ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND AND LEAST DISCUSSED reasons why we are still very far from that wedding between one of my grandchildren and a Sawsan, and from the tremendous social change I seek, became clear to me not long ago at a difficult meeting in the Galilee.
In 2007, I was invited to a public debate about an issue—admissions committees for Jewish rural communities, whose sole purpose was to “screen” Arab candidates. Most of the small villages in Israel are quite ethnic; the Jews live in their own neighborhoods and the Arabs in theirs. The Jewish villages are usually more affluent and therefore more attractive to Arab families who are looking to improve their lives. In order to prevent this “invasion,” the Jewish settlers wanted a selection process to prevent the freedom of movement and housing, one based on “Zionist criteria.” The discussion was very stormy, laced with shouting, shaking fists, and waving flags. At some point, one of the participants, whose body language had said from the start, “I don’t agree with you,” hurled very harsh personal comments at me, and then said, “The most meaningful moment in my life as an Israeli was when three Israeli fighter jets flew over Auschwitz.”
Our two worlds apparently were reverse mirror images. He saw a positive connection between planes over Auschwitz and structural discrimination against people because of their ethnic origin, religion, or national affiliation. And I saw the exact opposite. I tried not to raise my voice, but I did not mince words: “To me it was a hollow moment, totally empty. A declaration of arrogance, nothing more. The people, Jews and others, murdered down below were not killed because they didn’t have an air force, weapons, or were denied atomic bombs for mass destruction. They were murdered because other people—the Nazis and their associates—had no binding values of human rights, inalienable basic rights of equality among all people without compromise, despite the differences between them. Western Jews have no air force and no atomic bombs and no paratroopers, and still they are far less threatened than Israel and Israelis, because they have a safety net of a constitution and rights, like any other member of their society.”
The evening did not end well, to say the least, because after those words there was a moment of silence in the hall. Then people assailed me from every direction for many minutes: “Let’s see you living next to Arabs.” The shouted questions were difficult, and my answer didn’t really calm anyone down. “Listen, for me to be a Jew is not a genetic code of someone born to a Jewish mother. It’s a value system that is in conversation with and open to those who enter it, while tolerant of those who leave. Genetic Judaism is pure racism, and Jews who are not completely committed to equality and human rights are no different than any other discriminatory racist.” As I left, the shouts trailed my car as it moved into the night. We—Jews and Israelis—sanctify Jewish blood and genetics literally and not the value system that forms the basis of larger Jewish culture.
We are on the cusp of the first generation without living witnesses to the Holocaust. In my lifetime, or the lives of my children, the last victims will pass away along with the last perpetrators. There will be no more Germans or Jews of those days. Because the Holocaust will no longer be a personal experience, but one consigned to the tremendous annals of history. Many powerful forces are already vying to shape this moment. The deniers began their task of obfuscation even before the passing of the previous generation. The commemorators are divided into two camps, ours and theirs. Theirs shave their heads, wear swastika tattoos, and march by the thousands in the streets of Germany and Europe. The neo-Nazis and xenophobes are not about to disappear from the landscapes of our lives. They are active and committed to commemorating what they see as the greatness of the past, seeking to revive the romanticized hatred that was. And like them, in a dialectical and completely opposite fashion, there are those among us who yearn for a reality in which the Holocaust will never end, and that we will always and forever have a way to shape our existence through it, the experience of endless trauma.
Against them I wish to present my parents’ spiritual and existential last will and testament. My sisters and I were born from Mom’s snow, not from the blood and massacre. We received a pure, clean slate from our parents. We grew up in a miracle, in a home completely free of traumas. Mom’s Hebron was destroyed before her very eyes, Dad’s Dresden went up in flames, and still they created a calm and joyful human environment that was optimistic and trusting. And from these foundations a rarely powerful connection was made between my parents and my wife.
My father-in-law was a partisan in the Jewish underground in France. He fought the Nazis, and my mother-in-law was a young woman who volunteered to write letters to a partisan. After the war they met, and thanks to them we are all here. She knitted him socks, wrote letters, and sent him her chocolate ration right to the front lines. When the war was over, they returned together from the assimilating world to Judaism. But in contrast to others, they didn’t return from the killing fields to the nationalist, isolationist, and traumatized extreme. On the contrary.
