“Now go. Give the alarm. Tell your friends and neighbors. We shall fight for them, for them too. Let them lend their support. Tell them what we expect from them. Let them open their eyes, let them stay awake. Let them be prepared. Go, tell your community that it is about to live an extraordinary moment—it has an appointment with history.”
They all obeyed. They were afraid, but they obeyed. They dispersed, alone and in groups of two or three. Projected length of the operation: an hour, or two. Family, neighbors, friends to inform, to forewarn. These heralds of rebellion descended on the community, spreading dismay—delivered their message and withdrew. People listened to them without understanding, without really hearing them. Some were petrified, speechless; others began to weep. A pogrom? In the twentieth century? Here? What exactly did that mean? A massacre? Like in the Middle Ages? Had nothing changed then since Chmelnitzki? But then what was the use of defending oneself?
Shaike was the last to go out into the courtyard. He went down the street toward his parents’ house. After a few steps he stopped, turned back and went to the Kreiners’, where his fiancée Piroshka was staying.
He had the odd sensation of walking in an unfamiliar street where all the footsteps were his own.
The cell was dark. Airless. A streak of blue light filtered through the bars in the skylight, glided over a large pail of water in the corner, played with the dust in the twilight shadows.
Moshe was sitting on the floor. He seemed feverish, his shoulders shaking with every breath he took.
“Peace be with you,” said my father, placing a bowl of hot soup and a paper bag bulging with fruit on the wet ground.
The prisoner lifted his head in my direction. “So you thought it right to bring along my young companion? You did well.”
“He insisted.”
“He did well.”
The man who stirred me more than anyone in the world was unrecognizable. His clothes were rags, his body seemed dislocated, patched, his arms and legs disconnected. His eyes and lips only by chance part of the same face, which itself was nothing but a mask shattered into a thousand fragments where nothing moved, nothing indicated life. A chilling thought crossed my mind: This was not Moshe, this was an imposter! How could I be sure? Ask him for a sign? We would have to be alone.
My father cleared his throat and went about his duties as chronicler. “Aren’t you afraid people will say that Jews are murderers?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“To understand you. And then to write it down.”
“And what if you don’t understand?”
“I’ll write it, anyway. It is my duty to record everything, to transmit everything. Even that which lies beyond my understanding.”
Moshe thought for a moment. I tried to intercept his gaze. In vain. Noises from the outside were distracting me: the sentry’s steps marching back and forth, a horse neighing, a drunkard’s cry. Life was continuing on the other side but not at the same rhythm. Was it the same life?
“No, people will not say that Jews are murderers. They will say that one Jew, mad to boot, turned murderer. They will blame the act on my insanity and you will all be cleared.”
He had spoken with impressive calm. In my mind I had not yet resolved the problem of his identity. He could be anyone.
“What about me?” I asked. “What is my role in all this?”
He stiffened. The mask fell apart around his lips. He was about to answer, changed his mind. He opened his mouth several times, but said nothing. I felt the weight of his gaze.
“What about me, your disciple?” I continued. “Am I to follow you? To the end? Am I to succeed you? Or perhaps repudiate you? Forget you?”
Torn between discretion and his duties—as a father, as a chronicler—my father coughed into the palm of his hand, as he did whenever he was confused, undecided, embarrassed.
“In prison the Master is no longer free to teach by example. Therefore, he is no longer Master,” said Moshe, his voice almost severe.
This is someone else, I thought, this is not his voice. This harshness, this certainty are not his.
“And Rabbi Akiba?” I asked with a touch of disrespect, if not anger.
Akiba, one of the martyrs in Roman times, taught till the end of his life. While he was in jail his students would wander back and forth outside, pretending to converse among themselves, and they would ask him questions on Talmudic law, thus outwitting the guards. And the Master would answer.
“No connection,” said Moshe. “Besides …”
This is an imposter, I thought. Moshe had taught me that nothing in Jewish tradition was unconnected. In Jewish history everything is linked. The sacrifice of Isaac and the destruction of the Temple and the successive pogroms all over the Ukraine and Poland. Akiba was closer to Moshe or to me than I am to myself.
