“I was taught from infancy that the Jewish people never existed merely in order to exist, we never survived just to survive, we never just carried on in order to carry on. Jewish existence has always been directed upward: not just to the Father, the King, up in the heavens, but up toward the great human calling.”
I just finished reading Avraham Burg’s book, The Holocaust is over: We must rise from its ashes. Allan Brownfield has written a good review of the book for those who want a quick summary of its 242 pages. Burg’s book, as the title suggests, alludes to the use of the Shoah to justify Israel’s human rights abuses, and Burg documents this in painful ways. But his stories are also filled with amusing insight into how the Shoah has been packaged into a common, unifying, one-size-fits-all, Jewish experience – for example, the anecdote about a Iraqi Jewish friend who experiences the Holocaust “all over again” on a business trip to Poland. Other stories, like the one of his father’s involvement in the Eichmann trial, in which he pictures Jews having replaced Eichmann in his bulletproof defendant’s box, are the keen observations of an insider who grew up in Rehavia, an old Yekke neighborhood in Jerusalem.
Those expecting a trivialization of the Holocaust will be disappointed. From Burg’s stories of his family, neighbors, and friends, it is indeed remarkable how many Israelis have had direct experience of camps or fleeing for their lives. These are woven into the fabric of the book, but he prefers to bring his readers a different message.
The working title of the book was “Hitler Won.” This angrier viewpoint is indeed embedded within Burg’s pages, but he ends the book by calling – a view he credits to his mother – for a more universal love of humanity which conquers fear and suffering: the “courage of love.”
Burg’s book is really about two Jews. One is represented by his father Yosef, a reserved German-Jewish scholar and government official who witnessed the collapse of a world in which Jews played a major part. The other is his sensitive mother, Rivka, a Sephardic Jew from Hebron, whose family was wiped out in the massacres of 1929. What they represent, of course, is the cosmopolitan, progressive Jew with a connection to Judaism’s humanistic values, and the traumatized Zionist, still reliving the Holocaust and finding in Zionism a kind of “survivalist” Judaism, a worldview we can find today in Israel and in Zionist organizations in the United States.
These two Jews have always existed. Abraham and David. Heine and Jabotinsky. Buber and Kook. Maybe even Hillel and Shammai. This is why we are continually searching for clues about who we are and what Judaism really means.
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