The miracle of World War II, they taught me, is not the fact that the Jewish people were saved, and that the State of Israel rose from the ashes. The real miracle is that humanity was saved because of the bravery of Righteous Gentiles. For dozens of years my dear father-in-law, a precious man, has been devoting all his efforts to finding and decorating Righteous Gentiles, those who risked their lives to save other human beings, Jews.
Many years ago, when I served in one of my public posts, the chairman of the Jewish Agency (1995–1999), a group of young Israelis came to meet me. “We have an idea of first-rate historical and national significance,” they told me. “We want to tell you about it, and if you’re convinced, we’d like you to lead it.”
“What’s the idea?” I asked, with curiosity.
“Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, right?”
“Right,” I replied.
“And there are six million Jews today in Israel, right?”
“Correct.”
“And Israel is the heir to the Judaism that was destroyed, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“We think that every Israeli should adopt a dead victim and tattoo on his arm the number of a Jew who was murdered there. And when that Israeli’s days are done, someone else, maybe one of his children, will tattoo the same number. And that way, you see, they will never die, they will live forever. And the memory of the martyrs will never be forgotten.”
I’m looking for another way. One that does not only orbit the past, reliving it again and again, unable to ever get out of there. Neither is it a way of life that is an indifferent, straight, and rigid line that moves to the future and leaves the memories of the past behind it as if nothing had happened. I’m trying to clear a path for myself and for us who remember but are alive. A spiral of progress and memory, a synthesis of a line and circle, of continuity and change. I’m looking for the path that will take me from the memory to the lesson, from trauma to renewed trust in myself and in people in general, from what was mine and ours to what is supposed to be universal and belongs to all people wherever they may be.
For many, the Holocaust was and will forever be an incurable trauma; for others, it is a pure crystal around which the elements of their identity coalesce to form a whole. For both, the Holocaust is a tangible reality, present in whatever they do.
I wanted to take the legacy of my parents’ home and turn it into an alternative concept to the culture of tragedy that guides our life here. I imagined the miracle that my parents created; they managed to transmit and inculcate in us many of the values of a world destroyed and vanished while preventing destruction and trauma from having any real contact with our lives.
The mass demonstrations in Jerusalem against reparations from Germany to Holocaust victims and survivors, against diplomatic relations with Germany, and even the Eichmann trial, did not come into our home. Just like the settlement enterprise and the renewal of Jewish settlement in Hebron, my mother’s home town, which were kept outside our heavy wooden door. I don’t recall even one conversation in which these issues came up and were discussed. So, it’s no wonder that the whole Holocaust industry that has swept Israel in recent years was very alien to me. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know if Mom or Dad successfully repressed the horrors of their youth and the terrifying reality that wiped out their happy childhoods, or perhaps, like any normal young couple, they created their own reality for themselves and created a new world. Either way, I was never involved, emotionally or practically, in the “Holocaustization” that has become such second nature for us Israelis and Jews.
IN 2006, I TOOK A FASCINATING TRIP WITH OUR YOUNGEST son, Noam. Together we followed the footsteps of my late father to Germany. We traveled far, thousands of miles, but what I discovered was deep inside me. On the last day of the journey we were notified that our flight was delayed, and suddenly we had a few unplanned free hours. We left our luggage and strolled, like any ordinary father and son, along the paths of the Berlin Zoo. While Noam ran around looking at the many cages and unusual animals, I found myself sitting on a bench and peering at the captive monkeys behind the partition. All, except one, jumped energetically and mischievously from branch to branch. One hand holding a branch and the other stretched out for the next branch. Letting go, leaping into the air and moving forward, up and back. Over and over. Just one, the exception, sat alone, oblivious to his mates. I asked a zookeeper who passed by what that monkey was like.
“He’s different,” the German veterinarian answered me. “He can’t climb and move forward because he’s afraid to let go of the branch. When you hold a branch with two hands, you can’t move. That’s his fate,” he added sadly. “He sits all day on the ground like someone in mourning, cut off from what’s going on around him.”