“Besides,” continued Moshe, “I am not yet Rabbi Akiba.”
He had said “not yet.” My father could not repress a shiver. Rabbi Akiba: symbol of accepted, invoked, inspired suffering. His torture in the marketplace was the longest and the most cruel.
“Any regrets?” my father asked.
To that same question, asked by an adversary or an admirer, Rabbi Akiba had answered: No, on the contrary, this is the ordeal—and also the end—that I have wanted all my life.
“Why do you want to know?” asked Moshe.
“To record and to safeguard. For the sake of history. Aren’t we the people of memory? Is oblivion not the worst of curses? A deed transmitted is a victory snatched from death. A witness who refuses to testify is a false witness. As for me, I do not refuse; on the contrary, I do nothing else, I yearn to do nothing else.”
Moshe shook his head before he answered: “I don’t mean to discourage you, but I don’t believe in the written word; I never did. The words pronounced at Sinai are known. Perhaps even too well. They have been distorted, exploited. Not the silence, though it was communicated from atop that same mountain. As for me, I like that silence, transmitted only among the initiated like a secret tradition that eludes language. But even more, I believe in the other tradition, the one whose very existence is a secret. A secret that dies and relives each time it is received, each time it is invoked. Only the Messiah can speak of it without betrayal. Remains to be seen whether he will speak at all.”
Was that the sign? Not recognizing his voice? Broken, hoarse, it did not carry the words but let itself be carried by them. It rose and fell and rose again but did not register inside me. Obstacle rather than link—could this be Moshe’s voice? I compared it to the one still reverberating inside my memory. No, no resemblance.
“I imagine,” said my father, “that by choosing total sacrifice you intend to lend greater meaning to your death than to your life. Am I mistaken?”
He was stubborn, my father, his obstinacy close to indiscretion. He sometimes hurt people’s feelings with his compulsion to find out everything, consign everything to paper. Never mind if people were annoyed, antagonized or hurt. Professional conscience pushed to the extreme? A sublimated, outrageously magnified sense of duty? His zeal either angered people or made them smile. Recalling him now, his son also smiles and more than at that time. Poor historian! How could he have guessed that his labors would be in vain? He was the last of a line, yet his testimony would be forbidden, as would the mention of that interdiction. How could he have known that he was attributing to his mission a future it no longer possessed? That his project, at this very moment, contained its own negation? My poor chronicler of a father, how could he have imagined that, supreme irony, the idea of a Herem had only just taken root in Moshe’s mind and that he himself was contributing to it to a considerable degree?
Telling of it now, his son is smiling, cannot help but smile. He was too tenacious, the chronicler.
“You ought to answer me, Moshe,” he said gently but firmly. “Think of the future generations. Of the yet-to-be-born children. Don’t you wish to take part in their destiny? Live through
them? In them?”
The prisoner seemed to be irritated by these words. I could not be sure. Later, during his speech to the community gathered inside the synagogue, I knew I had been right.
“If you don’t answer,” continued my father, “I shall write down that you could not or would not answer. Even that is important.”
And in spite of the prisoner’s reticence, he kept insisting. Was Moshe aware of the prominent role of the witness in Jewish tradition? Even God needs him. The Bible tells us so and the Talmud confirms it: “If you shall be my witness, I shall be your God; if you shall refuse that role, I shall refuse mine.” The anguish of the witness facing history; his obsession not to depart without having scarred a single consciousness or ripped a single veil. His reward: thanks to him, past and future generations are linked to one another; without him, they would remain alien.
