In Days to Come Read online

  We went home with the mother of one of my classmates, Yisrael, who at that moment was for me the mother of all Israelis. As a young kid, I had no idea about defense systems, military powers, or diplomatic shields. She—this mom—symbolized for me, then, the fragile protection against the eruption of war evilness and the deepest of fears. We didn’t walk on the main roads to avoid the fire from the Jordanian snipers in red-checked head-scarves who were posted at the top of David’s Citadel. Suddenly everything that had been regularly forbidden to us became temporarily permitted. In those days, parental authority was supreme. A parent spoke, and the child obeyed. But in that moment the roles were reversed, and suddenly I became Yisrael’s mother’s guide. I told her “this way,” and she obeyed. I showed her how to jump over fences, and she followed me silently. In those moments with her we were allowed to vault over roadblocks and go through courtyards that were forbidden to us all year. We passed through the Reform Har-El synagogue and the Baptist church on Narkis Street, which our parents and teachers shunned: the former because the Judaism practiced there was not ours, and the latter because of its missionary Christianity. But in that first time of trouble in our lives, everything was forgotten, and they—the Baptists and Reform Jews in the heart of Jerusalem—became our temporary refuge; the walls and fences of the church and Temple shielded us from the hostile fire, becoming the backroad safe way home, the one we hardly ever dared to take during peace time. That’s life sometimes; places we find terrifying in times of peace can suddenly become safe havens in times of trouble and hardship.

  We crossed the yard of the Ratisbonne Monastery, which was usually locked shut. I had always been haunted by the fear that if I passed by the place the priests in their brown robes and rope belts would seize me and send me to the Christian orphanage. But in the face of the demonic Arab enemy, the terrifying Jordanian Legion, everything unfit to eat became kosher, and all the fears became momentary security. The teacher, Yisrael’s mother, and I did not know then that this was the essence of the Six-Day War for Israelis: turning the unacceptable into the appropriate, putting the stamp of approval on everything that was supposed to be absolutely forbidden, making it permissible and even sacred.

  I arrived home safely. I clearly remember the sound of exploding shells falling in the yard and my sister’s fear, as well as our surprise at the new, unfamiliar names the radio announcers peppered us with: Sharm el-Sheikh and Quneitra, Nasser and Hussein. Who are these terrible demons? Where are these hellish places?

  On Wednesday, it was all over. After much shelling and bombing, endless rumors and news flashes, patriotic music playing on the radio, and families huddling together protectively, Dad returned home from his job at the government and said to Mom, “Get ready, we’re going to the Kotel,” the Western Wall. I didn’t know exactly what this Kotel was. We were never taught at home to yearn for it. We didn’t have a picture of it on the wall, not even a bronze engraving, as was common in so many homes at that time. The walls of Dad’s large library were decorated with photos of Mom’s family from the old Jewish community in Hebron that had been destroyed, and next to them was a lithograph of synagogues from around the world that were no more, from the Jewish diaspora that had been wiped out. But there was nothing to commemorate the Temple.

  I will remember Mom’s excitement until the day I die. She was wearing her blue pleated skirt. “Does this look all right?” she asked Dad, as always. “Very much so, Rivka,” he replied, as always, and together they went to the road to board the military transport that had come to pick them up. A dusty, unshaven soldier helped them climb into the command car.

  “I want to go, too,” I wailed at the top of my lungs, crying heavy, salty tears whose taste I can still recall. It was the first great outburst of my childhood. Cries of longing and sadness, of fear and disappointment, of a parting much greater than myself. Perhaps I was curious to see the battlefields; perhaps I was just giving voice to all the fears that had built up inside me during those days. The cries of a young boy who was not ready to be left without the security and protection of his parents. But despite my tears, they left without me. When they came back after a few hours, my mother pulled out a small bag from her pocketbook and retrieved from it a few short, squat cartridges from an Uzi submachine gun. “I collected them at the Kotel especially for you,” she said, as she handed the cartridges to me. She wanted to compensate for having left me behind, but she was also entrusting me with a little treasure.

