by Elie Wiesel
Later, during the emancipation, our newly acquired civil rights led us to dilute or even shed our Judaism rather than use it to fulfill ourselves. The historian Simon Dubnow stresses the point that upon contact with individual liberties, Judaism weakened. Once admitted into the Christian milieu, the Jew often came to look upon his Judaism as a blemish, an obstacle. Emancipation drove us to assimilation, not to nationalism; it brought about a setback rather than a rebirth of our spirituality. Instead of revolutionizing our own history, we set out to change that of others. We absorbed every culture, excelled in every tongue, interpreted all the signs, and took part in every battle; no other people has, either by necessity or vocation, been as universal or as universalist. We hoped to save humanity even as it was bent on our destruction. We were determined to accept nothing less than absolute salvation for all nations; we exerted ourselves more for others than for ourselves.
Israel belongs to all Jews. But is the reverse true? How, then, is one to explain our reticence to join you there permanently? You condemn us. At worst, you consider us hypocrites; at best, you consider us weaklings. Nor do we think that you are entirely wrong. Israel exists, and we live elsewhere; therein lies an anomaly. Of course, there are all sorts of alibis, excuses, justifications to be invoked: We help you, we act, we use our influence on your behalf. What would Israel do, what would Israel be, without the Diaspora? Yet the fact remains: The Jewish people, dispersed as it is, does not live in a state of siege, while you, in Israel, have made your homes on the front lines; your children, not ours, confront perils every day; you, their parents, not we, endure anguish every night.
If you reproach us for our failings, you are right. We don’t deny them. As we stand before you, we feel inadequate.
As for us, for what do we reproach you? This may sound absurd and surely unjust to you: We blame Israel for having happened too late. Too late to save the millions and millions of Jews who needed its protection the most. I know it is not Israel’s fault. And yet it hurts. Not only do I wish to love Israel, I want to admire it, hold it up as an example, find there what cannot be found elsewhere: a certain sense of justice, a certain sense of dignity. I want to find there a society ruled by a vision of probity, justice, and compassion.
It is a paradoxical yet understandable demand. The more we in the Diaspora fall prey to materialism, the more we yearn to see idealism flourish in Israel; the more passive we are, the more we would like Israel to be creative; the more earthbound we are, the more anxious we are that Israel be ethereal and sovereign. In short, we would like Israel to be what we are not. And if we sometimes voice our disappointment, it is because its reality dangerously resembles ours. Perhaps Kafka was right: Man’s weakness lies not in his inability to obtain victories, but in his inability to make use of them.
We follow your current events and frequently fail to understand them. The tone of your debates, the recriminations, the animosities remind us of other societies, other lands. Is it wrong of us to expect so much of Israel? To place you on what amounts to a pedestal?
Try to understand us as we try to understand you. In a world gone mad from feeding upon falsehood and greed, we look upon Israel as a haven where the cycle of cynicism and nihilism will be broken. As people who live in a discredited, disintegrated society, we see in Israel proof that man can and must win the battles within himself. Call me romantic or naive, but I see Israel, surrounded and besieged by hatred, as an ancient laboratory eternally renewed. I see Israel as a country in which victory does not necessarily signify the defeat of the enemy and in which true triumph means triumph over oneself. And in which friendship is possible and irrevocable. And in which everything that is tainted by banality, by vulgarity, is outside the law.
Are we wrong to raise you so high, thus asking Israel to be a model nation? Are we wrong to seek there signs heralding a social messianism or a messianic humanism? And to ask you—though we dislike interfering in your internal affairs—to disagree less frequently and less noisily? And to prepare a friendlier welcome for new immigrants? And to treat Russian Jews as brothers, even when they change their minds on the way and decide to settle in America? Are we wrong to ask you to adopt a more Jewish attitude toward Palestinian Arabs and, particularly, toward Israeli Arabs? To be less intransigent, more receptive? From Israel we expect no more, no less than the impossible.
Let us open our eyes, my Israeli brothers. As a Diaspora Jew, I live the life and the destiny of Jerusalem. And I should like you to understand us. We are responsible for each other; you do not deny it. If the principal task of the Diaspora is to protect Israel, yours should be to become a new source of life to the Diaspora. Let us assume the dialectics of our so singularly Jewish and so Jewishly singular condition: that we both live on two levels simultaneously; that we both lead a double life; that we be each other’s heart and conscience, constantly questioning and enriching each other. Without the Diaspora, Israel would have no one to question and no one to be questioned by. Without Israel, the Diaspora would know nothing of victory but the anguish that precedes it.
In these extraordinary times our generation is at once the most blessed and the most accursed of all. Some thirty years ago Jewish heroes wept every time a courier brought them a weapon; today strategists marvel at the Jewish army’s military genius. Fifty years ago nobody imagined that Russian Judaism could survive Communist dictatorship; today we are witnessing its rebirth. A generation ago we discovered the ruins of the world and the dark side of God; today it is on them that we are building future Jewish history.
