If you had asked any Jewish mother, from the Dnieper to the Vistula, what she most wished for her children, she would invariably have replied: “All I want is that they grow up to be good Jews.” What, precisely, did being a good Jew mean? It meant taking upon oneself the entire destiny of the Jewish people; it meant living in more than one period, listening to more than one discourse, being part of more than one system; it meant accepting the teachings of Hillel as well as of Shamai, and following Rabbi Akiba no less passionately than one followed his adversary, Rabbi Ishmael; it meant summoning joy on festive days and retreating into sadness when in mourning; it meant being ready to sacrifice oneself to sanctify the Name without even being sure that the Name desired the sacrifice, or that it was not He who conferred upon the executioner his might, if not his right.…
For the child I was, that last question did not arise. I was convinced that everything emanated from God. If He punished us, He had a reason: All we had to do was trust in Him and thank Him. Who was I to dare to chart the paths of heaven? I was obliged to choose between good and evil but not to define what they were: their definition was the province of the Supreme Judge. It was often through chastisement that He showed us the significance and consequences of our actions; we may have thought we were doing good while we committed evil. Was this process unjust? It is a good question, but one which brooks no answer.
A Talmudic legend: Moses, impressed by Rabbi Akiba’s erudition, wanted to know what would happen to him. God showed him the tragic end of the great master who, in a market square in occupied Judea, suffered the torture the Romans reserved for rebels. Moses cried out: “O Lord, is this Thy justice? Is this the reward for having studied Thy Law?” And God replied: “Be silent, you cannot understand.”
Moses was silent. But my teachers asked: “What was good enough for Moses is not good enough for you?” I was obliged to respond that, in effect, it was sufficient for those who believed in Moses. “For a believer,” said a Hasidic rabbi, “there are no questions; for an unbeliever there are no answers.”
All this seemed irrefutable, then. And today? I have written and I have spoken but have I said all I wanted to say? Have I learned to distinguish between the essential and the frivolous? What is the meaning of history? What is the future of mankind? I have a son, I have students. Why should they be responsible for a world they did not create? In the name of what belief shall I attempt to inculcate on them the notions and precepts which were taught me when I was their age?
Before emphasizing what I believe, perhaps I should point out what I do not believe, or what I no longer believe: I no longer believe in the magic of the spoken word. It signifies not order but disorder. It does not eliminate chaos, it only conceals it. It no longer carries men’s hopes but distorts them. It has ceased to be a vehicle, only to become an obstacle. It does not signify sharing but compromise.
Yet, through my tradition, and also my vocation, my relationship with language was a solemn celebration. Indispensable to the development of man, language is his ultimate expression; there were those who attributed mystical powers to speech. Life and death are dependent on the tongue, according to Ecclesiastes. The destiny of the world depends on it. The name of the Messiah precedes the Messiah. The spoken word preceded creation itself. Because of that word, the world emerged from nothingness and light parted from the dark. Before acting, God spoke. Language introduced mankind into history, not the reverse.
Jewish youngsters knew the lullaby Oif’n pripitchik, which women in the ghettos sang to their children. It tells of a rabbi who is teaching his small pupils the aleph-bet: “When you grow up, you will come to understand how much pain and how many tears these letters contain.” And joy. And majesty.
The Midrash describes how Moses, pleading for his people, called on the letters of the alphabet as witnesses for the defense: “My people have done enough for you, now it is your turn to show your gratitude.” The Bible and its commentaries, the Talmud and its interpretations—the infinite indeed exists and is to be found in words, words which sooner or later will be made to explode. A strange, primal, unique light traverses them and causes them to vibrate with life and truth. The Baal Shem Tov, it is said, used to read the Zohar while his eyes surveyed the earth from end to end; we Jewish children would listen to this legend and, in our imagination, we would see the rabbi stopping to smile at us and show us the way.
Few other ancient cultures or living civilizations are so imbued with a passion for words. As the Hasidic tradition has it, it was not the Ark that saved Noah—but eloquence. In Hebrew, teva denotes both “ark” and “letter.” In order to save him from the Flood, God commanded Noah to construct a language which would serve as both shelter and refuge. When they were driven out of their country by the Babylonians, and then by the Romans, the Jewish people took with them only a few laws, some memories and various customs consigned to a book, but this book enabled them to resist temptation and defeat danger. Thanks to the Talmud, they could continue to inhabit Jerusalem from afar. Murderers might be sharpening their knives in the marketplace outside, but in the house of prayer and study just a few steps away, the sages and their disciples would be engaged in a debate that began a thousand years before. Linked to David’s kingdom by the language of memory, the exiles kept it alive by featuring it in their stories and praying for it to be rebuilt. The third Temple, says a Midrashic text, will be indestructibly fashioned of fire; we preferred to think that words would contain the fire.