  In those last innocent days of the State of Israel, we all had to take a shop class at school. Once a week we left the gray, neglected schoolyard and walked a few blocks to the workshop of the teacher, Mr. Tarshish. In the faded apron of a craftsman from a bygone era, with a booming voice and a ruler he rapped against the table any time he grew angry, Mr. Tarshish taught us all the survival skills we’d ever need. How to fix a short circuit with a special iron wire, how to change a light bulb, how to sand down a rough board and polish metal. To this day, I don’t particularly like manual work, mainly because I’m not that good at it. I am not just left-wing politically; I also have two left hands, far more left than my most firmly held views. I was also never good at conforming to the mold, or copying a template exactly and without variation. Even back then my spirit sought something else, something creative and original. The complete opposite of the strict, precise work ethic of the formidable Mr. Tarshish.

  A few months after the war had ended, we prepared a surprise for our parents in honor of Chanukah: we made metal menorahs, the proud work of our own hands. We toiled for days, cutting the brass, bending and joining, shaping the frame and the branches. For me, the high point was taking the Uzi cartridges that Mom had brought me from the Kotel and attaching them to the menorah as candleholders. My souvenir from the remnants of the Temple is inextricably bound up in weaponry, violence, and bloodshed. I was not yet familiar with a Judaism of pacifism, but if I had been, I doubt I would have committed to it. In school, we had not yet read the biblical verse rejecting all violent associations with the Temple and its altars: “And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones, for by wielding your sword upon them you have profaned them” (Exodus 20:25). And thus, the Jewish Kotel and the Israeli Uzi were melded together for me into something new, inseparable.

  TO THIS DAY, WE LIGHT THIS MENORAH EVERY CHANUKAH, and I both love it and hate it. Each time my heart is pierced anew—by longing for the childhood I once had and that is no longer, and by lament for the great transformation that has come over all of us. I need that particular menorah not just as a nostalgic link to those innocent bygone days, but also as a tangible reminder of all those things that I still want, and still need, to change in this world.

  I always loved Chanukah, more than any other holiday. In the beginning, in my youth, it was because of the mystery of the darkness and the small lights that banish it, and because of the modest little gifts we always received from our parents. I loved those magic moments in which Dad, Mom, my sisters, and I sat on the rug and played with the dreidels, the spinning tops—one of the rare occasions when Dad came down to our childhood level. Perhaps that’s why dreidels became my favorite collector’s item, with thousands of them now decorating the walls of our home. With time, I came to love Chanukah even more, as a unique and special holiday in which Mom had a significant role. Not just as the passive woman who says Amen to all the blessings, rituals, and customs that Dad performed with flair, but also as the one who lit the candles on the nights that Dad was not at home. I loved her in this role—she inspired me to take on my first public position. It was during Chanukah when I was in first grade. I was selected to play the part of the shamash, the candle used to light all the others. Mother ironed my white shirt, made me a cardboard crown with a paper candle on top, and rehearsed with me again and again the line I was supposed to recite in a loud voice in the class play. “To be a shamash is to bear a great responsibility,” she said to me, “and my son needs to be the best shamash ther
e is.” So I tried, for her sake. I wanted to be the best shamash there is.

  Since Chanukah is always celebrated in the winter darkness, it is the Festival of Lights, similar to festivals of light in many other cultures, such as Diwali, the Hindu festival. We Jews, who do not worship nature in and of itself, have added more and more layers of religious meaning to Chanukah, as with many of our other holidays. The miracle of the jar of oil, the redemption of the Temple, the victory of the few over the many—the whole deal. Thus, we transformed a festival celebrating the shortest days of the year and the approaching lengthening of the hours of daylight into a religious holiday. Adam’s sigh of relief, as his fears were alleviated when the winter nights stopped growing longer, was transformed into a great, spontaneous joy. The joy of the faithful over the redemption of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Greeks had defiled it with their pagan rites and their military conquest. The Greek empire issued religious decrees against us. Our benevolent God, the master of history, stood by our ancestors in their distress and granted them a “great salvation.” As a sign of gratitude, and as a means of commemoration, the ancient Jews dedicated these eight days to giving thanks to the God who delivered them, and to praising His name.

