by Avraham Burg
Thanks to him much space was made; I lost both God and volleyball. I probably would not have become a real athlete, but thanks to him I learned a lesson in Jewish skepticism. I learned what I was not. I am not him. In his wrong, violent, and self-righteous way he did me a valuable service, completely contrary to his original intention. He fought the spirit of sports that seized me in order to return God to the center of my being. And since then I have been fighting to push him away, because his absolute, zealous God is not my God. God is not a fact, just as she (yes, she) is not a ball. As a youngster, I felt intuitively what I can today easily express: God doesn’t compete at volleyball because sports are sweaty and tangible, and God—if he or she exists at all—is far beyond the physical that can be detected by the senses. He or she is an idea, abstract, unattainable. And anyone who tries to conceptualize him will never reach him. In prayer services, we sang “He has no body or image of a body,” and I remember pondering, the thought needling me, “Could it be that the rabbi’s god is jealous of me for having a body?” The abstract Jewish divine is all that stands beyond the tangible, and the moment God is positioned beyond what can be comprehended with the human senses, a different, wonderful belief is born, completely different from the brutal faith of that gloomy teacher. The skeptical belief.
Maybe there is personal oversight and perhaps not, maybe this is our God and maybe he belongs to others, maybe he is male or perhaps she is female, maybe there is a Creator and maybe not. I will probably never know all these things. That is why I make do with my natural skepticism as an engine that is constantly working and helping me reach new thoughts and ideas. In the end, with time, my painful loss in those days became a very big gain, which shaped the foundations of my character. I gained two important things at the time: I learned to survive even while swimming against the tide, and I became a creative skeptic.
Those were sad, gray years. My oldest sister had already left home, Dad was busy and far away, somewhere at the height of his career, most of my childhood friends were immersed in the new religious enthusiasm—stirring, total, and all-encompassing. That’s how they all were, similar boys from all across the country living the dorm life. And me? I didn’t want to be absorbed and drowned in that sticky stuff, I didn’t know that Freud had already invented psychology and that you have to talk about issues. So I internalized things and kept quiet.
“Er izt pushet hungarik” (He’s simply hungry), Dad and Mom would reassure themselves when confronted with the mute anger of their youngest son and his adolescent problems. I was indeed very hungry, but for something entirely different. I read all the books by Hermann Hesse with avid interest. I became Demian and Steppenwolf, torn like them between contradictory and raging forces. Narcissus, the wise priest, and Goldmund, the creative and mending artist, were my real rabbis and advisors. My parents had sent me out onto life’s path much too early, and the social and educational world was no more prepared for me than I was ready for it.
The years of my youth became a giant battleground between my soul that wanted to fly to freedom and the official jailers who did all they could to imprison me in the seductive place called “like everyone else.” I had only one corner of human refuge at the time. My girlfriend, my partner in love, who was the one and has remained the only. Just then—right after the Six-Day War—she moved to Israel with her parents from France. I met her on her first Sabbath in the country, when she came to the local branch of our youth movement. I fell in love with her immediately, like all the boys. Foreign, pretty, new, and mysterious. I proposed to be her boyfriend near Falafel King, but it wasn’t so simple. “Are you crazy? I don’t know you!” she protested in her French accent, which was very pronounced at the time. More time and stubborn effort were needed, and ever since then she knows me better than anyone. And the craziness? It’s still there.
We made furtive appointments on the streets of the religious neighborhood. I skipped classes to see her, even for a minute. She was the only ray of light in that darkness, and for those years of devotion I will be eternally grateful to her, to my last day. We were counselors together in the youth movement. One evening we returned home, and as young lovers do, we chose the longest and darkest route to walk, trying to take advantage of every minute together before she went back to her house and I returned home or to the dorm. After taking leave of the entourage of friends who went their separate ways, we wandered off in the dark in the narrow, wild paths of the Valley of the Cross. The large multilane road that now crosses the valley had yet to be paved. I can’t remember if the new Israel Museum on the opposite hill was already lit up, but we sat on the dark and romantic slope and held each other with all the force and love and hopes of that age.
