Can the Jewish People Survive Without an Enemy?
By Tony Karon
Avrum Burg is the scion of one of Israel's founding families his father was
the deputy speaker of the first Knesset, and Burg himself later became speaker
of the legislature, and a member of Israel's cabinet. His position at the heart
of the Israeli establishment makes all the more remarkable his critique of the
Jewish State, which he claims has lost its sense of moral purpose. In his new
book The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (Palgrave/MacMillan),
he argues that an obsession with an exaggerated sense of threats to Jewish
survival cultivated by Israel and its most fervent backers actually impedes the
realization of Judaism's higher goals. He discussed his ideas with TIME.com's
Tony Karon.
January 07, 2009 "Time" January 01, 2009
TIME: You argue that the Jewish people are in a state of crisis, partly because
of the extent to which the Holocaust dominates contemporary Jewish identity.
Can you explain?
Burg: I, like many others, believe that a day will come very soon when we will
live in peace with our neighbors, and then, for the first time in our history,
the vast majority of the Jewish people will be living without an immediate
threat to their lives. Peaceful Israel and a secure Diaspora, all of us living
the democratic hemisphere. And then the question facing our generation will be,
can the Jewish people survive without an external enemy? Give me war, give me
pogrom, give me disaster, and I know what to do; give me peace and tranquility,
and I'm lost. The Holocaust was a hellish horror, but we often use it as an
excuse to avoid looking around seeing how, existentially, 60 years later, in a
miraculous way, are living in a much better situation.
In your book, you raise the question of the purpose of Jewish survival over
thousands of years, insisting that Jews have not simply survived for the sake
of survival. What is this higher purpose?
Both my parents were survivors my father ran away from Berlin in September
1939; my mum survived the 1929 massacre in Hebron. So, my family knows
something about trauma. Still, my siblings and I were brought up in a
trauma-free atmosphere. We were brought up to believe that the Jewish people
did not continue in order to continue, or survive in order to survive. A cat
can survive so it's a circumcised cat, so what? It's not about survival;
survival for what?
Look at the Exodus: After 400 years of very aggressive oppression and
enslavement, all of a sudden the outcry was "Let my people go," and that
continues to resonate against slavery everywhere to this day. Then we come to
the Sinai covenant, which is a key moment not just for Jewish theology, but for
Christian belief as well: The Ten Commandments is the first human-to-human
constitution, setting out the relations among humans on the basis of laws. And
then you come to the Prophets, and its amazing that they're calling so clearly
for a just society. And then, in the Middle Ages, you listen to Maimonides say
he's waiting for redemption of the world without oppression between nations.
So, in the Jewish story over so many centuries, there has always been a higher
cause, not just for the Jews, but for all of humanity.
Even in the Holocaust, the lesson is "Never Again." But this doesn't mean just
never again can genocide be allowed to happen to the Jews, but never again can
genocide be allowed to happen to any human being. So, the Holocaust is not just
mine; it belongs to all of humanity.
You suggest that there's been a turning inward from the universal purpose and
meaning of the Jewish experience...
Both the internal and the external hemispheres of the Jewish experience are
essential. I cannot envisage my Judaism without the input I got from the
external world, be it philosophy, aesthetics, even democracy, which was
introduced to the Jews in the last 200 years because of our interface with the
the world. On the other hand, I can't imagine my Western civilization and
Western culture without the Jewish input, without Jesus Christ, who was born,
was crucified and passed away as a Mishnaic rabbinical Jew. I cannot image
Christian Europe opening up to modernity without a Maimonides reintroducing
Greek philosophy. I cannot imagine modern times without a Spinoza, and
Mendelson. I cannot imagine the 20th century without Marx and Freud. So, this
conversation between Jews and the world is not just a conversation of pogroms
and slaughter and Holocaust; it's also a couple of thousand years of a
conversation that enriched me and enriched them, and I don't want
to give that up.
Your book argues that the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli identity is
dysfunctional...
The Holocaust is a very real trauma for many people in Israel, and nobody can
argue with that. But ... when I hear someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a
very intelligent person, say of [Iran's President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, "It's
1938 all over again," I say, is it?! Is this the reality? Did we have such an
omnipotent army in 1938? Did we have an independent state in 1938? Did we have
the unequivocal support in 1938 of all the important superpowers in the world?
No, we did not. And when you compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, don't you diminish
Hitler's significance?
