by Elie Wiesel
Miraculously the Scuds caused no fatalities. Even more miraculous, thus far, they have not contained gas. Still, the threat of chemical warfare remains everyone’s obsession. “And to think it was German engineers who supplied the gas to Saddam Hussein,” whispers an old woman. Someone else notes that Germany sold the gas to Iraq and the masks to Israel.
The old question of Israelis versus Diaspora Jews surfaces again. A Davar editorialist lectures foreign Jews who did not experience the missile attacks, practically labeling them bad Jews. Let them stay home, he concludes. Similar odious attacks are published under other bylines. Why didn’t the Diaspora Jews come? And those who did, why didn’t they stay longer? And those who stayed longer, why aren’t they settling in Israel? What are they waiting for to break with the gilded lives they lead in exile? Rarely have I sensed, in the Israeli press, such hatred toward the Diaspora.
I am reminded of an incident that occurred during the Lebanon war. A journalist asks to see me. I receive him at the Hilton in Tel Aviv. His demeanor is unappealing, self-important; what he has to say makes him even more repugnant. Is he trying to provoke me? He gives me a description of what is happening in Lebanon, where the war is in its second week: Israeli soldiers, he tells me, are behaving “like SS.” Incensed by this analogy, I get up. He continues: “And it’s your fault.” Seeing my amazement, he corrects himself: “Of course, I am not speaking of you personally; I am referring to Diaspora Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals. If you were here, our soldiers would not be committing these atrocities….”
He later publishes a pamphlet in which he describes the Jews of the Diaspora, myself included, as more dangerous to Israel than Yasir Arafat.
I try to determine to what extent his opinions are shared in Israel. The results of my investigation scare me. I hear Israelis more intelligent and cultivated than he express, in more elegant terms, more or less similar ideas.
The foreign correspondents have a different point of view. They pelt me with questions: “Why did you come to Israel now?” “Are you attracted to danger?” I try to explain: I love Israel too much to stay away when it is in danger. Having lived what I have lived, having written what I have written, I am compelled to link myself to its destiny.
What about the bombings of the Iraqi military bases? And the punishment inflicted on Baghdad? “You are known as a man of peace,” notes an Italian newspaperman. “How can you identify with those who make war?” Normally this kind of question troubles me. But in the context of this conflict the question seems irrelevant. This is a war that Israel endures but does not participate in. It is Saddam Hussein’s war. The security of the civilized world is at stake, its right to peace, not just Israel’s future. We should have understood and intervened the day he ordered the Kurds gassed. If at that time we had convened an international tribunal to try him for crimes against humanity, the Gulf War could have been avoided.
This is what I say when I testify, for the second time, before the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, which is debating the need to establish an international court to bring Saddam to justice. The senators’ unanimous vote is yes.
• • •
The pressure exerted on Shamir by Bush was too great for Israel not to take into account. During that entire period Israel did not make a move. The United States showed its gratitude: Its intercepting missiles, called “Patriots,” could be seen at strategic locations; they were reassuring. But people didn’t think they were the reason why the Iraqi missiles caused so little damage. But then what was the reason? Miracles were a big topic in Israel, not only in religious circles. Even Yitzhak Rabin mentioned them in a speech he gave in the synagogue I attend in Manhattan, which caused one listener to comment: “Now that is a miracle—to hear Rabin use that word.”
In the Hasidic courts and the yeshivas, every situation is examined in the light of biblical texts. Thus, on Shabbat, one reads the passage: “God will do battle for you and you will remain silent.” In Brooklyn the Lubavitcher Rebbe declares to his followers: “You have nothing to fear; the war will be over before Purim.” My friend from the camps, Rebbe Menashe Klein, promises me solemnly that “nothing will happen to Israel.” I am told that a third rabbi has made a similar promise. Perfect. Three rabbis constitute a tribunal. And a tribunal has the power to issue a verdict. And even the heavens must obey a rabbinical verdict. In that case, why worry?
