Jews. Because the great Heinrich Heine was a converted Jew, no one bothered to expose us to his wisdom written more than a century before that conflagration, to wit: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”
All those hidden flames burned my hands. During the entire visit to Japan I could do nothing with that book. Disposing of it would have been inappropriate, because it is a book revered by many of my hosts. Reading it was out of the question, if only because of the heavy burden of the prohibitions of my childhood. So, I dragged it around in my bag like a useless object until the flight back to Israel, which lasted almost twenty-four hours. At night, half a world away, having difficulty sleeping, I began reading Buddha’s sayings. Until then, to my shame, I had not read any holy book aside from our Bible. Neither the New Testament nor the Koran. And here in the high spiritual place, literally between heaven and earth, I discovered to my surprise, and perhaps even to my dismay, that I understood many of these sayings that were written far beyond Judaism and its younger sisters, that I recognized and identified with them.
Then came long days of thinking. For the observer in me, that visit to Japan opened a window to entire worlds that were inaccessible to me from childhood: the wisdom, experience, ethics, history, and culture of other peoples and nations. On the emotional level I again felt that sense of missing out, a sourness that dogged me all the days of my youth. Life inside a plugged-up bottle. The dense air, the breath fogging up the glass and preventing any eye contact or access to the external world. The profound feeling that someone is fooling me, deceiving and blinding me. Amin Maalouf had not yet written then about the clash of identities, and that “identity [is] the sum of all our allegiances, and, within it, allegiance to the human community itself would become increasingly important, until one day it would become the chief allegiance, though without destroying our many individual affiliations.”*
MY GENERATION WAS THE BRIDGE ON WHICH THE ISRAELI Jews crossed from Athens to Sparta. We experienced firsthand the mechanisms that made possible this shift from the soft, warm, and inclusive parental home to the hardened and tough nation that grew up here seemingly unnoticed.
In our house, as in many religious homes, there were two appliances meant to get us through the Sabbath safely: the electric hot plate and the hot water dispenser. Every Saturday they were there, long before most of the Judeo-technological inventions, which were meant to deceive God according to Jewish law—the Sabbath timer, the Sabbath elevator, and all the rest of the strange and embarrassing deceptions.
In our home the bluffing didn’t reach such high levels. On the contrary, the hot plate was just a plain hot surface, with no thermostat, on which the food being cooked for the Sabbath was placed, and beside it was a tall water container that in the early years stood above the Jerusalem single burner on which my mother cooked. When the water in the dispenser ran out, Mom added more so “that there won’t be too little if guests arrive.” She improved the food on the hot plate as she saw fit: a bit more water here, a stir there, or the addition of missing ingredients. When the water got low in the dispenser we tilted it toward the small faucet at the bottom to use up what was left, and when it got in the way of the strict order in Mom’s kitchen we respectfully moved it to a less intrusive place. No one talked about strictures and prohibitions. We made sure to observe the Sabbath according to the tradition in our house, a tradition very similar to those of other homes but not exactly the same. Every home had its customs, every family had its heritage and traditions. The Jewish chain was extended, as always, from generation to generation, in all our homes.
On one Sabbath, Judge Haim Cohen was invited to give a lecture in the synagogue. He was “one of ours,” a German Jewish immigrant with a high forehead, a heavy accent, wonderful Hebrew, and a matching sense of humor. He talked about the relationship between his parents. His father was a stern-faced rabbi in Frankfurt, and his mother managed both him and the house with a flourish. Once, he said, a Jewish woman came to the house on Sabbath Eve and asked his father for a ruling on whether the slaughtered chicken in her basket was kosher. The rabbi’s wife brought the chicken into the father’s room, and he carefully examined it and ruled—not kosher! The rabbi’s wife came out of the room and returned the chicken to the Jewish woman. “It’s kosher, you can go,” she said, wishing her a good Sabbath as she accompanied her to the door. “Why did you say that to her?” the young Haim Cohen, then still known as Herman, asked his mother. “Dad ruled differently.” “Yes,” his mother replied, “Dad saw the chicken, but I saw the widow.” I’m not convinced that it was a true story, perhaps it was just a fable. But I remember how Dad told it to Mom when we returned home, and they both drew their conclusion: “Nu, of course it’s obvious.”