The sad thing is that whenever a head of state begins a visit to Israel, he
doesn't go to a university or to the high-tech sector or the beautiful cultural
places we have in Israel; first you should get molded into the Israeli reality
at [the Holocaust memorial] Yad Vashem. And I do not think that Yad Vashem
should be the showcase or the gateway through which everybody should first
encounter Israel. Part of the program, yes; but the starting point? This is not
the way to baptize people into an encounter with Judaism.
You argue that the purpose of the Yad Vashem visit is to silence criticism...
It's an emotional blackmail that says to people, this is what we have
experienced, so shut up and help us... When the sages created the national
holiday of Tisha Be'av, they made it the single day on which we commemorate all
the traumas of our history, from the destruction of the first temple to the
Spanish expulsion. These events did not all happen on this exact date; the
founders of Jewish civilization confined the memory of the traumas of our
history to one day, to allow us the rest of the year to get on with being
Jewish, rather than letting sorrow take over our entire existence...
Look where we were 100 years ago and look where we are today no other people
made this transformation. Imagine we did not keep the shadow of the trauma
looming over ourselves daily, what could we have been? How come 25% of the
Nobel laureates in certain fields are of Jewish origins, and 10% of the arms
deals around the world are done by Israelis? Why is my brother or sister in
America a great poet or composer or physician whose achievements raise up all
of humanity, and I who live here on my sword became a world expert on arms and
swords? Is that really my mission, or is that an outcome of the black water
with which I water my flowers? To make our contribution to humanity, we have to
free ourselves of the obsession with the trauma.
Many Jews, in Israel and in America, see Israel as surrounded by deadly
threats, and would see the benign and peaceful world you describe as a
dangerous fantasy. What do you say to your critics?
I have very low expectations of new thinking and insight emerging from the
mainstream Israeli and Jewish establishment. Their role is to maintain the
status quo. Israel is bereft of forward thinking. We are experts at managing
the crisis rather than finding alternatives to the crisis. In Israel you have
many tanks, but not many think tanks. One of the reasons I left the Israeli
politics was my growing feeling that Israel became a very efficient kingdom,
but with no prophecy. Where is it going?
My idea of Judaism can be represented through a classic Talmudic dilemma: You
are walking along by the river and there are two people drowning. One is Rabbi
[Meir] Kahane, and the other is the Dalai Lama. You can only save one of them.
For whom will you jump? If you jump for Rabbi Kahane because genetically he's
Jewish, you belong to a different camp than mine, because I would jump for the
Dalai Lama. As much as he's not genetically Jewish, he's my Jewish brother when
it comes to my value system. That's the difference between me and the Jewish
establishment in Israel and America.
But how can this new thinking you're advocating help Israel solve its security
problems?
Many people say to me, "What about Gaza? Don't have so much compassion for
them, don't tell the Israelis to be nice there, tell [the Palestinians] to be
nice there. And I say Gaza is a nightmare, and it's a stain on my conscience.
And I'm very troubled by the attitude of Israelis against Israeli Arabs. It's a
shame. It's a black hole in my democracy. But I say sometimes that I'm too
close to the reality; I don't have the perspective; I don't have the bigger
picture. But if enough of my kids and enough of my youth will go to volunteer,
be it in Darfur or be it Rwanda, or be it in the squatter camps of South
Africa, they will sharpen their sensitivities. And they will come back and say,
listen, if we can do so much good out there, let's do something over here. And
I see my own kids, when they come back from India and from Latin America, how
changed they are as people. I see my son, after one and a half years in Latin
American. He came home, and five days
later, was called for 30 days "miluim" service [with his military unit] in the
West Bank. And he was sitting in the worst junction in the West Bank. And he
says, "When I look around me 360 degrees, nobody loves me. Settlers, Kahanes,
rabbis, mullahs, Hamas, Palestinians, you name it they all hate me. And he
told me, "Here I was sitting on a corner one day; it was my break time, and I
was drinking coffee with a friend of mine, and out of the valley climbed an old
Arab. He was very bent forward and frail, and walked slowly to us and said
'Here is my ID.' And we told him, you don't have to give us your ID; we didn't
ask for it. And he said 'No, here it is, I want you to look at it. Look at it,
I'm okay, I'm kosher, I'm kosher.' I checked it and let him pass, and then I
began crying and crying."
So, I asked my son, why did you cry, what happened? And he said, "You don't
understand that for a year and a half, I was in Latin America, going to small
villages and sitting with this kind of man, listening to their oral tradition,
to the beauty of their history, to the wisdom of their culture. And they shared
it with me. And now here I am, the policeman, here I am the bad guy, here I am
the occupier. And I can't talk to this man. You know how much he could tell me
under different circumstances?" And I say, that's an example for me.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21666.htm
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg
Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny.
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