One of the startling moments for me in reading Avraham Burg's new book is when he talks about his kids getting back to Israel from India and bringing Indian wisdom. I've talked about this phenomenon on my blog: the fact that Israeli kids do their 2 or 3 years of army service and then have to decompensate for the awful business of serving in the Occupied Territories by going to India or South America for a year and smoking a lot of dope. From tough soldiers they become hippie backpackers. I'd glommed this phenomenon in a Vietnam-R&R way; and never understood it in the deeper way Burg does: as the kids profiting spiritually from it. Burg's a semicloseted assimilationist; like me, he wants to base any idea of a Jewish future not on nationalism or alleged superiority but on an integrated place in a world community.
I want to take his idea to my own spiritual/cultural place. The other day my wife and I were talking over her bath, one of my favorite rituals, when she remembered going to Tikal, the great ruins in Guatemala, 10 years ago. It was an important event in our lives because the guy in the other couple that we went with has since died. A dear friend, a guy I loved. My wife knew him since she was 20, a lot longer than me. And she loved him in that way that the woman loves the former lover in The Dead by James Joyce, i.e.: he did things for her I couldn't.
This guy's name was John. From Memphis, gentlemanly. And that day at Tikal a guide attached himself to us in the way that they do, and then started to bloviate knowledgeably as we entered the ruins to try and win our patronage. And my wife went over to John, because she knew it wouldn't work with me, I'm not good at negotiating with anyone, and said, John, do me a favor and get this guy to rejoin us in an hour, I need to experience these ruins on my own before I get the commentary, it's going to ruin the ruins. John wordlessly nodded, then did that, in a lordly instant. Blew him off, told him to come back at such-and-such a time.
As my wife remembered the story, she lost it. I know that anyone who's lost a friend can relate. You think about the last time you've thought about him, about how much you lost when you lost him, about the ways that you were with him. I find it too painful even now to think about.
How does all this relate to Avrum Burg? Burg is an internationalist/universalist Jew. He seeks a full participation in other traditions at the risk of his children marrying out. And in this instance, the brutalized wanderjahr of Israeli youth, he sees a higher wisdom in what his children have taken from Hindus.
As an immature 53-year-old, I tend to look on my own identity as fluid and infinite–and one aspect of this blog has been exploring a very tribal original identity, Jewishness. But when my wife lost it thinking of her dead friend, I reflected that life is short, and I am the increasingly-finite sum of a particular set of experiences, which includes revelling in wider American cultural options, taking in all the referents of this now-shaggydoggish anecdote, James Joyce, Vietnam, Memphis, gentlemanliness, Tikal, the New York Public Library, etc., without regret.
