Stars of David (25 page)

Edgar Bronfman Sr.

EDGAR BRONFMAN SR. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RICHARD LOBELL

MOST BILLIONAIRE EXECUTIVES don't have a Torah in their corporate office. A Torah under glass, to be precise. But Edgar Bronfman Sr., former president of Seagram's Co. Ltd. (the liquor giant), has one, displayed importantly in its velvet sheath near his massive desk and his tufted black leather sofa. “I don't want to put my religion in anyone's face,” he says. “But this way they know who I am.”

He also has an ornate shofar—the ram's horn traditionally blown on Rosh Hashanah—made of silver and wood, poised in the middle of his black marble conference table. And there's a library no yeshiva would sniff at, including a multivolume set of the Talmud and tomes such as
Jews and
Medicine, Torah Linguistics
, and
Jewish Law
.

All this Judaica is a fairly recent fascination for the seventy-six-year-old Bronfman. As a kid, he rejected Judaism because he rejected his father, Samuel Bronfman, who was a demanding and detached figure in his life. The senior Bronfman, who built Seagram's from a Canadian distillery into an American empire that made every subsequent Bronfman extremely wealthy, was renowned for being an adroit entrepreneur but an overbearing, volatile man. “I was really rebellious as far as my father was concerned,” Bronfman says, “and I just turned my back on the whole Jewish thing. It really started when I found out that he didn't know what he was saying when he was praying. He was just reading Hebrew because he had been taught to read it. I didn't consider that praying: If you don't know what you're saying when you're praying, then I'm outta here. And I left and I didn't go back to it till I was in my fifties.”

Samuel didn't care particularly that his son abandoned Judaism after he became a bar mitzvah. “I don't think he gave much of a damn,” Bronfman says, his hands folded over his green and yellow Hermès tie. “My father went to synagogue because it was expected of him—because he was a leader in the community. But religious he was not.”

Bronfman absorbed his father's indifference. “I was supposed to go to Sunday school and junior congregation on Saturdays. But since my father didn't go to synagogue—he went to the office—I didn't see any reason to go. Sunday school was just dreadful. I'm sure there are seventeen zillion people who will tell you how awful supplemental education is; it's something we really have to take a hard look at because it's awful.” It's become one of his personal crusades—to make Jewish learning intriguing to young people. “I'm chairman of the governing board of Hillel,” he says. “I love to go to different campuses and see the kids—I get big audiences because they want to meet me—and I just love talking to them about being Jewish and how much fun it is. We do study sessions and they're all blown away— the fact that I can actually discuss the texts with them.”

He can spar on Talmud because he's been a dedicated student of it ever since the mid-1980s. That was when, as president of the World Jewish Congress (established to safeguard fair treatment of Jews internationally), he had a clarifying experience during one of his trips to the Soviet Union. He was in Russia to lobby for Jewish freedom—the ability to pray openly and to emigrate. One evening he watched hordes of Jews defy a ban on worship in order to observe one of their holidays in the streets. “On Simchas Torah, they were all milling around outside the synagogue; only three or four blocks from Lubyanka,” Bronfman recalls, referring to the location of KGB headquarters. “It's not as if the KGB didn't know what they were doing. But they took a chance. The Jews really wanted to be with other Jews on that day. There they were, thousands of them, talking to each other, saying, ‘
Hag Sameach
' [Happy Holiday]. This, after seventy years of prohibition against religion in the Soviet Union.” He raises his untamed eyebrows. “I thought to myself, ‘There must be something to this that I've missed.' And that's when I started to look into it.”

He relied on his colleague at the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Israel Singer, to be his informal guide, and started reading the Torah two hours or more every week. “I suddenly discovered this was something
I
was interested in. Not discovering good works—I'd done that, I'm still doing it. But this is just how to be a better Jew. Singer said I'd make a great Talmudist, because I love to argue about these things.”

He says that dialogue and debate are the foundation of Judaism and therefore he's made it the organizing principle of the High Holy Days services held in his home every year. “We have a nice service and Arthur Hertzberg [former president of the American Jewish Congress] is there. The rules are that no sermons are allowed; the whole congregation gets involved in the discussion—it's not just that someone is giving a lecture. Synagogue bores me to tears. I don't get any spirituality out of going. Some people like the music, some people like the davening; I can't understand why they like it, but they do. I like the intellectual part. I like to discuss this business of what was Abraham doing taking his son, Isaac, and almost killing him? And what was Isaac doing letting him? There was more to it than obeying God. And there's a passage before, with Sarah throwing out Hagar, the thirteen-year-old, and all sorts of theories about the kid's homosexuality, masturbating, whatever. All nonsense. The fact of the matter is that Sarah was jealous of Hagar because Abraham was having a good time with her. So she threw her out. Until she had a son of her own. I find it fascinating that the Bible lets everything hang out—all our faults. There it is, for everybody to see.”

As he eased himself out of Seagram's business two decades ago, he started giving more and more time to this new pursuit. “I fell in love with the Talmud when I first discovered that it had to do with fairness and decency,” Bronfman says. “I think God is that little conscience in your head; you know when you're doing something wrong. And I don't think that's only Jewish—I just think it's wonderful that Jews are the ones who brought it. This is not exclusive; we're just the first.”