We were youngsters during the transition from the sixties to the seventies, and we wanted to experience some of the feelings and thrills felt by many of our generation in the West. Suddenly, out of the darkness, we were caught in a shaft of light. We were startled, scared; we had been caught. One of the young members of our youth group had pointed his flashlight at us. He shined a light, and we were plunged into deep darkness.
Overnight, we became easy prey for everyone. Self-righteous disapproval and institutional hypocrisy swirled around us. People demanded our dismissal from our posts as counselors. Some threatened to tell our parents, teachers, and worst of all, that the episode would be published in Hatzofeh, the official newspaper of religious Zionism. Were it not for the human and civic courage of the counselor in charge, things would have ended very badly. She, like us, was a religious girl on the brink of adolescence, on the cusp of modernity. She courageously backed us up, blocked our dismissal, talked with us, and calmed everyone down, both gossips and zealots. She turned that courage into a way of life. Many years later our paths crossed again, when she was one of the greatest supporters—with wisdom, experience, and resources—of the establishment of Israeli civil society. And that was the way she acted to her last day, which came prematurely and after great suffering. But then, in my early moments of youth, it was a great and tremendous embarrassment, too big for children. Real distress that only with time matured into broader insight.
In those days, we weren’t actually taught anything about life itself. In class we studied Talmud, debating loudly. We were told that Talmud develops the mind, and we felt that we were intellectuals and very smart. We meticulously parsed the details of religious law, we reviewed verses and commentaries, and we argued passionately about strange legal realities. We went through the motions of general studies, but they had no real importance in the hierarchy of yeshiva priorities. In our free time—of which we did not have very much—we were heavily preoccupied with utopias, repaired worlds, establishing settlements, and yeshivas. We sang patriotic songs and marched in paramilitary parades with deafening drumbeats and flaming, inflaming torches. We sang: “Let us spread the great light, the light of the Torah.” We yelled at the top of our lungs: “God is the lord of vengeance,” and we commanded him, “Lord of vengeance, appear!” We were not taught about the basic components of human life and human society. In the yeshiva, we were prevented from exposure to the existence of non-Jews in the world, to the existence of the secular world around us and its meaning, and more than anything, efforts were made to block out the very existence of women, girls, friends, and lovers. A world of boys without gentiles, secular Jews, and girls. And as a counterweight to this ignorance and restriction I was lucky; the sole stroke of luck of my youth was that I had a girlfriend. She was the one who led me through that gloom, gave me a hand, and had faith in me in the days when I didn’t have any faith in myself.
That ray of light in the darkness of night led to my first public crucifixion, shedding some light as well on the sanctimoniousness that permeated our Bnei Akiva youth movement and our entire generation. The debates that divided us then were so naïve. Mixed dancing or not. Western dancing or only hora dances. Nylon stockings and makeup for girls—heaven forbid. But this didn’t last long; the questions were repla
ced with answers, and the question marks became unequivocal and one-dimensional exclamation points. The circles of boys and girls were consistently moved farther and farther away from each other. The girls’ skirts grew longer and thicker. My mother and sisters never routinely covered their hair. Today? Woe to the woman who walks uncovered and with her hair showing in a religious neighborhood, in a settlement, or on the city streets. Woe to the young woman who still lacks the modest head-covering of marriage. In general, modesty has become one of the obsessions of this community, a loaded and somewhat sick term, trying to limit and restrict the most complex human relationship—between the sexes.
All the signs of illness of those days have become complete madness in recent years. Excluding women from public spaces, members of parliament seeking to ban female performers from official ceremonies in the Knesset, neighborhoods with separate sidewalks for women and men, buses with places reserved for women (in the back, of course). Soldiers and commanders of military units refusing to hear the sound of a woman singing because “a woman’s voice is nakedness,” religious decrees prohibiting women from running for parliament because that would violate modesty restrictions, and even a prohibition on participation in parlor meetings “because these are immodest public events”—these things no longer surprise anyone. After all, “this mixes men and women like salad.”