In 1969, when I was fourteen, it all ended. Myriads of children like me, almost an entire generation, were disconnected from home and exiled to other places. No longer did we grow up according to the customs and flexibility of home and natural, understandable compromises. We shifted to life “by the book.” The strict, absolute books of Jewish law became our operating instructions for the correct life. All at once, the day-to-day shrewdness of the Jewish housewife was gone, and Dad’s eyes, not averse to overlooking things, were closed. The forbidden became absolute, and less and less was permitted. Everyone became uniform, like assembly-line matches. A body of wood and a head either on fire or scorched. And everyone had the same operating system. From a child of my parents I became a robot of my rabbis. Colors were erased, different shades disappeared. Home lost its magic, its authority, and its role. Other institutions took its place and kneaded our young consciousness like soft dough, the consciousness of the first religious Israeli generation ever.
There were mediators for the transition from home to the new institutions. In my case they were the rabbis, known as the Ramim, our yeshiva teachers. They were always to be addressed in the third person: The Rabbi. The Rabbi thinks that… The Rabbi, I have to go to the bathroom. The Rabbi said that… Most of them came from the ultra-Orthodox world, graduates of the adult yeshivas of the Lithuanian Torah tradition. I don’t know why they came to us. Had the yeshiva world already produced more graduates than the ultra-Orthodox community needed to sustain itself, and we received the surplus? Perhaps it was a strategy of ultra-Orthodox infiltration behind the lines of the religious Zionist enemy in order to defeat it from within? Or perhaps just unexplained coincidence. Either way, I again encountered the ultra-Orthodox world that I got to know in the heder classroom of Rabbi Yisrael Lev and the bar mitzvah preparatory lessons in the Hebron yeshiva. Again, the rabbi as teacher, and me as the pupil. Again, they are the carriers of Jewish historical knowledge, and I am an empty ignoramus who is supposed to be filled from their reservoirs. I was hostile to them all from the start, except one.
There was something fake about every one of them, almost fraudulent. One of them invited us once to his house, and to demonstrate that he was with it, young and plugged in to our reality, he showed us the television hidden in his clothes closet, somewhere between his folded ritual fringed garment and his wife’s blonde wig. He tried to communicate openness, and I sensed hypocrisy. Another one spoke pompously about values and ethics, but time and again deceived us with double messages, half-truths, and absolute lies. A third was cruel and wicked, venting his frustrations on schoolboys. And the most prominent among them, the head of the yeshiva, a mythic figure in our circles, turned out to be a weak and hollow prisoner of his controlling wife.
The one I genuinely liked was Reb Nissan. This is the appropriate place to thank him for his wonderful role in my life, which at the time wasn’t so wonderful. He knew how to smile, tell a good joke, share experiences of his youth and his dilemmas at important junctures of his life. He invited me over to his house several times, even in later years when he was no longer my teacher. Simply a good man. But he was the exception. In those days, religious Zionism did not have enough of its own Torah scholars, and its rivals gave it no quarter. The ultra-Orthodox criticized us as ignorant boors, empty like secular people but much more dangerous because we pretended to be something we were not. “You,” they lashed out at us with zealous fervor, “are not the followers of venerable Jewish tradition.” And they would conclude with the most terrible criticism: “You are Reform Jews.” On the other side were the secular Israelis who denigrated religious Zionism with no less intensity. “You’re not really pioneers, you’re not really settlers, you don’t really bear the burden of the country’s security.” This was not only an abstract ideological argument; it was an almost daily experience.
One of the main sites of our childhood experiences was the “branch.” The branch was the center of activity of our youth movement, Bnei Akiva. The location of the historic Jerusalem branch was at something of a midpoint. The direct route from home to the branch went along King George Street and passed by the secular Hashomer Hatzair youth movement center. We wore Sabbath clothes, they wore the blue shirt, their youth movement uniform. We had neatly parted hair, they had hair that covered their ears, we were full of awkward hesitation between boys and girls, they spent time together naturally, we ate sunflower seeds, they smoked cigarettes on the Sabbath. Beyond the branch, down the street, in the Mea Shearim quarter, lived, then as now, the most powerful and fanatical concentration of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Sometimes one group provoked us, sometimes the other threw stones at us, or vice versa, and sometimes both. On the way to the branch, we got it from the Hashomer Hatzair kids; on the way back, from the ultra-Orthodox members of the Neturei Karta sect. One thing never changed: the branch was always torn somewhere in the middle, between the Zionists and the ultra-Orthodox, between the extroverted freedom of the former and the antiquated conservatism of the latter. All those years that’s how we were, children of religious Zionism, playing second fiddle to the two other large orchestras.
