by Avraham Burg
The arrangement between the disciples of Shammai and followers of Hillel actually laid the groundwork for the Jewish pluralism of contradiction. Although there are dogmas and absolute statements in Jewish culture, there is also complete acceptance of the opposite opinion. About everything. Or almost everything. I try to imagine a particular moment in Jewish history, the moment of the first meeting of sages who gathered in Yavneh. Jerusalem had been destroyed because of the internal rivalries and violence that tore apart the city of the Temple. You could feel the grief in the air. Many people had lost loved ones; they had property in the smoldering city and memories that went up in smoke. Everyone had already done their own soul-searching about their share of responsibility and the fault of their neighbors. The Temple had been destroyed for all of them, and there was not one person in the room who did not understand that the Jewish state was finished for many years to come.
From the trauma of the destruction, bereavement, and personal loss, they made the most natural but also most astonishing decision: they would never let disputes over ideas and ideologies tear apart and destroy. Civil war before the destruction brought forth the culture of disagreement that followed, a culture that subsumed all sects and factions and brought them all in. The halls of study and their penetrating debates shaped the Jewish soul for a great many years. A soul that is no stranger to contradictory voices and colliding ideas. On the contrary. Out of the destruction a new Judaism was born, which has lived on until our time. I think that is the secret magnetism of Jewish culture, which has pushed and pulled Jews to opposite places precisely because of their Judaism. The greatest communists and capitalists, tough pioneers, genteel bourgeois, complex intellectuals, artists, and people of action. A human kaleidoscope full of contradictions and disagreements in which everyone—lover or hater—can find a hook on which to hang one’s hat.
It appears that not only Arendt and my son at the checkpoint were betwixt and between. My father and mother, as well as their God, came from there and went there. That is my wadi, and these are the old people coming out of it toward me, and I’m very comfortable here, in the warm culture of Judaism as the homeland of internal contradiction.
* Scholem’s and Arendt’s letters to one another were published in the January 1964 issue of Encounter; Arendt’s letter to Scholem was reprinted in her anthology The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2008), 465–471.
† Quoted in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, xliii.
‡ From Arendt’s letter in Encounter, January 1964; quoted in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, xlv.
§ Translation mine; compare with Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 60.
** Benjamin Tammuz, ha-Pardes ; Mishle babuim ; Pundao shel Yirmeyahu [Orchard, Bottle Parables, Jeremiah’s Inn] (Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot aaronot: Sifre emed, 2008), 170–171.
EPILOGUE
THE DAWN AFTER THE LONG NIGHT
IN 2013, I PARTICIPATED IN A MASS GATHERING IN VIENNA, a city that in recent years has become a kind of distant second home for me. In the commotion of the tens of thousands of people who packed the place, I “corresponded” in my head with the late Stefan Zweig, the prominent Jewish writer who wrote The World of Yesterday, a great lamentation for his beloved Europe that the Nazis had destroyed, and who, a day after he sent the manuscript to his publisher, took his own life in Rio de Janeiro.
Greetings, Mr. Zweig,
I’m sitting here, leaning on a tree, on the edge of Heldenplatz in Vienna. I’m writing the last lines of this book and thinking of you. Before me lies the expanse of the Heroes’ Square. There from the balcony, Hitler announced the Anschluss seventy-five years ago, the annexation of Austria to Germany. He stood there at the other end of the square, and the throngs cheered him enthusiastically. Maybe one of them leaned on my tree, just like me. Now separating me and the lofty balcony, between that nightmare and this reality, stand tens of thousands of Viennese who came here to mark the anniversary of the end of the Nazi occupation and to express their revulsion against Nazism and its values.
Too bad you’re not here. Here on the grass next to me is a Turkish family. The mother and big sister are wrapped in the traditional headscarf, and the youngsters are running around chattering in Viennese German after a ball with the logo of the Rapid Vienna soccer club. On a mat on the other side are a few same-sex couples. They are in love, judging from the way they touch each other, and like me they are enjoying the last rays of the sun of the “blue hour,” the hour of the beautiful Viennese sunset. There are also many Jews assembled in the crowd. I know some of them, some are identifiable by their traditional garb, others are no different from the rest. Disabled people in wheelchairs move everywhere freely because of means of access available to anyone. And I can identify in the crowd members of the gypsy people, the Roma. In this wonderful human mix, it is hard for me to avoid the thought that all those whom Hitler wanted to destroy—the Jews, the disabled, the homosexuals, the gypsies, the foreigners—are now celebrating our victory. It took many years, too many, and claimed many victims, too many as well, and still we reached this day. The news these days is very disturbing, Europe is shaking, the economy is fractured, the immigrants and nationalists are staking out territory, and benighted fanatics threaten world peace from near and far. And still, I am happy and full of hope. A minute ago, I heard two people saying to each other, “Today the Second World War has ended.” And I believed them. It won’t happen again, not here, not to us, not to anyone else across the Western democracies.
