by Elie Wiesel
Why such hostility toward this kind of stranger? The answer is obvious: he represents danger.
For there are many ways to live as strangers—and they are not all alike.
To act as a stranger toward strangers is natural. It may be unpleasant, painful and absurd to find oneself face to face with someone one has never seen and know that the relationship is one of individuals whom fate has brought together for one moment, one encounter. A word, a gesture—and the moment is forgotten.
But then again: I could conceivably be a stranger to a friend—a colleague, a fellow writer—even a brother. Cain and Abel were not enemies; they were strangers, which is worse. To reject or be rejected by a friend is painful. Here I am, there he is; and I thought we belonged to the same intimate circle; that we were allies, bound by the same dreams and discoveries—and suddenly I am confronted with a stranger. I thought I could count on him. I thought I counted for him. Wrong. When I see the stranger in him, it also means that I am a stranger to him.
This is serious, but there is something even more serious—to realize that I am a stranger to myself, which means that there is a stranger in me who wants to live my life or my death—or even to die by pushing me to my death through self-hate. This stranger forces me to look at things, events, and myself with his eyes, urging me to give up because of him.
One must never allow oneself to become this kind of stranger. To anybody. During the era of night and flame, the executioner wanted not only to kill us as strangers—anonymously—but as numbers, as objects, not as human beings. He wanted to kill us twice—to kill the humanity in us before killing us.
And yes—there were times when nocturnal processions of tired, frightened people would march to the mass graves and then lie down quietly, obediently, almost respectfully. Those men and women were dead before they were killed. But even worse: the killers tried to drive the victims to self-hate, pushing them to see themselves through the killers’ eyes—thus to become strangers to themselves, strangers to be despised, discarded. In this the killers did not succeed. Few Jews became zar in ghettos and death camps.
Do not believe what some scholars and writers tell you: the Jews did not collaborate in their own death; they were not overcome by a collective passion for self-destruction.
Who is the enemy? He has a name: Amalek—the eternal stranger.
Remember: in our Biblical tradition, real strangers are treated with some measure of fairness. Esau? We feel compassion for him. Pharaoh? In spite of his cruel edicts, we somehow are unable to hate him, or even be angry with him: after all, it was God who hardened his heart. Poor Pharaoh: God’s instrument and Israel’s victim. Or take Balaam: he cannot even curse us. He starts to form words, rhymes, sentences, he thinks he can blacklist all the Jews and involuntarily ends up singing their praise: poor prophet, poor poet. The only enemy to inspire unqualified apprehension and anger is … Amalek. Always. We are unmistakably ordered to strike him, to defeat him, to kill him.
Why Amalek? Amalek, we said, is the stranger who frightens us most, the stranger who knows our weakness and—perhaps—is our weakness.
Though we know much about other ancient peoples with whom our forefathers were dealing, we know little about Amalek. All we know is that we are told to remember to wipe out the memory of him. Meaning, we must forget him, but remember what he tried to do to us. He attacked women and children—defenseless people. He attacked when we were weak. As soon as Israel doubted God’s presence in its midst, as soon as Israel felt apprehensive about its destiny, Amalek launched his assault. Amalek: the epitome of the stranger. Amalek: the other side of experience, of life, of hope, of ecstasy. He is the other; he exists not simply to force us to be strong, to teach us the art of survival; no: he exists to kill us, to turn us into victims of our own weakness. Amalek: the stranger in us, who is against us; he must be opposed mercilessly. And struck down.
LET US RECAPITULATE: these are the differences between our traditional Jewish attitude toward the stranger and that of others who were taught to oppress, repress, or altogether eliminate the stranger they confronted. As for us, we have tried to resist the stranger inside ourselves. When others were complacent with themselves and ruthless to strangers, we did the opposite. We have been and are compassionate toward others—except for Amalek.
We are compassionate even toward the enemy—except the enemy whose aim is to annihilate the Jew in us. That is the Jewish belief. If I must die, I shall, but I must, to the last minute, resist death—and resist the enemy who symbolizes death. To wish to die is the ultimate insult to our existence. That is why suicide is a sin: we may not allow the enemy inside us—the stranger inside us—to choose death on our behalf.
And now, in conclusion, let us return to Abraham, who, on that dramatic and suspenseful night, learned for the first time what the future held for his children. He saw the fire and the smoke; the exile. He saw the darkness and he felt the anguish. On that night he shared the experiences of our generation. On that night he signed, on our behalf, the covenant—a symbol of endurance and survival.
Our generation can best understand the terms of the covenant. We have seen the smoking furnace, we have seen the burning torch. And night has no end. And Abraham’s sacrificial offerings were not saved. Of all the divine promises, only one was fulfilled: We have not become strangers to our past. Now we are waiting—again—for the rest of the covenant to be implemented. We are waiting.…
We asked earlier: Why did Abraham agree to its terms? Why didn’t he plead with God to save his descendants from exile? To spare them from slavery? What better time could there have been to ask and obtain compassion for his children? Why didn’t he say, Ribono shel olam, Master of the universe, the covenant must be agreed upon by both of us—and I shall not agree unless you accept my conditions? But then, God, too, causes us to wonder: Was that the proper moment to tell His partner that his children would be cast into exile? That they would become strangers? Wasn’t He worried that Abraham might become frightened and discouraged—to the point of refusing the terms of the covenant?