Some strings were pulled taut, almost to the breaking point, by apologetics directed at the ultra-Orthodox, the strictly observant fanatics of God who seemingly never compromised and would never give up their total belief. Their religious absolutism stood in complete contrast to the compromise that characterized all aspects of religious Zionism. We were a little bit of everything, but there was nothing totalitarian that characterized us. We very much wanted to be like everyone else, so we weren’t fanatical about anything. We tried to dance to the tune of pioneering Zionism. We left our shirttails out, and we wore khaki pants manufactured by Ata, folded very short. We wore simple one-strap “biblical” sandals, and the daring ones among us grew moustaches. We learned how to build structures with wooden poles and tie knots “like the kibbutzniks.” We wandered the paths of the country like the greatest hikers. We sang the songs of the youth movements, and we knew the war songs by heart. We admired the bearers of their culture, Meir Har-Zion and the heroes of the paratroopers, the pioneers of tower and stockade, the illegal immigrants, and the fighters of the Palmach militia. They were all theirs, and not a single one was ours. We didn’t have even one personal and intimate hero of our own, until 1967.
Only then did we finally have our own heroes. Our leaders were born, and at long last we had our own dreams. Only we spoke about reviving the monarchy, and only we had a plan to conquer the country, the whole country. It took a few more years for this potential to burst forth, but from the start the writing was etched on all Israeli walls: this is our time, the youth of religious Zionism. The storm of 1967 ripped all the old doors from their hinges. Nothing returned to the way it was after the cease-fire. Everything had been thrown open, breached, and made possible. From a small country surrounded by narrow and oppressive borders we became an expansive empire.
The new wide-open spaces of the Holy Land opened before us. Here was Hebron and Bethlehem, ours and King David’s. There was Jeroboam’s Tirzah and Gideon’s Ofrah. We almost climbed our forefather Jacob’s ladder, whose legs were planted in Beit El, and our heads touched the sky. It started with trips. We youngsters wandered here and there around Jerusalem, and the older ones “went down to Sinai.” We knew by heart the Tombs of the Kings, Kidron Valley and the necropolis adorning it, and we meandered through Tzofim Stream and the burial caves carved into its banks. Sometimes we climbed on foot from Lifta to the tomb of the prophet Samuel. We went down to the Givon pool and imagined ourselves as the heroic biblical fighters led by Yoav Ben Tzruya, defeating Avner Ben Ner and his fighters there—establishing the young Kingdom of Judea with our very hands. Jews unwittingly vanquishing the Israelis of the Israelite kingdom. Sometimes we were taken to Kfar Etzion to see the renewal of Jewish settlement there. A religious Zionist revival in the place where both settlers and the young Israeli army were defeated and humiliated only nineteen years earlier, in the War of Independence.
On Sabbaths, we went to the Western Wall. We prayed at the Chabad House. We came back home with dusty shoes after we descended into the depths of the four synagogues in the heart of the destroyed Jewish Quarter. We got to know all the steps and climbs on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. We walked there with heads held high. We hid in the nooks and crannies of the wall when we were searching for some romance mixed with identity and meaning. In all these places, we met only children and youths like us. There were virtually no secular children in all these new places. Most of us belonged to the same youth movement, Bnei Akiva. We were members, counselors, or graduates of the movement. Our parents came from various distant diasporas. They had other accents, old-fashioned clothes, customs and mannerisms from worlds that had existed but were now destroyed and vanished.
And we were so proud of our uniformity. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. If you listened to one of us, you knew all of us. We wore plaid shirts over white T-shirts. Khaki pants, definitely not jeans. We wore our ritual fringes under our clothes, and we all had knitted skullcaps. Our sisters or cousins knitted our head coverings. For the happy ones among us, they were gifts of love from our girlfriends. Yael knitted me a skullcap, or kippah, and I made her a keychain of olive wood, on which I pasted the symbol of the youth movement, committing us all to “Torah and Work.” Ultra-Orthodox youths weren’t there, either. All the shababniks we had seen in massive demonstrations on Sabbaths in Jerusalem were absent from the new Garden of Eden. Greater Israel became our stage, on which we could suddenly break out and express ourselves.