  It was never a holiday about wars and warriors. On the contrary, the mighty ones in the Chanukah story are the Greeks, not us. But that is something that no one told me before I ascended the tall chair of the shamash on Chanukah during first grade. In my black polyester Sabbath pants, which were secured high above my belly button, I sang my lines as loudly as I could: “In our time as in those days, God’s Maccabee redeems always.” I didn’t know that in my cousin Moshe’s secular school down the block, they sang the same song, but with a slight variation: “In our time as in those days, the Maccabee redeems always.” For us, it was still a religious holiday with God at the center; for them, the holiday had already been appropriated by the steamrolling revolution of Zionist consciousness. God was cast aside, and the Maccabee took center stage.

  The Zionist revolution dearly wanted to return us Jews to an active role in political history, and it grasped at every symbolic straw it could find. It is natural, therefore, that the heroism of the war and the struggle of the Maccabees became the most important port of call in the Zionist movement’s voyage home. The return to the land and to our memories, to language and history, to the places that once were, and to the glory of the past. And we small children each were the best shamash there is, the caddies of this fantastic revolution. A decade later, in the mid-seventies, we in the army were singing completely different versions of those Chanukah songs. God had disappeared entirely from the holiday, and we marched in unison—left, right, left—accompanied by the hoarse loudspeakers:

  We carry lights

  Through darkest nights

  The paths aglow beneath our feet.

  We found no jar of oil

  No miracle but our toil

  We hewed the stone with all our might—

  Let there be light!

  With rifles on our shoulders and heavy military steps, we trampled on any religious vestige of the holiday. From a Jew in my parents’ home I became a new Israeli Maccabee. We, my Israeli friends and I, didn’t rely on miracles. Not like all the weak, meek members of our parents’ generation. We took responsibility into our own hands; we were the masters of our own fates. I was transformed from an anonymous little religious Jewish boy from Jerusalem into the conventional Israeli hero, whom none of my parents’ generation or their parents before them ever had imagined.

  This popular modern Chanukah song has become associated, in recent years, with the opening ceremonies for Israel’s Independence Day on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. The Hasmoneans (the ancient Jewish dynasty established by the sons of Mattathias the Hasmonean and encompassing Judea and surrounding areas) became retrospective heroes who were enlisted as the inspiration and model for present-day Israeli war heroes, those who “hew the stones.” Through this marching song written for a Zionist Chanukah and played on Independence Day, Chanukah and Independence Day become inextricably intertwined in our consciousness. The modern holiday of Chanukah became a festival of heroism, rather than a festival of lights commemorating the rededication of the Temple. With each Uzi cartridge I fastened to our menorah—any of which may have felled someone near the Kotel in ’67—I unknowingly fastened this new myth to our Israeli narrative.

  “You have a holiday, again?” a non-Jewish friend asked me. “Which is it this time?” When I patiently explained it to her, I realized how hard it is to avoid the feeling that, for us, holidays and disasters are inevitably intertwined. It seems that there was always some disaster about to happen, always with a great villain involved, and we were always miraculously saved. That’s why we have so many holidays and we celebrate happily with plenty of commentary and food. On Passover, we are threatened by the Pharaoh and we eat matzah as a culinary reminder of our ancient misery. On Purim, it’s the wicked Haman, our classical anti-Jewish biblical antagonist, who was a vizier under King Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes I), and we eat hamantaschen pastries, shaped like triangles to remind us of the evil one’s ears.

  One of my daughters asked me once, “What does the sesame on the burekas [poppy seed–filled pastries] commemorate?” One of my sons came home from kindergarten one day and asked, “Dad, who’s the villain of Shavuot?” But the sesame is just sesame and the Shavuot holiday never had a “villain.” In my childhood, Shavuot was a very low-key holiday but nevertheless quite a happy one. Though brief compared to Passover and Sukkot, it was heavily freighted with symbolism and meaning. On Shavuot, we went to the synagogue as Jews, as religious people. There we celebrated the giving of the Torah, according to our traditional customs. But on the streets and in schools, we were Israelis first, and as such we celebrated the other aspect of the holiday—the first fruits of the harvest.