This speech of 1974—which in my mind remains valid even now—was one I had prepared with great care. I weighed every word, every question mark. I knew that I was treading on mined terrain. But, I did not deliver the speech … at least not in its entirety. For a strange thing happened: During the first half, while I was saying mea culpa for myself and my fellow Jews in the Diaspora, the Israeli officials were listening, their faces beaming approval. As soon as I began the second part, suggesting that Diaspora Jews also had a few reproaches, the mood in the hall turned. It was as if a wind from Siberia had frozen my listeners’ features. The contact had been broken to the point that I asked myself what good it was to continue, to hurl myself against this human wall. In any case I would not be heard … and so I, too, broke the connection. I set aside my prepared text and improvised a different conclusion. I needed to finish. I had to get out of there.
The following year I receive a call from Pinhas Sapir, former finance minister and acting chairman of the Jewish Agency: He would like to pay me a visit at my home in New York. I tell him that I will gladly come to his hotel; after all, he is someone I respect, and he is my elder. Nothing doing. He insists on coming to my home, accompanied by his entourage. Without preamble he tells me: “I heard you last year, but I was not present at the debate your speech provoked. I know that my colleagues attacked you severely, and I know that they were unjust. That is why I wanted to come and see you today. To offer you our official apologies and, especially, my own.”
Sadly, this remarkable man died shortly afterward during a ceremony in an immigrant village, clasping the holy scrolls in his arms.
In spite of his soothing words, the incident in Jerusalem stays with me. I still don’t understand my inability to criticize Israel. Perhaps I am guided by the readings of the biblical and talmudic commentaries. Is it not said that even our teacher Moses was punished for having been too harsh with our people?
It is a troubling subject. I shall return to it.
It was only in 1995 that I discovered that the Six-Day War was not as noble as I had thought.
I had been so proud of the moving simplicity of “our” officers, the bravery of these soldiers who, to quote my friend André Schwarz-Bart, “fired and wept.” But in August 1995 the Israeli press is filled with articles describing assassinations allegedly perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and officers at the beginning of June 1967.
Yedioth Ahronoth, which by now has become the lea
ding paper in the country, prints an article by Gabi Baron. He reports on what he himself saw near the airport of El ’Arīsh, which had just been won. In a hangar, 150 prisoners waited on the ground, their hands behind their necks. I read:
Next to the fence guarded by the military police, there was a table at which two men dressed in Israeli military uniforms were seated. They wore blue helmets and their faces were hidden behind antisand goggles and khaki kerchiefs. Military policemen went to fetch a prisoner and led him to the table. There ensued a brief conversation we could not overhear. Then, the prisoner was led one hundred meters from the hangar and one of the policemen handed him a shovel.
I saw the man dig a hole for fifteen minutes. Then one of the policemen ordered him to throw the shovel out of the hole. And then, one of them took his machine gun and fired three or four shots. The prisoner fell and died. A few minutes later another prisoner was taken to the same hole and shot. A third died in the same way. I myself was present at ten or so executions.
Military specialists have explained that the army had no choice: It feared the fedayeen, those terrorists who wearing the Egyptian military uniform operated behind the Israeli lines. Or then: In the desert, in the midst of a campaign, what is one to do with “useless mouths” …?
How I regret today not having known these facts, this horror, when I met with Moshe Dayan. Had he not been minister of defense during the Six-Day War?
Bad news from Canada. Bea is not doing well. My poor sister is still fighting, but she tires quickly. The treatments exhaust her. She is suffering terrible pain. She spends the High Holy Days at the hospital. I visit her often. She is coughing a lot. She bites her lips as she tells me slowly how she had been able to hear the sound of the shofar on both days of Rosh Hashana. What is she thinking? That the heavenly court’s judgment on “Who shall live and who shall die” must have been pronounced? She is pale and weak, my wounded, generous sister. She speaks in a broken, staccato voice. Her gaze is veiled. Whenever she removes her oxygen mask to speak to me, she gasps for breath. But she must confide in me how much she worries about her young children, Sarah and Stevie. I beg her: “Don’t speak; I understand you without words.” Oh yes, I do understand her. And I ache.
1973. On November 13 and 14, at Carnegie Hall, “Ani Maamin, a Song Lost and Found Again” is performed by an orchestra and choir under the baton of Lukas Foss. I had conceived this cantata, for which Darius Milhaud composed the score, for the centennial celebration of American Reform Jewry. It was commissioned by Al Ronald, a German Jew and former member of the Office of Strategic Services. I loved to listen to his tales of espionage, of parachuting into Germany. The victim of a fatal heart attack, he had pursued happiness with such zeal, my special friend Al.
I have never worked at such a pace. In less than a week the prose poem was completed and sent to the composer in Paris.
Ensconced in his armchair near the window in his Paris apartment, Milhaud asks why I chose this theme, this legend, over others. I tell him that since childhood I have felt a special tenderness for this twelfth article of faith proclaimed by the great Rabbi Moses Maimonides.
As children we had sung the original melody at heder and at the yeshiva on every holiday. For me it was a call to faith and an affirmation that even though he was late, the Redeemer would make his appearance one day.
Later I learned that Jews on their way to Treblinka and Birkenau had sung that song, as if to defy death. And I failed to understand: How could they believe in the coming of the Messiah over there? From where did they draw their faith in divine kindness and grace?