In 2017, with Donald Trump and Brexit and Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage on the rise, people are concerned again. It would not be accurate to say that I am without worries; I am very concerned about the future of freedom. Yet I am full of confidence and trust that it will eventually prevail. The strengths of the free human spirit will overcome. I believe that people will not go back voluntarily to the confinement of fewer rights and fewer liberties. As much as modernity, secularism, and progress require many updates, corrections, and fine-tuning, they are still the superior paradigm. We have to work very hard, sometimes fight for it, but the victory is ours.
I look around me, in Israel, in Europe, and all over the United States, and I see social responsibility expressed like never before; impressive civil societies, humbling volunteers, persuasive activists. There is almost a formula: the worse the government, the better the civil society. There dwells our true human security; from there comes to the world the enhanced and improved pluralistic and diverse social models. All of these fantastic, devoted people were not around to stop your beloved Europe from perishing. Now they are, we are, with the promise, “never again.” Just listen to Angela Merkel, of all people, the German chancellor, Time magazine’s 2015 Person of the Year, who said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for. If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations, then that’s not my country.”*
And, Mr. Zweig, if you ask, desperately like she, how Europe can make space for thousands of refugees and migrants, the answer is so Jewish: “We will cope.”
I think about you with sadness and gratitude. With sadness, because with all the lovers of peace and freedom that are here, your suicide is much sadder. You wouldn’t believe it, but we won. Who am I to preach to you, but I don’t believe that it is permitted to despair, ever. The good human spirit is much stronger than the evil human spirits. And between committing suicide and patience, between despair and happiness, I am always patient, waiting for the happiness to come. I’m sad because had you been alive, you would have stood on the stage today, and before the concert you would have built a bridge for the crowd between the good Vienna that was and the good Vienna that exists, and together we would have crossed the river of roiled waters of the years of terror and hatred.
And I also think of you with great gratitude. In the last few years I hav
e written the pages of this book. Many of them were written in your shadow, with your inspiration. In the last few years I have read your books and the books of other Jewish writers here in Vienna, writers who were people of this city. I finished reading Radetzky March by Joseph Roth in the Schönbrunn Palace, where the final plot takes place, and there the empire also ends. I read The Capuchin Tomb in Café Mozart around the corner from the Imperial Crypt. And I read your The World of Yesterday, again and again all around the city.
The book made a strong impression on me. Some have characterized it as a kind of biography. As I read the book more times, I thought that you were not writing about yourself at all. That if you had been asked to write an autobiography, it would have looked entirely different. In The World of Yesterday you did a great favor to many people like me. You opened the windows of your life to give me, the reader, a glimpse of the world in which you lived and from which you parted so tragically. You lent me your private photo album so that I would understand the human reality that you abandoned when you reached the conclusion that it had abandoned you. I don’t know if there is such a discipline, but for myself I define The World of Yesterday as an “autobiography of a period.” As if the period itself had written its memoir and used your windows to do it.
How did it begin? It’s really strange. I have no real connection to places. I love beautiful landscapes, but I’m not addicted to them. I love my homeland without sacredness and without meaning simply because I was born there, and these are the people, the language, and the places that I am used to. I love nature, but like the homeland, I don’t need ownership to feel good in it.
That’s why my feeling in Vienna was so odd and strange to me. A city in which I feel at home more than in many other places. I don’t like cities, and there is no place in the world that I love more than our small and isolated house in the Judean Hills. And still, in Vienna something else happens to me. Our first acquaintance was not good. I didn’t know you and the city you were born in. I arrived in the middle of the night from Naples. I appeared before an audience of intellectuals in the old and inspiring home of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. I lectured there about my book The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, which had been published at the time in German. The next morning I was supposed to head off to another place, to meet other people in a different language. At night, when it was all over, Gertraud went home alone, and I went out of the hotel to walk around the city for a bit. There weren’t people on the Graben pedestrian mall. The Viennese coffee shops were closed. A thin fog wrapped the city on a cold November night. Light chills accompanied me on the night walk, but not chills from cold. I had the strange feeling that from every doorway, from every alley leading to the church square, there were eyes peering at me. Only once before in my life did I have that feeling, in Prague. The murkiness of that beautiful and mysterious city wordlessly explained to me the existential mood of Kafka, a native of the city.
The next day I left Vienna with the feeling that I would not return there again, at least not in the near future. And I was very wrong. I have returned to the city since then many times. I was invited to various and fascinating gatherings as part of the Bruno Kreisky Forum, a medium for international dialogue that attracted me. With time, and over the many times I visited Vienna, deeper layers of the city were revealed to me, and I was taken with her charms. During a routine taxi ride I chatted with a young local friend by the name of Hielfried, and he opened the door for me to the secret cave.
“I’m so impressed with you Viennese,” I told him.
“Really?” he replied with the cynicism of a local who has seen everything.
“Yes, you are so cultured. Everyone has read the latest books, this one was at a concert yesterday, that one at the opera, and tomorrow they all meet for a culture weekend at the Burgtheater. The whole conversation is saturated with all the varieties of culture.”
“The city was really once like that,” he said. “The capital of an empire. A cosmopolitan city to which all the sounds and voices, ideas and expressions of central Europe flowed, where they collided and created the most wonderful and terrible manifestations of the twentieth century.
