Look there: the Valley of Tears, by Rabbi Mordechai Yoseph Hacohen of Avignon. Avignon occupies a special place in Jewish history—and literature. Jews lived there in peace, while around them Jewish blood was shed.
I never saw my grandfather without a book in his hands. Occasionally, when he was tired, he would doze off for a minute or an hour—but he continued, in his sleep, to chant the passage he was studying.…
My father had books in his grocery store. While waiting for customers, he would open one and read—and smile. I shall never forget his smile.
He was not alone in living with such passion for books; most Jews in my town, and in all Jewish towns, shared that passion. Idleness was the greatest of sins. You have nothing to do? a father would admonish his son: take a book—any book. You prayed minchah too early, you had to wait for maariv? Take a book. You have a headache? The Talmud offers you the best and cheapest remedy: study—and you will feel better. You cannot study? You are unable to understand Talmud or Zohar? Study Chumash and its accessible commentaries. Read the work of Rabbi Chaim ben Atar—the friend of the Besht who waited for him in Jerusalem. Had they met, says Hasidic legend, the Messiah would have appeared to save his people—and all others. You are unable to study the Bible? Say Psalms. You could hardly find a Jew in the shtetl who did not possess a prayer book with Psalms.
AS A CHILD, I would spend my meager allowance on books … I remember the bookstores and their owners: Rabbi Avigdor Greenwald, whose brother was a rabbi in Cincinnati, and Reb Shlomo Weiss. I would buy more books than I could afford, but my credit was good … I did not deserve it. Many books were left unpaid—but it was not my fault. A certain event occurred and our lives were interrupted. When I left for that place, I had in my knapsack more books than food.
Strange: when I returned to my hometown, many years later, I found some of my cherished volumes, lying in dust together with thousands and thousands of books, in the Wizhnitzer House of Study, where I had spent days and nights learning and praying—and waiting for the coming of the Messiah.
May I offer a suggestion? Redeem those books—and all the others that are waiting to be redeemed in all the formerly Jewish towns and hamlets. Send students to locate them, collect them—and bring them back to Israel and the Jewish people, the Jewish pupils, to whom they belong. It would help the students—for they would learn much about Eastern European Jewry, its glory and tragedy—and it would help the books. Those that students would find in my town alone would be sufficient to fill a library.
They will read, and their reading will become one more adventure—a source of excitement and wonder. And anguish too. One never knows what to expect in the next line, on the next page: another catastrophe? another warning? another miracle? To read means to open gates and go back to ancient times—and bring back ancient experiences.
My teachers taught me to question the text. To decipher it. To examine it from all angles, to peel away appearances and go to the essence—to the original meaning—but not straight away: one had to learn the superimposed structures as well. So when I would come home, my mother would not ask me whether I made an interesting discovery but, on the contrary, whether I had asked a good question.
The Jewish tradition of learning—is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality. If our forefather is Abraham and not Noah, it is because Abraham shared his knowledge with others, whereas Noah did not. When Jacob felt he was about to die, he blessed his children—and his blessings were teachings. Moses’s greatness? He could have kept the Law to himself but did not. Every Jewish person is commanded to write down every word of the poetry in the Torah, and thus transmit it.
The most urgent commandment? A father must educate his children. He himself must do it, and not rely on Sunday school teachers.
I remember the first day I went to cheder, the first lesson in Chumash, the first obstacles I had to surmount in the Talmud. I remember the voice of my first teacher who taught me the alphabet; I remember his sadness when I read poorly. I remember my master who opened the gates of Talmud and the gates of the Zohar for me. Why has God used words as instruments of creation? Because all of creation lies in them. All of creation could be destroyed by them. And redeemed again.
Commentaries on the Bible, on the commentaries themselves; Hasidic tales of wonder and fear: I remember where I sat, what I did, what I felt when I discovered them. I also remember my first—and premature—encounter with apocrypha—with forbidden knowledge.
One Shabbat afternoon, in the house of study, I found a book which somebody must have hidden on the top shelf. I opened it: it was a book of commentaries on the Bible by a certain Reb Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An old Hasid looked at the book in my hands. What are you reading? he asked. When he saw the name, he took it away and gave me a slap in the face that hurts me to this very day.
LEARNING IS PART of Judaism—and Judaism means learning. This is a command that all must follow—God included. The Talmud—and the Zohar—are full of stories about the Almighty teaching a course somewhere in heaven, with the tzaddikim as his disciples. Paradise? A great Yeshiva. What else? In our collective fantasy, the Yeshiva epitomized all sacred ambitions and lofty desires. When a Biblical—or Talmudic—hero disappeared, and we didn’t know where, we imagined him in a Yeshiva. When Abraham left Mount Moriah alone, where did Isaac go? To a Yeshiva. The best thing that could happen to a person was to enter a good Yeshiva—and find a good master—and learn a good page of Talmud. Torah therefore doesn’t mean only mitzvot, good deeds, but also the study of the mitzvot. And the Torah of Israel doesn’t mean the religion of Israel, but the study and the teaching of Israel. Hence the passion a Jew has for the Torah—it is physical. The way he holds the Torah. And kisses it. And clings to it: pure passion.