My early childhood was restricted by walls. Fences around houses and communities. A fence along the borders. Fences across the whole country. Independence ringed by coils of barbed wire, and it was natural and understandable to everyone. Near the old City Hall, bus number 15 had to make a sharp left, because Israeli Jerusalem ended with a high wall covered with rusty metal sheets topped with barbed wire. There was a no-man’s-land fence under the Yemin Moshe neighborhood and the whole scary area beyond the new zoo. All these fences came down at once. I felt this way only one other time in my life: when I watched, along with billions of people around the world, the fall of the Berlin Wall. I felt the tremendous catharsis of Berliners. I thought to myself then that only Jerusalemites, Berliners, and Irish residents of Belfast could understand the momentous declaration of President Kennedy: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
We grew up in a city with a wall through its heart and we witnessed its collapse. We collectively skipped over the wreckage and rubble and went out to new places. Here and there people were already talking about settlements. Renewing the Jewish community in Hebron hovered in the background in our home. The Hebron settlers compelled the Israeli government to appease them. The blood of those murdered in the 1929 massacre of Hebron’s Jews was their most powerful argument. And to this argument, Dad, the moderate minister, partner of Mom, a survivor of the riots, had no response. He also employed the Zionist rhetoric, that building and settlement are our ways of revenge, and did not understand that this path leads to many more wars and bloodshed than any local massacre. Those were years of great arrogance. We had defeated armies, we had struck a resounding blow against the bombastic Arab leaders. Daring David had struck multitudes of Arab Goliaths. We had the privilege of being born in a generation that completed what the mythic generation of 1948 had not succeeded in doing: liberating Jerusalem and lifting the siege ringing the reddening and thickening Israeli neck.
A few days after the ’67 fighting died down Dad went on a ministerial tour of the territories. I don’t recall if we called them “occupied” or “liberated” at home, but we felt very good about them, with “our Hebron” and “our Shchem,” or Nablus. My father was the ultimate charmer. There was not a person on the Jewish earth that he could not engage in conversation, communicate with, and endear himself to. He remembered many people and their personal histories. He memorized thousands of family trees. He knew human and Jewish history and the annals of hundreds of communities and multitudes of figures. When he was told something he never forgot it. Faces were forever engraved in his phenomenal memory. And on these strengths, he was able to always draw associations, make conversation, create a connection.
We all traveled in his giant official vehicle, a vintage American car, to Nablus, Ramallah, and all those places that just a moment ago were beyond the pale. On Mount Gerizim, we met the high priest of the Samaritans, and for the first time I saw my father dumbfounded. Dad wore a European hat with a wide brim, and the priest came toward him with a head covering that looked like a mix between a fez and an Arab head-scarf. Dad was clean-shaven, and the priest had a wild beard. My father in a tailored suit and matching tie, the priest in a white jalabiya robe reaching to his ankles. Dad spoke many languages fluently, and the latter understood neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. Oy, he couldn’t be humored with a good joke, and he hadn’t even studied the biblical commentary of Rashi. A European Jew facing a Samaritan—neither Jew nor Arab—and the foreignness of the territories struck us mercilessly in our first encounter. Faced with this new reality—half of which was old and identifiable, and the other half new and strange, embodied in the figure of the Samaritan high priest—even Dad was left speechless. Today, when I reflect on that moment, I see his loss of words back then as a symbol of far greater losses.
From there we went on to the Golan Heights. I had my picture taken near the Banias Fall, a twelve-year-old boy with a pioneer’s hat, holding an Uzi submachine gun. My head is tilted jauntily to one side like a tough fighter, as if I were a war hero of those days. With all these places, people, images, and experiences, my spirits soared sky-high. But Dad, it seems to me in retrospect, gradually shrank. On the way back he asked Mom a question that has remained unresolved since: “What will we do with two million Arabs?” But he and his colleagues never made any genuine and committed effort to find a real answer.
Those who had survived the destruction of their childhood, the destruction of the thousand-year-old Jewry of Europe, those who had the strength to save those uprooted by the Holocaust and were part of the founding of Israeli society, reached the great struggle for the Israeli soul weary and exhausted. Dad surrendered almost without a fight to the rising forces in his movement. The messianic youngsters bested him and dragged him against his will to be one of the builders of the new settlements in the territories, and, as a result, one of the main destroyers of the original Israel that he had established and loved. Today it is clear to me that in order to return to the path from which we strayed so dramatically, we have to destroy as many as possible of the failures of Dad and his partners gracing every hill and mountain in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Actually, all of them, and return to the path Dad had meant to take were it not for those messianic hijackers.
