BOOKS HAVE BEEN MY COMPANIONS FOR AS LONG AS I can remember. Adventure books and biblical philosophy, theology and politics. My library is an eclectic collection of thousands of books. From the old Jewish texts through the classics of world and Hebrew literature to the complex suspense thrillers of Jo Nesbø and John Le Carré. Hidden among them are all kinds of finds from used bookstores. Old articles by leaders of the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine, whose leadership has long expired, works by long-forgotten writers, original publications from the days that we were the people of the book and read books, items found in trash cans before they were to be collected by the big green garbage truck.
My library is a constant free association. A kaleidoscope that always surprises me anew. I had looked for Eli Amir on Iraqi Jewry and found Yehoyada Amir on Franz Rosenzweig. Staring at the poetry shelf in search of a nice passage from Wisława Szymborska, I was suddenly greeted with open arms by Hannah Arendt with The Jewish Writings. So it goes every day. In our home the difference between a young scholar studying a Talmud problem and an uneducated person was diagnosed thus: “The young scholar sits down to study. The uneducated person comes for bargains,” or metzies, as my father would say with his clever Yiddishist smile. In my library I am a wandering bargain-hunter, like the early risers who go down to the beach with metal detectors. I never despair of finding the treasure that may not be there at all, or that someone has lost and given up on, and was meant just for me. A find.
This is a characteristic I learned from my father’s giant library. Our entire house was full of books. In every room, in every corner. He arranged them according to an order and logic clear only to him. In every book there were paper notes with associative remarks, lines marked with a thick pen, and pages folded like Jewish origami during reading on the Sabbath, when writing and marking were forbidden. With his photographic memory, Dad documented every page and every note. But that didn’t help him in his constant arguments with Mom. She was a Hebron native and he was the formal yeke, or German immigrant, but when it came to putting things in order, cleaning, and being on time, she was the actual yeke of the family. “You have two options,” she would always say, giving him an ultimatum, “arranging the books by size or by color.”
“But Rivka,” he would beg and stick the books where he wished. He would mix, and she would organize. And so it was their entire life together. From the day he died she didn’t touch the library. She froze his logical disorder as it was. A monument that stayed that way until she died and the house was emptied of all their memories.
A few years ago, I received from my wife and children a wonderful gift for my birthday. A professional librarian arrived at the house without my knowledge and tried to arrange my library. She worked and labored, put up and took down, switched and placed, and ultimately gave up. My library remained in its perfect state, just the way I like it, half ordered and half jumbled. Over the years, it would become more jumbled, requiring the further intervention of a professional, and so on.
This life, which appears to be in disarray, among the shelves, suits me well. There are people who live “in between,” willingly confined there, because that is the place where they don’t have to do anything. Others on both sides decide everything for them. For many people being in the middle is parking in the world’s most convenient parking lot, the place of rest for those without an opinion. I too am today in some kind of middle, but my “in between” is completely different. It is not a comfort zone, but a churning whirlpool, a constant struggle. I am between worlds, but outside them. Time and again I find myself challenging and being challenged by more than one world. I am addicted to this complexity. Sometimes I’m worn out and get tired, but mostly I argue and debate in all directions with the hope that these disagreements will produce totally new creations for me and my adversaries. This life, between worlds, did not begin in Dad’s library. Because its core was in the “big room,” the bourgeois living room, which we were forbidden from entering on Sabbaths when respected guests arrived, those who could not be invited for a cup of black coffee in the small kitchen. In honor of these people Mom would spread a nice hand-embroidered or lace tablecloth in the salon, and place on it a silver serving plate shaped like a trio of delicate cloverleafs. In one section were homemade sugarcoated peanuts, in the second a mix of almonds and raisins, just like in a sad Yiddish song, and in the third cookies that she called strudel, which were unique and tasty, the likes of which I have never tasted, though they had nothing in common with Viennese strudel.
This was the place of the adults, a temple inaccessible to children. That is why when guests came, we found shelter with friends and neighbors. We went to play outside. The outside of my childhood home was an entire world. The house still stands, elegant as always, and my beloved sister carries on the family tradition there. You enter through the heavy art-deco gate and climb the wide staircase. Before turning left, toward the once-filled goldfish pools, or right, to the small garden, you see an alcove and above it a stone inscription in Gothic letters: “Villa Lea, 1 May 1934.” The story of the house was never hidden from us, though in those days it was an embarrassing tale.
It was built by a lawyer by the name of Nasib Abcarius Bey, the source of its popular name, Abcarius House. Abcarius Bey was a Christian lawyer, Greek Orthodox, a native of Egypt, who arrived here with the British occupation. He was one of the most successful and respected lawyers in the country, an energetic operator who concocted a few real estate deals between the Greek Orthodox church and the Zionist movement, deals that facilitated the establishment of the important neighborhoods of Jewish Jerusalem outside the Old City walls. During the years in which he lived in Jerusalem and came in contact with the Jews, he fell in love with a Jewish woman from the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, whose name was Lea Tennenbaum. The city was atwitter, but he was resolutely in love and built her a house, far from crowded Mea Shearim and its malicious gossip.
I think that it was the only non-Jewish home in the Rehavia quarter, the neighborhood of pioneers and intellectuals of the 1920s. All the homes in the neighborhood, except ours, were Jewish homes, unlike the houses across the street, in the neighboring Talbiyeh neighborhood, which almost all belonged to rich Arabs, mostly Christian. Our house was built from the start “in between,” between the Jews of Rehavia and the Christians of Talbiyeh, between the Christian man and the Jewish woman. The home of a gentile who lived with a Jewish woman who chose him over a proper arranged marriage in the ultra-Orthodox collective where she was born. Later she pauperized him with her wastefulness, and he became impoverished less than two years after the house was dedicated. She left him for other, more financially established lovers and he was compelled to abandon the beautiful home he had built for the two of them. The house is built in the Bauhaus or international style, and as my childhood home, my Kinderstube, it was not just an architectural style. It was the human “in between” style in which I grew up, a Jerusalem Bauhaus child.
Villa Lea is not just a grand Jerusalem house; its human history is just as fascinating. When Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, was granted political asylum in Israel after Italy conquered parts of his country on the eve of World War II, he moved into Abcarius House. (Abcarius Bey did not live there anymore, and his house was transferred to the property administration of the British mandate government.) When we were little and we were told, “A king once lived here,” we thought it was just a legend, like other fairy tales that parents tell their children. Only later did we learn that in this Jerusalem there are true fairy tales.
After the founding of Israel, the house and its courtyards were transferred to the property administration of the fledgling Israeli government, and the new elite of Jerusalem and Israel gathered there. Before us, Moshe Dayan lived on our same floor. Then the floor was divided, and we shared it with Chaim Herzog, then a senior officer and the son of the chief rabbi, before he became president, and with many more that came afterward. The first finance minister of Israel, Eliezer Kaplan, who died before I was born, lived above us. His scary widow continued living there with her childless daughter and son-in-law. On the top floor lived Avraham Kidron, who later served as the Israeli ambassador to several countries and as director-general of the foreign ministry. In the pre-state era, he was an investigator and judge in the scandalous treason trial—the Tobianski trial—which ended with the only death sentence pronounced in the country by Jewish judges and carried out (except for the sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, but that’s a different story). A house that was totally establishment, secular people, soldiers, socialists, and us.
Until age six I didn’t know the differences among them all. From my first to last day in the Israeli education system I was in an environment of religious boys. Today it seems to me that my parents wanted to encourage this duality. I encountered everything denied me in the religious education system at home and in the playground. I grew up in between. Between my parents and their social circles and the house and its other residents who were very different from us. Between the new Israeli street and my parents’ library that held worlds now vanished.
FROM THE DAY I LEARNED HOW TO READ AND WRITE, THE written word was always there at my side when I searched for my convictions. I read a great deal, but I didn’t write enough. For many years I wondered, even angrily, about my late father. So talented and eloquent, full of knowledge and memories. “Dad, why don’t you write?” I would ask him, and he, with his natural affability, would evade me time and again. I was mad at him, and it didn’t occur to me to think: and why don’t you write, Avrum? Only when I started writing myself and felt the scathing self-criticism of the end result did I understand him.
It’s very difficult for a person who is a talented speaker—which my father was, an exciting speaker, a sharp debater, a gifted teacher, and a fascinating preacher—to change his mode of connection with the public from speech to writing. They are not the same. The speaker is in constant and immediate associative contact with his followers and listeners. He reacts to their body language, argues when necessary, and flatters when required. And most importantly—the words of the speaker go into thin air. They are almost never firmly fixed or embedded. They can be changed, denied, sidestepped, added to, or diluted. Which is not the case with the written word. The black on white, the documentation that can no longer be altered, always confronts you as a constant reminder that cannot be denied. A monument to your words, a commemoration of the truth that was yours at the moment it was written. Writing is a commitment. A speech, on the other hand, especially a political one, flirts and floats, but only seldom does it give a commitment from which there is no return. And Dad, who right up to the last minute of his ninety years was busy with survival, was not ready to commit to anything, not even in the face of the grim reaper or his life’s memories.
The increased reservations about my political mission came with thoughts, doubts, and complex comprehensions about our modus vivendi. Far beyond the Israeli collective Zionist paradigm I was born into and function in. My thoughts led to the 2004 decision to break away from active political life. I understood that I wanted to bequeath these thoughts to my children. I will never have property and wealth for them. But I don’t want to hoard my thoughts and values like a miser. I write for my children so they will have starting points for life and the directions they choose, if they want them. My generous mother always encouraged us to take different things from her. Cake and leftovers from the Sabbath, an extra stainless steel pot that was on sale at the supermarket, a giant roll of plastic bags that she found as a “bargain.” “Why do I need you to wait until I die to get these things? Take them now and be happy I’m alive,” she would say with a joyful smile. And in that sense, I want to be like her, in generosity of thought and openness of writing.