  As little children, we would march to the headquarters of the Jewish Agency in the Rehavia neighborhood, bringing first fruits. We wore white, put baskets of fruits and vegetables on our small shoulders, and walked slowly up the hill from the kindergarten to the Jewish Agency compound. The children of Jerusalem, festively dressed, trailed behind the kindergarten teacher, who carried a tambourine, her assistant with a triangle and cymbals, and all of us singing at the top of our small voices an old song of Levin Kipnis, the Zionist holiday poet.

  That was our Zionist activity at its best. Blue-and-white youth in Israeli sandals—two brown straps and a hard leather sole—and white socks. In the streets, we celebrated the country and its districts, the land and its fruit, which we, the new Jewish generation, carried on our shoulders. And there I was, Avraham Burg, four or five years old, from 6 Ben-Maimon Street in Jerusalem, not my grandfather with the same name who is buried in Dresden. Me, the little Israeli, marching proudly in “our” streets and bringing the first fruits of the land—that is, fruit that Mom bought at the Mahane Yehuda market—to the headquarters of our new national institutions.

  I was eventually elected chairman of those institutions, the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization in 1995, when I was thirty-nine years old. The struggle to get elected to the post was long, difficult, and ugly, a global struggle that pitted the official representatives of the Jewish world who wanted me for the job against Yitzhak Rabin’s more suitable candidate. (The officials were a mix of Jewish world leaders and philanthropists, and some Israeli political hacks who were concerned that my “young Turk” energy might put at risk the conservative stability of the organization.) It was neither the first nor the last time that I would face Rabin. A national hero when he was killed, Rabin was a man I intensely disliked and did not respect during his lifetime. In fairness, the feeling was mutual. He did not really like me, justifiably in his view. He was a famous military man and a war hero, and I was one of the founders of the protest movement against war. He was the embodiment of the Zionist establishment and I was not, and no longer am.

  On my first day as chairman, I
set out for work on foot from my parents’ house. I walked through my old kindergarten, which is still standing, and walked up the street to the national Temple where we had brought first fruits as children. What was a difficult march for a three- or four-year-old was only a few minutes’ walk for an adult. That day my journey took me across the phases of my life to that point. A leap across many years. A moment before I went through the door to assume my official appointment as chairman, I looked back down the street from which I had come. It was a quiet Jerusalem afternoon. I looked for little Avraham, but he wasn’t there. I thought I was witnessing the closing of a circle, but I didn’t know that nothing had been closed. Nothing. In fact, everything was about to open, and the path ahead of me was longer than anything I had ever experienced. The natural flow of childhood—with the naïve images of a national utopia as a way of life and the childish optimism that replaced the hardships of all the generations before us—changed in 1967.

  The sense of relief and liberation after the Six-Day War was indescribable. Few wars end “well.” Often the first days of the war are heady—mass enthusiasm and the bravado of leaders—but they end with great disappointment. I had read much about the high morale of nations going to war, and I had listened closely to the personal stories of German Jewish immigrants of Dad’s generation (they would become the first members of the Israeli peace camp) when they talked about the enthusiasm that swept over them when they went off to fight in World War I. Like them and the rest of us, my enthusiasm in June 1967 knew no bounds. Like them, over the years and after gaining perspective, I would never feel the same way again. Since then, I have never again felt stirred or inspired by any of Israel’s wars. In the first days of every operation, I’m always afraid, concerned, and critical. That is why in the closing days of each of these wars I am never disappointed, unfortunately, because the grim reaper always comes to claim his price. All wars have a dark, sad end, full of loss and grief. So many of my friends are buried in this soil that it seems to me that a very high price has been exacted for the hope that has yet to be delivered.