In Days to Come Read online

  When I opened myself up to this wonderful and complex Lebanese author, I learned from him, from someone who is supposed to be my official enemy, a great piece of wisdom: identity is not necessarily the constant and destructive need to choose “either/or,” either God or volleyball, either modesty or a girlfriend, either a Jew or a gentile. Either Elohim, or God, or Allah. A rich identity can be all of these and contain many elements even if they are contradictory. There is great serenity in containing such contradictions. Why not study Talmud with the wisdom of Buddha? Or understand Maimonides along with the Islamic scholars who influenced him? Or think about the commentator Rashi in the context of the Crusader period and the Christian theology of the Middle Ages? Seeing Jewish works as a constant conversation with all the cultures of the world, as integrated histories, is openness. Forbidding me to play volleyball, turning my love for my girl at the time into a torturous web of prohibitions and guilty feelings, deliberately blurring the identity of secular people and blocking the light emanating from other cultures—this is the worst of ghetto culture. And there, in one of the alleys of the renewed Jewish ghetto in the State of Israel, I spent those years.

  MY GENERATION WAS THE BRIDGE ON WHICH THE ISRAELI Jews crossed from Athens to Sparta. We experienced firsthand the mechanisms that made possible this shift from the soft, warm, and inclusive parental home to the hardened and tough nation that grew up here seemingly unnoticed.

  In our house, as in many religious homes, there were two appliances meant to get us through the Sabbath safely: the electric hot plate and the hot water dispenser. Every Saturday they were there, long before most of the Judeo-technological inventions, which were meant to deceive God according to Jewish law—the Sabbath timer, the Sabbath elevator, and all the rest of the strange and embarrassing deceptions.

  In our home the bluffing didn’t reach such high levels. On the contrary, the hot plate was just a plain hot surface, with no thermostat, on which the food being cooked for the Sabbath was placed, and beside it was a tall water container that in the early years stood above the Jerusalem single burner on which my mother cooked. When the water in the dispenser ran out, Mom added more so “that there won’t be too little if guests arrive.” She improved the food on the hot plate as she saw fit: a bit more water here, a stir there, or the addition of missing ingredients. When the water got low in the dispenser we tilted it toward the small faucet at the bottom to use up what was left, and when it got in the way of the strict order in Mom’s kitchen we respectfully moved it to a less intrusive place. No one talked about strictures and prohibitions. We made sure to observe the Sabbath according to the tradition in our house, a tradition very similar to those of other homes but not exactly the same. Every home had its customs, every family had its heritage and traditions. The Jewish chain was extended, as always, from generation to generation, in all our homes.

  On one Sabbath, Judge Haim Cohen was invited to give a lecture in the synagogue. He was “one of ours,” a German Jewish immigrant with a high forehead, a heavy accent, wonderful Hebrew, and a matching sense of humor. He talked about the relationship between his parents. His father was a stern-faced rabbi in Frankfurt, and his mother managed both him and the house with a flourish. Once, he said, a Jewish woman came to the house on Sabbath Eve and asked his father for a ruling on whether the slaughtered chicken in her basket was kosher. The rabbi’s wife brought the chicken into the father’s room, and he carefully examined it and ruled—not kosher! The rabbi’s wife came out of the room and returned the chicken to the Jewish woman. “It’s kosher, you can go,” she said, wishing her a good Sabbath as she accompanied her to the door. “Why did you say that to her?” the young Haim Cohen, then still known as Herman, asked his mother. “Dad ruled differently.” “Yes,” his mother replied, “Dad saw the chicken, but I saw the widow.” I’m not convinced that it was a true story, perhaps it was just a fable. But I remember how Dad told it to Mom when we returned home, and they both drew their conclusion: “Nu, of course it’s obvious.”