WRITING AND RUNNING HAVE TAUGHT ME TO TOUCH MY soul and spirit and express them, because they provide paths that enable me to search for the deep roots of what interests me. One of my most important and deepest teachers of the soul of running is Nahshon Shohat, a fantastic runner, brilliant legal mind, and the best “running intellectual” I ever met, who tells me sometimes that I don’t run to mark the attainment of a specific objective; I look for meanings in the running. That’s why I called my running blog A Man Runs Inside Himself. Because that’s where it begins and that’s where it reaches, inside the self. I write for the same reason. In order to reach the chasms and sinkholes that have opened in my internal spaces and to fill them. To read a book and discover my thoughts, not those of others. And go on with them to the furthest places inside me. Since retiring I have published a few books, a great many articles, and endless words; I have run marathons, shorter races, and tens of thousands of kilometers; and through writing and running, I have reached truths that were hidden and imprisoned inside me without hope for rescue. Through hard physical and spiritual work, I developed the stubborn patience of a marathonic personality.
For me, running is returning to the most basic foundations of our existence, to the moment before things were spoiled. I look at my grandchildren learning to walk, and I am moved. I learn each hesitant step with them, the hand reaching for help; I accept with great love the smile that comes with great achievement; I embrace the fall and disappointment and do it over again. And now they’re running and moving away from me. Where are they going? Like toddlers but with moments of grace, as adult runners connect to the simplicity and innocence of their early days. Paradoxically, the more the technology of the shoes, clothing, and gear improves, the more runners can reach their own (pretechnological) foundations. This is a sport of return to the natural, return to the self. Every small child and toddler knows how to run. First, they crawl, learn to walk, and immediately run. Later, with the careful consideration, social passivity, and other antiphysical patterns of the contemporary era, the modern individual becomes a cumbersome lump. Our parents’ generation viewed a potbelly and slow walk as evidence of gravitas, respectability, seriousness, and personal abilities. We, on the other hand, invest in diets and body sculpting, much more than the entire Western world invests in eradicating hunger in developing countries.
During one of my campaigns for another respectable public position, one of my supporters in the Knesset plenum told me, “Avrum, you don’t stand a chance.”
“Why?” I wondered.
“Because you’re too thin,” he replied. “Israelis like their leaders fuller.” When I looked at the rest of those present in the plenum, I had to agree. When the contest was over and I was elected to the post, it turned out that some of the members of the electing body were Jews from abroad, who preferred me to other candidates because “a slim man is disciplined and restrained.” In time, I realized that I wanted to be opposite things at the same time: slim and unrestrained.
Very early in my life I was swept up in the fascinating vortex of relations between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Every time I was attracted anew, like a butterfly to a warm and friendly fire, to the spiritual pluralism of American Jewry. I saw how the health trend was growing there. People exercising, eating right, and in their spare time running and walking. I too tried to shake off my automatic aversion to sports imposed on me in the far and dark days at the yeshiva, an aversion that was a combination of the values of the Torah world, which despises the Hellenistic culture of the body, and the legacy of the army, which turned every sports activity into torture and hazing. I began slowly and modestly, and since then I run a lot. Most years, the hour of running was my vital break. The only moments I had to myself, alone. Without phone calls or tasks, without inquiries from the public or any disruptions.
Today I run for meditation. I run to the lost kilometers. To the sublime peak of the run, which is like a moment of nirvana. A serenity of being utterly clean. A reality in which the mind, thoughts, and obsessions vanish, and you run as if by suggestion. It happened to me for the first time in the Tiberias Marathon in 2003. I meticulously tracked all the data: pulse, breathing, drinking, the energy gels, and the kilometers marked at the side of the road. I turned around at Ein Gev, ran another kilometer, and suddenly I was in Tzemah. Wait a minute, how did I get here? Where did the last kilometers go? I don’t know. I wasn’t there, I was somewhere else. I was swallowed up in the infinity of the serenity, and in the words of Rachel, the poetess of the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings, it seemed as if I were absent. Since then I have tried to re-create that feeling every time. There are practice sessions in which I manage to erase a few hundred meters, sometimes even more, and the more I get to the vanished kilometers, the better my run and the calmer my life is. I still haven’t found the formula and mechanisms to get there of my own volition and in control. Sometimes it happens, and many times it doesn’t happen at all. Thoughts run in all directions. Indeed, this is not foot running, not even cardio running. It is the running of thoughts, or more precisely, the thoughts that you do not try to control and take control of. The minute the head is freed and capable of soaring, the body, as well, reaches the lost kilometers. The most beautiful, meaningful, and calming kilometers of life. I know, I was there, after Ein Gev on the way back to Tiberias. Those were the most enchanting kilometers of my life. And when I returned from eternity, I had my first book in my head, the whole book: beginning, middle, and end.
THE THOUGHTS WERE NESTING THERE FOR A WHILE. I heard the new rhetoric of Jewish and Muslim preachers getting louder and full of negativity; I listened to American politics and to the impact of Christian demagoguery on President George W. Bush. I find it difficult to distinguish among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious fundamentalism. And I realized that with the turn of the century, the incoming twenty-first century would be much more religious than the outgoing secular twentieth. All of these thoughts and voices around me found their way into my first book, God Is Back. It was written about the religious dimension of the twenty-first century. In it I described the central Israeli structure—the distorted relations between religion and state. I identified the erosion of Western secular conversation and the similar erosion that is happening in Israel. In the book’s pages and chapters I tried to look at life through two lenses: through the Hubble Space Telescope I peered with curiosity at distant galaxies of the humanity of our time, and with the electron microscope I examined the minute details of the realities familiar to me that threaten us. That is our era: you can see the farthest and biggest, and at the same time see the near and small. I wrote about global manifestations of religious fundamentalism and shameful local expressions of Jewish paganism. With the telescope, I tried to decipher the tremendous religious forces that drove President Bush, and I examined what lies behind the people attacking abortion clinics and women seeking the right to choose and have control over their bodies. At the same time, I wanted, through writing, to examine my religious identity.
A few years before the highly anticipated Y2K, I began by looking for an answer to a very personal, really microscopic question posed to me by a boy settler. I was on a visit to the land of the settlements south of Hebron. It was Chanukah time, and the tour began in one of the kindergartens in the historic region. One of the toddlers, with long sidelocks and blue eyes, beautiful as a divine angel and wearing an oversized kippah, fixed me with a stare.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Avraham,” I replied.
“And what are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to visit you,” I answered.
“Why?” he queried.
“What do you mean, why?” I said, almost insulted.
“You want peace with America and the Arabs. You are a Hellenizer! You eat pork at home? Why do you wear a kippah?” he lashed out at me.
At the time, I didn’t answer him. And I had never answered myself. Now the time had come.
When I studied in elementary school I met an unusual person, a wonderful teacher named Meir Bakshi. Smart, sophisticated, and with a healthy sense of humor. He would call me up sometimes to the front of the class, take the kippah off my head, knock on my skull, and say with feigned satisfaction, “the Dome of the Rock.” He was the best at such puns. Both a head hard as a rock and a holy place like the one liberated by the brave Israeli soldiers last year. There was no typical kippah then for schoolboys. Everyone brought what he had at home. The school kippah was not knitted. Every boy had a different kippah: made of felt or cloth, a “Jerusalem good boy” kippah or a black rabbi’s kippah. The kippah was mandatory in school, but not really required at home or during play. Everyone did in his free time what was customary at home. I came to school every day with a big Swiss skullcap. My everyday kippah had decorations of white flowers, the edelweiss of the Alps, and my Sabbath and holiday kippahs also had a woven tail and a pastoral embroidery of Swiss cows. I have no idea why my parents decided that this was the appropriate look for me, their only son.
I can imagine myself then. A small Jerusalem boy with slanted bangs in the style of the sixties, wearing the giant skullcap of cow herders high up in the Alps. What were they thinking? I ask myself. The wonder increases even more when I think about my parents, who made every effort to avoid falling prey to the gossip around us. “What would they say?” was the motivating motto of our lives.
In Israel’s early years—during the fifties and sixties—the weekly HaOlam HaZeh (a news magazine published in Israel between 1937 and 1993, famous for its highly unorthodox and irreverent style) was at the peak of its power. It was virtually the only voice in opposition to the chorus of the establishment and the national consensus. This daring and courageous paper combined brave and consistent exposure of the political reality that the establishment wanted to hide and cover up, along with pornographic nudity in the style of those modest days. The ideology of the paper was “without fear or favor.” A black bar covered the eyes and private parts of the weekly beauties on the back cover, and naked and unrestrained politics filled its inside pages. A political person, like my father, could not function in the roiling Israeli arena without this uncensored information, without knowing what was actually going on in the real world, the one not reported in partisan publications and the slavish media. Which is why we would get HaOlam HaZeh every week.
My mother, on the other hand, could not live in this world with the knowledge that, God forbid, someone would know that something so abominable was entering our home. I was the point of contact between these colliding worlds. One of my official jobs at home was to take out the garbage. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, I was sent with the family refuse to the local garbage can. A ritual that repeated itself every day, except the day in which we threw out HaOlam HaZeh from the previous week. There was a set drill. I took the garbage and went downstairs. I knew exactly where Mom’s sing-song voice would reach me, “Avraham.” As an expert courier I would return, and Mom would open the garbage bag, look for the old copy of HaOlam HaZeh and make certain what she had already made sure of five times before at home—that the embarrassing back page was folded inside. “So that if God forbid someone pokes around the garbage of the Burg family…”
They were very modest people. Until their last days, the house contained the used furniture they had bought right after their wedding. We never spent extravagantly on ostentatious events. On the contrary, my father was a minister in many of Israel’s governments, and during most of my childhood years he was eligible for an official car and a driver provided by the government. The driver, Baruch Vessely, was a member of the household. A friend. His children were my friends. We grew up together, similar and equal and different in the same way all human beings are different from one another. One difference was visible. Every morning Baruch took his son to the school in which we studied, and I was forbidden to get into Dad’s car, not even on rainy and snowy Jerusalem days, because of “what would they say?” That is why, when I think about the kippah they put on my head, I wonder where those fears had gone. Then additional questions come up: Why this kippah? And why a kippah at all?
