by Elie Wiesel
Lately, much has been written about it in the press. You are, after all, rather noisy. Like so many youngsters who confuse lack of discipline with independence, you have tantrums and destroy everything in sight. So that we cannot help hearing you; you force us to listen.
Not a week goes by without my reading about you in the news. Riots in Berlin: instigated by you. Violence in Frankfurt: you again. Marches, demonstrations, rebellions: you, always you.
Incidentally, we are not complaining. We consider it natural and, in a certain sense, desirable that you should feel the need to challenge the regime—whatever it may be—and reject authority—whatever its source.
Your impulse to rebel, to the degree that it is genuine and pure and therefore implies a need for innocence, merits approval. More than anyone else you have the right, perhaps even the duty, to direct your outcry of despair and disgust toward your parents and the world they are handing down to you.
More than anyone else you have a right to be angry, you who were born after the deluge, after the accounting, into a blemished world, into the midst of a fanaticized and stubborn people that repudiated its Führer only after his military defeats and not for his crimes.
The important book of this era, a book of horror and malediction, you are the one who could write it: the son accusing the father of having mutilated and poisoned his future even before giving him birth.
In this respect, you are less fortunate than we. You see, we have no reason to hate our fathers. You, on the contrary, have many. You cannot hope for brotherhood without hating your elders for having killed all hope; you cannot proclaim faith in mankind without repudiating them for having debased that faith. Not to despise your guilty fathers would make you inhuman. And unworthy of redemption.
There was a time when I thought I too could, and must, hate your fathers. I was against the cheap liberalism that requires one to forget and forgive—and absolve—for the sake of political or religious expediency. Whoever loves his executioner, I thought, creates a dangerously false vision of love and a dangerously unreal image of man. Whoever kills out of love, or simply with love, must in the end kill that love. He who feels pity for the cruel, says the Talmud, will eventually be cruel to those capable of pity. For man, condemned to choose between the roles of torturer and victim, love and what negates love may not be combined; no mortal has the right to reconcile them. It is one or the other, one against the other. Murder, by its own definition, excludes the human element of promise. Assassination—as end, not as means—constitutes an assault against the immortality pledged to man. Who kills, kills God. It is not enough, therefore, to fight murder and murderer; one must also cut all ties with them and relegate both behind walls of hatred. That is what I thought.
With the passing years one learns that feelings, like persons, escape us. In time, the most vital sources run dry. Even love, even hate. Reviving the one is no less disappointing than plunging back into the other. We thought we carried within ourselves dormant volcanoes; they are burned out. Who knows? Perhaps “to hate” like “to love” may be conjugated only in the present tense.
But for you, things are different. Whether we, as Jews, choose to forgive or to wait, that is our concern. Either way, it does not solve your problems. Forgiveness is not yours to give, especially not to your fathers, whose names and disgrace you bear. You cannot help but ask certain questions and demand certain explanations they can neither answer nor explain.
Born of so much anger, out of so many ruins, your revolt seems valid because it implies the need to repent, the desire to atone. Unfortunately you are not aware of its limitations. Originating in excessive trauma, it strives for equally traumatic and excessive goals.
Refusing to limit your criticism to your elders, you feel compelled to indict the entire world. Nothing pleases you, no one inspires you. Capitalism, socialism, communism: you abhor all systems, you condemn all who attempt to reach you. You detest America because of Vietnam, and Soviet Russia because it does not declare war on America. You consider Western democracies weak and therefore ludicrous: as for the others, you scorn them for being submissive. All countries seem “rotten” and “decadent” to you. The Chinese, it is true, attract you, but only because they are as removed from your “cultural revolution” as you are from theirs.
Never mind. That’s your worry. Since you insist on generalizing your rejection, since you persist in alienating all humanity, go ahead, knock your head against the wall; we won’t interfere.
But in your childish arrogance you take the liberty of assuming the role of public prosecutor with regard to Israel and the Jewish people. There, I must stop you: you are going too far, you are overstepping the permissible.
First: we have done nothing to hurt you, as far as I know. Second: you still have a fair number of problems to resolve in your own country, in your own self, before meddling with our concerns, which are in no way comparable. Many of your own voices still need to be silenced before you may dare prevent Israeli officials from speaking in public.
How many times must you be told before you understand? Much water will flow through the Rhine and the Jordan before a nation, any nation, has a lesson, any lesson, to learn from you.
Some of your elders understood this: Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch, Martin Walser. They understood that to gain self-respect as men, they had first to earn the respect of their fathers’ victims. That is what makes them so human, so close.
Do you know why Günther Grass hesitated many years before visiting Israel? He was afraid of either eventuality: a reception overly hostile, or one overly kind.
He is too lucid and honest to feel totally at ease and free of guilt in the presence of a Jew. And yet he surely has no reason to feel guilty; he did nothing, he was too young. Not only that: his entire body of work is one long outcry of a shattered conscience crushed by burdens imposed by others. That is why his books are so moving, so true. And why I feel a kind of kinship with him; he and I would understand each other. Despite the ghosts clinging to each of us, we could begin a dialogue and give it depth and meaning.