During—and after—each catastrophe, Jews wanted to know its meaning, its implications, its scope, its roots, and its place in history—or in God’s vision of history. Thus every disaster was followed by a surge of study, prayer, mystical quest, meditation, or scholarly endeavor. The reading of the Torah was established by Ezra and Nehemiah after the first destruction of the Temple—after Babylonian exile became reality. The Talmud was preceded by the second destruction of the Temple. The Crusades moved our people to messianic experiments—as did the pogroms, though on different levels and under different guises. Collective pain produced works of contemplation, poetry, and philosophy. Why? We felt the need to understand. To turn experience into knowledge—and then, only then, knowledge into experience. Why should pagans say, “Where is your God?” was a question we used to address to God as well as to ourselves. Why, why are we to be singled out, always, for all woes? Why are we in a situation which allows other nations to mock us, ridicule us, saying, Where is the Jewish God? Out of so many questions, many hypotheses—if not many answers—were formulated. Mostly religious ones, involving the age-old concept of sin and punishment: we suffer because we have sinned. There was—there is—a logic in our trials. Why were we sent into exile? Because we have sinned. But then—if we have sinned, we should be humble. We were not; strangely we took credit for our very punishment. God punishes only those He loves, we were told. He must have loved us very much. And we were right in feeling pride. Not for having suffered, but for having felt the need, for having had the strength, to explore the history of that suffering: for having managed to understand it—thus disarm and even conquer it. For having had the obsession to record that history in books.
When I travel, I am always afraid of running out of books. Half of my luggage consists of reading material and the other half of writing material.
If I had to describe hell, it would be as a place without books. What would life be without their appeal to our fantasy, without their power to change things simply by revealing their hidden message.
Both Hitler and Stalin understood the importance of books for the Jew. That is why they burned them in Germany and destroyed them in Russia. Stalin’s police went so far as de
molishing the Jewish presses in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. His pathological hatred was vented on both the Jewish faith and Jewish culture: the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabet annoyed him, angered him, defied him—that is why he condemned it to death. Except … he did not succeed. Like Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, we can testify: yes, the parchments may burn, but not the letters—not the spirit—not the vision—not the soul of a people, a people committed to eternal values, and thus to eternity.
And yet, there has been a certain reluctance among some of the masters to write books. The Ari Hakadosh never wrote anything; nor did the Besht; as for Rabbi Nahman, he ordered his faithful scribe Reb Nathan to burn his writings and send them back to heaven. Rabbi Bunam of Pshiskhe wrote a book entitled The Book of Man; it was meant to include everything concerning life and man, history and faith, past and future—a grandiose project whose stunning aspect was that the author wanted his book to consist of one page alone. So every day he wrote that page, and every evening he burned it.
As for the celebrated solitary visionary of Kotzk, he once explained why he refused to write books: Who would read them? he asked. Some villager. When would he have time to read them? Not during the week. Only on the Sabbath. In the evening? No, too tired. In the morning, then? Yes, after services. After the Sabbath meal. He would take the book—my book—and lie down on the sofa, ready and willing to see what I had to say about Torah and Talmud. But then the man would be so tired that, after glancing at the first page, he would doze off, dreaming about other things—and his book, my book, would fall to the floor. And for him I should write books?
But what about all those books that were not written? Our history has been preserved elsewhere, through other methods, too, we know that. In liturgical chants we learn more about the life and the lore, the anguish and the defiance of Jewish communities than in precisely edited volumes. In the responsa we discover more about the problems that agitated our brethren throughout centuries, in numerous places, than in documents. Jewish history may also be deciphered on tombstones. On prison walls. Some chapters were written, like the Torah, with fire on fire. Read their descriptions and your sleep will be haunted by their mute despair, and by their determination to overcome despair. Or, in more recent times, read the chronicles from ghettos and death camps: read the Sonderkommando documents and your life will be altered.
Eventually, it is with regret that one leaves this place of meditation and memory—one leaves it, having been enriched, enhanced, and yet one does not want to leave it at all.
But then, you do not really leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, then you are taking it with you.
The Stranger in the Bible
ON THAT NIGHT Abraham had a vision both magnificent and awesome. He heard God renewing His solemn promise that Abraham would not die without an heir. That his passage on earth, his journey among men, would be neither forgotten nor erased. And that the future would justify his past—for mankind would look at the world through his eyes. He, Abraham, would be the first of a line never to be broken, the founder of a nation never to dissolve.
And yet—despite God’s soothing, reassuring voice, Abraham hesitated; he wanted to believe but could not, not really, not entirely.
Abraham could not suppress his anxiety: so far God had promised him everything and given him little. How long could Abraham wait? Time was running out. He was almost a hundred years old. Thus, when God told him not to worry—he began to worry. God said, I shall protect you and reward you. And Abraham answered, Yes—but I am still alone. So once again God revealed his future to him: You will have a son, he will be your heir—lift up your eyes and behold the sky; your children will be like the stars—innumerable; and eternal will be their splendor.
Strange, but Abraham still was not satisfied; he wanted more. He demanded proof: How shall I know that this land will be mine, stay mine?