The kippah is a symbol, and perhaps the institution, that has accompanied me more than anything else in my life. From the time of my childhood until today. Before I knew how to read and write. Before I led synagogue services for the first time. The kippah was always there. A kind of basic instinct. You don’t go out of the house without a kippah. You don’t walk out on the street without a kippah. I remember the first times that I ran without a kippah on the streets of Jerusalem. I didn’t have too much hair left on my head by then, and there was nowhere to pin on the kippah, so I was compelled to run bareheaded. What a strange feeling. It would have been easier for me to run stark naked than to run without a kippah. Someone once taught me a joke, a vitz based on a Hebrew wordplay, according to which a kippah, unlike socks, shoes, and a belt, is worn by compulsion. I was never compelled to wear a kippah. It was simply there.
Since my parents never did anything without meaning it, I’m trying today, with the perspective of time, to understand their hidden intent, the distant message they sent me from my early days to these years of my maturity. The contours of the landscape are distant, blurred, the Israeli value system has changed unrecognizably, and their old world, the world of yesterday, which combined a strong diaspora consciousness with an almost sacred joy of independence, has been replaced with a tough local cynicism. The delicate complexity made up of equilibrium and balances has grown tired and worn, giving way to a totality of positions. “Keep it simple,” we say in spoken Israeli and run into trouble time and again. Members of the complicated, complex-ridden generation are no more, and I have no one to ask.
Dad bought the kippahs in Switzerland, in Zurich. Always Zurich. The bourgeois, respectable, quiet, and orderly Swiss city became over the years a city of refuge for my parents. My father went abroad often. There was something in him that embodied both supply and demand. He knew how to speak in so many languages that instead of sending three emissaries to three different places, he alone would be dispatched. In the morning in English in London, in the afternoon in French in Paris or Brussels, and in the evening in German. And in between, informal communication in Yiddish or any other European language. He could talk about politics and policy, about the weekly Torah portion and general philosophy, about contemporary literature as well as “The Song of the Nibelungs,” the thirteenth-century epic German poem. He had a cultural supply incomprehensible to today’s Israeli, like myself, limited to our cultural confines in the here and now. But he also had demands. He wanted to travel, he loved it. Or to be more precise, he needed it. He had what to offer, and he asked for something in return. Every time he traveled somewhere in the world, he always asked to go through Zurich. To the Far East through Zurich, to the far West through Zurich. It was such a fixture in the family landscape that we never talked about it. Once, in his old age, I asked him, “Dad, what’s the story with Zurich?”
“What do you mean?” he asked evasively, using his usual acrobatics with me to buy some time to compose an answer that wouldn’t get him in too much trouble, refusing to commit even in his final moments.
“Why did you always travel or return through Zurich?”
He needed a long time to reply and in the end, he groaned and said limply, “I couldn’t live without it.” I waited. After a while he continued.
“I actually never took proper leave of Dresden. The beautiful city, the city of my happy childhood. I escaped it in a hurry. I left behind an elderly mother to die, and wonderful, precious memories. I was never allowed to mourn, to bid farewell and recover. Zurich is a bit like Dresden. A cultured European city. Not too big and not too provincial. With a train station—the Hauptbahnhof—a river, a main street, and shops that have always been there. A city where things change very slowly, if at all. In Zurich, I found consolation. In Zurich, I was always refilled.”
Once we were together in his beloved Dresden. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the three of us traveled—Mom, Dad, and I. Three adults, experienced and astute, going back in time to one of the important points of departure of their lives. We toured the city and its restored landmarks, and in one place, a wonderfully aesthetic local pastry shop, Dad blurted, “Ah, just like Zurich.”
When he confessed this non-Zionist deviation to me, I was reminded of a story from the family mythology. Thirty-five-year-old Dad brought twenty-three-year-old Mom to meet his German immigrant friends. Members of his group were regulars at one of the cafes on Ben-Yehuda Strasse in Tel Aviv, playing chess, chatting, saving Jews with mere speech, fighting the Germans or the British with words and theses, and establishing a state in their dreams. Probably all in high German mixed with heavily accented Hebrew. And suddenly someone else shows up and breaks into the circle rooted back in Germany, the painful, longed-for phantom. Dad introduced her to them, with her rabbinic and Hebron pedigree, and after she went on her way one of the friends asked him, “Was, Yosef, mit einer asiatischen Frau?” (What, Yosef, with an Asian woman?) I reminded him of the story and asked him if there was a connection. “Very much so,” he replied. “It’s not easy with you Asians, natives of the country. I need to occasionally go back and recharge, to go back and remember the forces that positively drew me to Zionism and the belief in the State of Israel.”
After one of those many visits he returned with a gift for his boy, a large Swiss skullcap. It’s not clear to me whether he gave me a present or built himself a monument on my head, so that every time he looked at me he saw the unseen. In Zurich, he had thought of me, and when he looked at me he thought of Zurich. As he gazed at what was above my line of sight, something apparently percolated from the Swiss cap he gave me into my consciousness.
WHAT IS THIS KIPPAH, ANYWAY? WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE, like the boy settler, berate me in anger: “Take that kippah off already”? And why do so many sympathizers who identify with my words end up asking me, “So why is it that you wear a kippah? You’re just like us”? Many years ago, when my eldest son was a mischievous boy in kindergarten, he crossed the line one day. I don’t remember the precise incident, but we gave much thought to the correct educational way to deal with it. In the end, we told him, “Tomorrow you’re not allowed to go to kindergarten with a kippah. A kippah is a symbol of good behavior, and you don’t deserve it.” His distress was touching, really heart-rending. He wept bitterly for a long, sad day. Until now, years later, when he no longer wears a kippah on a regular basis and is raising his children in his own wonderful way, that event is still mentioned in family conversations with a smile. Since then I have done a lot of thinking about the place of the kippah in our family and the place of the kippah on my head.
Group pictures of previous members of parliament hang on one of the walls in the Knesset corridors. During all my years in the Knesset I passed through those halls thousands of times. I never stopped for a minute to look at those pictures. The only time I did, I had one of the big surprises of my life. There was a picture of my father and teacher, who served here as a minister and member of the Knesset from its inception until his retirement in 1988. But alas, in every one of his pictures in the first five elected parliaments, he is photographed without a kippah. My father, the leader of religious Zionism, an Orthodox rabbi by training, who prayed three times a day, who never missed morning prayer or afternoon services, had his picture taken without a kippah? I went to the Government Press Office to look for the original print. The estimated date, according to the assessment there, was early December, 1951, when he had been a minister for a month and a half in the third Israeli government. I assume that a secretary received a request, a directive to tell the minister to go to the Government Press Office and have his picture taken, so that there would be an official photo of the Israeli health minister for anyone who might need it. What a picture! The one and only, in black and white, and still so colorful. A three-piece suit, the finest attire at the time. The dotted tie not quite centered, and the left collar flap of the white shirt a bit too prominent. Handsome, stylish glasses. He’s so serious, in his early forties, younger than I am today, but when I look at him, he is so respectable and adult, an elderly Jew—he looks like he could be my father… I looked at what was left of his thinning hair, which quickly became his wonderful signature shiny bald pate, and indeed, there was no kippah. None. Simply none. I turned the picture over to the other side, and there was no kippah there either.
I immediately called Mom. I had to get to the bottom of this. And she said without hesitation, “Yes, it’s possible. Then he was still German.” A year and a half after the founding of the state, six years after the opening of the iron gate of Auschwitz, twelve years after he was ordained as a rabbi, my father, an Israeli minister under Ben-Gurion, remained a “German” for my mother. Her perception was that he did not become an “Israeli” until after the Six-Day War, because only from then did the kippah become a fixture on his wise head, in official pictures and in daily reality. Many pieces of the puzzle fell into place then. The more I think about it, the more I know: You were wrong, Mom. Dad’s exposed bald pate in the official picture, like the heavy kippah he wore during the rest of his history, was the pure Israeliness that he wanted us all to inherit, and which changed before our eyes on his big head.
Many people approach me to this day and tell me that my father was their teacher at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. Judging by their number, little Tel Aviv would have had at least ten million residents at the time. These people have a kind of pleasant glow on their faces. They talk about a beloved teacher, a teacher of life. About that period, Dad told me, with real admiration, that David Shimoni, the fiery national poet, was with him on the teaching staff of the gymnasium, and that “Shimoni taught literature bareheaded, and the Bible with a hat.” Once he told Dad that at a fairly young age he had stopped putting on tefillin, but after the pogroms in Ukraine in 1920 he resumed wearing them. “He told me, ‘I have complaints against the Almighty, and I can lodge them only when I put on tefillin. Otherwise I just complain…’” This made a strong impression on Dad. “This shows a depth of feeling and thought,” he would say.
Today I ask myself if that same depth of feeling and thought can be attributed to Dad’s admission: “I taught history bareheaded, which was not the case with Talmud.” When he taught history, he taught it as an ordinary person, so he stood in class without a kippah and without any head covering. And when he taught Talmud, he wore a kippah and taught the essence of rabbinic Judaism in the heart of the secular stronghold of Tel Aviv as a Jew for all intents and purposes. It seems to me that many of his students then, elderly Israelis today, miss that duality, the value system that can take in such contradictory worlds, like modernity and roots, reconciling them in a harmony between ideological garb and external clothing.
My trajectory in life was the opposite of his, and our kippahs, along with our religious outlooks, are evidence of the reversal of directions. In the world he was born into there was a clear separation between the Jewish space and the general environment. I don’t accept the thesis that the Jews of Germany walked without kippahs in order to avoid attracting attention. There was a much broader worldview at work here than just fear.
