by Elie Wiesel
Because you too have lived the holocaust. You were born after? No matter. One can step inside the fiery gates twenty-five, fifty years later. Do you know Uri-Zvi Greenberg? That Israeli poet and visionary tells the story of a young Jew in King Herod’s time who left Jerusalem for Rome. He had taken along a pillow which remained with him always. One night, as he slept, the pillow caught fire. That very same night the Temple burst into flames in Jerusalem. Yes, one can live a thousand miles away from the Temple and see it burn. One can die in Auschwitz after Auschwitz.
We are all survivors. And since holocaust there was, I prefer not to have experienced it from afar. Does that shock you? With its full burden of distress, shame and horror, the experience the survivor draws from it makes of him a privileged person: a witness.
And do not consider this an attempt to glorify Jewish martyrdom. I do not believe in martyrdom. It belongs to our past, not to our destiny. The Jews never sought to be martyrs; they never equated suffering with sanctity. Asceticism was viewed as alien to our tradition, which sees sin in mortification. Refusal of life and earthly sustenance does not lead to God. God dwells only in joy. God is joy, God is song and fervor. The need to suffer? Invented by those who for two thousand years caused us endless suffering. Martyrdom is only one of many myths attributed to us. It provided our persecutors with a clear conscience, since it permitted them to say: “Yes, we punish the Jews, but it’s for their own good, their ultimate salvation.” Or: “Our hostility is what keeps them alive.” Well, we say: “No!”
The Jews would gladly have forgone the persecutions. Contrary to generally held notions, we do not need anti-Semitism in order to affirm themselves and flourish. We do not need outside stress to enhance our creativity. The image of the hunted Jew, cringing with remorse, finding happiness only in expiation and sacrifice is not of our making. Study it carefully and you will see who created it: our enemies. We attempted to destroy this image as best we could. By laughter. And revolt. Since society considered the Jews’ existence incompatible with its own, it was natural that the Jews endeavored to change society. Which explains why so many revolutionary movements, in every sphere, counted so many Jews among their pioneers and apostles.
This brings me back to the question in your letter dealing with the rebellious spirit among your friends. You ask me what your attitude should be.
Rebellion is rooted in the very origins of Jewish history, as you probably learned at school. Abraham breaking his father’s idols, Moses rejecting slavery, the prophets criticizing—most disrespectfully—kings and power-seekers: they were true rebels. As were those Jews who, though exiled and oppressed, refused to join the ranks of their oppressors. By their stubborn faith, they contested the validity of the system. Their presence became protest and summons. Each Jew who did not take the easy road of conversion transformed his heresy into an act of defiance. Today’s rebellion fits into this pattern. Moreover, I believe it is directly linked to the tragic repercussions of World War II, or more precisely, to the holocaust.
Distrust and rejection of authority, the disturbances and riots, the craving for escape, the urge to abolish uniforms and taboos: the shadow of concentration-camp reality influences the aspirations and actions of your comrades. They may not be aware of it, but even their terms of reference apply more to my generation than to theirs.
It was at Auschwitz that human beings underwent their first mutations. Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Hiroshima. Or genocide in Africa. Or attempts to dehumanize man by reducing him to a number, an object: it was at Auschwitz that the methods to be used were conceived, catalogued and perfected. It was at Auschwitz that men mutilated and gambled with the future. The despair begotten at Auschwitz will linger for generations.
With Auschwitz in their past, your comrades—Jews and non-Jews alike—rebel against those responsible for this past. Parents, philosophers, teachers, profiteers, opportunists, leaders without ideals, preachers without souls, institutions and organizations without purpose—in short: the discredited and exposed generation of adults that gave you birth. Had it not been so blind, so dishonest, so uninspired, it might have avoided the unleashing of hell, or at least kept some measure of control. By undermining the present, your friends denounce the past, a bankrupt past tottering under its own guilt and revealing anew man’s bond to Cain. Every field, every sphere of activity is suspect. A society, a civilization, that could lead to such degradation has, in fact, issued its own verdict, a verdict without appeal.
If your comrades invent new gods, it is because the old ones begot Eichmann and Treblinka. If they lack respect for their elders, it is because the latter lived in the era of Sobibor and Babi-Yar. The anger of the young is a rebuff to the complacency they see in the way their parents choose to live—and die. If they aspire to a new language, it is because their parents’ was used in Majdanek. They opt for poverty and anonymity because they want to resemble those who lived in ghettos, and were poorer and lonelier than they will ever be. They allow themselves to be clubbed without responding, so as to follow the example of millions of Jews who, before them, practiced nonviolence with the same inefficiency and futility.
You tell me Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin no longer inspire your classmates. Why? Because they were part of the system of varied and contradictory ideologies that paved the way for Birkenau, simply by preceding Birkenau. If the new saints are called Mao, Che or Zen, it is only because nothing associates them with the holocaust.
