Avraham “Avrum” Burg, a one-time Speaker of the Knesset and, briefly, an Interim President of Israel, has performed an invaluable service for Judaism and for humanity, a truly Jewish “cri du coeur” with his latest Substack posting, bearing the subtitle “Israel v. Judaism.” The horror must be faced honestly, a test whether the real Judaism may survive. May these excerpts send readers to his full argument, linked above.
He opened: “In global interviews and conversations, one question keeps returning: how could the Jews, a people who once saw themselves as a moral messenger for all humanity, commit such horrific crimes in Gaza? It is a question that cuts to the rawest nerves of our identity, our faith in our righteousness, and our understanding of who we are.
“There are terrible answers: ‘These are not crimes,’ ‘They started it,’ ‘It was self-defense,’ ‘We had the Holocaust.’ There are also circumstantial ones: generations of indoctrination, a national education system built on conformity, social pressure to serve, blind trust in commanders. A mental structure in which moral questions are always postponed for later; because ‘now there is a war,’ and that ‘later’ never comes.
“But when you look at the accumulated results, the truth can no longer be denied. Tens of thousands of dead. Entire cities erased. And all in our name, in the name of a state that presents itself to itself as a bastion of morality and enlightenment, yet remains blind to what it has done in Gaza. To the humanitarian disaster deliberately wrought by its finest sons and daughters.”
He recalled a Judaism of “a spiritual and intellectual tradition nourished by debate, by thought, by the sanctity of life, and by love of the human being.” But now Israel has “built immense physical power, some of it justified, much of it inflated by fear and paranoia.... Israel abandoned the spiritual dimension of education.... A society that became efficient and materially successful, yet morally impoverished.... Once, Jewish education taught us to think, to challenge, to ask questions of conscience.... Today, our leaders have no shame dismantling the very system of justice itself….
“How cruel the irony. The so-called start up nation, proud to call itself the only democracy in the Middle East, has created the most sophisticated and repressive death industry in the region, exporting its poisonous fruits to any authoritarian buyer for profit.... [A]n entire economy has been built on domination, oppression, smart sensors, and a dead conscience.
“The true crime of this high tech world is not only the weapons it produces but the consciousness it shapes....That if we just build another algorithm, another digital wall, we can control reality itself. A world of remote killing, without touch or smell. A reality with no space for ethics, because ethics cannot be measured or monetized. And there is no exit strategy for the soul.”
To this recipe for disaster, he says: “Over time, another toxic layer has been added: nationalist religiosity that provides theological justification for the worst injustices. Instead of deepening the human spirit within Judaism, the system turned it into a caricature. No longer a Judaism of compassion and repair, but a zealous religion of perpetual holy wars—the Jewish jihad at its worst.... The result is a society torn between aggressive religiosity and defensive secularism, oscillating between the arrogance of ‘God is with us’ and alienation from everything human.”