Like stampeding goats, they stormed his generation, the young against the old, Israelis against diaspora Jews, pioneers against the establishment, radicals against conservatives. It was an epic battle that ended in resounding defeat. Not one of his political maneuvers worked. How can you make a deal with fanatics? What can really satisfy totalitarian people? Nothing. Dad’s worldview was the path of compromise. A complex man, he was able to understand and contain all sides of a dispute and always serve as mediator and problem-solver. But they were simplistic people who saw only one side. They were not interested in anyone but themselves, and took no one else into account. They wanted it all and immediately. All of the promised land, the redemption. Power and rule. He battled in smoke-filled halls and rooms, and they were fighters on the hills and mountains. He escaped by the skin of his teeth from “there,” from the Holocaust, and they won the Six-Day War and liberated the Holy City. They connected directly to convenient parts of the myths and ethos of the early days of Zionism and Jewish settlement and scorned him and his learned, universal sources of inspiration. They stole the symbols and content of the Labor movement and took them to new and bad places, showing arrogant contempt for those who established the state for them. They adopted the external trappings of secularism and loaded them with different, new Jewish content that had never been here before. The same huge moustaches, the same creased sandals and hands, the same coarse and meager language. But inside they burned with the fanatic fire of doctrines of redemption and the end of days.
The most significant public-opinion molders of the time, a mixture of Labor Zionists, Revisionists, writers, and poets, launched them; people like Nathan Alterman and Moshe Shamir, Haim Gouri and Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi. The younger Rabbi Kook gave them a blessing for the road, and they have never looked back. Traditional conservatives, the religious Zionists, joined with nationalist conservatives, led by Menachem Begin and the Likud movement, along with economic conservatives to embark on their paradoxical path: revolutionary conservatism. I was with them in their first moments; I was born from the womb of religious Zionism. With the insights I gained over the years, I grew very distant from them. We were together in the first chapter, in which Israel was secular, socialist, a budding democracy, whose organizing idea was state authority. Today, when they are at the height of their power, I see them as nothing less than a real and present mortal danger.
In 1977, the first ever right-wing government was formed in Israel. With this political upset and the rise of the right to power, I went my own way. They became the entrepreneurs of the second Israeli chapter and partners to it, and since then they have made Israel less democratic and more nationalist, capitalist, brutal, and religious. Territory, the complete and sacred Land of Israel, replaced the state for them as the ultimate organizing idea. And I did my best in the opposing political bloc, moving from protest movements to the heart of the establishment. Our movement was in completely opposite directions. They went far to the right to the extreme fringes, and I was becoming more of a peacemaker and working for the separation of religion and state. I was becoming a pluralist, a feminist, opening up to a great degree.
Today, many of them are doing what they can to move Israel to its third chapter. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, when religious winds are blowing throughout the region, Israel is also growing from the chapter of Greater Israel, with all its associated ills, to the chapter of the Temple and its myriad dangers. For many, too many—nationalists, secular people, and many of my religious relatives—the idea of erecting the Third Temple is the yearning that organizes all political activity. In this chapter of theirs and of a profoundly changed Israel, two things are becoming clear to me. One is that they have gone from being political rivals to bitter enemies, and that bloodshed, a real civil war, is no longer inconceivable if the Temple movement indeed becomes a political reality. The other is that without a complete humanistic, egalitarian civic doctrine that will fight them and replace them and their rule, Israel will be lost.
In the beginning, the outlines were unclear; the lines separating us blurred. Our general feeling of euphoria lasted a few more years. We called the Arabs names, laughed at their powerlessness and the primitiveness we attributed to them. The “them” and “us” always ended in our favor, and they always accepted the result, which for them was no more than zero. “Arab work,” “Arab army,” or just “Arab” were the most common derogatory terms. Who knew then that this good feeling does not necessarily indicate good health, but is rather a sign of serious illness, the racism that has eaten away the Israeli body and soul? Very few. I wasn’t one of them.
IT WAS 1973, AND I WAS PREOCCUPIED WITH OTHER anxieties. The culmination of every yeshiva high school student’s educational experience is the matriculation exam in Talmud. I couldn’t sleep. I had been absent from so many classes over the years that I didn’t have the slightest idea of the material. The little I knew, I didn’t really understand. I was a long way from the Talmudic exchanges between the great sages Abayey and Rava. They were discussing gittin—Jewish divorce documents—and I was dreaming of my love, Yael. They were debating the laws of Shabbat observance, and I just wanted to be back home for my mother’s chicken. To this day I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because “tomorrow is the matriculation exam in Talmud,” and I don’t know anything. A mix of castration fears and performance anxiety that never leaves you.