I thought about the poor monkey, and not only about him. I asked myself, is this the metaphor? Are we the monkey? Since the Holocaust, we have been holding tightly, our knuckles white, to the little we have, unwilling to let go. Clinging to memories and pain, and not letting go. Wallowing in the trauma and using it to justify everything. Sitting on the ground of the past, mourning, and not taking off to the heights of humanity and humaneness. When Noam came back from his tour of the zoo, my train of thought was interrupted. We went to buy ice cream and began the journey back home, and I forgot to ask the veterinarian if there was a remedy for the monkey’s ailment, our ailment.
I HAVE NO IDEA IF THERE IS A GOD, I DON’T HAVE PROOF of his existence or non-existence, it’s not important to me. One thing I’m sure of: if there is a Creator somewhere, she created the world through debate and disagreement. I believe that disagreement is the most important tool of human creation, which Jewish culture adopted and greatly improved. Because if I agree with you and you think like me, and we all agree about everything, then ultimately everything degenerates and dies. But if we disagree on something, sharpen our self-held truths, if we’re precise and thoughtful, maybe something new will be born between us.
My arguments pertaining to the legacy of the Holocaust hurt my readers in various ways. More than anything, it is difficult for Israelis to face the mirror I hold up to them. “How dare you compare us to Germany? We are, after all…” I had carefully compared contemporary Israel to Germany between the Second Reich and the downfall of the Weimar Republic, not to the Germany of the grim and dark days of Nazi rule. But the very comparison of something Israeli to something German was enough to create an uproar. A response is necessary to the claim: why Germany of all places? The role of an analogy in a conversation or discussion is to be a reflecting mirror, and it is almost always problematic. If something in the analogy doesn’t match 100 percent, immediately attention will turn to the aberration, not the substance. Still, there is no alternative to looking at the mirror facing us, even when it is not always clean, and even when the image reflected in it is not always flattering.
I have given great consideration to what would be the most accurate historical analogy. I thought of comparing our reality to the invasion by the white colonists of North America—“pioneers,” refugees, immigrants, and religious reformers who ultimately brought a great tragedy of annihilation and erased memory to the members of the original indigenous people. I thought later a great deal about the history of France in North Africa in general, and particularly in Algeria. A painful occupation and disengagement full of tragedies, very similar to our reality in the Palestinian territories. In the end, I was left with Germany. Anyone in his right mind knows that the two works that were the most important and had the most influence on contemporary Jewry were Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the one hand and Herzl’s Altneuland on the other. What was there in the German environment then that produced two such prophecies, the prophecy of darkness and the vision of light?
Germany, as I knew it from observation and endless reading, contained an impossible race between two different and contradictory spirits. One spirit carried collective gusts—gray, sad, and angry—of national trauma. Because of the damage inflicted on Germany by the international community—the Germany that did not find its place in the sun during the great imperialist contest, that was vanquished and humiliated in World War I—it became the most hurt and insulted nation in Europe. At the same time, however, winds of freedom were blowing there like nowhere else. Winds of equality, creativity, freedom, brotherhood, and new and fascinating thinking. It was a race between pessimism and optimism, between hurt and hope, between trauma and trust. In the end, hurt rose to power, and the national trauma overcame hope and its spirit of progress, renewal, and humanity.
Such a race is also taking place in Israel. Between a painful and tangible national trauma and a new spirit of Jewish hope and Israeli esprit de corps. The race has yet to be decided. Sometimes trauma is ahead, and sometimes it is hope. And it is not at all clear who will win this race. I wanted to raise an alarm, a warning sign on the nation’s path, telling it to pay attention. Sometimes trauma wins, and who but the Jewish nation knows better the implications and consequences of such a dark victory.
The storm caused by my attempts to sound a warning was accompanied by self-righteous fury in the press and the public that pushed me far outside the accepted circles and the Zionist consensus. They pushed and I willingly distanced myself. Their emotions were no longer mine. To my great sorrow, not too many years were necessary for my painful views to become a commonplace reality. The same thinkers, writers, journalists, and critics who attacked me have become the critics of contemporary Israel, as if their words were taken from my writings. They lament racist Israel, the shrill xenophobia here, the malignant occupation that seems irreversible, the repellant aggressiveness and collapse of the supporting pillars of democracy. These voices are being heard from all directions. And Israel, unwittingly and without acknowledgment, has become a polarized society whose rifts seem a long way from healing. When they get to the places where I had been in previous years, I’ve already moved on elsewhere. I’m already beyond despair, looking for new hopes, paradigms, and insights that are entirely different from those that have brought us to this pass, to this shock.