Anyone who was around my dad knew he was Jewish. In school, he didn’t write and wasn’t tested on the Sabbath, on the street it was known that his father was a wine merchant whose stock included strictly kosher wines brought from the new wineries of the settlements in Palestine, and at the university in Leipzig it was known that he was not only a doctoral student, but also a student in the rabbinical seminary. So, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the separation was a separation in essence. There are areas that are Jewish realms of activity—tradition, religion, customs—above which the kippah is displayed. And there are areas and realms that are not Jewish, and they are bareheaded and have broad horizons. There is and must be a separation between general life that belongs to everyone and the unique life of those who choose it.
We—my wife, our children, and I—have lived more than half of our lives in a small community on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A community whose members come partly from religious homes and partly from secular homes, and there is no tension between us. An example of what Israel could have been had it really wanted to take a different path. Over the years, we established a very special synagogue for ourselves, a place of gathering and consideration for others. It doesn’t have the classic separation between men and women, and is meant for women, men, and families. There is a mixed area for those who want it, like us. The service is also virtually completely egalitarian. Since this prayer group was founded I refuse to take part in any religious or cultural activity that is not completely egalitarian.
The Jews among my readers as well as travelers to and from Israel know the moment during the flight in which the observant but annoying people try to organize a minyan, ten Jewish prayers needed for the praying ritual. Whenever any of them approaches me on the plane and asks me to join, I ask with mock innocence, “Is this an egalitarian service?” When people try to compel me to complete a random male quorum for prayer, I point to the women around us and ask why they don’t join the group. This revolution in the life of our community took several years and was not at all easy. There was anger and insults. Friendships were broken and new connections made. But in the end, things settled down and calm returned to our lives, or more precisely, to the lives of our friends. Because for me a much larger crisis erupted with the conclusion of the revolution that I’m so happy about. For a few years, I happily attended the common synagogue where I sat with my partner and children—boys and girls together—in the mixed area, satisfied with this rare and special arrangement. But once the physical impediments, the chauvinistic divisions between men and women, were removed in the synagogue we had established for ourselves, I took the time to study the texts of the prayer, and I was alarmed. Those same ancient prayers, wrapped in melodies and tunes that I love so much, are actually texts that I cannot accept under any circumstances.
Sacrifices? The Temple? The chosen people? A gentile faith that is “vanity and emptiness”? The revival of the dead? A God that determines our lives? The messiah? I don’t believe in any of these things. On the contrary, I think that some of them are embarrassingly simplistic and primitive and some are alarmingly dangerous. The day I left politics I swore to myself never to live a life of lies again. I make every effort to reach my deepest truth and live by it as much as possible, whatever the price. That is why I have not gone to my community’s synagogue for many years. I have difficulty with the beliefs and religious content, and I don’t want to start another religious war with my friends and loved ones about the content of their Judaism.
I left the synagogue because I want entirely different content in my Judaism. Dad never gave up his place in the synagogue, especially because he wanted to preserve virtually every jot and tittle of what was and is no longer. From early childhood, I liked synagogue events very much. I liked the gathering, the early morning walk with Dad, a rare moment in our lives, until we met the other worshipers who latched on to him and separated us, as usual. My childhood was spent in two synagogues. One, known as Beit Hillel, was very close to home, attended by students and lecturers, and younger at heart. A lively mix of young and old, children and homeowners. We always sat on the right in the second row. On the left side in the first row sat Professor Akiva Ernst Simon, tall and impressive with his white mane. “He is a real yeke,” we would say with genuine reverence. But despite the supreme compliment in the scale of family praise, neither he, his wife, nor their children were ever guests at our home, nor did we visit theirs, although we lived at opposite ends of the very same street. Something very cold and official stood between him and Dad.
With me, on the other hand, he was very friendly. He always smiled warmly at me, sometimes shook my hand with adult formality after the end of services. Every time I performed a role designated for children in the synagogue he spoke very highly of me. When I made a mistake in pronunciation or chanting a tune he came over to me quietly after prayers and asked with extreme politeness whether he could exchange a few words with me. He was sixty and I was six, but politeness was obligatory. When I agreed to talk with him, he commented very quietly about how a particular word should be pronounced or a particular tune I had sung off-key should be sung. It was between us, while between him and Dad something just didn’t click. Hello, hello, a touch to the brim of the hat as they passed one another on the neighborhood streets, and that was it. They didn’t even cross the street for some small talk. Occasionally something about him would be revealed, like his bravery and the German Iron Cross he was decorated with in the First World War. Like the “frightening” fact that he was a liberal, heaven forbid. And that he had said things that were “best not repeated.” I didn’t care then, nor was I sensitive in the least to these nuances. I didn’t know that he was an important thinker, one of the pillars of German Jewry in the pre-war generation, whose ideas would eventually become part of the organizing ideas of my life.
Our second synagogue was Yeshurun, then the main Jerusalem synagogue. We went there on holidays, on Independence Day, and on special Sabbaths. Dad always had his regular place in the third seat in the first row on the left. “This is the first synagogue I attended on my first Sabbath ever in Jerusalem,” he would repeatedly say with gratitude. On the wall next to us was a commemorative plaque for the Conservative movement, which founded the synagogue, but who knew the difference then between the roiling Jewish streams whose wellsprings were in German Jewry? That was where I was called up to the Torah on my bar mitzvah. It was there that I sat as a boy in the lap of Ruby Rivlin, who later became the Knesset speaker, succeeding me, and a beloved president of Israel. That is where presidents and dignitaries, official visitors and important figures came. Sitting in the rear section of the synagogue, always hunched and sullen, was Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the most significant person in my life aside from my parents and family members. Dad knew him from there as well. But I don’t recall any contact between them. Not even a nod of the head. By then Leibowitz was already a popular teacher. His lessons on Maimonides and the weekly Torah portion attracted throngs. But we never moved in his circles. I always recognized his gaunt and bony figure lurching forward with the old leather bag in his hand. I never said hello to him in the street, and he never showed that he recognized me.
After my military service, I worked in the College for Jewish Heritage and Leibowitz was one of the admired and important teachers there. In my first week of work, the principal sent me to “organize something” with Leibowitz. I called him, introduced myself only by my first name, and asked to meet him. “Happily, happily,” he invited me with his raspy voice. I came to his house at 63 Ussishkin Street. We spoke for a long while about the planned seminar and its content. A room full of books, and this old and warm man showered me with his spiritual generosity, with more and more of the full galaxies of his knowledge and wisdom.
Every so often he would leap up from his seat, climb a wooden ladder, take down a remote book from one of the upper shelves, and order me to write down a citation. Then he would sit back down and continue lecturing me. Suddenly in the middle of it all, in our first meeting ever, when I knew who he was and didn’t think he knew who I was, he blurted out, “You father was actually a smart man, I wonder why he went into politics.”
That was the start of a great love that I felt for this wonderful man. The moral intellectual, who with his bare hands, with his rare courage, tried to save Israel from its two great ills: the malignant occupation and the incestuous corruption of religion and state.
I returned home and told Dad about the meeting with Leibowitz. “Ah, yes, he’s very smart. We once had many debates in Berlin.” At the time, I didn’t understand the heavy baggage that separated them. I didn’t know that Leibowitz had tried to be a politician and failed, I didn’t know a thing about the debate that tore apart religious Zionism—between Ernst Simon and Leibowitz on one side and the big establishments of religious Zionism on the other. And Dad, who wasn’t very good at making decisions, was torn between them and stuck in place.
In the Germany before they immigrated, in Zionist Berlin, they argued about the image of the State of Israel that they had dreamed so much of founding. In Israel’s early days they continued their debates. A few years before I was born, Simon laid the foundations for the most scathing critique of the religious Zionism of my father and his colleagues. Then came Leibowitz, who improved on Simon’s argument and confronted them with his penetrating philosophical truth. Without mercy or any fear. Simon wrote a weighty essay that wondered “whether we are still Jews.” His premise was that historical Judaism was catholic, general and encompassing all areas of life. The invasion of secularism and Zionist nationalism into the realms of the old Judaism led to the loss of the historical monopoly of Judaism over the Jews. Suddenly we had new masters of the house: the Enlightenment and progressiveness and secular realms of life that were not at all religious. Following Simon, Leibowitz demanded separation of religion from the state in order to resolve the dilemma for himself and for us. Religion, according to their perception, does not extend to the whole of life. They recognized secularization and created different departments for different behaviors. There is a religious department and a general department, and they do not necessarily overlap.
I know all this in retrospect. The more I think about it, the more I understand why our families were not closer. “They’re not like us, they’re not unsere menschen, our people,” was the immediate and harsh judgment rendered around the Sabbath table, and the case was closed forever. But apparently their seeds were sown inside me already in those distant early days. For many years people have been trying to catalog me. There’s always someone shallow enough to ask me, “But what are you? Religious, Orthodox, Reform, Conservative?” Usually I refuse to cooperate with the desire of that person to make the definitions troubling him more convenient—let him make an effort, let him think. Aside from the fact that this is one of those invasive questions that immediately make me very harsh and unpleasant. But sometimes when the spirit moves me, I reply—and my facetious answer stems directly from Simon’s dilemma—“I am a Protestant Jew.”
I really don’t believe in a central religious establishment responsible for belief and religious law. I am not prepared to accept and do not want these institutions to encompass the entirety of all aspects of my life. On the contrary, I’m ready to fight with everything I’ve got against the religious occupiers who are trying to annex all areas of existence with their quasi-Catholic aggression. They should get out of our pockets and out of women’s uteruses, out of what we eat and out of our souls. I dream of a proper country and society, in which there is a clear separation between religion and state, as well as a commitment to equal citizenship for all citizens, regardless of their spiritual choices or tribal origin. I yearn for a spiritual and cultural life in which the current corrupt reality, where “religion is the mistress of politics,” in Leibowitz’s words, will have disappeared.