The martyrdom of the great Rabbi Hanania ben Teradyon is beautifully told in a Talmudic legend. The Romans, having condemned the rabbi to perish at the stake for teaching the Torah in public, wrapped him in the sacred scrolls and set them afire. His disciples asked him, “Master, what do you see?” He told them: “I see the parchment burning but the letters are floating in the air.” For the letters cannot be destroyed; the enemy will always be rendered impotent by the power of language.
This legend is part of the liturgy of Yom Kippur, but it is valid every day of the year. It describes how a Jew felt whenever he was persecuted. “Our enemy may kill us but he is powerless against what we embody.”
“Lord,” declared Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, “I want to strike a bargain with you. I would like to compose the eulogies and litanies you deserve but as I am no poet let me give you the twenty-two letters of your sacred tongue: you will make better use of them than I.”
For some part of every word is sacred; all words should lean toward the sacred. Today we are articulating words which Yitzhak and Jeremiah uttered under other skies and in other contexts. If our words sound different, that is our fault; we forget that God is listening.
The children of Israel were rescued in Egypt, according to the Talmud, because they remained true to their language. If King David were to return to his city, he would be able to understand what its inhabitants are saying to one another; better still: they would understand him. The words of the Lord heard at Sinai still retain their full authority and freshness today.
Our own words are no more than a vehicle reflecting the divine communication. That is their justification. But does all this amount to excessive respect for human speech? It is language that connects us to the mystery of the beginning and, at the same time, to that of survival. God, at Sinai, uttered just one word, Anochi, I, but that word contained all the words which man, from the beginning, and till the end of time, will have spoken, whether to spread His glory or to bring His curse upon himself.
Nowadays, man speaks loudly and volubly. There has never been so much talk. Television, radio, satellite telecommunications, speeches, interviews, commentaries, news analyses: modern man is bombarded with so many voices that he no longer hears any. Least of all his own.
Might that be because of his fear of being overtaken by events? Might man be afraid of not being able to express himself in time?
All this applies equally to writing. It seems there has never been so much of it. And definitely never so much in print. Was
Ecclesiastes right to include literary inflation among the eschatalogical maledictions?
There was a time when a book, any book, aroused in me a feeling of reverence. I would stroke it, sniff it before opening it. If the volume was in Hebrew and dealt with religious matters, I would kiss it before closing it. If it chanced to slip and drop to the floor, I would rush to pick it up and ask its forgiveness.
Today it’s different. Mystics speak of “the exile of language.” Like the Shekinah, Divine Presence, language has followed Israel into exile. What does exiled language mean? It refers to the distance between words and what they mask. It signifies the tension between language and its subject.
This phenomenon is not restricted to one language or one society; it is virtually universal. In every modern country one witnesses this verbal inflation, and a resulting devaluation of words. Political parties “war” with each other, industrial enterprises launch “offensives,” critics “massacre” novels or plays, journalists praise or condemn the latest “revolution” in haute couture. On another plane, Stalin built the Gulag to “re-educate” his citizens and Lavrenty Beria (Soviet Intelligence chief during Stalin’s regime) annihilated hundreds of thousands of people for the “salvation” of humanity; as for Hitler, he invented the terms “concentration camp” and “final solution,” and all for the “well-being” of the human race.
Hitler distorted language as never before. Neither Emperor Nero nor Attila the Hun concealed their crimes with grandiloquent phrases. The Inquisition called its tortures and executions by name. Marat and Robespierre did not seek a pleasant-sounding euphemism to justify the Terror. Until the Nazi reign, killers killed and said so; torturers tortured and were proud of it. But the Nazis assassinated thousands upon thousands of Jews and spoke of “special treatment.” “Things, objects,” meant human beings. “Relocation” signified deportation, evacuation, liquidation: extermination. Night and fog are evocative words; we now know what they hid. Similarly, the word “selection.” Thanks to this verbal technique, the assassins succeeded in convincing themselves that they were not assassins. By “obeying,” they were doing no more than “purifying” Europe of its Jews.
There are certain German words I can no longer use, said Nobel Prize-winning German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs when I visited her in Stockholm.
Have I myself written too much about the camps? Some of my colleagues tell me so. If only, they say, you could speak about something else. As a matter of fact, I do. I write on ancient themes from the Bible and the Talmud, and on the Hasidic world, Jerusalem, and Russian Jews in order to free myself from the theme which seems to me the most consuming, the most urgent of all. One day I, too, would like to compose a novel in which the landscape is not reduced to ashes; one day I, too, would like to sing of life and celebrate love. But not yet.…
In one of my novels, a character is shot at point-blank range but he cannot die: all his family are dead, all his friends are dead, he is the last one left, and because he is the last he is unable to die; but his killer says to him, “One day you will curse me for having spared you, even if I didn’t intend to; you will speak but no one will listen; you will tell the truth but it will be the truth of a madman.”
All survivors are a bit like that: our memories are those of madmen. How can we get the doors to open? What can we do to share our visions? Our words can only evoke the incomprehensible. Hunger, thirst, fear, humiliation, waiting, death; for us these words hold different realities. This is the ultimate tragedy of the victims.