God’s response is astonishing. He told him to take a calf, a goat, and a ram—all three years old. And a pigeon, and a dove. And prepare them for sacrifice. Abraham obeyed. He cut them into pieces and divided them into two lots, one facing the other. And he waited. And when wild birds of prey arrived and tried to devour the sacrificial offerings, he chased them away. Then the sun set, and Abraham fell asleep, his entire being heavy with anguish. And God said unto him, “Know, Abraham, that your descendants will be treated as strangers in foreign lands; they will be sold into slavery; they will be persecuted, tormented. But it will not last forever. For their oppressors will be punished. So, you see, you may die in peace.…”
By then the sun had vanished from the horizon and there was darkness from one end of the world to the other. Suddenly, out of the darkness emerged a smoking furnace and a flaming torch and they passed between the offerings. And God concluded His covenant with Abraham: This land, He said, from the Nile to the Euphrates, will belong to your children and theirs.…
Thus ends the description—intense and allegorical—of that most important moment in the destiny of our people. If we are what we are—if we are attached to a past which envelops so many years of yearning and so many centuries of exile—it is because on that fateful night, shrouded in secrecy, God and Abraham concluded a covenant which may be viewed as a prefiguration of all that was to follow—until the end of time.
This passage in Scripture is disquieting, notwithstanding its beauty and meaning; its mystery is enhanced by its imagery. What began as vision ended as theater, deserving our scrutiny.
Biblical commentators have all felt that the text was puzzling on more than one level.
First of all, psychologically, Abraham—at this moment of his life—does not need to be reassured; he has just defeated the mightiest kings in the region; he is respected, feared, and loved as well as powerful and rich.
God said, “Do not worry. I shall protect you.” Do not worry? If ever Abraham could live without worry, it is now.
Then how does one explain Abraham’s sudden insecurity? Did the first believer doubt God’s pledge to the point of demanding proof? Did he have to remind God that he had no successor? Didn’t God know that?
Also, what is the significance of God’s stage directions? The animals, the birds, the smoking furnace, the burning torch—what do they all mean?
And then—when was Abraham awake and when was he asleep? This is not clear in the text. The scene is composed of three parts. It opens with Abraham hearing God’s voice in a vision; it develops with God telling him to go out. Out of where? And where to? And it ends with Abraham’s anguish—while he is asleep—when God foretells both exile and redemption. Was the covenant only a dream? A hallucination? Did Abraham sleep while God spoke?
More important, why did Abraham accept the terms of the covenant? Why didn’t he protest against sending his children into exile? Why did he accept suffering on their behalf? Why were they to become strangers?
The Talmud and Rashi—and countless commentators—felt so disturbed, and so moved, by this striking episode that they had to try to explain it.
One explanation was that Abraham was afraid precisely because he had been so victorious—afraid of having exhausted his credit. So God had to restore his self-confidence: Do not worry, this is only the beginning, more rewards will come to you.
Why did Abraham demand proof? Rabbi Hiyya, son of Hanina, said that this demand shows his humility and not his arrogance: he wanted proof that he, Abraham, would be worthy of his future. The sacrifices? A hint of future rituals in the Temple. The darkness? The long night of exile. The smoking furnace and the flaming torch? Symbols of punishment, but also of glory and royalty.
Secular scholars offer their own interpretation. For them, the spectacle is nothing but a reflection of ancient pagan rituals, quite common in that region, vestiges of which survived until the time of Jeremiah.
The text is especially important because here, for the first time, the term “stranger” is used: “And your descendants will be strangers in foreign lands.…”
Why is the term ??
?stranger” linked to a promise? Why is it part of a covenant? What kind of promise is it anyway? Furthermore, who is a stranger? What is a stranger? When does someone become a stranger—and for how long? What must he say, do, or feel—or make another feel—to be so called? And then, is he to be fought or befriended?
Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him—a world which didn’t need him. And which will survive him.
A stranger, he goes through life meeting other strangers. His only constant companion? Death. Or God. And neither has a name. Or a face. Are they strangers to him too?
Indeed, no topic, no problem is as urgent to our generation, haunted by a pervasive feeling of loss, failure, and isolation. Once upon a time, past civilizations were remembered for their temples and works of art, or for their pyramids and idols. Ours may well be remembered for certain words and expressions: uselessness, absurdity, alienation.
Existential philosophers use such terms to illustrate their concept of contemporary man as empty, desperate, and estranged from both the world and himself. According to this view, there is between man and society a wall never to be demolished, between man and his conscience an abyss never to be bridged. He can neither love nor hate—neither help nor be helped. He is not free to define himself as mortal among mortals; he is not free—period. His very existence lies in doubt. Whatever he may do, he will do as a stranger; whatever his hope may be, it will perish with him.
Our generation flirts with madness and death—our own, and not only our own. We try anything—nihilism, mysticism, escapism, violence and antiviolence, solitude and communes—to awaken, to attain a sense of belonging, of sharing, of participating: of being alive. I want to exist is the leitmotif in modern literature. You hear me? I want to exist There are so many dead in our past that we sometimes feel that we are among them. So what? Better to belong to the dead than to no one.