Yes, I remain convinced that the current wave of protest calls into question much more than the present. Its vocabulary takes one back a quarter of a century. Factories and university buildings are “occupied.” The Blacks rise up in the “ghettos.” Prague is in the headlines and so is Munich. The police use “gas” to disperse demonstrators. Concentration camps in Egypt and in Greece. The Watts and Harlem riots are compared to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Biafra is referred to as another Auschwitz. Political analysts talk of nuclear “holocausts.” Racism, fascism, totalitarian dictatorship, complicity, passivity: words heavy with past significance, which explains their impact on your comrades. By criticizing today’s regimes, they indict yesterday’s corruption. That is why it is important to put society on trial, this society which was—and still is—ours. By scorning its defenders, you place yourself on the side of the victims.
But remember: the Jew influences his environment, though he resists assimilation. Others will benefit from his experience to the degree that it is and remains unique. Only by accepting his Jewishness can he attain universality. The Jew who repudiates himself, claiming to do so for the sake of humanity, will inevitably repudiate humanity in the end. A lie cannot be a stepping stone to truth; it can only be an obstacle.
You ask me: How is one to reconcile man and Jew? The question is badly put. I do not accept the commonly made distinctions between Jew and man; they are not opposites and do not cancel each other. By working for his own people a Jew does not renounce his loyalty to mankind; on the contrary, he thereby makes his most valuable contribution.
More specifically: by struggling on behalf of Russian, Arab or Polish Jews, I fight for human rights everywhere. By calling for peace in the Middle East, I take a stand against every aggression, every war. By protesting the fanatical exhortations to “holy wars” against my people, I protest against the stifling of freedom in Prague. By striving to keep alive the memory of the holocaust, I denounce the massacres in Biafra and the nuclear menace. Only by drawing on his unique Jewish experience can the Jew help others. A Jew fulfills his role as man only from inside his Jewishness.
That is why, in my writings, the Jewish theme predominates. It helps me approach and probe the theme of man.
Of course, had there been no war, I would have sought self-realization in other ways. I would not, for example, have become a writer, or at least, I would have written something other than novels. And in the small yeshiva where I would have stayed, indefinitely poring over the same page of the same book, I would
never have imagined one could justify one’s existence except by strictly observing the 613 commandments of the Torah.
Today I know this is not enough. The war turned everything upside down, changing the order and substance of priorities. For me, to be a Jew today means telling the story of this change.
For whoever lives through a trial, or takes part in an event that weighs on man’s destiny or frees him, is duty-bound to transmit what he has seen, felt and feared. The Jew has always been obsessed by this obligation. He has always known that to live an experience or create a vision, and not transform it into link and promise, is to turn it into a gift to death.
To be a Jew today, therefore, means: to testify. To bear witness to what is, and to what is no longer. One can testify with joy—a true and fervent joy, though tainted with sadness—by aiding Israel. Or with anger—restrained, harnessed anger, free of sterile bitterness—by raking over the ashes of the holocaust. For the contemporary Jewish writer, there can be no theme more human, no project more universal.
As a child I knew all this without really knowing it, and above all, without being able to express it. Yet I still don’t know how one becomes a “good” Jew.
A certain Reb Zeira, the Talmud relates, decided to fast a hundred days so as to forget all he had learned. Only afterwards did he go to the Holy Land.
And so what must we do, my generation and yours, to learn anew what every day, a little more, we tend to forget? I don’t know. Throughout this letter I have told you that I attach more importance to questions than to answers. For only the questions can be shared.
RUSSIAN SKETCHES
As a child I believed that the Messiah would appear at sunrise, a prince disguised as beggar, and we would all be present to welcome him: the rabbis and their disciples, the scribes and their pupils, all dressed in prayer-shawls and wearing tephillin. Some would sing and dance or recite psalms, others would rejoice and drink from golden goblets filled with wine, the wine set aside since creation for that precise purpose, for that precise festivity.
Today I am convinced it will be different. The Messiah will come at night and will be received with burning torches and the silence will be such that even the angels in heaven will stop praising their Master.
The reason for my new belief?
Listen: it happened one Simchat Torah in Moscow, not too long ago. I have described it before, I shall repeat it, for the event itself was repeated more than once.
For many hours, thousands of Jewish students had been dancing in the street leading to the capital’s main synagogue. Suddenly the entire block was plunged into darkness. The crowd grew quiet, expecting the lights to go on again. But soon we realized that they had been turned off deliberately to end the festivities. Enough dancing, enough singing. Come back next year. Don’t overdo your rejoicing.
For a moment there was confusion. Then a mighty roar of protest rose from thousands of throats. No one was willing to accept the implied order. But how does one fight darkness? Here is how: one youngster rolled up a newspaper and lit it. His friends did likewise. The flame was passed from hand to hand. A moment later we were in the midst of a bizarre torchlight parade.
No one had planned it; everything happened by chance. The street became a quietly burning river, a silent stream; its eerie stillness broken only by the crackling of burning paper.
I don’t remember how long it lasted. I only remember the dreamlike quality of the scene: students climbing onto a balcony, torches in hand, chanting in Hebrew and Russian: “Am Israel Hai, the Jewish people lives and will go on living!” And the crowd answering thunderously: “Hurrah, hurraaah!”
“Well?” asked a man I had met on a previous visit. “What do you think now? Are you more confident than last year?”