Yes, Abraham was frightened: the text says so. But his fear didn’t last. Yes, he felt anguish when God first revealed that his descendants would become strangers. But then he heard the last part of the sentence: they will be strangers in foreign lands. Among strangers. Not at home. Not to themselves.
And so Abraham felt reassured. He understood that the covenant contained a plan, a kind of blueprint for life in society. A society without strangers would be impoverished; to live only amongst ourselves, constantly inbreeding, never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy. The experience of encountering a stranger—like the experience of suffering—is important and creative, provided we know when to step back.
In His promise, God told Abraham that his children would always know how far they could go. They would be strangers only among strangers, to strangers, but not to Him. They would return to Him—as His children. And this too is part of the covenant.
Exile will come to an end—everything does; exile will have a meaning—everything has, for God is also in exile, God is everywhere. God is not a stranger to His creation and surely not to His people. El is in Israel: God is in Jewish history, therefore in history. And man must not treat Him as a stranger—or be a stranger to Him.
Of course, we are all strangers on this earth which is older than we are—and yet it is up to us to be true to ourselves, to live our own lives and share them, to bear our truth and our fervor and share them—and then one day we may all gather around one who has not come as yet—but who will come.
And on that day, when he does come—finally—he will not be a stranger—and none of us will ever be strangers again. For he will be—the Messiah.
A Celebration of Friendship
WHAT IS A FRIEND? It is my character Gabriel who, in The Gates of the Forest asks himself this question out loud. And he answers: “More than a father, more t
han a brother, a traveling companion; with him, you can achieve what seemed impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession; friendship is never anything but sharing. It is to a friend that you communicate the awakening of desire, the birth of a vision or a terror, the anguish of seeing the sun disappear or of finding that order and justice are no more. Is the soul immortal, and, if so, why are we afraid to die? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end? What is death? The closing of a parenthesis, and nothing more? And what about life? In the mouth of a philosopher, these questions may have a false ring, but asked by friends during adolescence they have the power to change. What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his, and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him you may remain silent without shame and speak freely without risk.”
Gabriel is my friend and he speaks for me. All my fictional characters exalt friendship; for some it is an obsession. Sometimes I tell myself that I have made them up only because I needed to believe in friendship, because I needed them as friends.
As a child, I felt so weak, so inadequate, that I’d spend my pocket money to make a new friend or keep a playmate. In this I was following the counsel of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yehoshua, son of Prakhia, who, in Ethics of the Fathers invites man to choose for himself a Master and to acquire for himself a friend.
Nothing was ever left of the goodies and cakes I took to school—my mother lived in fear that I would faint from hunger. I distributed everything among my schoolmates. I coveted the attention of the brilliant students, the protection of the strong ones, and the affection of them all. Most of all I dreaded finding myself excluded, an outsider, alone.
I felt guilty because my friends were poor. So was I, but I was not aware of it. I wanted to obtain forgiveness for what I believed to be my privileged circumstances. To make amends, I gave away whatever I was given. All by myself, I hoped to do away with social barriers and the injustice that springs from them; I burned to correct the errors of creation. I deprived myself of the superfluous to provide for the needy. I arrived with full pockets and went home with empty hands.
I remember the friends of my childhood as I remember my childhood; I look at them as I look at myself, and a familiar sadness engulfs me. Where are they? Why were we separated? How could I have deserved to outlive them? For most of them are no longer of this world.
I recall them and I speak to them: Do you remember? Our schemes, our dreams of long ago seem closer to me than the events of today. Our teachers, so strict they terrorized us; the tears we tried to choke back as we struggled with some indecipherable text; our anguished or ecstatic faces at the sight of a beggar who told strange and marvelous tales: how could I forget them? Our walks through the forest on a Saturday afternoon, our preparations for Passover, our Purim games: it was yesterday.
What did our friendship mean to us? We were still so small, we hardly knew the real significance of the word. We were pals, that was all. Together we learned to read, to write, to pray; we amused ourselves by gathering fruit in spring, by counting clouds, by outwitting our tutors or supervisors at the synagogue. Of course, one malicious word, one rough gesture, would make me sob with vexation, but the next day everything was forgotten.
For children, friendship takes on a practical, immediate meaning: You give me your toy, you are my friend; if you don’t, you aren’t. It’s all very simple. And provisional. A friend turns into an enemy and back into a friend in an instant. Is this to say that their feelings are less profound? I would rather say that, for children, time passes less quickly: one instant in a child’s life is like a year in ours.
Friendship takes on more breadth, another dimension, when a child enters adolescence: then, it becomes a necessity. Without it, he suffocates.