In 2007 I was interviewed by the Haaretz newspaper. It was an interview with plenty of shouting, and its climax was this exchange between me and the interviewer:
He: “Don’t you understand that your positions endanger the State of Israel? There won’t be an Israel. It won’t exist.”
Me: “Tell me something. How can it be that I have been a Jew for two thousand years, without a gun, without planes, without two hundred atomic bombs, and I never for a day feared for the existence and eternity of the Jewish people? And you—the Israeli—you’ve been armed to the teeth for sixty years, with troops and special forces, with capabilities the Jewish people never had, and every day you are scared, perpetually terrified that this day is your last.”
He: “I don’t have an answer to that.”
He published the interview and ended it this way: “You can’t take away from Avrum what he has. You can’t take away his education or eloquence or ability to touch painful points of truth. Maybe for that reason he is so infuriating. A friend and a predator, a brother and a defector.” He marked me and the border between us. He was inside, and I was outside. He was a patriot, and I was a defector.
On the morning the interview was published I went out as usual to bring in the newspaper. Before the first light of day I had read it. Not easy, but penetrating, sharp, and thought-provoking. With our first coffee, I brought the paper to my partner. She, who doesn’t read newspapers and despises our cacophonous news, read it very quietly. When she finished reading she erupted in bitter tears, crying like she never had before, even in the most difficult moments of our lives. The kids, who were home at that moment, rushed into our bedroom.
“Why are you crying?” they wondered.
“I agree with Dad’s every word, but I already see the reactions,” she said with the pain of her experience. “I have no more strength for the hatred, the madness, the evil that is about to pounce on us.”
Roni, my oldest daughter, thought for a minute and said warmly, “You don’t have to cry, Mom. In fact, you mustn’t cry, there’s no need to cry.” She argued that I was finally expressing what I held to be true, and that this truth is also her truth, of her generation, and that finally someone is speaking to it truthfully. This voice must be preserved, Dad’s voice, she told her. He should be supported, he must be helped, because he is the only hope left here, in this lousy country.
It was a moment of clarity for the family. Everyone was right. My partner could not imagine how much her prediction would come true, the intensity of the resentment that has since become an inseparable part of our lives. And my daughter was very right in her intuitive assessment. It was the first time that I had confronted in such a clear fashion a generational gap.
Most of those I lost, or who wanted to do away with me, were of my age group, and their remarks to me and about me recurred in numerous ways: “Avrum, just when we finally have some peace and quiet you bother us with your questions? Leave us alone, for God’s sake!” Their children, on the other hand, didn’t stop coming. First, they came one at a time. Then they invited me to parlor meetings and gatherings, and now I’m also involved in building many of their futures. Many of them understood that along with my criticism of the current reality there is a proposal for an alternative spiritual and moral identity that is positive and constructive. Their message is loud and clear: we don’t necessarily agree with you, but you are one of the few who allow us to ask the absolute questions that trouble us so much. In recent years, the existential and political conversation with them has become something entirely different.
A YEAR LATER, IN SEPTEMBER 2008, MY DAUGHTER RONI got married. I was flooded with happiness. My first daughter to get married, at home, in a small and intimate circle of friends and loved ones. She and Ariel chose me to officiate and bring them into the covenant of marriage. We went up together to the hill above our small house in the village; we put up a marriage canopy in the Judean Hills, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and were very excited. The day after the wedding, the three of us, Roni, Ariel, and I, flew to Germany to run the Berlin Marathon together.
It had taken me a long time to return to Germany. I had been there many times, but none of my visits were easy or simple. My first trip abroad was at the end of high school. My parents said to themselves and to me that I must broaden my horizons before joining the army. I traveled to Munich to see the Olympic Games of 1972. The visit was aborted with unforgettable symbolism due to the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in Munich. Years later, I headed a parliamentary delegation to Berlin. We took off at dawn, and when we landed I realized that I was sick, feverish, and weak. That same evening, in the same plane, I returned home, and when I landed I was feeling healthy and hardy—another attempt to reach Germany that came up empty.