  In 1969, when I was fourteen, it all ended. Myriads of children like me, almost an entire generation, were disconnected from home and exiled to other places. No longer did we grow up according to the customs and flexibility of home and natural, understandable compromises. We shifted to life “by the book.” The strict, absolute books of Jewish law became our operating instructions for the correct life. All at once, the day-to-day shrewdness of the Jewish housewife was gone, and Dad’s eyes, not averse to overlooking things, were closed. The forbidden became absolute, and less and less was permitted. Everyone became uniform, like assembly-line matches. A body of wood and a head either on fire or scorched. And everyone had the same operating system. From a child of my parents I became a robot of my rabbis. Colors were erased, different shades disappeared. Home lost its magic, its authority, and its role. Other institutions took its place and kneaded our young consciousness like soft dough, the consciousness of the first religious Israeli generation ever.

  There were mediators for the transition from home to the new institutions. In my case they were the rabbis, known as the Ramim, our yeshiva teachers. They were always to be addressed in the third person: The Rabbi. The Rabbi thinks that… The Rabbi, I have to go to the bathroom. The Rabbi said that… Most of them came from the ultra-Orthodox world, graduates of the adult yeshivas of the Lithuanian Torah tradition. I don’t know why they came to us. Had the yeshiva world already produced more graduates than the ultra-Orthodox community needed to sustain itself, and we received the surplus? Perhaps it was a strategy of ultra-Orthodox infiltration behind the lines of the religious Zionist enemy in order to defeat it from within? Or perhaps just unexplained coincidence. Either way, I again encountered the ultra-Orthodox world that I got to know in the heder classroom of Rabbi Yisrael Lev and the bar mitzvah preparatory lessons in the Hebron yeshiva. Again, the rabbi as teacher, and me as the pupil. Again, they are the carriers of Jewish historical knowledge, and I am an empty ignoramus who is supposed to be filled from their reservoirs. I was hostile to them all from the start, except one.

  There was something fake about every one of them, almost fraudulent. One of them invited us once to his house, and to demonstrate that he was with it, young and plugged in to our reality, he showed us the television hidden in his clothes closet, somewhere between his folded ritual fringed garment and his wife’s blonde wig. He tried to communicate openness, and I sensed hypocrisy. Another one spoke pompously about values and ethics, but time and again deceived us with double messages, half-truths, and absolute lies. A third was cruel and wicked, venting his frustrations on schoolboys. And the most prominent among them, the head of the yeshiva, a mythic figure in our circles, turned out to be a weak and hollow prisoner of his controlling wife.

  The one I genuinely liked was Reb Nissan. This is the appropriate place to thank him for his wonderful role in my life, which at the time wasn’t so wonderful. He knew how to smile, tell a good joke, share experiences of his youth and his dilemmas at important junctures of his life. He invited me over to his house several times, even in later years when he was no longer my teacher. Simply a good man. But he was the exception. In those days, religious Zionism did not have enough of its own Torah scholars, and its rivals gave it no quarter. The ultra-Orthodox criticized us as ignorant boors, empty like secular people but much more dangerous because we pretended to be something we were not. “You,” they lashed out at us with zealous fervor, “are not the followers of venerable Jewish tradition.” And they would conclude with the most terrible criticism: “You are Reform Jews.” On the other side were the secular Israelis who denigrated religious Zionism with no less intensity. “You’re not really pioneers, you’re not really settlers, you don’t really bear the burden of the country’s security.” This was not only an abstract ideological argument; it was an almost daily experience.

  One of the main sites of our childhood experiences was the “branch.” The branch was the center of activity of our youth movement, Bnei
Akiva. The location of the historic Jerusalem branch was at something of a midpoint. The direct route from home to the branch went along King George Street and passed by the secular Hashomer Hatzair youth movement center. We wore Sabbath clothes, they wore the blue shirt, their youth movement uniform. We had neatly parted hair, they had hair that covered their ears, we were full of awkward hesitation between boys and girls, they spent time together naturally, we ate sunflower seeds, they smoked cigarettes on the Sabbath. Beyond the branch, down the street, in the Mea Shearim quarter, lived, then as now, the most powerful and fanatical concentration of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Sometimes one group provoked us, sometimes the other threw stones at us, or vice versa, and sometimes both. On the way to the branch, we got it from the Hashomer Hatzair kids; on the way back, from the ultra-Orthodox members of the Neturei Karta sect. One thing never changed: the branch was always torn somewhere in the middle, between the Zionists and the ultra-Orthodox, between the extroverted freedom of the former and the antiquated conservatism of the latter. All those years that’s how we were, children of religious Zionism, playing second fiddle to the two other large orchestras.