Over the long course of those days of study, each of us tried to pave his own way to his future. Many went to continue their studies together at the college-level yeshivas and in the army units comprising mainly students from the same yeshiva. This was a special arrangement, known as hesder, for religious young men, combining the yeshiva and army settings. And I, as in all the previous years, continued without them—alone and lonely.
Over the course of my final year of study, my rabbi, the one with the television in his closet, tried to persuade me to enroll in a college-level yeshiva instead of signing up for military service. He held out lots of sticks, and a few carrots. The sticks were the destiny of the Jewish people and my own personal responsibility as the scion of an elite religious Zionist family. He assailed me with all this during every one of our conversations. Like everyone else in those days, I was always trying to stay fit. I lifted weights, I did push-ups, and I hoisted myself up again and again over the chin-up bar. But this weight was already too much for my fragile religious frame.
The rabbi’s biggest carrot was my final grade on the matriculation examination considered most important of all—the exam in Talmud. This grade was calculated by averaging the final exam grade with that given by the school, which assessed and weighed my accomplishments during all my years of study. “If you will go on to yeshiva, you’ll get a very high grade. And if not… then not,” he kept repeating to me. Obviously, I wanted the highest grade, and over the course of that year I led him to understand that his wish would come true, and I would indeed continue my Torah studies. I gave him what he asked for in order to get what I wanted. But it was an empty promise in exchange for a hollow grade. Most of my friends didn’t hesitate about the decision at all. They planned to continue learning Torah at the various institutions suggested to them. Only a handful of the 120 in my grade informed me, with heads held high, that they intended to go into the army as soon as they finished their studies. The majority simply went with the flow.
It was strange that, despite the constant presence of the army in our lives, and in spite of the crowns of glory and the miracles we associated with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), they—the various governmental agencies, educators, and army recruiters—did not prepare us at all for army service. It always loomed before us, but we didn’t exactly know what it was about. Our rabbis and educational role models put tremendous pressure on us to continue our studies in the college-level yeshivas. From their perspective, it befitted their pedagogical efforts, their investment in us. They sent us for a “yeshiva week” in various institutions of higher Torah learning in order to give us a taste of the intellectual paradise they would offer us. That was the last thing I needed, more of that terrible thing that had destroyed all the beauty of the last few years. But to say that aloud also was the last thing I needed, because it would come at the expense of my final grade.
Quietly, almost clandestinely, I began the official process of enlisting in the army, like most other Israelis my age. I had no one to consult. My parents didn’t know anything about the subject, my schoolmates were in the thrall of another world, and I didn’t really have other friends. And so, two parallel channels were dug beneath the puddle of my life. The rabbi dug his, and I dug mine, and they were heading in opposite directions. His, the rabbi’s, was heading toward my yesterdays, and mine was heading toward my own tomorrow. The army officials, in those pre-computer days, the days of copy paper and pencils stuck behind the ears of bored clerks, didn’t notice that I was registered on two lists: the rabbi’s, which was for a deferral of army service, and mine, which was about immediate enlistment.
Signed up on both lists, I walked into my exam. Two stern-faced rabbinic examiners sat with my rabbi and asked me a few questions. I didn’t fully grasp their questions, but suddenly there came to my aid—for the first but not the last time in my life—my father’s prodigious memory. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that I had inherited this quality from him. I began quoting extensively and flawlessly from the text in which the concept they were asking about appeared. They spoke out of deep understanding, and I spoke in quotations; they asked learnedly, and I responded by rote. But I passed the terrifying exam, and with a high grade, which they told me then and there. “One last question,” the examiner said to me, when my hands were already pushing against the door. “What are you doing next year?”
It was a moment of truth, a decisive moment. “Next year I’ll be a paratrooper,” I responded forthrightly with the answer I had not even given myself yet. It was as if the clouds of the last four years had suddenly parted to reveal a sun that shone right on me. The sun shone in one place, but night fell in another. It gave me pleasure to see the shadows pass across the examiners’ faces, and my rabbi’s face, livid. He yelled at me, “But you said you were going to yeshiva—otherwise I would not have given you such a high mark. You would have scored much lower!” But it was too late.
* Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 100.