Dad wasn’t capable of walking those paths with them. He wasn’t capable and didn’t want to. And from this stemmed his great anger with Leibowitz, who once told me, “A learned person who has no opinion is worse than a carcass.” And I was very insulted on behalf of Dad, who was not explicitly mentioned by the philosopher who was so important to me at most stations of my life. That insult was magnified because I thought there was a grain of truth in his oblique criticism. But only a grain. Because deep down, Dad had faith, not blazing, not burning, not zealous, but very clear. Different than Leibowitz’s in its content and style, but real faith. He believed with all his heart that the State of Israel is “the first flowering of our redemption.” Once, during one of our arguments, I harshly denigrated the chief rabbinate and its rabbis, and he grew red with anger and told me, “But it’s such an important institution, for that we established the state.” And indeed, he had a secret dream of getting out of the religious ghetto he shared with his friends and expanding it to Israeli society in general.
Now that I am more moderate and not angry at all—when Dad is gone and I miss him so much—I know how wrong he was. How much most of Israeli society, following his wisdom and weakness, adheres to the past and fails to understand what is growing before its very eyes, afraid to decide. “Whoever makes a change loses,” he would say, defending himself with an old Talmudic saying, and he was defeated. I, on the other hand, haven’t the slightest doubt that the renewed Jewish meeting of religion and rule, faith and power, zealotry and nationalism, are leading us to perdition, to the destruction of the third Jewish sovereignty. That is why I, knowing them so well, their internal language and their real intentions, must confront them, offer a comprehensive alternative to them, and if there is no other choice, fight them with all my might.
My parents needed a very long time to find their exact place along these complicated continuums. By 1968, by the time Dad had finished being German in Mom’s view, an existential decision much bigger than them was made in the Six-Day War. In that cursed war, Israel erased the borders surrounding us externally as well as all internal boundaries. Our reality became entirely limitless. There is no limit to our gall and occupation, no limits to anything. And even the few distinctions between religion and state have been totally erased. In 1948, my parents were active and enthusiastic partners in the establishment of a secular and socialist state. In the twenty-first century, my grandchildren were born into a completely different Israel: Orthodox, capitalistic to the point of brutality, and nationalistic to the point that it sometimes doesn’t realize how chauvinistic it is. The Israel of my parents failed, and my grandchildren are being born into it. And when all the borders were erased, Dad also erased his borders between religion and state and became a Jewish Catholic who would never again leave the house for any purpose without a very big kippah, too big, on his head.
In the mid-2010s, I was supposed to appear on a television program. The researcher for the program questioned me at length about my opinions and positions, about everything. I answered her at length, patiently, and finally she said, “Can I ask you one more personal question?”
I replied, “Of course.”
“So, by what right do you wear a kippah?” she asked, her anger evident in her effort to control her voice.
Does that belong to you? Do you have entitlement to my appearance? Or a monopoly over permission to wear a kippah? Or a religionometer to accurately determine those who are qualified and those who aren’t? In the past I would have thrown all that in her face and not come to the program, but the past has settled down.
“Can I ask you an intimate question?” I wondered.
“Uh… yes, please,” she replied.
I asked. A very personal and intimate question. There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“See you Monday at the studio,” she said and quietly hung up.
The next week I came to the studios and was interviewed. After the program, I stood alone in a room and removed the makeup. “Can I bother you for a minute?” a woman staff member asked me.
“Why not,” I replied.
“I’m the researcher. I wanted to answer you,” she said. “Yes. The answer to your question is yes. But I understand. I’m sorry I asked, I shouldn’t have invaded your privacy and intimacy.”
In the following year, I officiated at her wedding. A Jewish ceremony for all intents and purposes, without the coercive framework of the chief rabbinate. It was worth restraining myself. And I still wear a kippah.
It is difficult for me to take it off, but I think that I have no choice. The kippah on my head—I explain to those interested—is my antidote to the arrogance that has brought so much pain and suffering to humanity in recent generations. The kippah is my border. It reminds me how small and limited I am. That’s a nice, original speech. A surprising argument that leaves others silent. But it is hollow. At best, I wear a kippah for others, because “it’s important for us to know that there are also religious people like you.” Though to tell the truth, the kippah on my head is just a remnant of the religious existence of my previous incarnation. Today I am not a religious person. I am secular, enthusiastically soaking up Jewish culture. I don’t think that Judaism is a belief system or petty observance of commandments, and I’m not prepared to play this game anymore with these players. Judaism for me is a cultural civilization, of which religion is one element but not necessarily the most important component. And the religious element needs deep and comprehensive reform in concepts and texts, particularly a dramatic shift from the total “Catholicism” that today organizes all of Israeli life, to a much more Protestant concept in which there are clear divisions between religion and the state, between the general secular realm and private areas of identity and content. In the West I have many liberal partners, progressive and pluralistic—Jews and non-Jews. In Israel, I sometimes feel like there’s no one to talk to about these things.
As time passes, I understand that the kippah on my head is a kind of illusion. As if I’m still somewhat connected to those worlds. But that’s so untrue. I left political religious Zionism even before joining it. I turned my back on Dad’s Catholicism and followed Leibowitz almost the whole way, except for his stubborn Orthodox dogmatism. I can’t connect with my friends’ traditionalism because of the troubling texts underpinning this tradition. And the kippah we all share, the knitted kippah that is there all the time, in every situation, on my head, is the last imagined link with the world of which I am no longer a part. Because the kippah, like so much traditional garb, is ultimately meant to set apart. To create distinctions between those who are “like us” and those who are not part of our solidarity. But I don’t believe in this sweeping “us.” My world is not divided into Jews and non-Jews. My division is completely different. I divide the world into good people and bad people. Whoever is good is my brother or sister, and I don’t care what their faith is, their race, or cultural affiliation. And anyone who is bad is my enemy, even if he or she speaks Hebrew, wears a kippah, and observes the Sabbath. I have no automatic, racial patriotism that favors all Jews, even the worst of them, over the gentile, even if he is the finest human being. On the contrary. And because of that, I don’t want anything that will differentiate me as a person from the community of the rest of my humanistic partners, regardless of their faith and culture.
When Judah Leib Gordon, one of the poets of the Enlightenment, wrote, “Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home,” he coined the motto of the Enlightenment movement, which sought to bridge the Jewish and modern worlds. Dad was such a bridge, until the whole structure collapsed on him. A rabbi with a doctorate, a German-speaking immigrant and an Eastern European Jew, educated and traditional, both in high German and juicy Yiddish. For “Father Burg, Part One,” one of the early years in which there was a clear separation between the holy and the profane, the movement of the kippah on and off his head was the sign of this precise internal and external division. Whatever was Jewish wore a covering, and whatever was general, civil, and belonging to humanity at large was bareheaded. This division between the man and the Jew was actually lost by Dad when he became “Father Burg, Part Two” and adopted the habit of wearing a kippah all the time. No wonder it happened to him after the Six-Day War. He was, after all, an official and practical part of the border nullifiers, and through that actually erased his own borders. I hope that by the time these lines are published I will have succeeded in becoming a divided man like his early version. Wearing a kippah as a Jew, and bareheaded in all other dimensions of my life.
It’s not easy for me—it’s like an amputation, or disconnecting a tube that has become part of me like a vein. And still, I want to go back to my father’s first division. To the days when he was still an Israeli-German. To the worldview according to which everything Jewish is done with a kippah, and everything general is done without a kippah, and the separation between religion and the rest of life is clear and natural. Like in Zurich, like in Dresden. As it was when there was still hope here, so that there will be new hope.
THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I LEFT THE SAN FRANCISCO airport in the early 1980s was to take off my kippah and all other identifying paraphernalia. At the time, those were the security guidelines for Israelis traveling abroad. It was my first visit to the United States. I had been invited by the New Israel Fund, which was very, very new. It was run by Jonathan Jacoby, my guide to American Jewish life, who became one of my dearest, cherished friends. Johnny is one of the most accomplished strategists I have had the privilege of meeting. Virtually with his bare hands he established one of the most important organizations of politically progressive American Jewry, and he is the most sensitive and committed friend I have. I traveled with Johnny to his home. On the way, we stopped for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. I took out my wallet and counted the cash I had. “Avrum, here it’s all backwards,” he told me, “Here you can walk around with any kippah you like, anywhere, anytime. No one will bother you. But don’t take your money out of your wallet in public—you could get mugged.”
The next day I was mugged.
The comfortable, familiar order of things was breached, and the foundations of new worlds were laid down inside me, worlds in which I will continue to move until my last day. Johnny took me to meet the man who would become one of my closest friends, a soul mate in word and deed. Brian Lurie was then the charismatic executive director of the San Francisco area Jewish Community Federation. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about American Jewry, its leaders, institutions, and organizations. “They’re plastic Jews,” someone back home had told me before I left. Until then, I had met very few American Jews; most were friends of my parents. Immigrants or refugees like them, Jews of the synagogue, Psalms, pastrami, lox and bagels, accented English and lively Yiddish. At the time, I had yet to meet a religious Jew who was not Orthodox. Reform and Conservative Jews were demons that one must be very wary of. That is why we would pass by the Reform synagogue on the way to elementary school with real physical fear. In the hierarchy of our lives they belonged somewhere in the infernal depths with Christian missionaries and the rest of our enemies who in every generation try to wipe us out.
We went into Brian’s office, and everyone introduced themselves. “I’m a Reform rabbi by training,” he began. I was so scared, really. If the chair and floor had answered my prayers I would have been swallowed up and disappeared at that very moment. Reform Jew. Gevald.
“What do you do here, in the community?” I wondered aloud with any remaining politeness I could muster. I was not familiar yet with the first principle of politics: don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer.