Not with you. Why? Because you are closed to humility. Because you seem not to understand one essential point: that for a German today there is no possible salvation outside his relationship with Jews. Your path will never lead to man unless it leads to us first. Günther Grass realizes this, you do not. You think your hands are clean: so be it. But you also claim to have a clear conscience. There you are wrong.
Is this to say that I subscribe to the theory of collective guilt? Of course not. You are not responsible for the crimes of your fathers. Committed before you were born, the Nazi atrocities concern only their perpetrators. If you yourself are insensitive to them, to the point of ignoring them in your behavior, again that concerns you and only you. Still, you must agree, this lack of sensitivity places you in the present—and the present is your responsibility. It shows you to be someone I should not like to befriend: a heartless creature without memory, and worse, without imagination.
That you should have the impudence to insult Israel in public, and the gall to offer aid and assistance to its enemies: far from releasing you from the German guilt which you discard, these offenses place it firmly on your shoulders. By siding with the Arab terrorists, you define your position within the context of the holocaust. And the time has come for you to know it.
Know at least that you are following your fathers’ footsteps. They lived their present under the sign of their hatred for Jews. And so do you: the Jews are not the same, but the hate has not changed, neither has its motivation. Like your fathers, you are against us and for the same reasons. Your propaganda recalls that of Goebbels. He too accused us of wanting to rule the world and oppress all nations. His ally, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hadj Amin el Husseini, is still your ally. And you claim to be “progressive”? And “revolutionary,” at that? You must be joking. Blind, stubborn reactionaries, that’s what you are. What you are doing, your fathers did before you. Though unt
il now you have merely repeated their words, lacking the opportunity to emulate their deeds.
You are responsible for your present activities and doubly responsible to the extent that they relate to the past. In other words, since, after all, twenty-five years have elapsed since Auschwitz, it is impossible—and improper—to judge the present as though it were unrelated to the past. By taking a stand against the Jewish people today, you become guilty of what was done to Jews yesterday. By agreeing to deliver to death the survivors of yesterday’s massacres, you become, today, the executioner’s accomplice and ally.
So don’t go around proclaiming your innocence and your desire to change the world: you have lost that right. You are only carrying on the work planned and undertaken by your fathers. Like it or not, from this moment on, you are their successor and heir.
And now, am I to tell you that I respond to your hate in kind? No, I do not.
Even if you perpetuate the evil spread by your fathers, I shall not hate you. I shall denounce, unmask and fight you with all my power. But your hate will not contaminate me. No, I shall never hate you. Not for yesterday and not even for today. It is something else: for yesterday you have my pity; for today, my contempt.
TO A YOUNG JEW OF TODAY
You are seventeen and confused. You are Jewish without knowing why. You don’t even know what it means to be Jewish: your friends are not, and your parents just barely. You are not religious, yet not fasting on Yom Kippur makes you feel inexplicably uneasy. You identify with the left, yet reject its anti-Israeli line: without being a Zionist, you feel as close to Jerusalem as to Moscow. Marxism attracts you by its messianic vision, while Jewish messianism leaves you indifferent. Real or apparent, your contradictions trouble you and you ask me to help untangle them. In short: what does being a Jew mean in these times and to what does it commit you? You would like to know.
At the risk of disappointing you, I must confess I have no key to offer, no secret formula to reveal. Rather than speak of my certainties—I have so few and they are of so personal a nature—I prefer to tell you of my efforts to acquire them. I write in order to understand as much as to be understood. Reflected in all my characters and their mirror games, it is always the Jew in me trying to find himself. Perhaps because he is the mirror.
A memory: as a child, I often accompanied my mother on her visits to the Wizsnitzer Rebbe. Invariably she solicited the same blessing on my behalf: that I grow up to be a good Jew, fearing God and obeying His Commandments.
Realized in part but only in part, her wish haunts me as does everything linking me to the landscape of my childhood.
Today I already know that God is to be feared, I think I even know why. But I sometimes question the first part of the Rebbe’s benediction: how does one become a “good” Jew? It is the adjective that troubles me. Without it, the problem becomes simple.
For to be a Jew, in my eyes, constitutes not a problem—no man is a problem—but a situation. I am Jewish because I am Jewish. And not because my existence is a problem for those who are not. I could never subscribe to Sartre’s now obsolete thesis. To tell the Jew that his existence is conditioned from the outside is to negate not only his uniqueness but also his intrinsic identity and creativity. Like man, a Jew defines himself in relation to himself alone. He is subject, not object, a sovereign being, and may not be explained in terms of what he is not and what rejects him.
Must we then conclude that Jewish fate allows no element of choice? Of course not. The two notions are by no means incompatible. On the contrary, to be a Jew, for me, is first to accept my destiny as a Jew, and then to choose it. In other words, we face here a deliberate choice with retroactive effect. It is because I was born a Jew that I can and must choose to be one.
This choice implies an experience on the levels of history and conscience. Nothing is certain, nothing is determined; at any moment, at any turning point, you may begin all over again. You commit yourself totally with your every decision, a commitment that has meaning only to the extent that it springs from an eternally torn conscience, capable of surprising itself.
