P R A I S E
F O R
Five Biblical Portraits
“This collection of biographies of prophets does a masterful job of humanizing these figures. Elie Wiesel does more than inform us about their lives and supposed thoughts. He asks today’s questions in the context of the past. . . . There is no ambiguity or vagueness in Wiesel’s writing. He promises us portraits, and there is not a wasted brushstroke, not a blurred line.” —The Christian Century
“Deeply moving and enlightening.” —Chicago Tribune
“Jonah the unlucky, Joshua the lucky, Saul the complex, Jeremiah the tearful—all stride through semi-narrative episodes which the masterful story-teller weaves as a historical vignette of prophetic destiny.” —Commonweal
“Wiesel’s sketches will stir the imagination in ways that will open readers to new depths in ancient texts.” —Religious Studies Review
“Elie Wiesel asks: What went on within the minds and souls of these biblical figures; what were their hopes and their hurts; and what do they have to say to our hopes and our hurts?” —America
WO R KS O F T H E O L O G I CA L B I O G R A P H Y BY ELIE WIESEL
Souls on Fire Messengers of God Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy Five Biblical Portraits Somewhere a Master Sages and Dreamers Wise Men and Their Tales Filled with Fire and Light
F URT H E R SE L E CT E D WO R KS BY ELIE WIESEL
Night Dawn The Accident The Jews of Silence A Beggar in Jerusalem The Trial of God All Rivers Run to the Sea And the Sea Is Never Full Open Heart
EL I E WI ESE L
FIVE BIBLICAL PORTRAITS
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
ARIEL BURGER
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Copyright © 1981 by Elie Wiesel New introduction copyright © 2023 by Ariel Burger Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942252 ISBN: 978-0-268-20731-1 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-20733-5 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-20730-4 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at undpress@nd.edu
CONTENTS
Introduction to the 2023 Edition by Ariel Burger ix
Joshua
1
Elijah
31
Saul
63
Jeremiah
89
Jonah
117 Sources 143
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2023 EDITION
In the beginning there was the Holocaust. We must therefore start all over again. —Elie Wiesel, in Irving Abrahamson, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel’s Five Biblical Portraits, first published in 1981, is one in a series of seven books that he somewhat astonishingly called “celebrations.” This series, which includes Souls on Fire (1972), Messengers of God (1976), Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy (1978), Somewhere a Master (1982), Sages and Dreamers (1991), Wise Men and Their Tales (2003), and the posthumously released Filled with Fire and Light (2021), represents an old-new approach to Jewish textual commentary. In the essays presented in these books, ix
Wiesel reread great Jewish texts through the lens of his most pressing and enduring questions as a survivor and witness.1 In doing so, Wiesel reinvented a new and essential post-Holocaust Midrash: a bridge between the millennia-long Jewish tradition of sacred text study and the realities of a compromised world in need of moral clarity.
The Need for a New Approach
Wiesel’s reading stands in a long tradition that extols creative reinterpretation. Yet he went further—he had to go further—than the traditional approach. As he expressed in the epigraph above, the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people, including the murder of one million Jewish children, made it necessary to begin again and to question inherited ideas. The challenges posed by the Holocaust to faith, to traditional ideas about God, humanity, and the notion of progress, required new responses and new methods. Wiesel’s experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his mother, little sister, and father were murdered, provoked in him a passionate quest for responses to unanswerable questions: Where was God during the Holocaust? Why was the world silent? What is the significance of the victory of overwhelming evil? 1. Though I always refer to my teacher as “Professor Wiesel,” editorial convention requires me here to use the family name alone. I attended his classes at Boston University in 1996, and from 2003 to 2008, when I served as his teaching fellow. Where I refer to quotes from the classroom setting in this essay, it is from my lecture notes from this period of time. Beyond the BU classroom, I was privileged to be in conversation with Professor Wiesel from 1990, when I was fifteen, until his passing in 2016. I continue to learn from him every day. x | Introduction
Note that his quest was not to find answers to these questions. Wiesel found the explanations and religious justifications offered by some thinkers unsatisfying and offensive. As Wiesel has one of his characters say in Gates of the Forest, “If their death has no meaning, then it’s an insult, and if it does have a meaning, it’s even more so.”2 Instead of answers, he sought responses, ways of living that would somehow transform the unresolvable questions themselves into generative forces for good. An answer closes, while a response opens new possibilities. And, unlike an answer, a response requires the embodied participation of the respondent. For Wiesel, this meant living a life burdened by the knowledge of and sense of responsibility for those suffering in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda,Darfur, and many other places. As he said publicly many times, “Because we suffered, no one else should ever have to suf fer.” The questions remain questions, but positive advances in human rights, genocide prevention, and the quest for justice emerged from those questions and Wiesel’s lived response.