“Lots of things,” he answered. “But today is especially important for me. After my meeting with you I’m going to a meeting in which we will decide to increase by thirty percent our contributions to hospitals that treat AIDS patients.”
“What is AIDS?” I asked. It was 1983. And while the earth had failed to swallow me up half an hour earlier, his eyes bore through me on the spot. Brian has those kind of eyes.
“It’s acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” he patiently explained. And I understood even less.
“But what is it?” I probed politely.
“It’s a homosexual disease.” That was the belief at the time, and that is how that terrible illness was branded.
“But there are no Jewish homosexuals, so why is the Jewish community contributing to it?” I heard my mother speak from my mouth.
And thus began a journey of faith, friendship, and partnership, which has included unique experiences, good deeds, and especially a common study of human and Jewish fate, a journey that has been going on now for more than thirty years. I learned from him about the United States and its spiritual movements, about American Jews and the trends among them. About philanthropy and fundraising. We don’t always agree, but I have always loved him unconditionally, and I learn something new with our every encounter.
In 2008, I officiated at my daughter’s wedding in our house, in an entirely Jewish and completely egalitarian wedding. Later, Brian married her in San Francisco in a civil marriage, so we were partners in the same chuppah—not only in the limited sense of the family celebration, but in the wider sense of the struggle for a humane Judaism, different than the one represented here in Israel by the repellent rabbinic establishments.
DAYS AND YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THEN, AND MY LIFE no longer revolves solely around what happens to me. Change is also reflected in the content of our children’s conversations, including during the familial Shabbat meals that we so cherish. When they were little, we talked around the table about teachers and studies, games and hobbies. As army service approached, militarism asserted itself on their side, and on our side, there was sad concern for them. When they were released from the army the conversation shifted from service to studies, work, and their future. Then the room was filled with the happiest of subjects—their weddings, the new families they were going to have. Now there are lots of grandchildren, and the commotion starts anew. Not all our children are married, and for some the conversation is very practical while for others it remains theoretical. In these worlds of theory, we always tried to delicately sketch the outlines of the future bride or groom. To assure them that we genuinely believe the broad human message, according to which there is really only one test at home for any who come in—that they be good people. What do I care whether someone is Jewish if he is fundamentally bad or evil, racist or violent? And what will stop me from loving my new daughter-in-law or son-in-law if my children love them and they will bear my grandchildren?
In 2013, I was in a public debate in Netanya. The audience was very right wing, and the conversation was heated. The arguments continued long after the lights were turned off and the hall was closed. It was nearly midnight when I finally got to the parking lot, eager to get as far away from there as fast as possible.
In the darkened lot only my car remained; everyone had already gone home. Next to the car was a group of young people wearing the kippahs of the Chabad movement and wearing T-shirts of the extreme rightist Kahane Chai movement. Bad news. For a minute, I was afraid. My mailbox is full of threatening letters from their ilk, and it’s clear to me that one day this violence will catch up with me. Was this the moment?
“Burg,” one of them began, “he wants to ask you a question.” He directed me to the one who looked like the biggest thug in the group. They all chuckled in expectation of the intellectual knockout punch that would soon be thrown at me, the hated leftist.
“Tell me, with all these views of yours, would you be ready for your daughter to marry an Arab?” I sounded my internal all clear and relaxed my tensed muscles; this wouldn’t come to blows. Not tonight. I explained to them that in my view there was no difference between my sons and daughters. That it wasn’t me who approves my children’s marriage partners. That they had been educated to be independent, ethical people who make the decision about their lives themselves. “And most importantly, if my daughter will come home and tell me, ‘Dad, I have two marriage proposals, which do you recommend? One man is a Jewish Kahanist, racist, studies with Arab-hating rabbis, a violent activist who participated in two lynchings of Arabs’—someone like you for example,” I said, pointing at the questioner. None of them responded to my provocation, so I continued. “‘And the second is an Arab doctor, active in human rights groups, a volunteer in the community clinic in the mixed city in which he lives, he has Jewish and Arab patients and he’s a veteran peace activist,’ whom do you think I would recommend to her?”
“He definitely answered you,” said the one who started the conversation, and they quietly moved away. But the incident was not over. Out of the darkness came two young girls, bearing their identities on their skin, Ethiopians. They said that they were at the debate and wanted to ask me a question.
“Of course,” I replied.
“Would you also not care if your son married an Ethiopian?” Unlike the baiting question of the group of youths, this was a painful question, full of tears.
“Yes, my dear girl, I don’t care who they marry. Tall or short, black or white, I don’t care what his or her faith is. I will have only one test for whomever they bring home. That they be good people.”
“Non-Jews as well?”
“Of course! If they are good, what do I care what their faith is? And if they are bad, what good does it do me that they are Jewish?”
“And a homosexual?”
“Yes, even a homosexual or a lesbian. There is only one test for partnership and humanity.”
One of them began to cry, and the second told me, “We’ve been in Israel for years. We’ve studied in religious institutions, and we always knew there was something else, but we didn’t know how to say it. This evening you said it for us. Thank you so much. Drive carefully.”
I’VE REACHED A POINT IN LIFE IN WHICH MY FAMILY IS the center from which other circles emanate. Imposed closed tribal and national frameworks repel me. I need human space without barriers. I want to define my own borders and connections. I don’t feel genuine automatic membership in collectives only because of our common ethnic, genetic, or religious origin. I have too many relatives who are real moral enemies, and there are distant relatives I don’t even know who are potentially very close to me. At the same time, pure, egoistic individualism repels me no less, and does not satisfy me at all. The family is therefore the framework in which I feel most comfortable. Mostly it is filled with solidarity and brotherhood, but sometimes it generates quarrels and resentment. Despite everything, it is a microcosm of humanity in a size that I can grasp. Not billions or millions of partners with whom I have no real connection, and not myself alone.
From my extended family, I look at the world and try to understand the contexts of my relatives’ lives and our future. Our family is old-fashioned in every respect. Most of the marriages are stable, the relationships are healthy, tensions are contained and not externalized, and all generations speak with one another. From my old-fashioned family I watch and even stare inappropriately at the new families. What happens to them interests me a great deal. Through the old families, I better understand the past and the old world, and through the new families I try to understand the renewed humanity and the future waiting for us all.
When I was a child, all children had a father and mother. The Sephardic children usually also had a grandfather and grandmother from both sides, and we, the Ashkenazic children, had almost none. The children of today are exposed to far greater complications. Many have more than two pairs of grandparents. Sometimes more than one mother or father, or less. Same-sex or single-parent families, divorced or separated parents, and so on. Biological children and test-tube children in the same class. I don’t know what it does to the souls of these small children, but it certainly demands the ability to absorb far more complexity than we encountered at their age. The new structures of parenting, the complicated and separated families, the erased borders between generations of parents and children—all these raise the question anew for me, where is human society heading? I once knew the answer—what was, what will be, because the basic social core, the family, had remained as it was. Now I no longer know. I can’t guess what future society will look like, because I don’t entirely understand the modern family. I accept it as it is, and I am hopelessly curious about the new intimacy, which I am sometimes witness to, but don’t understand—yet. How can someone from my background understand someone such as L., one of my new friends in the wide world?
L. is a friend I love very much. He is a Lutheran theologian who is gay, and who was born in Germany and lives in Holland in a happy family with his two male lovers. A standard family of three men. And they are not alone. A. is a single-parent mother who received a sperm donation from her former partner whom she divorced through the rabbinate according to religious law. K. and Y. are two test-tube babies whose marriage I officiated. And their family happiness is even richer and more complex.
In order to better understand the new realities, I’ve been watching established rabbinic Jewish weddings, and I don’t like what I see. The bride and groom stand under the chuppah, like scarecrows in their own play. The rabbi mumbles some incomprehensible words that to many sound like a faint echo of ancient voodoo rituals. And the audience waits impatiently for the end of the forced ceremony in order to sit comfortably at a table, eat a good meal, chat with friends, and dance before the dawn of a new day of work.
Whoever takes a deeper look understands that this is a meeting of two terrible wrongs: the distorted perception of women by the rabbinic establishment and the coercive involvement by the authorities. The first in that marriage is an ancient ritual that is basically the husband’s acquisition of sexual ownership of the woman from her father. Yes, it must be acknowledged that the roots of the ancient original Jewish wedding are planted, among other places, in the flowerbed of trafficking in women. The man purchases the woman with a ring that is “worth a penny” and becomes her “husband,” that is, her owner. And she, on the “happiest day of her life,” effectively becomes his property. And the second—as if the first were not enough—in that the Israeli wedding has three people under the chuppah: the bride, the groom, and the State of Israel. The state, the regulator, intrudes into the sexual relations and partnership of the two lovers and imposes on them very specific religious content, though that really should not be its role.
For many years, I wanted to offer couples a different kind of wedding. One that is entirely derived from tradition, but turns the damaged into the meaningful and the discriminatory into a declaration of love and a completely equal, committing partnership. In the wedding, humanity, and family that I believe in and am committed to, there is no trafficking of people. The weddings have to reflect and echo the values and commitments of the couple getting married. But so long as my children were not married, I couldn’t come out with my plan. I knew what people would say: “Ah, you married your children by the book, and you’re offering us a second-rate wedding.” That is not my intention.
An egalitarian and respectful wedding, committed to human and universal values, is the deepest and most comprehensive expression I can give to up-to-date Jewish culture, combining what is good in tradition with what is wonderful in renewal. In every wedding I now conduct, all that is inappropriate is erased or changed: there is no ownership, no monetary marriage contract between the woman and her partner, there is no fictitious sadness over ruined Jerusalem, because the city spreads from Jericho to Netanya. All these ancient symbols are endowed by the bride and groom with new and egalitarian meanings, so this ceremony has real, actual significance.
With this commitment, we conducted the weddings of our children as ceremonies of union in which the man and woman are completely equal to one another. We stayed true as much as possible to the ancient texts and traditions of the wedding celebration, and in places where the meanings of the tradition could not be papered over, we exchanged his ownership of her to a partnership between them.