“I feel sorry for you,” said Moshe, bursting into laughter. “By wanting to know too much, you end up understanding nothing. There is a link between the witness and the object of his testimony. Between the one who writes and the dramas and triumphs he describes, there is a connection of truth if not of cause and effect. Are you aware of that? And do you persist in spite of it? The prophet who predicts an ordeal and the chronicler who depicts it are equally responsible. I feel sorry for you, my poor friend. Confer a meaning on death? Death has no meaning. It is useless. The first death in history was a murder. Senseless, absurd. Involuntary, unconscious. Cain killed for nothing. His brother died for nothing. Neither proved anything. No, my poor historian, to turn death into a philosophy is not Jewish. To turn it into a theology is anti-Jewish. Whoever praises death ends up either serving or totally ignoring it. A trait pagans and atheists have in common. We, on the other hand, consider death the primary defect and injustice inherent in creation. To die for God is to die against God. For us, man’s ultimate confrontation is only with God.”
He tried to stand, but failed; his legs would not support him. And so he motioned us to sit down beside him on the ground, which we did, Father on his right and myself at his left, like two disciples preparing to receive the teachings of their Master. And I was delighted to discover my father in a new role.
“You must know,” Moshe continued, abruptly seizing my arm. “I have no fear of dying—nor of living. What frightens me is not to be able to distinguish between life and death. There are men who are dead and do not know it.”
“Moshe …” said my father, beginning a question he would never complete.
“To be Jewish is to be able to distinguish,” said Moshe, following his own train of thought. “In our tradition, danger is called mixture, the enemy is called chaos. To be Jewish is to live separate from others but not against others. His whole life long the Jew is committed to separating light from darkness, Shabbat from the rest of the week, the pure from the impure, the sacred from the profane, the return from the exile, life from death. ‘And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed.’ The emphasis is on the word between. Moses separated the first from the latter and thus succeeded in containing the scourge. To mingle categories is to destroy them. Just as one may not celebrate Shabbat during the week, one may not experience Shabbat without celebration. Israel may flourish in its kingdom and survive in exile but it may not transfer exile into its kingdom. ‘And thou shalt choose life’ means you shall separate it.”
“Moshe …” I said, not knowing what else I was going to say.
“In no way do I wish to go before my time,” Moshe continued, unaware of my interruption. “The innocent man who allows himself to be killed voluntarily, whether he admits it or not, is taking sides with death. That is why I wish to be guilty. Since I shall be condemned, let me deserve it. The innocent man who has been punished constitutes a scandal as revolting as the criminal who has been rewarded. Yes, I refute my innocence. I shall assume my guilt by sheer will power. Sometimes I think I actually killed this Christian boy I have never seen; that it was important for me to commit this absurd act to achieve an end that is no less absurd. But I am afraid, I am afraid …”
The pressure of his hand became more insistent.
“If we are all innocent, then the mystery of evil, drawing its strength from our very innocence, will crush us in the end. For in order to realize himself, man must fuse all levels of being into one; every man is all men. Every man can and must carry creation on his shoulders; every unit is responsible for the whole. That frightens me. Where am I in all this? Created in the image of the One without image, man is so constituted that as he comes close to one extreme, he advances toward the other. It is frightening because in the name of the absolute, he is called upon to do good and evil at the same time, relying on identical gestures and inventing identical forms. Chosen by God, Abraham came close to becoming a murderer on God’s orders. I am afraid because that means that evil too leads to God, that death too—woe to us—leads to God. But then, where lies the solution? There is but one viable attitude: granted, everything leads to God; only indifference makes us stray. Whoever comes to God empty-handed cannot help but identify Him with emptiness. Better to live evil and death.”
“Moshe,” I said, surprised to hear him discourse at such length.
He caught me looking at him. He began to laugh again. “Thus, what is essential is to live to the limit. Let your words be shouts or silence but nothing else, nothing in between. Let your desire be absolute and your wait as well, for all yearning contains a yearning for God and every wait is a wait for God. Let your steps lead you toward yourself or me, no matter, for either way you will be taking the same path. Whoever walks in the night, moves against night.”
He was no longer speaking to both of us but to me alone. As in the old days. My hesitation disappeared. I knew. He was raving and I accompanied him, I would have accompanied him to the end, with my father and even without him. But why was he laughing?