What we suffered has no place within language: it is somewhere beyond life and history. The ghetto and the sealed cars, the children hurled alive into the flames, the dumb old men with slit throats, the mothers with crazed eyes, the sons powerless to relieve their fathers’ agony: a “normal” person cannot take in so much horror. A normal person cannot absorb so much darkness, nor can he understand, or ever hope to understand.
Here lies the tragedy of the witness: What shall he do with his testimony? He incessantly asks himself the meaning of a survival some mistakenly call miraculous; he feels guilty toward the dead who have charged him with an impossible mission; he is destined to feel that he exists in the place of someone else.
Formerly, thoughts became experiences and experiences became words, but today this process is interrupted. Today we must admit that certain experiences defy language. Speech is no longer the logical result. And all the discourse on the “lessons” of Auschwitz and the “message” of Treblinka—lessons about ethics and politics, messages to do with theology—have nothing at all to do with the experience of Night.
The morning after the storm, facing a horrified world, the survivors of the camps could only repeat, “You cannot understand, you cannot understand.” Later, invariably for humanitarian reasons, they tried to explain. After all, people had to be made aware, warned of certain dangers, shown the paths it was perilous to take. Yet each time the witnesses had to suffer anew in order to reveal themselves even partially, in order to speak even haltingly of the most intimate things—is there anything more intimate than pain or death?—and each time, it was a lost cause. The listener either failed to understand or missed the point.
But in that case, you will ask, how should we read all those books, all the novels, accounts, studies? Haven’t they so much as lifted the veil? Pointed out the wounds? Indicated the graveyard? Naturally, witnesses must write and readers must read. And yet, I know that their secret cannot really be transmitted.
I do not utter these words without discomfort, without sadness. But I must say them.
The Kabbala speaks of shvirat hakelim, the “breaking of vessels” at the moment of creation. In the same way, today we would do well to envisage the possibility of a similar break, on a scale no less vast than the first, involving the totality of being: a break between past and future, between creation and creator, between man and his fellow man.
But then, you will say, what is left? Is there hope despite everything, despite ourselves? Despair, perhaps? Or faith?
All that is left is the question.
Inside a Library
IN HIS “Society and Solitude,” Emerson said with typical simplicity:
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hidden and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.…
True—but what about the books written by fools, literary technicians or fame-hungry authors who have nothing to say—and say it?
Of them, King Solomon said in his Ecclesiastes that their books will be the ultimate malediction: “Of the making of books there will be no end.…” Why should this be a curse? Solomon was wise—the wisest of all kings. He knew. He knew that there would be a time when more books would be published than written.
If the school is a temple, then the library is its sanctuary. In the classroom you teach, you learn, you argue; in the library you remain quiet. You read alone; you listen alone. And all of a sudden you discover that you are not alone; you are in the presence of masters and disciples of centuries past; and you grow silent. In the library you are always silent. Not only because you do not want to disturb your fellow students or teachers, but also because you do not raise your voice in a sanctuary: with Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai present, with the Ari Hakadosh and Rabbi Shneur Zalmen ben Baruch of Ladi in the room, you dare not speak except in a whisper.
That is why I have always felt such deep attachment to libraries. Here, within these walls, there is peace. The old quarrels subside. Maimonides no longer fears the arrows of the Raavid. The Rabbanites and the Karaites live side by side in harmony. The Gaon of Vilna and the Maggid of Mezeritch coexist in peace. All these writers and teach
ers, all these thinkers and lawmakers who engaged in disputations during their lifetime, now accept one another’s views with tolerance and serenity. Because of the books? Because of the silence. Here, words and silence are not in conflict—quite the contrary: they complete and enrich one another. Is it possible? In our tradition—it is.
When the Torah was given at Sinai, says Rabbi Abahu in the name of Rabbi Yohanan, the birds did not chirp, the beasts did not growl, the sea did not roar, and the wind did not stir: the entire universe was silent. And then, when God spoke and said Anochi, “I,” the words entered silence without breaking it.
There lies the beauty and the enchantment of the library: within its walls, everything is possible.
But then—what is a library? Simply a room with bookshelves? The answer may disappoint some of you but it is Yes: any room with books and students can turn into a library—just as any home can become a house of study and prayer. Isn’t this the teaching we received from Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai? Wherever Jews gather to study Torah, the Shekinah dwells among them. Erected by man for God, the Temple does not imprison Him; quite the contrary, it frees Him and calls Him to join His creation. Thus every home becomes a sanctuary, every table is transformed into an altar, and every person performs the functions of the High Priest.
And so, any room can become a library; only, once it has been a library, it can never again be a simple room.
There are secret corners, hidden words in a library. A few words on the margin of a page. Dates of birth and death on the inside covers of prayer books. Tears, invisible but real, shed by a grandmother who wished to be heard by God—at least by God. Occasionally, you will discover a tale which encompasses another tale, a name which conceals another story.