June 22, 2007
by Daniel Gordis
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"Did you read the article in HaAretz about Avrum Burg?"
It was, of course, the question of the week. It was the same week that Shimon Peres was elected (now there's a phrase few of us ever thought we'd hear) Israel's next President, and the week that Gaza turned into Hamastan. It was also the week that Ehud Barak was named Defense Minister. But few of the people I hang out with were talking about Peres, Gaza or Barak. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about Burg, and the superb job that Ari Shavit, one of Israel's foremost journalists, had done interviewing him.
This time, though, the question was coming from my son, on our way back from shul.
"I did read it," I told him. "Did you?"
"I read it twice," he said.
"Twice?"
"Yeah. I read it once, and then, when all my friends started talking about arguing about it, I read it again."
"What'd you think?" I asked him.
"No, what did you think?"
The truth is, I was already thinking about something else. I was trying to remember whether, when I was a senior in high school, just weeks away from graduating, any article about nationalism, ideology or anything of the sort could have gotten my high school friends and me so worked up. And I couldn't think of anything. We grew up in a world, it now seems to me, about which we didn't have to think very much.
Not so our kids. They're growing up in a world in which the very existence of the country in which they live is a matter of continued debate. They understand that Arab hatred of Israel is so deeply entrenched that it will flourish even when it destroys any hope for a better Palestinian future. They don't even get terribly surprised when British academia chooses to boycott Israeli academics. But when someone like Avrum Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset and the former head of the Jewish Agency, says that it's time for Israel to give up on being a Jewish state, or that the Jewish state doesn't have a soul, even that young-but-jaded generation takes note.
But Avi deserved an answer. "I didn't think his critique was entirely wrong," I said, wondering what he would say to something like that.
"Me neither," he said.
"But I thought he was mostly wrong. And I thought that his conclusions were completely misguided." And then we started to talk.
Though it's tempting to dismiss Burg and his critiques of Israel out of hand, that would be letting ourselves off the hook a bit too easily. Burg is clearly not wrong that three-quarters of a century of incessant warfare and loss have turned Israeli society into a rather militaristic one, with sometimes ugly consequences. "Israelis understand only force," he says. An overstatement, I think, but not a critique that any of us who care about this society should dismiss cavalierly.
But the question is not whether he's right. The question is what we do about it.
Burg is not wrong that there are racist elements in Israeli society. His prediction that the Knesset will one day prohibit sexual relations between Jews and Arabs is ridiculous, I hope, but again, it would be too easy to focus on Burg's excesses, and to deny the parts of his argument that aren't wrong. One fifth of this country is made up of Arab citizens, and most of my kids' friends have never met one, unless that person was doing some work in their house. Here, too, Burg's not entirely wrong. We're proof (as are many other societies) that living among hostile neighbors for generation after generation can breed xenophobia.
But again, the question is what you do. Burg's suggestion? Adopt Gandhi's strategy, and get rid of Israel's nuclear weapons. Oh, Israel should cease seeking to be a Jewish State. And then, every Israeli who can, should get a second passport.
Timing's everything, they say. Burg's book (available so far only in Hebrew) came out as Iran moves inexorably closer to nuclear capability. It came out less than a year after Hizbollah, an Iranian proxy, demonstrated that the IDF is no longer the invincible force we once imagined it was. And it came out just as Hamas took over Gaza, extending Iran's conventional-weapon reach to the very edge of many of Israel's cities.
And in the face of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, Burg thinks we should become Gandhi.
That prescription makes sense, of course, if you want to give up on the enterprise. And Burg clearly does. He insists that we're psychological cripples, wounded by Hitler and incapable of recovering, and that our wounds color everything about this society.
He's right that we're wounded. What the Jewish world went through not only from 1938-1945, but for decades before, has clearly shaped much of our worldview. And 60 years of war since 1947 haven't helped.
Burg wants to know to where we should run. And I'd rather ask how we should heal.
Burg believes that we'll be healthier in Brussels. We don't need this place any longer, he believes. "I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish." (A direct quote.)
Sounds a lot like the Jews of Cordova in 1485, or the Jews of Berlin in 1920. Or the Jews of West Los Angeles, Newton and the Upper West Side of New York today.
About Europe, I think Burg's completely wrong. But one can still hope that America will continue to be a place of vibrant and vigorous cultural Jewish life.
Yet even if it does, what's wrong with Burg's placing the hope for our survival on some other place, and what Burg knows but doesn't want to admit, is that outside of this place, the sorts of choices that Jews have to make are limited to a very particular set of spheres. Outside of this little slice of the planet, the vast majority of Jews do not have to back up their foreign policy sentiments with the lives of their sons and daughters. In America, Jews can vote one way or the other on amnesty for illegal immigrants, but only here does the question take on distinctly Jewish qualities.