I nodded; I had trouble speaking. I recalled a question a close friend had asked me a few months earlier. He had wanted to know whether I still believed, even after the holocaust, in the concept of netzakh Israel, the eternity of Israel. And during the holocaust? What had my thoughts of Jewish eternity been then? Hadn’t I come to the conclusion that we were nearing the end and that soon there would not be even ten Jews left to form a minyan in this wicked world?
I had not answered my friend. I wished he were here, standing with me in this joyous, fearless crowd. Here he would answer his own question.
Now you understand what I meant about the coming of the Messiah, who is expected to answer all questions.
He will come at night. And he will be welcomed not only with songs and wine and not only by holy rabbis and their disciples, but also by young Jews expressing their Jewishness by parading with burning torches made of ordinary paper in the very heart of Moscow.
2
This year again there will be dancing and singing in Arkhipova Street in Moscow. Young Jews by the thousands will come and prove to the world that they have not forgotten Simchat Torah and what it symbolizes: a link with Jewish tradition and kinship with the Jewish people.
But this year I shall not be able to join them. For that I am deeply sorry. Since I first visited Russia I have come to think that Simchat Torah cannot be truly celebrated anywhere else. Just as Shavuot reminds us of Sinai and Tishah b’Av of the Temple, Simchat Torah will henceforth be associated with Russian Jewry. More than in Williamsburg, more than in Jerusalem itself, it is in Moscow, not far from the Kremlin, that one feels the depth and magnitude of Jewish commitment to joy and memory. The staunchest Hasid could learn from the most assimilated Jewish student in Moscow how to rejoice and how to transform his song into an act of belief and defiance.
Twice, in consecutive years, I witnessed street-dancing on Arkhipova Street, outside the synagogue. Never before and never since have I felt such elation. Prior to my visit to Moscow, I had not known that Simchat Torah could be more than a holiday: an event and an experience as well.
Since my last visit, changes have taken place in the world, affecting Jewish life everywhere.
The Six-Day War brought about a renewal of the “anti-Zionist” slander campaign in the Soviet press. The infamous Trofim Kitchko has been rehabilitated, reinstated as a member of the Ukranian Academy and even given an important award. His Judaism Without Embellishment, once repudiated by world communism, is no longer a source of embarrassment to the Kremlin; on the contrary, his anti-Semitic theories, especially with regard to Israel, seem to have been accepted. So violent were the statements of Soviet representatives in the United Nations, and so frequently were they repeated at home, that there can be no doubt of their being aimed not just at Israel but at Russian Jews as well.
Officialdom embarked on a campaign of intimidation that reached proportions reminiscent of the Stalin days. Synagogue leaders were forced to sign petitions condemning Israel “aggressions.” Jews were threatened throughout the Soviet Union and warned to refrain from doing anything that might be interpreted as a move toward identification with Israel and world Jewry.
Too late.
Listen to this story: on June 5, 1967, one of my Israeli friends happened to be in a small town somewhere in Russia. It was early in the morning when he heard the first radio bulletins announcing “Israeli defeats.” Since he did not know a soul in that faraway place, my friend, in desperation, decided to find the synagogue. It was already crowded. Hundreds of Jews, young and old, men and women, had gathered spontaneously, as though moved by the same impulse: to be together in a time of danger. When they noticed the visitor and the Israeli emblem in his lapel, they formed a line and each of them came to shake his hand. Some of the older men whispered in Hebrew: “Al tira avdi Yakov—do not be afraid, my servant Jacob.”
Long after his return to Israel my friend continued to hear the same voices, the same words: for weeks he heard nothing else.
Similar accounts reached us from other cities. When Israel was in danger, the Jews in Russia found ways to express their solidarity. Not all the tales can yet be told. But when the time comes and they are told, they will have the ring of legends. And I wo
nder: will we be worthy of them?
Are we worthy now of the Georgian Jews who, risking their freedom, send letters to Golda Meir and the United Nations announcing their desire to go and live among their own people in Israel? Or of those youngsters who publicly renounce their Soviet citizenship in order to dramatize their determination to be reunited with their families in Jerusalem, Haifa and Eilat? These acts take courage, just as it takes courage to organize and attend clandestine classes in Hebrew, Jewish history and Jewish literature, or to participate in Simchat Torah festivities.
In Moscow, Leningrad, Tiflis and Tashkent, more and more young people come to sing and dance with more and more enthusiasm each year. They know more and more songs. Here and there, incidents are reported, scores of students are arrested by the police, but the others keep on dancing. Once reawakened, these youngsters, in search of their past, cannot be suppressed. To express what they feel, they are prepared to wait a whole year for one single day, one single night.
Does that mean that they are rediscovering religion? No. They know nothing of Jewish religion, they cannot know. There are no formal Jewish schools, no specially trained teachers. They have nothing. Simchat Torah, for them, is not a religious holiday but something else, and perhaps even something more. For them it is a way, the only way, to identify with Klal Israel and enter its history. Therefore, they will not give up. They will go on singing and dancing even if it means imprisonment and reprisals. Simchat Torah represents to them all Jewish holidays combined; on that day and that night, each of them renews his personal covenant with the Jewish people.