The weddings of our older children (in 2008 and 2009), which I was privileged to conduct with them and for them, exposed me to many other couples getting married. First, to the circle of our children’s friends, and in recent years, to couples getting married from wider circles, much further away. I have several preconditions for every one of the couples that I marry. The first and main one is equality between bride and groom. As the weddings increased and I listened to the many messages that emerged, I became more aware that I was effectively involved in a battle that had been nearly decided. The recognition that every woman is equal before God has already penetrated so deep that it can’t be rolled back. Along with my belief in equality for women, I also realized that if I am indeed committed to the principle of equality between all people, then every person has the right to have a family, to be happy, to raise children, and to pass on his or her legacy and beliefs through them. So why not have an LGBT wedding? That’s what I explicitly tell my children: personal preferences are not important, what is important is a positive personality, no?
It didn’t happen immediately. On the contrary. One day in the early nineties, when I was serving as chairman of the parliamentary education committee, a group of political activists came to see me. As soon as the routine opening remarks were made, I was sorry that I had agreed to meet them. “We are LGBT community activists, and we want…” I devoted the rest of the meeting to evasions, excuses, and obfuscation. “That’s the last thing I need,” I rationalized to myself. I was closer then to my mother, who didn’t believe there was such a thing as a Jewish homosexual, than to Brian, who mobilized his community in San Francisco to help AIDS victims. At the end of the session with the activists, they asked if they could have their picture taken with me and issue a press release about the meeting. “It wouldn’t be good for you…” I convinced them.
Today, gazing back from the keyboard over time, I think a great deal about my status and my positions in those days. Usually I was more thoughtful than I had been that day. Many people came to me to consult, to share, to take advantage of my experience or connections. It seems to me that all of the advice I gave then, or at least most of it, was good… for me. Like that empty statement to the LGBT activists. Today I am entirely the opposite. When I’m asked, I try to reply with the most accurate truth I see before me, even when it is entirely contrary to my interests.
A whole generation has passed since then, and when Gal and Moshe approached me and asked that I marry them, I agreed. I was grateful to them, because I felt that they were challenging my Jewish conventions and theirs. For many months, we studied—together and separately—Jewish sources on marriage and the wedding ceremony, sexuality and same-sex relationships. In the end, we developed a complete ceremony that integrated ancient Jewish content with their unique same-sex familial bond.
At their wedding, I felt that there were two other people standing with us under the chuppah, my late mother on the one side, and Brian on the other. In the moments of silence, always part of the intimacy of the chuppah, I imagined Brian whispering to her quietly, “Yes, Mrs. Burg, there are Jewish homosexuals.” But while I didn’t manage to imagine her response, I know there are questions that people like her, of her generation and upbringing, would never leave unanswered. Johnny’s warning against being mugged in broad daylight was right on the mark, because in many respects, which have increased over the years, he and Brian mugged me in broad daylight, stealing the limited identity with which I had arrived in San Francisco. But in their spiritual generosity, unlike other thieves in my life, they granted me far better alternatives than those I came with to my first meeting with them.
Not long ago, an Arab partner and I interviewed a candidate for a job. She was a young Arab woman from a Muslim home and a lawyer by training. “Let’s assume,” my Palestinian Israeli colleague asked her, “that tomorrow you could choose the citizenship you want, Israeli or Palestinian. Which would you choose?” She thought for a moment and answered, “The one that I think will safeguard as many of my rights as possible as a secular woman with equal rights.”
It will take more time before there is equal treatment in all aspects of our lives for women and every individual, like my daughters, the job candidate, and the brides I married. But this revolution can no longer be turned back. The issue has been decided, though victory has yet to be declared. In every place that I fearfully see and hear Jewish fundamentalists who devote themselves entirely to exclusion of women, homophobia, and xenophobia, I know that we are taking another step closer.
Because the more women are liberated, earning a living, important and equal, the more men’s hegemony is threatened and hence their harsh and violent response. The recognition of the equal value of all people is penetrating deeply everywhere, and it is especially threatening to those of religious or traditional persuasions. And the more they are threatened, the more extreme and strident they become. That is why their extremist move to the dark side is evidence of the gains made by our brighter side. And because in recent years they have been very vociferous and aggressive, I know that they will be defeated.
IT TOOK ME MANY YEARS TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE place of women in society—any woman in society—is the litmus test for the degree of equality in that society. The boys-only schools in which I had studied, the male combat units in which I had served, and the long years in local political life in which there are few women—all these environments gave me plenty of opportunities to understand and express my commitment to the equality of women and their status, a commitment whose basis is so simple: a society in which women are discriminated against is a flawed society, and an egalitarian society—among all and for all, not only for women—is a proper society. That is how we raised our girls and boys together. We didn’t want our boys callous and insensitive, and we didn’t expect to have fragile and needy girls who have no active role in building the world.
During the nineties, in the years before my children’s bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah celebrations, we sat down every Sabbath and studied together. Every child chose his or her topic, and from the broad and deep study, the speech on the festive day emerged. Not an incomprehensible and inexplicable speech like mine, dictated by father to son, but their own words, expressed as they wished. To this day, ideas are still sprouting from those seeds. Equality, freedom, justice, sensitivity, environment, vegetarianism, and a great deal of brotherhood. Roni wanted to learn about “the status of women in Judaism.” At age eleven, when we started these studies, she was already a veteran of the feminist wars. In the religious public school where she studied, the principal wanted to forbid the girls from coming to school in pants. She confronted him, launched a school movement named “Modest in Pants,” studied Jewish sources, prepared a sharply worded petition, got male and female students to sign, and had the decree rescinded.
Before her bat mitzvah, Roni expressed a desire to read her weekly portion from the Torah in synagogue. Together we studied the traditional melody and the Torah trope. At first it was a bit strange for me because I had never heard the Torah read and sung with a woman’s voice. In my ancient, primitive consciousness, the Torah belonged to the male world, and its sounds were somewhere in the area of the bass and baritone. But with her help it became more natural. In alto or soprano, the Torah sounds so beautiful, new, fresh, and right. We studied every Sabbath, and each time I would witness her wonderful progress. As our studies progressed, the complexity of the topic deepened.
The bat mitzvah date drew near, and the question grew more urgent: how can we have a shared family prayer when my parents, especially my father, were never part of the religious egalitarian revolution? “I’ll talk to Grandpa,” the young revolutionary said with determination. After a week, she came back with an arrangement. On Independence Day of that year we celebrated with her—the whole family together—the day of her entrance into the circle of Jewish responsibility. She read from the Torah and Dad, for the first time in his life, joined a mixed, egalitarian service. She and I completed the journey, and my father, in his eighties, embarked on his own path.
My sisters and I turned out very differently from what we witnessed in our home. The division of labor among my parents was classic for that generation: Dad was the breadwinner, and Mom was the homemaker. He was outside, she was inside. He was the representative, and she was with the children and at parent meetings. It turns out that precisely there, at the place furthest from what I consider the proper model for relations between a couple, that the seeds of that model were sown in me.
I don’t think that Dad knew how to do any of the household chores himself. At the end of the family Sabbath meal everyone would mobilize to clear off the table, clean and wash the dishes, take out the garbage, arrange everything again in the refrigerator, and set the table for Sabbath morning. We all worked, each with an assigned task. Mom cleaned the pots, my sisters shined the glasses—“don’t forget to hold it up one last time to the light to make sure there are no stains”—and I cleared off the dishes, shook out the tablecloth—“outside please”—and threw out the garbage. Dad had one task: to remove the salt and the challah knife. He treated the chore with dead seriousness, walking slowly with the light load in his hands and loudly declaring, “Achtung, vorsicht.” German words of deterrence and warning that he was familiar with, automatic language he retreated to when he encountered situations outside his control. And that was it. He did nothing else.
In her old age, Mom was once out of the house—abroad or in the hospital—I don’t remember exactly. And my father, who was always cold, felt an even greater chill because of the absence of his love. With uncharacteristic determination, he went by himself to the biggest and most expensive electric appliance store in town and bought himself a heater, because he had no idea how to run the heating system at home. On the way back he stopped at the nearest grocery and bought a giant jar of coffee, a spoon, and a cup, because he simply did not know where all these were in his own home. Never, until that moment, did he ask himself how his coffee appeared in the morning, precisely when he wanted it, and how the cup refilled, seemingly by itself, next to him at his desk. That was how dependent he was on Mom’s work at home. In short, a real man.
Whoever was familiar, even in the slightest, with their relationship discovered mutual admiration that did not fade with the years. She admired his wisdom, he her earthiness; she, his worldliness, he, the fact that she was a native; she, his sophistication, he, her common sense. If a jigsaw puzzle had been formed in their image, it would be impossible to know where he ended and where she began, and vice versa.
So, this feminism of mine was something new in my life, an egalitarian rebellion against all the inequality that my mother experienced. All her life, I was saddened and almost angered by her refrain, “I gave up my career as a teacher in order to raise you.” Or, “I could have been something else, but I promised Dad that I would support him and his political activity.” And the worst of her sayings: “All my life I’ve belonged to somebody. I was the daughter of… and the sister of… and then the wife of… and now I’m the mother of…” And I always wanted her by herself, not through the prisms of all the others who, I believed, she thought defined her.
In short, from such a home—a mother who sacrificed herself and a father who spent most of his hours and years outside, a home in which he was the breadwinner and she the manager, in which he studied the daily Talmud page every night, while she was in the kitchen, responsible for cooking and cleaning—from a home like that nothing could grow that resembled the ideal of equality to which I am committed. No wonder that I never attributed these foundations of my values to her, or to them.