When I read the writings of these religious and ultra-Orthodox moralizers or hear their sermons—in Judaism and other faiths—I feel that these are sick people and a community of followers and believers who are no less ill. The preoccupation with rules of modesty, sex, and sexuality is itself a kind of permission to engage in pornography in reverse. There’s something demonic in their attitude toward women. They feel so threatened by their very presence, as if women were sex machines endowed with nothing other than seductiveness. That is why they are thoroughly obsessed with every exposed and covered inch of a woman’s body. As if their whole purpose in life is to hide the witch inside her. “Mom, are you a witch?” I once asked my mother after a synagogue lesson on the phrase in the Sayings of the Fathers: “The more wives, the more sorcery.” “No, yingele,” she replied. “I love you, and witches can’t love.” I calmed down.
We were never allowed to ask the questions raised by this approach to the world. I had a girlfriend who introduced me to the great spirit of women. Together we got to know ourselves and our relationship, and that was enough for me. From a distance, I can draw some distinctions between those who had girlfriends in their childhood, a sweeping, permitted love like mine, who became committed to sexual and gender equality, and many of my friends at the time, who unlike me learned the laws of marital relations in distorted theory books, primitive volumes of Jewish law, from a ritual bathhouse attendant and bridal counselors provided by the rabbinate. They became blind zealots, following a Judaism of discrimination and exclusion.
So it is regarding women and secular Jews, and even more so when it comes to conversation with anyone who is not Jewish. I think that until I was seventeen I hadn’t set eyes on a real gentile (I don’t mean a local Arab or one under occupation, which somehow fits in a different category, but a gentile like Dad’s gentiles and his friends from “there,” the perished Jews of Europe, with their colorful Jewish stories). In 1972, I traveled abroad for the first time in my life. I landed at the Amsterdam airport on the way to Munich and the Olympic Games. On the way from the airport to the city there was a small traffic jam, and the bus came to a halt. By the side of the road local laborers worked at laying a pipe in a ditch they had dug. Every so often the blond head of one of the workers would pop up from the ditch, and I stared at him as if I were hypnotized. A blond laborer? I had never seen such a thing at home in the Israel of the fifties and sixties. We didn’t have many blond people at all at the time, and all the workers I had seen until then were black-haired and dark-skinned. I think he was the first gentile who made an impression on me.
My experience in later years taught me that precisely conversations with those who are not like me, not like us, are the most enriching. As a collective, we sanctify the stultifying narrative of “a people that dwells alone,” clinging to any manifestation of anti-Semitism as a justification for our isolationist existence, talking only with ourselves about ourselves, completely unaware of the great missed opportunity of our life: the wonderful richness of conversation with the other, someone different.
IN THE MID-NINETIES, I WAS INVITED TO VISIT JAPAN. IT was the first time in my life that I spent a few days outside the boundaries of monotheistic civilization. Until that trip anything I knew about the world was processed through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tools. I wasn’t aware that far beyond the monotheistic half of the globe there is a parallel world, no less deep, complex, aesthetic, ethical, and wise. The pain I felt during that visit surfaces every time I encounter the limited thinking of an interlocutor who is not prepared to genuinely recognize the truth and beauty of the other, of someone who is different. These are the limits of the victim of monotheism. The blind followers of the one God are systematic problem-causers, because in a place where believers can entertain only one truth, making room for only one God and only one brand of faith and commandments, there is no room for others. Ultimately it comes down to “yours” or “mine.” In the eyes of the religious monotheist, there can’t be room in heaven or earth for two or three Gods: Elohim, God, and Allah together. Therefore, the potential battle between them is constantly joined, until Armageddon and the victory of “the true God.”