Wounded Faith
Wiesel’s early life was one of traditional Jewish faith, a sustaining belief in the mystery and presence of God in human affairs, in the power of kindness to advance the purpose of human history, and in the ultimate promise, even the proximity, of the messianic redemption. This childhood 2. Elie Wiesel, Gates of the Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 197. Introduction | xi
faith was shattered in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as he recounts in Night, his first book. Over many years he developed what he called “a wounded faith,” a faith expressed precisely through questions and questioning, through wrestling with doubt and struggling with God. Wounded faith departs from traditional terms of theological engagement. It insists that we demand the same level of ethical behavior from God that we would from human leaders. Whereas traditional views posit a binary choice between faith and doubt, Wiesel’s wounded faith allows them to coexist, insisting that no question is taboo, no line of inquiry heretical. Questions express a high form of faith when those questions are in the service of morality. The only true blasphemy is to passively accept an unjust or dehumanizing divine decree, religious policy, or sacred text. The only real heresy is to refuse to argue on behalf of humankind, even against God when necessary. Like the biblical Abraham, like Moses, like Job, like the Hasidic master Rabbi Levi-Yitzchak of Berdichev, Wiesel was unafraid to challenge God; he felt it was his religious duty. His wounded faith was the result of years of study and labor. But there was one powerful and formative experience that showed a young Elie Wiesel what is possible. In Auschwitz, he witnessed a rabbinical court hold a trial of God, complete with prosecutors and defense lawyers, arguments for and against the defendant and his role in allowing the mass slaughter of the Jewish people to take place. As Wiesel recounts in his memoirs and elsewhere, after several days of deliberation, the head rabbinic judge announced the court’s verdict: “In the matter of omnipotent God allowing His children to be oppressed, attacked, and destroyed en masse, our verdict is: guilty.” The rabbi xii | Introduction
paused, then continued: “Now it is time for the evening prayer: let us pray.” This scene, the basis for Wiesel’s play The Trial of God, remained with him all his life. It perfectly captured a seemingly paradoxical Jewish ethos of arguing against God within a faith context—the essence of what would become Wiesel’s wounded faith. Wiesel once ended a classroom lecture with the following statement: “When it is time for me to come before the heavenly tribunal, I will ask God my question. It will consist of one word: Why?” This emphatic, passionate “Why?” lies behind Wiesel’s reading of biblical tales. It is both the primal wound the Holocaust conferred upon the traditional Jewish approach to exegesis and the reason Wiesel could not remain entirely within that approach. Wiesel’s “Why?” spans six million deaths and countless moments of suffering. As a religious question, it is a protest against what appears to be a breaking of the covenant between God and the Jewish people. Given the many biblical and liturgical texts that speak of God’s love for his people, the Holocaust should be impossible. Instead, its reality challenges the foundations of faith. How can one believe in a just and loving God after such an Event? How is it possible to go on as a believer, as a Jew, and why should one even try? The choice Wiesel faced was between the complete dissolution of faith and a new way of understanding faith. In the end, his love of Judaism and his loyalty to his ancestors made the critical difference. When asked why he maintained a life of faith, even of traditional observance, he replied, “My ancestors include Rashi [an important early medieval commentator] and the holy Shl’ah [nickname of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, an influential seventeenth-century Introduction | xiii
Jewish mystic]; how could I be the last in that chain?” His devotion to his family and history kept him from turning his back on Jewish tradition; but this was simply the beginning of a lifelong project to develop a new, plausible approach to faith and to restore the credibility of the great texts of Judaism for Jews and non-Jews alike.