I learned my feminism from my partner, who is better than me at everything, while developing our relationship as a couple at home and the ways to raise our children. Later, when the fruits of our tree of life began ripening, and our children became independent, I received much more from them, especially from my daughters. For many years, I thought I had not learned this from the home where my sisters and I grew up, an old-fashioned home. I was wrong. Again, it turns out that the ancient Jewish Aramaic saying, psychological before Freud, is practical and relevant to this day: “The lessons of childhood are not forgotten.” I understood these roots of childhood only at the last minute, next to my father’s deathbed.
He wrote the first words of that saying on my wall a few years before he passed away (in 1999, at the age of ninety-one). But I didn’t really notice their power. That happened in one of the rare times in our public lives when we were officially together on the same stage. He was in his traditional role of presiding judge at the international youth Bible quiz, and I, as chairman of the Jewish Agency, also had some official role there. I was asked, ex officio, to say words of welcome to the Jewish youngsters from abroad.
“What do you want to speak about?” Dad asked me a few days ahead of time.
“About the idea of equality in the Bible,” I replied.
“In three minutes? You won’t have the time.”
“I’ll have to try, Dad, I’ll try.”
On the appointed day, I ascended the big stage in Jerusalem. I began, as customary when my parents were present, by acknowledging them, and then continued:
With your permission I would like to welcome you, the contestants, and pray for the Torah’s triple blessing of love. The blessing contained in the commandment, “You shall Love the Lord your God,” is entirely equivalent to the requirement to love my neighbor like myself, and there is no difference between them and the eternal requirement to love the stranger, the other among us, the one different from us. And remember this—all these equated loves, love of God and his worship, love of the neighbor and love of any person, even a stranger, is not applicable to men only. Because in the great revolution in Egypt, the one whose call, “Let my people go,” still echoes to this day, Moses tells Pharaoh explicitly, “We shall go with our young and old, with our sons and daughters, because we must observe the Lord’s festival.” Moses represents there, before Pharaoh, an entirely different inner truth: in his view, worship of God is not only man’s worship, but of believers from both genders, “our sons and daughters” together. If that is how it is between human beings and God—all the more so between people, and between Adam and Eve.
The whole message took no longer than three minutes. Very little—if any—applause came from the hall, which was packed with Bible buffs, most of them equality-challenged Orthodox Zionists. Of all the dignitaries on the stage, only Dad, who I could see from the corner of my eye, applauded. In the evening, I called him to see how he was doing and ask how his day had gone. “You indeed did not exceed three minutes,” he answered, without elaborating. A warm German Jewish compliment. Who could ask for more?
A few minutes later he called me in the car. “Where are you?”
“I’m with the kids on the way home.”
“Can you arrange for everyone to hear me?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ll put on the speaker.”
“I wanted you to know,” he told me, “that you said very important things today. They didn’t understand you, but I understand. In the revolution of equality for women, the Jewish people doubles itself in one stroke. Humanity doubles itself. And not just a doubling that duplicates the same thing, but something entirely different, much better. Like your mother, not like me,” he added with affectionate cynicism. “The Jew discovered the one God. That is the main pillar of Jewish thought. But the Jew also discovered humanity. And humanity is the entire human race, including women. That is the real meaning of the revolution in Egypt. An end to slavery, an end to subjugation. That is the source of Maimonides’s vision of the end of days, ‘without subjugation by other authorities.’” With that, he ended his short phone lesson.
Two years passed, and his strength was sapped. We all sadly felt that these were the last days, and that his body would no longer renew itself. Dad, like the good, organized German Jew that he was, planned his funeral to the last detail. Who would come, who would escort his single sister from New York, what would be inscribed on the tombstone, and who would speak. Those moments were so special. Some so sad they would move us to tears, and some funny, because we always laughed at home. Delicately, suggestively, but right to the heart. During his preparations with us he said, “After my death I no longer owe anything to the chief rabbis, right? So maybe they don’t have to speak at the funeral, right? Let them read a chapter of Psalms, that’s enough for them.” That was the way my wise and gentle father transmitted his message. Truth hurt him, and honesty required him to acknowledge reality. His attempted revolution had failed—there is no official rabbinical authority in Israel, at least not one he needs to bow to, on his last day. Something happened to religious society in its meeting with modernism, freedoms, and democracy. So maybe saying Psalms will save it.
In his life, Dad knew these things and kept them inside, because he saw his role in life as a preserver and protector of past glory. A representative of the conservatives. Only before his death did he loosen up and reveal something to us of what he really felt. Next to his grave, when his body was lowered into the pit, another surprising and penetrating truth of his rose up to the heavens. It had started a few weeks earlier.
In the last weeks of my father’s life, my sister and I gathered every day near his bed, fluffing up the pillows, asking how he was, shaving him, putting on his tefillin, wrapping him in his beloved prayer shawl, continuing to prepare for the inevitable. One day he said, “Let’s talk about eulogies.”
“You,” he said with a smile always reserved for me, “you never listened anyway when I told you what to say, especially what not to say. I know that I can’t tell you what to say. So at least say it well.” Then he turned to my sister. They always had a deep understanding, tremendous appreciation, and a rare love reserved for the two smartest people in our family.
“You,” he told her softly, not out of a desire to hurt her, God forbid, “you are a woman of action, not words like us. But I would like you to say a few words at my funeral.”
“Of course, Dad, whatever you want,” she said, kind as always.
“Do you have a paper and pen?”
“Yes.”
“Then write please.” And he dictated his request.
A few weeks later, he closed his eyes forever. His funeral took place at the plaza of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, with which he was very involved to his last day. Throngs of people, thousands, gathered in the big plaza. National leaders, ministers, rabbis, and intellectuals, and with them thousands of the ordinary people he loved so much. And they, the masses, returned his love. He saved some during the Holocaust, he supported others with personal charity, the mother of one was his student in the Herzliya Gymnasium, and with others he had studied in the rabbinical seminary in Berlin before everything went up in smoke. Many took the podium to deliver eulogies. All men, including me, maneuvering between my role as eulogizer of my father and my role as a public figure. After the rabbis and politicians, my sister took the podium. A lone woman eulogizer among the men.
At first, she said what a daughter always says in these moments. Delicately, painfully, with the longing that had already permeated our lives, even though the deceased had yet to be brought to his final resting place. And then she raised her eyes, looked at the crowd, and took from her pocket the piece of paper on which she had written the things that Dad had dictated to her. The last earthly message with which he wanted to bid the world farewell: “When I sat next to his bed, Dad asked that I speak at his funeral, and expounded his view that the most important revolution of the last century, the greatest of revolutions, is the entry of women into the world of action and creation. This is a greater revolution than the French and Russian revolutions, because as a result the world gained full partners in action and creation. In every place that this revolution was accomplished, society gained another 100 percent of human beings who became partners in social life. Dad added that he feared that not all parts of our society are aware of the importance of this revolution.”
Because this was the funeral of a beloved man, and because I was not only circumstantially saddened but deep in my heart as well, I couldn’t break out two smiles that threatened to spread across my face. One smile at the sight of the astonished faces of the throngs of mourners, Jews who advocate the separation between women and men, the exclusion of women and male superiority, the very same Israelis who are still not aware of “the importance of this revolution.” It turns out that we had grown up our entire lives in the shadow of a complete feminist, and we didn’t know that he had led them in this spirit, and they also had not been aware of it.
His last words were the most courageous I had heard from him during my entire life. Words that made me want to smile the second smile that has not left my face since, the smile of liberation and disclosure. Many friends tell me that only after the death of their aged parents do they dare do and believe in things that they could not as long as their parents were alive, if only out of respect. In our home, there were no real limits on thoughts and words. And still, this new ideological freedom was the last and greatest natural gift that a father could give his son, leaving him alone in the commotion of life. From the brink of his grave, Dad challenged Orthodox thinking in our time and in the future. I remember well the thought that struck me through the pain of bereavement: this is Dad’s legacy, this is his spiritual last will and testament, the will of equality and justice. There I must go.
VERY FEW TIMES, IF AT ALL, DID DAD TALK TO ME ABOUT God, about his belief in the Creator. This issue was a constant, a driving force that we almost never discussed, and we never doubted its existence. There was always water in the faucet, electricity in the sockets, Mom’s frozen food in the freezer, Dad at the head of the table on one end, and Mom at the other end facing him, and God. We accepted them all automatically and did not spend time on them. The whole house focused on people, God’s creations. Creation and creatures without a Creator, results without causes. That is why our door was always open, that is why the house was full of books packed with the views of wise men from all cultures and all generations, that is why there was not a speech in which Dad did not cite such a man, one of our sages, or one from another nation. Every day, Dad was a Jew among Jews, but sometimes his ideological and spiritual windows would open up, and through them he was revealed as a great universalist. And between the “Jew” and “universalist” he was not God’s Jew.
I often thought that after the Holocaust he must have stopped talking to God and devoted all his energy to conversations with the creatures of that God who turned out to be false. Just like music. He had a very musical ear, and in his youth he knew how to play bourgeois and Jewish instruments, like piano and violin. But I never saw him really playing or singing. Some trauma at some point put a sudden and complete halt to that.
With the completion of my father’s cycle of life it became clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that despite everything, my Judaism is like my parents’ Judaism, and my feminism also comes from them. When people ask me, with a look of smug self-satisfaction on their faces, “And what would your father say about you?”, and when their cowardly brothers lash out at me with anonymous trolling such as “You are a discredit to your parents,” or “Your father is turning over in his grave,” I tell them in my heart the story of Dad’s funeral, and I know that the civilization that I believe in and am trying to develop is a Judaism of complete equality between people, whoever and wherever they are.
We will not shed blood; on the contrary, we must wage a constant, all-out war against any manifestation of subjugation, violence, occupation, or discrimination. With the power of my father’s spirit in life, and in his will from the grave, we are mobilized for a still-unfinished struggle for equal status for women and others discriminated against by society. Dad was absolutely right in his very last words: “Not all parts of society are aware.”