He doesn't buy the fact that the Torah was handed down from God. “Please,” he scoffs. “Don't try to give me that stuff. It's all written by men. But I think the beauty of it is that they were trying to teach a people how to behave ethically and decently and morally. And that's how I like to live and that's why I stick with it. I don't need the miracles, so to speak. My own interpretation of God is that God is the creator, created the universe. Because otherwise, why does the universe behave so properly? But a personal God? Don't be silly. Why would kids get cancer? Babies born with AIDS—why would that happen if there was a benevolent God who looks after people?”

So how does he comfort people who are going through some tragedy and ask where God is? “Don't ask me where God is. What about the Holocaust? Where was God then? That's not the kind of God we're talking about.” He says Jews are understandably misled by the prayer book, which does extol a protective, all-powerful deity. “The problem is that in synagogue, we talk about this
Avinu Malkeinu
business [“Our Father, Our King”] all the time. I don't do that. I mean, I can sing it, but while I'm singing it, I'm saying, “It's not
my
father, it's not
my
king. I don't talk about God when I'm trying to console somebody. I say, ‘Look, life isn't fair. All sorts of terrible things can happen.'”

He has his own way of explaining God to his grandchildren—he now has twenty-two—all of various religious persuasions. “My sixth grandchild—she was four or five years old. We were down in Virginia and it was a gorgeous sunset. And I said, ‘Look at the painting God has made for us.' And she said, ‘Who's God?' And I said, ‘God represents everything that is good on earth. We try to be more like God so we can be good.'” But he also teaches them that God doesn't stop evil. “Man has free choice. But we do know the difference between wrong and right—that's the little God in our head.”

He suggests that that “little God” was missing for him during his college years, but he's vague about why. “I was really in bad shape, but that had nothing to do with religion. That had to do with my own personal rebellion. I'd overdone it to the extent that I needed a little help. After I fell off my motorcycle, then I got help. I don't know how the hell I survived that night, but I did.”

In his memoir,
The Making of a Jew
(1996), Bronfman says that his father made his school years difficult by sending him, without much choice, to Williams College, where there was a five-percent limit on Jews, and before that, to a preparatory school in Ontario called Trinity College, where there were no other Jews. “I was the first Jew to ever go there,” he says. In his book, he writes,
“To this day, I do not know what my parents were trying to accomplish with this bizarre treatment . . . Perhaps he reasoned that our
generation would be rich enough and important enough that we would successfully
break down those barriers. But did he have to make it that hard for us to be
Jewish?”

I mention my conversation with Leon Wieseltier—specifically his point that one's religion often gets confused with feelings about one's parents. “That's true,” Bronfman says. So how did he reconcile that for himself? “It wasn't reconciliation. My father was dead—long dead—when I was in the Soviet Union and discovered Judaism. Obviously there was always the spark in me someplace . . . I began to feel pride in it; that was the key.”

Ironically, he tells a story about how he persuaded his father to start putting up Christmas decorations outside the Seagram Building on Park Avenue every season. “I said to my father, ‘We really have to do something about Christmas.' My father said, ‘But Edgar, we're Jews.' I said, ‘I know, but we do forty percent of our business at Christmastime; we should at least acknowledge it.' So I said, ‘Can I try something?' He said, ‘Okay.' So I got Philip Johnson to design the trees that are in the pools every year. My father said, “That's beautiful! We should get some Christmas cards made!' I said, ‘Father! We're
Jews
! Don't get carried away.'” He laughs.

As for his own fatherhood, he wishes he could do one aspect over again. “The only regret I have was that I didn't have a Jewish home for my children. Israel Singer said it very well when he said, ‘It's a very Protestant country; if you're a Protestant and you don't practice your religion, you're still Protestant. But if you're a Jew and you're totally secular, then you're nothing.'”

He says he couldn't be disappointed when four of his five children married non-Jews. “I couldn't blame them; I didn't give them any Judaism growing up. How could I suddenly say, ‘You can't marry her, she's not a Jew.' They'd say, ‘What do you mean, Dad?' No, I'd have to be consistent.”

Bronfman has been married three times—first to a Jew, then to a non-Jew who converted, then to Jan Aronson, a Jew and an artist. They opted for an Orthodox ceremony. “I just thought it would be more kosher,” he explains. “I think probably because it would be recognized in Israel.” Though his wife does not share his zeal for study, they light candles Friday nights and have decided to keep kosher. “One day, I was sitting in the dining room with the then-head of the National Urban League, who is Jewish. And we were eating crab cakes. And suddenly the thought occurred to me, ‘What does this guy think of me as the head of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of Hillel eating
treyf
?' So I said, ‘No more.'”

I probe for what he thinks has driven him to be so committed to Judaism so late in life? “I don't know. Sometimes, when I've had a couple of drinks on the airplane with Richard Joel [former president of Hillel], I'll say to him, ‘I feel I have a calling.'” Bronfman uses the same language to explain his extensive philanthropy and his successful campaign to make the Swiss banks pay retribution to Holocaust survivors. “This is something I have to do. I've done very well in business; no problems there. I'm old enough that I don't have to think about business. And I like to think about the Jewish world and how we can make it better.”