  Some strings were pulled taut, almost to the breaking point, by apologetics directed at the ultra-Orthodox, the strictly observant fanatics of God who seemingly never compromised and would never give up their total belief. Their religious absolutism stood in complete contrast to the compromise that characterized all aspects of religious Zionism. We were a little bit of everything, but there was nothing totalitarian that characterized us. We very much wanted to be like everyone else, so we weren’t fanatical about anything. We tried to dance to the tune of pioneering Zionism. We left our shirttails out, and we wore khaki pants manufactured by Ata, folded very short. We wore simple one-strap “biblical” sandals, and the daring ones among us grew moustaches. We learned how to build structures with wooden poles and tie knots “like the kibbutzniks.” We wandered the paths of the country like the greatest hikers. We sang the songs of the youth movements, and we knew the war songs by heart. We admired the bearers of their culture, Meir Har-Zion and the heroes of the paratroopers, the pioneers of tower and stockade, the illegal immigrants, and the fighters of the Palmach militia. They were all theirs, and not a single one was ours. We didn’t have even one personal and intimate hero of our own, until 1967.

  Only then did we finally have our own heroes. Our leaders were born, and at long last we had our own dreams. Only we spoke about reviving the monarchy, and only we had a plan to conquer the country, the whole country. It took a few more years for this potential to burst forth, but from the start the writing was etched on all Israeli walls: this is our time, the youth of religious Zionism. The storm of 1967 ripped all the old doors from their hinges. Nothing returned to the way it was after the cease-fire. Everything had been thrown open, breached, and made possible. From a small country surrounded by narrow and oppressive borders we became an expansive empire.

  The new wide-open spaces of the Holy Land opened before us. Here was Hebron and Bethlehem, ours and King David’s. There was Jeroboam’s Tirzah and Gideon’s Ofrah. We almost climbed our forefather Jacob’s ladder, whose legs were planted in Beit El, and our heads touched the sky. It started with trips. We youngsters wandered here and there around Jerusalem, and the older ones “went down to Sinai.” We knew by heart the Tombs of the Kings, Kidron Valley and the necropolis adorning it, and we meandered through Tzofim Stream and the burial caves carved into its banks. Sometimes we climbed on foot from Lifta to the tomb of the prophet Samuel. We went down to the Givon pool and imagined ourselves as the heroic biblical fighters led by Yoav Ben Tzruya, defeating Avner Ben Ner and his fighters there—establishing the young Kingdom of Judea with our very hands. Jews unwittingly vanquishing the Israelis of the Israelite kingdom. Sometimes we were taken to Kfar Etzion to see the renewal of Jewish settlement there. A religious Zionist revival in the place where both settlers and the young Israeli army were defeated and humiliated only nineteen years earlier, in the War of Independence.

  On Sabbaths, we went to the Western Wall. We prayed at the Chabad House. We came back home with dusty shoes after we descended into the depths of the four synagogues in the heart of the destroyed Jewish Quarter. We got to know all the steps and climbs on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. We walked there with heads held high. We hid in the nooks and crannies of the wall when we were searching for some romance mixed with identity and meaning. In all these places, we met only children and youths like us. There were virtually no secular children in all these new places. Most of us belonged to the same youth movement, Bnei Akiva. We were members, counselors, or graduates of the movement. Our parents came from various distant diasporas. They had other accents, old-fashioned clothes, customs and mannerisms from worlds that had existed but were now destroyed and vanished.