“Evil is Satan and Satan is more than evil, he is evil disguised as good, the link between the two. That frightens me. After all, his place is at God’s right. An awesome concept, leading to horror. How is one to distinguish God in evil, Satan in good? Are we to understand that they maintain a dialogue, arguing over Job’s heart, Abraham’s faith, Isaac’s reason? Who wins, who loses? God, Satan? No. Man wins and man loses—but he does not know it.”
My father, notebook on his lap, was taking notes in the semi-darkness. Moshe did not take offense. He talked and talked, very fast, laughing, rocking to and fro, jumping from one subject to the next, from one image to the next as though he wanted to express it all in one single sentence, one single word. The notion of “Breaking the vessels” in Kabbala, the death of kings, the exile of divinity, the Great Return, the vast unification in the universe. Suddenly he came back to the messianic theme:
“The Grandfather of Shpole entreated God: Make haste, you must save the children of Israel, they cannot hold out any longer. If you do not save them as Jews, you will have to redeem them as pagans! And I, Moshe, I tell him: Hurry and send us the one we are expecting, otherwise he will come and no longer find us; and you yourself will no longer find him either.”
And as though to prevent my father from interrupting his train of thought, he quickly went on, squeezing my arm with renewed strength:
“Let him come, let him come and all the commandments will be abolished. Thus states the Talmud. All the laws will merge into one, the one that opens not unto fear but unto joy—the joy of man facing his Creator, the joy of the Creator facing His reflection, the joy of mankind triumphing over fear and even over joy. When will he come? I wait for him, I call him, yet he is inside that call, he is that call, he is that wait. He comes and goes, he visits this dwelling and not that other, this man and not that other, not all together, not in the same way. His reign will come about when all men will be just or when all will be guilty. That too is stressed in the Talmud. In both instances the point is to carry out a resolution, not to deviate from the chosen path, to go to the end—and ther
e, on the tightrope linking two peaks, lies the heady zone of sanctity. And I am afraid. For sanctity is not an end in itself. I am afraid …”
His voice choked. My father seized the bowl, dipped it into the pail and handed it to him filled with water. To grasp it, Moshe let go of my arm. I saw his gaping swollen lips and had to contain a scream. Yet I was still not certain, not quite, that it was he. Why was he laughing?
Moshe began to speak again, then paused in the middle of a sentence. We waited for him to finish it. For a long time he seemed absent. He was wandering among the rubble of his words, his thoughts reduced to shreds, unable to organize them. Then his eyes lit up and he emitted so raucous, so deep a groan that I too felt torn apart. Then, alternately crying and laughing, he uttered a sentence of which I can remember only the first part: “Since God exists, the meaning of punishment escapes me. On the other hand …”
That is all. I have forgotten many poignant and evocative words, many ideas received or acquired at the cost of sleepless nights and solitary dawns; I have forgotten what it was companions and friends did or said when parting with me at this or that crossing of the roads; I have forgotten what it was my dying mother made me swear on the eve of our separation and what I felt the next day. But this fragment of a cry, the germ of a doubt or of an understanding, has not left me. “On the other hand …”—on the other hand … what? What sort of evidence had Moshe stumbled upon in his delirium? That enigma haunts me—and I like it that way. It links me to Moshe, my mad, tormented friend, and takes me back into his dusty cell at once cold and stifling where, laughing and talking at the same time, he held forth incoherently on equally incoherent events.
Very well, I shall speak, says the old man. I shall speak of the joy, the madness, the fervor of the living. I shall also speak of the anger of the dead. For I have seen them. I have seen them emerging from pits and slaughterhouses and altars, in groups or alone, glowering and fierce. At first I was surprised, but later I found it natural. I understood that they had decided not to count on the living any longer but to accomplish the task of digging their own graves in heaven, unaided. And they had brought along an entire retinue of companions who had died before them, to cross the blazing town, the indifferent countryside. They had assumed the daring role of avengers determined to occupy the entire world so as to impose on it the awesome principle of equality at last.