In distant Japan I was exposed to a different approach. We were a group of Israelis from several walks of life. In Kyoto, in a very old traditional tea house, we had a meeting with an elderly Buddhist monk. We all sat around a low table, very close to the floor, kneeling and waiting for the traditional tea service, as is customary. After five minutes my knees were about to collapse. I writhed, asked for a chair, got up, sat, walked around, and got back down on my knees before repeating the process. Very undignified and disrespectful. And he, the old monk, sat there calmly, gaunt and erect. Not a movement. He had translucent skin and a soft smile on his face. We talked, through an interpreter, about everything, but mostly about faith and its principles, about the traditional way of life and the customs derived from it. About human duty and duties of the heart. I sensed that I was having a conversation with a partner who understood me. At that moment, I wanted to leave everything and stay there with him as long as he was alive.
During that entire sensitive meeting, a phrase from the Jewish morning prayer flashed deep inside my head: “to understand, to learn, to listen, to study and teach.” I wanted to know much more, to understand and to learn. I was avidly ready, there of all places, to listen, to hear and learn from someone older and wiser than me.
At the end of the evening, the Buddhist monk gave me a book of Buddha’s sayings in Japanese, with English translation. The book was wrapped in delicate silk paper, in the finest origami style. I felt like my hand had been scalded. “Idol worship, idol worship,” all my rabbis from that narrow-minded yeshiva shouted at me from my inner darkness. All the epithets hurled at the New Testament, at the “idolatry” of other faiths, scorched my palms. Three times a day we would all pray devoutly, “they bow to nothing and pray to a god who will not save them,” and the stricter ones among us would spit—during prayer—on the floor while saying these words.
Once we went, as a group of children, to one of those places that were called “missionary,” a distribution point for Christian missionary messages. We asked them, as a complimentary gift, of course, for copies of the Bible and the New Testament bound in one volume. Each one of us received a copy, and together we went to one of the empty lots in town and used their profane pages to make a large bonfire. We didn’t know then what burning books meant. We hadn’t been taught that Jews had burned the philosophic wisdom of Maimonides, and we had not learned about the burning of the Talmud in the Middle Ages. And we had no idea that only a few decades earlier the Na
zis built a large bonfire in the bustling center of Berlin, in the opera square, before its name was changed to Bebel Square, and burned tens of thousands of books, the finest world literature written by Jews. Because the great Heinrich Heine was a converted Jew, no one bothered to expose us to his wisdom written more than a century before that conflagration, to wit: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”
All those hidden flames burned my hands. During the entire visit to Japan I could do nothing with that book. Disposing of it would have been inappropriate, because it is a book revered by many of my hosts. Reading it was out of the question, if only because of the heavy burden of the prohibitions of my childhood. So, I dragged it around in my bag like a useless object until the flight back to Israel, which lasted almost twenty-four hours. At night, half a world away, having difficulty sleeping, I began reading Buddha’s sayings. Until then, to my shame, I had not read any holy book aside from our Bible. Neither the New Testament nor the Koran. And here in the high spiritual place, literally between heaven and earth, I discovered to my surprise, and perhaps even to my dismay, that I understood many of these sayings that were written far beyond Judaism and its younger sisters, that I recognized and identified with them.
Then came long days of thinking. For the observer in me, that visit to Japan opened a window to entire worlds that were inaccessible to me from childhood: the wisdom, experience, ethics, history, and culture of other peoples and nations. On the emotional level I again felt that sense of missing out, a sourness that dogged me all the days of my youth. Life inside a plugged-up bottle. The dense air, the breath fogging up the glass and preventing any eye contact or access to the external world. The profound feeling that someone is fooling me, deceiving and blinding me. Amin Maalouf had not yet written then about the clash of identities, and that “identity [is] the sum of all our allegiances, and, within it, allegiance to the human community itself would become increasingly important, until one day it would become the chief allegiance, though without destroying our many individual affiliations.”*