“We are still living on that energy. Many of the creators of that Viennese culture and its carriers were Jewish,” he added matter-of-factly.
That was a piece of information that I knew, but was not conscious of. In our German Jewish background, Berlin was the center of the world. The city to which Moses Mendelssohn went in the mid-eighteenth century and where he opened with his own hands the gates of the West and of Judaism. Vienna was on the fringes of consciousness. Hielfried’s remark pushed me to know more about this city. And from there I quickly reached you and the people of your generation.
In 2012, I met Professor Steven Aschheim of the Hebrew University. He let me read his reflections on Vienna. Even before the first line, in the title, everything fit into place. He wrote about “Vienna: Harbinger of Creativity and Catastrophe.” And suddenly I understood the mystery of my attraction, and why precisely in this city I could reach the places to which my writing took me. What a magnetic city. A few years ago, I was in Leipzig with my youngest son, my beloved Noam. We sat on the patio of a pizzeria near a church where Johann Sebastian Bach, the Kapellmeister, would conduct, where he is buried. “Dad,” Noam said, interrupting my thoughts, “do you think that Bach once walked on this street?” Since he asked that question I think differently about streets that existed in history. To think that there were days that in these very streets of Vienna, Freud, Herzl, and Hitler walked, and maybe even tipped their hats to each other. The city where in those days both pan-Judaism, which became Zionism, was born, along with pan-Germanism, which became its great misfortune, Nazism. The city in which the most emotionally disturbed person walked freely, along with the greatest emotional healer.
What do I see in the Vienna of today? It’s not clear to me. Many things are still blurred blots, not a clear and accurate picture. A kind of Rorschach test that doesn’t have an incorrect answer, just different answers with different meanings. Sometimes I see the terrible past poking out among the cracks, refusing to blend in with the walls. In politics, in facades, in graffiti on the walls, in tattoos of the younger generation. At other times, I see the decline of the empire. How this city, like a black hole, absorbed all the languages and cultures, names and memories of all the peoples and tribes linked by nothing but the energy of imperial Vienna. And when the historical centrifuge reached peak speed in World War I, all the peripheral areas were detached, leaving Vienna alone to carry the multiculturalism that was the concentrate of the twentieth century. According to Aschheim, Vienna was the harbinger of creativity and destruction, the cradle of psychoanalysis, the center of advanced experimentation in painting, literature, and modern music, and the place where the first molds of mass politics and incitement were cast, in which the forces of myth and irrationality entered the life cycles of individuals and society.
It took this city a long time to take up its current place after the dramas and traumas of the previous century. But now it is there. The same city, with the impressive ring boulevards, the great imperial buildings, the institutions, the gardens, and the names. The same but so different. The fascinating mix of languages. Muslim women covered from head to toe shop with scantily clad young women in erotic lingerie stores. Many international and local paths of statesmanship and diplomacy, open and secret, cut through the breadth and depth of the city. Serbs and Croats, Turks and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, intellectuals and businesspeople—all pour new content into the vessels of the old memories.
Sometimes I feel that Vienna is a model very similar to Israel. Many cultures folded into one place. Sometimes colliding with powerful insensitivity. That same secret of a black hole sucking in energies that once burned and are now dimmed. And at the same time, I feel that something new is seeking to erupt onto the respectable surface.
What seeks to erupt, Mr. Zweig, is you. When you ended yo
ur life in distant Rio, you became a pupa that went to sleep for a few generations. And today, decades later, it’s time for the butterfly to emerge. When you explained your act of desperation, you wrote: “Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me, and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.” And you ended this way: “I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them.”†
Indeed, you went too soon. The dawn broke, patience pays off, and I wish to be one of your friends and followers of your path. In every place, especially in the place of the Jews, in Israel. In my own way, which does not have the spiritual strength that drove you and your generation. But I am trying very hard.
* Roland Nelles, “The Real Merkel Finally Stands Up,” Der Spiegel, online English edition, September 16, 2015.
† Stefan Zweig, suicide letter, February 22, 1942, Stefan Zweig archive, Archives Department, National Library of Israel. A digital image and partial English translation of the letter are available online at http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/personalsites/archive_treasures/Pages/stefan-zweig.aspx.
Avraham Burg was born in Jerusalem in 1955 to one of the most prominent families in Israel. His father, Dr. Joseph Burg, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped from Germany to Palestine in September 1939 and went on to lead the National Religious Party and serve as a minister in the Israeli government from 1948 to 1988. His mother, Rivka, was a seventh-generation resident of Hebron and the daughter of the local community rabbi. Avraham Burg first took on a public role during the first Lebanon War in 1982, when he was a leader of the anti-war protests. He went on to serve as advisor to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a member of the Israeli Knesset, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization, and the Speaker of the Knesset, among other public positions. Since his voluntary retirement from public life in 2004, Burg has become an outspoken leader of the Israeli left wing. He is the author of numerous books, including (in English) The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes (Macmillan, 2009) and Very Near to You (Gefen, 2012). He lives in Nataf, just outside Jerusalem.