Only, I have learned to be wary of miracles. They trouble me. They trouble me even in the context of Hasidic tales, to the point that when I tell them I try not to make too much of them. True, I believed in them as a child, like everybody else. They fascinated me. Today they are a problem. They imply God and His selective compassion. If God has at times taken the trouble to save His people, why has He been so sparing in His interventions? He could have intervened more often. Paradoxically, for my generation, there are many miracles to be thankful for.
As a child in Sighet I would repeat my prayers; daily rituals contain their own miracles. I still believe this. But today it is their human dimension that matters to me. “And God in all this?” asks one of my characters in The Trial of God. I would answer: The very question contains the miracle. What is a question if not the element that allows a human being to transcend himself? A morning prayer tells us: “Every day the Creator renews His creation.” In other words, miracles abound, only man is sometimes blind.
François Mitterrand and
Jewish Memory
IT IS TO JOB, and the French minister of culture Jack Lang, that I owe my encounter with François Mitterrand. And it is because of René Bousquet, organizer of the infamous roundup of Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, that we went our separate ways.
Philippe Nemo, one of the young right-wing “new philosophers” who later reproached me for my friendship with President Mitterrand—who, as everyone knows by now, had a right-wing past and a left-wing future—had written a book on Job. Having also read my own commentaries on that particular biblical figure, he proposes to interview me for the radio station France-Culture.
Nemo is referring to my Célébration biblique, published in the United States as Messengers of God, and we agree to devote a series of broadcasts to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. And what we imagine happens in fairytales comes to pass. An important political person listening to his car radio hears a few thoughts about Jacob, the weakest, the palest, the most awkward, the most malleable of the Patriarchs, until he became Israel. The future president of France finds it an original way of approaching the Bible. He likes it. He listens to several broadcasts, obtains all the cassettes, then decides to offer another set to his longtime friend Charles Salzman, but is told his supplier has just run out of stock. Of the author, he knows only one book, the witness account The Jews of Silence.
During the electoral campaign of 1980, Lang, matchless as an intellectual and artistic impresario, learns of the Socialist candidate’s interest in me and invites me to one of his debates, the real purpose of which is to illustrate François Mitterrand’s impact on the outside world. I am quite aware that this initiative is not an innocent one: The elections are looming on the political horizon. As an American citizen I should not get involved. But I play the game.
The first meeting takes place at the house of one of his friends. We exchange a few words. There are too many people around us. Never mind; next time.
Next time will be at the Élysée. And I shall return there often.
I welcome François Mitterrand’s victory as an act of justice.
There is joy everywhere. The capital is festive, especially the Place de la Bastille. Socialism is being celebrated. There is singing and dancing in the streets. The Socialist victory has turned people’s heads. Some go so far as to hiss the outgoing president as he leaves the Élysée—a regrettable lapse of tact.
Celebrations are in progress both at the Arc de Triomphe and at the Pantheon, where Roger Hanin, the actor and President Mitterrand’s brother-in-law, is directing the ceremon
y. The newly elected head of state stands in solitary but regal splendor before the crypt of the heroic résistant Jean Moulin.
From outside, the sound of pouring rain. Bareheaded, the new president listens, motionless, to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Hoping to please his new boss, a future minister sends a message to the young maestro: Couldn’t he conduct a little faster? I go back to the hotel drenched to the bone.
Mitterrand wishes to receive me the following day. I am flattered and tempted, but I cannot delay my return; I am scheduled to spend the weekend at Yale. A pity. It’s not every day that one is officially declared to be a “friend of the president.” But the people at Yale wouldn’t understand. Would there ever be a next time?
Once established, the contact proves solid, fruitful. Mitterrand insists that I come to see him every time I’m in Paris. When I tell him of my hesitation to disturb him, he answers that he always has time for his friends. I see him again a few months later, during a Sorbonne conference. He scolds me: “I know you come to Paris often, but you don’t call me.” I promise to call the next time. And I do, certain that I shall run into one of those barriers behind which the great and not-so-great of this world hide. But to my surprise, I’m told he will receive me that same day.