Ultimately, where does this adventure lead? No Jew can answer. No Jew knows. Israel nikra holekh, says the Talmud. The Jew is in perpetual motion. He is characterized as much by his quest as by his faith, his silence as much as his outcry. He defines himself more by what troubles him than by what reassures him.
The Russian, Pushkin once said, is born for inspiration. Unamuno stressed the sober and poetic quality of the Spaniard. To me, the Jew and his questioning are one.
When the debate is over, when everything seems to have been said and accepted, it is then that the Jew appears, and by his very presence, his very survival, reverses learned elaborate theories and doctrines. And one must start anew. Hardly is a structure completed than the Jew insists on altering its foundations. He devises systems and immediately questions their validity; he refuses to be categorized. Small wonder he is not liked: he disturbs and irritates even his protectors. With him, they must be ready for the unexpected. Rooted both in the contemporary and the timeless, he invites hesitation and doubt. He sows disquiet in the heart of the victor and undermines the good conscience of the vanquished. Two thousand years of exile have taught him to wait for the Messiah and to suspect him once he has arrived. Push interrogation to its limits and beyond, and you will do what the Jew has been doing for centuries.
To be a Jew, therefore, is to ask a question—a thousand questions, yet always the same—of society, of others, of oneself, of death and of God. Why and how survive in a universe which negates you? Or: How can you reconcile yourself with history and the graves it digs and transcends? Or: How should you answer the Jewish child who insists: I don’t want to suffer, I no longer want to suffer without knowing why. Worse: How does one answer that child’s father who says: I don’t want, I no longer want, my son to suffer pain and punishment without knowing that his torment has meaning and will have an end? And then, the big question, the most serious of all: How does one answer the person who demands an interpretation of God’s silence at the very moment when man—any man, Jew or non-Jew—has greater need than ever of His word, let alone His mercy?
As a Jew, you will sooner or later be confronted with the enigma of God’s action in history. Without God, Jewish existence would intrigue only the sociologists. With Him, it both fascinates and baffles philosophers and theologians. Without God, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry would be relevant only on the level of history—another episode in another inhumane war, and what war is not inhumane?—and would not require a total revision of seemingly axiomatic values and concepts. Remove its Jewish aspects, and Auschwitz appears devoid of mystery. Remember Sartre’s phrase: in love, one and one are one. For us, contemporary Jews, one and one are six million. Six million times one is God. For just as one cannot conceive of such slaughter with God, it is inconceivable without Him. This is perhaps the final absurdity of the event: all roads lead to it; but all explanations fail. The agony of the believer equals the bewilderment of the non-believer. If God is an answer, it must be the wrong answer. There is no answer. If with the holocaust God has chosen to question man, man is left to answer with a quest having God as object. The interrogation is twofold, and it is up to you to claim it as your own and link it to the actions it calls forth.
But I repeat: we are talking about a double, a two-way, interrogation. It must not be divided. The question man poses to God may be the same God poses to man. Nevertheless, it is man who must live—and formulate—it. In so doing, he challenges God, which is permissible, indeed required. He who says no to God is not necessarily a renegade. Everything depends on the way he says it, and why. One can say anything as long as it is for man, not against him, as long as one remains inside the covenant; only if you repudiate and judge your people from the outside, will you become a renegade.
You will undoubtedly reply: Why speak about God, since I do not believe? Don’t worry, my purpose is not to give you back your faith
. You are free to replace God with any word—or presence—you prefer. It would in no way alter my message to you.
Besides, I leave you the task of working out your own relationship with God. What matters to me is the relationship between the individual and the community.
To be a Jew is to work for the survival of a people—your own—whose legacy to you is its collective memory in its entirety. No one has the right to dissect history, making personal choices, selecting this period, that personality. Your “I” includes them all. You have seen Moses at Sinai, heard David in his citadel, fought the Romans at Massada, felt the Crusaders’ sword. Whoever sees himself as a severed branch becomes other, the Midrash teaches us. Isolate yourself within time, and time itself becomes abstraction, and so do you. Time is a link, your “I” a sum total. Your name has been borne by others before you. Your fate is not yours alone. The questions asked by children and the answers they will be given were all heard at Sinai. Your doubts and turmoils, your victories as well, come down to you, in a direct line, from your earliest forebears.
You may call this phenomenon historic consciousness, or spirit of solidarity. Your kinship encompasses those who live in your time and those who survive within you. You cannot fulfill yourself as Jew if you feel no bond with those who share your dilemmas, your celebrations and even your contradictions: the Jews in Israel, in the Soviet Union, in the Arab countries, and even in the lands where they are not harassed.
As a Jew, you are entitled, indeed required, to speak in the name of all Jews. Your word, therefore, takes on immeasurable significance and ancient resonance; it involves others: your ancestors from the most distant past. For the Jew who denies himself denies more than his own person: he denies Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To betray the present means to destroy the past. Whereas to fulfill oneself means choosing to be a link between past and future, between remorse and consolation, between the primary silence of creation and the silence that weighed on Treblinka.