The adolescent begins to question himself, that is, he opens himself to anguish. He asks himself questions, he demands answers. Alert to the world that eludes him, he wants to be able to think that his case, at least, is not unique: all men are weak, vulnerable; they end up bowing their heads in resignation; they end up being drawn into death as one is drawn into a hypnotic gaze. The adolescent is not an individualist. Even when he wishes to be different, he hopes to be like others; that is, he wants to be different because this is what everybody wants. He is comforted by the words “Me too”; I hurt: “Me too”; I am in love but she does not love me: “Me too”; I love God, but He does not answer me: “Me too.” The friend, for the adolescent, is the one who says, “Me too.”
I vividly remember the friends of my adolescence. I see us sitting on a bench, rocking back and forth the better to concentrate during our study and prayer. I hear us chanting a Talmudic text or a mystical litany. I see the son of a Hasidic rabbi who speaks to me in our garden of a secret army to drive away our enemies; I walk in the courtyard of a synagogue with the son of a merchant who refuses to speak any language but Hebrew. Absorbed in ourselves, we do not hear the sounds of war in the distance, the sounds of the enemy who advances on us. Our parents take an interest in politics, in what goes on at the front—not we. We are interested in what goes on in heaven. The present leaves us cold; only eternity excites us.
Well, yes, at the time I was too young to understand that eternity does not exist except in relation to the present. I was not mature enough to understand that it is eternity which lends this moment its mystery and its distinction. There were many things I did not understand. That is why I needed the presence of a friend at my side: to share my confusion.
Let us take a look at Scripture: What role does it attribute to friendship? And, first of all, where is friendship to be found in it? It is hardly ever mentioned, at least not explicitly. There are references to solidarity, love, hate, vengeance, punishment, and promises—but very few to friendship. And yet it does exist, it dominates the relationships between certain Biblical characters. Unfortunately, these are not always on the side of the angels. In fact, close friendships are usually found among the “bad guys.” The people who tried to erect the Tower of Babel showed more solidarity than those who followed Moses out of Egypt. Datan and Aviram, who organized the plot against God and His messenger, were close friends, while the entourage of Moses was divided by internal squabbles. Only Joshua and Caleb, son of Jefune, who were friends at the time of their reconnaissance mission into Canaan, remained friends. There are no other examples in Scripture. The same is true of the “brothers” mentioned in the Bible. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers all illustrate a cruel and timeless truth: human beings can become enemies and each other’s victims even if they are brothers. Any exceptions? Yes: Moses and Aaron. Moses learns that his brother has been elevated to the office of High Priest and he is delighted with the news. And yet, one remembers, his brother had caused him no small worry, no little grief. Never mind: Moses has not forgotten but he forgives. Aaron is not only his brother; he is also his partner, his friend.
Still, it is not the story of Moses and Aaron that is usually cited to illustrate friendship between two men in Biblical history. Whenever selfless and complete friendship is celebrated, the names evoked are those of David and Jonathan. Jonathan knows that Saul, his father, both loves and hates David, yet he remains David’s friend and protects him against Saul. Jonathan’s loyalty to the future king is absolute. The two men understand each other down to the slightest gesture. They are always on the same side, they fight for the same cause. One could say the same soul lives in both of them. As adolescents, we sought to imitate David and Jonathan, who stood together against the world of adults with its plots and intrigues—sometimes spiritual, at other times banal. Friendship was to protect us and make us strong.
MY FRIENDS AND I needed strength for what we hoped to accomplish. What was it we had in mind? As I described in one of my novels, the three of us intended to accelerate the course of events and hasten the coming of the M
essiah. Laugh if you will, but for us it was serious. Having studied the splendors and the dazzling mysteries of the Kabbala under the guidance of a Master whose physical weakness belied his spiritual power, we were convinced we would find the right words, the appropriate gestures, to liberate the Jewish people and, through them, all the nations from the exile in which humanity is held prisoner. For us, impassioned and exalted adolescents that we were in our little village in the Carpathian mountains, this was a most serious matter.
I remember my two friends, I shall remember them always. I see their burning faces, the penetrating look in their eyes. I see us at the House of Study at night, huddled in shadows, making of our project and our friendship an offering to Zion, in need of solace. I hear my friends whispering the litanies of Yehuda Halevi. I feel their pain as they can feel mine. I see us going home in the small hours, in silence.
We had vowed to one another to go to the end of our mystical quest, even if it meant risking madness, isolation, or death. We had promised to keep our intentions secret. Mad, yes: we were mad as only certain adolescents, certain friends, can be. One had to be mad to believe it was in man’s power to conquer evil, to disarm death; one had to be mad to believe that one need only utter certain phrases, mortify the body in a certain way, invoke certain celestial powers, to bring redemption. In the end, it was not the Messiah who arrived, it was his nemesis: the killer, the mass murderer, the exterminator of nations. As for my two friends, I saw them go; there was a contemplative air about them, as if they were meditating upon the meaning of their lives and mine, upon the failure of our adventure in bringing the Messiah. I saw them from the back, leaving the ghetto as if drawn by night.
I followed them a week later. That is to say, I followed them as far as the kingdom of barbed wire, but I did not see them again: they had been liquidated a few hours after their arrival, along with the other sick people in their convoy.