The man, as much as his power, intimidates me; I feel ill at ease. At first I answer his questions evasively; I need time to overcome my inhibitions. But little by little I feel free to speak. I like the way he listens and smiles.
We sometimes lunch together in his private quarters at the Élysée. He is interested in the complicated laws of kashrut: Why is one meat ritually pure when another is not? Why are Jews forbidden to mix meat with milk? What is the difference between biblical commandments and their rabbinical interpretations? And again and again, he asks, what does Jewish tradition say about the immortality of the soul?
Our relationship grows more intense. I have also become fond of his wife, Danielle. Gracious, sincere, she has convictions and knows how to share them with others. Her activities on behalf of human rights have won her admiration and affection. The president often feels he has to explain her absence at the table: “She’s off somewhere … in Latin America,” or, “She is in Africa.” I’m often too taken by the conversation to eat. So this is how it works: When the president eats, I speak; when he speaks, I listen. He takes an interest in my activities; he asks about Marion’s, too. He invites me to accompany him to Normandy for the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of D-Day. I would give much to go with him, but June 6 falls during the festival of Shavuot. (He will renew his invitation for the fiftieth anniversary, and this time I’ll accept.) I explain our festivals. His interest in everything that touches the Jewish religion—and religion in general—is genuine. We sometimes spend hours discussing related subjects. He would make an excellent professor of religious studies and of literature, possessing as he does a profound grasp of both the classics and modern works. His quotations are always perceptive. And he’s rarely wrong. He knows his biblical texts: Jacob amuses him, Moses intrigues him, and Jeremiah irritates him: “First this prophet demoralizes his people, then he snivels about its defeat.” He calls him a “very ambitious thunderer, ambiguous in his relations with the Babylonians.” It so happens that I like the author of Lamentations. This leads to endless discussions that I propose to end by consulting the text, hoping thus to rehabilitate in his eyes this man from Anathoth who moves me so. “Some other time,” says the president.
Usually, according to a tacit agreement, we avoid touching on French domestic politics. On the other hand, we often discuss Israel. His admiration for David Ben-Gurion and Yigal Allon, the former chief of the Palmah; his respect, with some reservations, for Menachem Begin; his affection for Shimon Peres. Though he disagrees with Yitzhak Shamir’s policies, which he considers extremist, he nevertheless remarks that if he were Israeli he might act similarly. He stresses the fact that he has never referred to the “occupied territories” but to the West Bank; “occupation” for him, too, is a word with specific connotations.
His visits to our home in New York have left unforgettable memories. The first time, he arrives from Washington, where he has been on a state visit to Ronald Reagan. The chairman of the telephone company calls in person to inform us that a special line is to be installed for the exclusive use of our guest of honor. The French later tell me that this line will connect him with the French army’s strike force, just in case. Amused and slightly worried, we ask to have the instrument installed in Elisha’s room, among his toys. And when I show Mitterrand the supersecret telephone’s location, I tell him that if it rings I am thinking of answering: “Sorry, wrong number.” I am not looking forward to having World War III start in my apartment. The guests we have invited are happy; the other tenants in our building are not: The security agents have closed the street and taken over one of the elevators.
For every one of his visits, we invite intellectuals—artists, journalists, writers, professors—to meet him. He likes their company more than that of politicians or diplomats, and he, in turn, always impresses them with his eloquence and erudition. People tend to compare him—favorably—to other Western heads of state. His preeminent standing in cultural affairs, in France as well as abroad, is unchallenged.
We rarely, if ever, discuss my writings. When I offer him my most recently published book, the conversation invariably revolves around its implications rather than its theme. If it’s a novel, we talk about literature in general. An essay on the Talmud? We discuss the Talmud’s complexity, its capacity for synthesis, and the magic of its style. A book on Hasidism? The subject draws him into a comparative analysis of various forms of mysticism.