I don't think I was the only one gratified to hear Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann insist that Israel simply must take in the Darfur refugees who are making their way to Israel's borders. The Bible, he said, affords us no other choice. Had anyone asked me (which, of course, no one did), I would have added that a country created largely on the backs of people who had nowhere else to go when the world shut its borders and looked away, dare not forget that part of its history. I'm much less interested in why certain things happened to the Jews than I am in what the Jews have to be, given that those things did happen.
Sixty-five years after boatloads of Jews were turned away from shore after shore, is there really any question about what we need to do when people fleeing Darfur end up at our border? (Does wandering the desert on the way from Egypt to Israel sound familiar?)
Of course, everyone here understands that this could become a huge problem, if thousands and thousands begin to arrive. That's undeniable. And it's true that Israel's Jewish majority (which is necessary for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic) is shaky, with 20% of the population Arab, many of the Russian immigrants not technically Jewish, children of foreign workers petitioning to stay, etc. And that complexity, I think, is precisely the problem that comes with sovereignty, and is precisely the problem that we should celebrate, for it's key to this country having a soul.
Some people disagree. The Chief Rabbi of Hebron, Dov Lior, recently insisted that Israel does not have to take these refugees in. "The poor of one's own country take precedence over other peoples' poor," he insisted, referring to the famous Talmudic principle in Bava Metzia. "We have enough problems of our own with immigration absorption. We need to take care of our own Sderot refugees and we do not have budget reserves. We have enough poor people in Israel. There are plenty of nations that can help those refugees besides us."
I don't agree, and find it ironic (to put matters mildly) that Lior's own parents starved to death after his family was expelled from Poland and was wandering through the Soviet Union. But the irony's not the important part. What's significant is that we have a dispute between a (very secular) Minster of Justice quoting the Bible, and a well known rabbi quoting the Talmud. And in the midst of that, kibbutzim all over the south are adopting these families from Darfur, as is the city of Beer Sheva.
Is the problem solved? Obviously not. But the very fact of the argument, and the beginnings of real action, make it hard for me to buy Burg's argument that Israel's soul is lost. Hurting? Absolutely. Calloused? Probably.
But lost? No way.
Burg's also distressed by the quality of Israeli writing, and again, sees the solution in the Diaspora. "There is no important writing in Israel. There is important Jewish writing in the United States."
Obviously, what constitutes genuinely important writing could constitute an interesting debate. But perhaps not coincidentally, Burg's book came out during Hebrew Book Week in Israel, the annual festival of Hebrew writing and publishing that's taken place, without fail, every year since 1926. And this year, the press noted, about 6,000 new books were published in Israel. Not bad for a country with a population smaller than that of Los Angeles.
Quantity, though, is surely not a guarantee of quality, and even if there were quite a few very good books, one can debate whether anything truly "important" emerged here. But what's emerged of late in the United States that's so "important"? Some great fiction, to be sure, like the work of Nicole Kraus, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and the tireless Philip Roth, among others.
In the non-fiction world, though, what truly "great" ideas have recently been introduced to the Jewish conversation? I can't think of any, to be honest. But I'm not surprised. We're living in a confusing age. Though many very good books this year were published in both countries, perhaps the reason that nothing comes to mind of genuinely mindset-altering significance is that none of us yet knows precisely what to say about the collapsing ideologies on which many of us were raised.
For those who were nurtured on the classic Zionist notion of Israel as a haven for Jews, it is of no small significance that Israel is probably the most dangerous place to be a Jew. With Ahmadenijad to the east, Hezbhollah to the North, Hamas to the south-west and a host of other players all contributing, even Paris doesn't compare to the lurking threat with which Israelis have to contend. That portion of early Zionist ideology has clearly come crashing down.
And for those who believed that Israel's victory in the Six Day War heralded the coming of the Messiah, Israel has turned her back on that messianic possibility. Admittedly, many of us may not think in those theological terms (I don't think most Jews think in any theological terms, for that matter, theology being an ex post facto language for commitments to which we've already come for other reasons), but some people here did. And those people, it must be noted, were the vanguard of the new Zionism. Say what you want about the settlements (and Gershom Gorenberg's book about the settlements, Accidental Empire, deserves to read by people on both sides of the political divide), the people who populated them were the new blood and energy for Zionism. As these ideologues see the world, Israel abandoned them. When Israel gave back Sinai, Gaza and took steps (by electing Olmert) towards getting rid of the West Bank, too, Israelis turned their back on the messiah. On God.
Given that, is it hard to understand the fissures in the ideological commitment of religious-Zionist youth?