  And we were so proud of our uniformity. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. If you listened to one of us, you knew all of us. We wore plaid shirts over white T-shirts. Khaki pants, definitely not jeans. We wore our ritual fringes under our clothes, and we all had knitted skullcaps. Our sisters or cousins knitted our head coverings. For the happy ones among us, they were gifts of love from our girlfriends. Yael knitted me a skullcap, or kippah, and I made her a keychain of olive wood, on which I pasted the symbol of the youth movement, committing us all to “Torah and Work.” Ultra-Orthodox youths weren’t there, either. All the shababniks we had seen in massive demonstrations on Sabbaths in Jerusalem were absent from the new Garden of Eden. Greater Israel became our stage, on which we could suddenly break out and express ourselves.

  My early childhood was restricted by walls. Fences around houses and communities. A fence along the borders. Fences across the whole country. Independence ringed by coils of barbed wire, and it was natural and understandable to everyone. Near the old City Hall, bus number 15 had to make a sharp left, because Israeli Jerusalem ended with a high wall covered with rusty metal sheets topped with barbed wire. There was a no-man’s-land fence under the Yemin Moshe neighborhood and the whole scary area beyond the new zoo. All these fences came down at once. I felt this way only one other time in my life: when I watched, along with billions of people around the world, the fall of the Berlin Wall. I felt the tremendous catharsis of Berliners. I thought to myself then that only Jerusalemites, Berliners, and Irish residents of Belfast could understand the momentous declaration of President Kennedy: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

  We grew up in a city with a wall through its heart and we witnessed its collapse. We collectively skipped over the wreckage and rubble and went out to new places. Here and there people were already talking about settlements. Renewing the Jewish community in Hebron hovered in the background in our home. The Hebron settlers compelled the Israeli government to appease them. The blood of those murdered in the 1929 massacre of Hebron’s Jews was their most powerful argument. And to this argument, Dad, the moderate minister, partner of Mom, a survivor of the riots, had no response. He also employed the Zionist rhetoric, that building and settlement are our ways of revenge, and did not understand that this path leads to many more wars and bloodshed than any local massacre. Those were years of great arrogance. We had defeated armies, we had struck a resounding blow against the bombastic Arab leaders. Daring David had struck multitudes of Arab Goliaths. We had the privilege of being born in a generation that completed what the mythic generation of 1948 had not succeeded in doing: liberating Jerusalem and lifting the siege ringing the reddening and thickening Israeli neck.

  A few days after the ’67 fighting died down Dad went on a ministerial tour of the territories. I don’t recall if we called them “occupied” or “liberated” at home, but we felt very good about them, with “our Hebron” and “our Shchem,” or Nablus. My father was the ultimate charmer. There was not a person on the Jewish earth that he could not engage in conversation, communicate with, and endear himself to. He remembered many people and their personal histories. He memorized thousands of family
trees. He knew human and Jewish history and the annals of hundreds of communities and multitudes of figures. When he was told something he never forgot it. Faces were forever engraved in his phenomenal memory. And on these strengths, he was able to always draw associations, make conversation, create a connection.

  We all traveled in his giant official vehicle, a vintage American car, to Nablus, Ramallah, and all those places that just a moment ago were beyond the pale. On Mount Gerizim, we met the high priest of the Samaritans, and for the first time I saw my father dumbfounded. Dad wore a European hat with a wide brim, and the priest came toward him with a head covering that looked like a mix between a fez and an Arab head-scarf. Dad was clean-shaven, and the priest had a wild beard. My father in a tailored suit and matching tie, the priest in a white jalabiya robe reaching to his ankles. Dad spoke many languages fluently, and the latter understood neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. Oy, he couldn’t be humored with a good joke, and he hadn’t even studied the biblical commentary of Rashi. A European Jew facing a Samaritan—neither Jew nor Arab—and the foreignness of the territories struck us mercilessly in our first encounter. Faced with this new reality—half of which was old and identifiable, and the other half new and strange, embodied in the figure of the Samaritan high priest—even Dad was left speechless. Today, when I reflect on that moment, I see his loss of words back then as a symbol of far greater losses.