One evening he invites me to dinner not in his private apartment but in a restaurant. But which one? He reflects a moment and decides: Le Train Bleu. A quarter of an hour later, we’re there. Two bodyguards sit at the next table. I ask him whether he isn’t worried about security. “What could happen to me here?” he answers. “How could a terrorist prepare an attack here, since I myself didn’t know a half hour ago where we would dine?” He didn’t realize, I was told later by Pierre Joxe, his interior minister at the time, that some twenty Internal Security agents were scattered among the customers. A fatalist, François Mitterrand?
Here is something that may surprise some who knew him better and longer than I: I never heard him say anything derogatory about his opponents, even in the midst of the electoral campaign or during the first cohabitation, which surely was painful for him. Of course, he did not cover them with compliments either, and I could tell when he did not like this or that person—his face would cloud over abruptly. But he rarely used his sharp sense of humor to wound.
Still, I know that he could be severe, unfair, even merciless with anyone stupid enough to annoy or cross him. He had no tolerance for contradiction. He was incapable of ever admitting that he might be wrong on any subject. A saint he was not; far from it.
That he loved gossip, political and other, became evident only when we were not alone. In his entourage, official and private, there were always people whose company he enjoyed because they knew how to entertain him with funny tales about public figures.
I like his simplicity—which is genuine. At the beginning of his seven-year term, he went home every evening to his apartment on the Rue de Bièvre. The Élysée, he explains, is only a workplace for him, an office for dealing with affairs of state.
For many, his most appealing trait is his intelligence. For others, it is his tenacity. For me, it is his loyalty to friends. Those closest to him repeat this to me often enough: Friendship for him is more important than anything else, the only thing that matters. I am told he never lets down a friend, even when the friend is wrong. That pleases and touches me. Of course, that was before …
My notes are full of impressions of our encounters. Of course, as is usual for me, every time I walked into the Élysée Palace, I remembered where I came from
and wondered in what possible way a former yeshiva student from Sighet could interest the leader of France and one of the world’s great men. Probably too respectful and certainly more than awkward, I let him go on indefinitely without ever interrupting him. Even when we had our dialogues—I’ll return to that subject a little later—I chose to make him talk rather than to express myself. I liked listening to his confidences, to his analyses of the workings of high international politics. The man intrigued me. I saw in him a living symbol of the Resistance. Whenever I left the Élysée, I felt that I had been close to a leader with great impact on current events, and I would rush to the Bristol to jot down his every word in my diary.
Some of the questions:
God? “I’m an agnostic.” A strange agnostic, fascinated by mysticism.
Nuclear peril? It preoccupies him, of course. I say: “Let us imagine the following scenario: Your red phone rings; it is late at night. A general informs you that the Soviets have just launched a nuclear missile in the direction of France; it will hit its target in seven minutes. What will you do? Whom do you call first? On what basis will you decide to give the order to respond?” Silence. I insist: “Do you know now what you would do then?” He says very quietly, “Yes, I know.” And he immediately adds: “But I also know that we must do everything to prevent this from happening.”
Israel? Israel holds a crucial place in his political philosophy. He knows the country that according to him belongs more to history than to geography. Israel, for him, is the land in which the Bible and its characters still live and communicate with one another. For him it is the place possibly inhabited by God, and certainly by Abraham, David, and Ezekiel.
The Middle East conflict? The historical claim of the Jews on the one hand, and that of the Arabs on the other, the tragedy of two peoples bound to the same—largely arid—soil. “What is evident,” says Mitterrand, “is that over these last centuries the Arabs have settled there; therefore it is their country too.” That is his view of the “incredibly confused” situation in which we live today: “two peoples, two Gods, two religions, two prophets all crowded into one small land.”