Then I sometimes question the child within me: What in the world was the Good Lord doing while His people were being massacred and incinerated? When He veils his face, as in the times of the biblical Malediction, what does he see? And then I ask myself: What were our ancestors, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, doing while their descendants were humiliated and sent to their death? Were they not, according to our tradition, our protectors and intercessors? Why didn’t they shake the celestial throne with their prayers and drown it in their tears?
God. Of all the characters in Scripture, said Saul Lieberman, God is the most tragic. It is not sacrilegious to feel sorry for Him. He, too, needs Redemption. Thus it is for Him, too, that we recite Ani Maamin—yes, I believe with all my heart in the coming, however belated, of the Messiah. Ani Maamin? I believe? In what? In whom? In the coming of the Messiah? Whom will he deliver? Who is there sufficiently worthy to make him come and save a humanity that has doomed itself?
These are thoughts that come to my mind every year as we commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The speakers recall the heroism of the fighters and the faith of the martyrs. And to conclude the ceremony the Ani Maamin is sung as if to emphasize that the dead, at the moment of dying, had maintained their faith.
Is it possible that in the midst of hell the victims kept their faith in a better world? Some witnesses answer affirmatively; I have no right to contradict them. We know that a principal goal of the fighters was to show the world that Jews were capable of taking up arms “to defend and save Jewish honor.” This expression often appears in their letters and testaments. We also know that those who were lucky enough to escape from the ghettos cared more about alerting their unfortunate brothers outside than about their own survival. All were filled with ahavat Israel, love for their people. That was why these young Jews risked their lives. And in the death camps there were Jews who took it upon themselves to become chroniclers and historians, writing and collecting testimonies so that future generations would remember and judge.
And yet there are other documents that reflect total despair. In their solitude Jews realized they could count on no one, that they counted for no one. The free and “civilized” world had handed them over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers—and there were those who remained silent. Does that explain the so-called Jewish passivity during the Holocaust? Perhaps Jews refused to fight for a world that had disappointed and betrayed them? Such pessimism is irreconcilable with Ani Maamin.
But then which approach is more justified? Both are, equally. There were Jews who prayed for the Messiah, and others who were ready to send him away. There were those who clung to the belief that all was not lost, and others who proclaimed that humanity was doomed. To say, as I do in my cantata, that the silence of God is God, is both an admission of resignation and an affirmation of hope.
The whole question of faith in God, surely in spite of man and perhaps in spite of God, permeates this cantata:
In those days, even as the heart of the world was being consumed by the black flames of Night, three angry old men appeared before the celestial court, asking to be heard.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the three forefathers of a people consecrated to God by God—were desperate. Their mission had been to roam the lands near and far, gathering the echoes of Jewish suffering in the world, and make them known in heaven. They wanted to bring it to an end.
Abraham tells what he sees on an earth drenched in blood, and the choir responds: “Pray for Abraham.” Isaac describes what he sees, and the choir responds: “Pray for Isaac.” Jacob tells us what he observes, and the choir responds: “Pray for Jacob.” And God? The choir concludes:
Ani maamin, Abraham,
Despite Treblinka.
Ani maamin, Isaac,
Because of Belsen.
Ani maamin, Jacob,
Because and in spite of Majdanek….
Ani Maamin, a song found again? This subtitle implies that I had found it, lost it, or at one time rejected it. This is what happened: One Passover evening in the seventies, my childhood friend Moshe-Chaim Berkowitz turns to me and asks: “Do you remember the melody for Ani Maamin, the one we used to sing at the Wizhnitzer Rebbe’s?” Suddenly it comes back to me. Winter 1943. We are spending Shabbat Shira—whose biblical readings remind us of the Red Sea crossing—at the Rebbe’s court. Toward the end of the af
ternoon I become aware of a man, small in stature, wearing shtreimel and caftan. He stands alone in a corner, near the stove. I know he is a relative of the Rebbe’s. He comes from Galicia. How did he manage to cross the border? I don’t dare ask. Suddenly he begins to hum Ani Maamin, it is a melody I have never heard before, and I find it both beautiful and heartbreaking. I close my eyes. In the huge study hall there is silence. Like everyone else I hold my breath. The men draw closer, forming a circle around the singer. We all wait for him to repeat the melody. That is the custom; that is how Hasidim learn new songs.
But the Rebbe’s relative prefers to speak. He tells a story, his own, of what he has seen and endured on the other side, in occupied Poland. After every episode he stops and sings anew the same haunting tune of Ani Maamin, as if to tell us: Remember not only my stories but also my song. In the end we learn it. But since Auschwitz it had eluded me. Yes, I had forgotten it, as had Moshe-Chaim. And it was at the same moment, one Passover eve, in the middle of the Seder, that we both found it again. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful Hasidic tunes I know. To this day, when I sing it I close my eyes.
Does this mean that I have made peace with God? I continue to protest His apparent indifference to the injustices that savage His creation. And the Messiah? He should have arrived earlier, much earlier. Perhaps Kafka was right: The Redeemer will come not on the last day but on the day after.