I had been in Berlin many times: during layovers between flights to distant destinations, as a member of Knesset and public figure, as Knesset speaker on the day the Bundestag moved from Bonn to Berlin, as an Israeli with his youngest son following his father and his world that had vanished. But I had never been to Berlin like this. I had never come to Berlin as a pariah at home in my country and I had never come to this defining city in pursuit of my love, running, and with my loved ones. Free of any agenda, liberated from emotions and excessive emotional baggage. So I thought.
I cried the whole forty-two kilometers. For one-third of them I cried in pain and sorrow. There was Oranienburger Straße, where my father would often pray. And from there you go to Grenadierstraße, where the Gestapo headquarters was, and then we passed very near the Alexanderplatz of the writer Alfred Döblin, and the finish, oh, the finish. Potsdamer Platz, under the boulevard of linden trees, the Unter den Linden, still bearing the imprint of the Nazi architect Albert Speer, through the Brandenburg Gate and the actual finish line. Once upon a time—during the Nazi era—there were other thousands here, they too cheered, but not for me, they too were full of joy for the body and for nature, without me. But then, in 2008, it was my time, and with my whole body and soul I felt that something different was happening here. Every street corner spoke to me, echoed and reflected familiar shadows of a past that I was never privileged to know, of a present that could have been mine. I ran and cried for Dad and for us and for myself and for the history that was, and all those who are no more. For another third I cried because it was hard for me. The kilometers added up, the muscles cried out, and age also asserted its claim.
In the last third I cried for joy. I was living in the most amazing Jewish generation ever. There was never a generation like this before. Jews running? Marathons? Jews running a marathon as equals? As athletes, not objects of persecution? There was no difference between me and the Danes and the Dutch and the Germans and the British and all the others around me, just as happy as I was. We were really all equal. Each one according to his ability, each one according to his wishes. Where was my dad, why wasn’t he here waiting for me in the expanses of the Tiergarten, to see me grinning? Happy and believing in the happiness of my children? Dad, you were right, there is a different Germany, but Dad, you didn’t know, there is also a different Israel.
All my life is a race, an endless marathon. I have come from an ancient history and I am focused on eternity. Meanwhile, I’m trying to grab some moments of reality and current events and understand them, to decipher the meaning of things. Now I’m on the Judeo-European track. So complicated and complex. So much potential and achievement, along with endless disappointments and innumerable victims. I’m not one of those who think that in the Holocaust saints were killed by animals. It was a horrific and unnecessary war and a brutal annihilation of people with no reason or purpose. People murdered people. The murderer was a German person, and he can’t be relieved of responsibility as if he were a mad, mindless dog. The murdered Jew, gypsy, and homosexual was a human being, who must be remembered as such.
This is how it happened: the arrogant individual, full of feelings of inferiority, was pushed to immortalize his superiority through evil violence and the elimination of the one he saw as lowly and inferior. The first thing this violent human virus attacks is the concept of equality of all people. And the minute that one individual is worth less, the way to his elimination is easier. It happened to us in Germany, and it can happen to any nation, anywhere, in any situation.
It didn’t only take me time to get to Germany; it took Germany time to get to me. I saw the fears and hesitations of the German interviewers and of other friends. “Herr Burg, it is difficult for us,” they admitted to me. Only a few reached the last leg of my journey, the end of the marathon, the proposal to go together, Jews and Germans, sacrificers and sacrificed together, to all the places where people are still tied to the stake, bound to the altars of cruelty. To raise our voices together and say: “‘Never again’ is not only for the Jews. Never again! For any murder and destruction of any human being, whoever he may be.” Because that is the universal lesson of the tragic relationship between the Germans and Judaism that we are trying to make a turning point. From “our Holocaust” to a better world, healed and humane, for all human beings in the image of God, in which there will be no Holocausts—for anyone. A different Germanism, Judaism, and humanism is my key to making a few necessary corrections in this world.