And what about the "other" youth? They, of course, are the children of the peace-niks, of those who believed that all it would take was a bit of territorial compromise, and two reasonable peoples would divide this land and live in peace, side by side. But that dream, of Jews and Arabs sitting in the hills of the Judean desert, smoking peace pipes and singing "Kumbaya", is probably further away than it has ever been. (It's perhaps a token of Israel's deeply-entrenched optimism that on the same week that Hamas' conquest of the Gaza strip marked the end of any possible accommodation with the Palestinians for the foreseeable future, the Knesset elected as Israel's next President practically the only living person who still believes in the possibility of the "New Middle East.")
These kids, too, step towards the future without the ideological underpinnings that their parents had at the same age.
The Jews of the world are no longer certain what they should believe in. Theology is dead. History wounds. Zionism is shaken. Israel is living - "hanging on" is probably more apt - in a post ideological era, with an uncertain and undefined future. It would be nice to have some genuinely important Jewish books appear, but with the Jewish world's assumptions so up-ended, is it any surprise that they are slow in coming?
So Burg's not entirely wrong. This is a society plagued by many ills.
But again, the question is what you do about it. Some Israelis (and many of Israel's supporters in the Diaspora) would rather pretend that the problems don't exist. Other Israelis are ready to throw in the towel, pointing, like Burg, to the ills that plague us, preferring to flee rather than to work.
Some of us, though, still want to slog through and work, because we believe that a Jewish State that's not Jewish and decent ought not exist, but that a Jewish people without a Jewish state has no chance of surviving. So, to save not only the State, but the People as well, we're going to stick it out see what we can build here. We'll try to fight to stay alive and to be decent at the same time. And we'll try to figure out a way to educate another generation of kids, pre- and post-army, who can speak intelligently about Judaism, Zionism, humanism and history, whether they're left or right, religious or secular. That, more than anything else, is probably what will save this place.
But the solutions to Burg's list of ills are long-term fixes, and this will be a wounded, broken place for a good, long time. That's why it was a welcome relief, given the past few weeks, that Avi's high school graduation came last night. Given the virtually religious obligation that most Jewish parents feel to rag on their children's schools, I should note that Avi graduated from one of the best high schools I've ever seen. I went to an excellent high school in Baltimore, and his was infinitely better.
In last night's informal ceremony (a few of the kids wore ties, but many more wore sneakers and shorts - this is Israel), there was a refrain among virtually everyone who spoke. Teachers, principal, a parent - they all spoke about the combination of openness and commitment that characterizes the kids. The intellectual and religious openness. The Zionist and religious commitment. The insistence on thinking for themselves. "Our generation failed," the parent who spoke basically said, "and it's up to you to make this place into what we dreamed it could be."
And, though the talks were all very different, each ended with an implicit reference to what no one explicitly said all night - some of these kids are going to the army now, but all will be in the army within a year, and these are not simple days to be getting drafted. Thus, each person who spoke ended with virtually the same words. Tze'u le-shalom, ve-shuvu sheleimim u-vri'im. "Go in peace, and come back to visit, whole and healthy." Because given what these kids are soon about to do, no part of that can be taken for granted.
Professor David Hartman, the key personality behind the founding of the school some twenty years ago, also spoke to the kids. "Don't give up on what you believe in," he said, reminding them of the values that the school is all about. And then, he concluded: "Be brave out there Be brave, but don't be careless. Take care of yourselves. And come back in peace."
And as I watched more than a few parents wipe away a tear, hugging their younger children still sitting next to them, it was clear. The ideologies are wounded, and so are our souls. About that, Burg is clearly correct. But that's why the people at last night's ceremony - and their sons - aren't throwing in the towel. For they understand that the healing can't happen any place else but here.
Avrum Burg can enjoy his second passport. And he can myopically call Europe a "Jewish utopia." He can make a life in France. It sounds great, and for his sake, I'm glad he's found something in which to believe.
But our kids, I think, have been brought up both to stare reality squarely in the eye, and, at the same time, to understand that this place is the only chance the Jewish people will ever have to heal and to flourish. They get it, and they're on board. Last night, it was clear that Burg notwithstanding, this place isn't going down so quickly.
The kids read Burg's interview, and argued about it. Some probably agreed more, and some probably agreed less. At the end of the day though, it wasn't Burg, once a rising star of Israeli politics, who told them what they needed to hear. It was a rabbi, a professor, one of contemporary Judaism's most important thinkers (who, Burg might note, chose to leave North America and to live here) in a school, wishing them - quite literally - "fare well."
"Remember what you believe in. Be brave out there. Be brave, but don't be careless. Take care of yourselves. And come back here whole, and in peace."
Amen to that.