Texts against Humanity?
It is a historical fact that humanity’s great religious texts have often been used to cause harm. As a Holocaust survivor who saw his childhood world destroyed by radical evil, Wiesel came to understand that, though the Nazis drew upon pagan motifs and pseudoscientific racial theories, centuries of Christian antisemitism played a role in the Holocaust as well. (This was epitomized by the phenomenon of SS officers receiving communion and immediately returning to their genocidal activities.) Wiesel became keenly aware of the dangers of fundamentalism and literalist readings of sacred texts, and he recognized the power and the danger involved with sacred texts that shape the behavior of millions of people. A single dehumanizing interpretation can lead to the marginalization, persecution, oppression, and destruction of entire communities. Witness the uses and abuses of religious ideas in the persecutions of the Jews from antiquity to the Holocaust, including the portrayal of the Jews as Christ-killers. Witness nineteenth-century pastors like Samuel How, who published a sermon in the 1860s in the southern United States justifying slavery as God’s will, based on
xiv | Introduction
the notorious Hamitic myth, an early interpretation of Genesis 9:24–25. Witness the Belgian missionary who brought that same perfidious interpretation to the Congo over a century later, planting seeds of hatred that would later explode in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Witness the ways aspiring theocrats of various faiths today draw upon religious ideas and scriptural quotes to prop up dehumanizing policies and calls to arms, justifying the persecution, expulsion, and murder of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. The sins of religious leaders and their followers throughout history leave one wondering whether religion is not inherently harmful. Is it possible to find hope within religious traditions? In response to these dangers, Wiesel sought a moral and ethical hermeneutic, one that would sensitize the listener and the reader to the concerns of humanity and that would eschew abstract dogma in favor of the needs of actual human beings. As he often said to students, “One life is worth more than all the pages that have been written about life.” A frisson of creative tension characterizes Wiesel’s writing: between his love of and reverence for Jewish tradition, and his radical honesty in confronting new questions posed by the Holocaust. Wiesel writes of Jeremiah that “he transmitted only what he received—and so do we.”3 This claim is more complex than it appears. Wiesel only transmitted what he received; but what he received was a tradition and methodology ardently dedicated to 3. See 116 in this volume.
Introduction | xv
innovation and insight. Each essay in this volume and in Wiesel’s other works bespeaks a passionate love of Jewish tradition, and therefore a willingness to offer audacious and far-reaching interpretations. Let us examine the three aspects of traditional Jewish tradition which shaped him most: the Bible, Midrash, and Hasidism.
Biblical Roots
Wiesel’s fascination with the Bible began in childhood, as he shared numerous times in his lectures and writings. That childhood was permeated with the sacred study of traditional texts, beginning with the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew Bible, at the age of five or six. Imagine a young boy swaying over a large leatherbound book in a synagogue in Sighet late in the afternoon. He is alone: school hours have ended, and the other children are playing ball or doing chores at home. But he remains, seemingly hypnotized by the words he reads, and the ancient melody that accompanies them. When I was a child, I read these Biblical tales with a wonder mixed with anguish. I imagined Isaac on the altar and I cried. I saw Joseph, prince of Egypt, and I laughed.4 In later years, Wiesel often said that he preferred works of literature that have outlasted empires. The biblical accounts of all-too-human figures—kings and wanderers, 4. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), xiv. Italics in original. xvi | Introduction
strangers and poets, messengers and victims of fate— wrestling with history and the divine, captivated Wiesel from childhood to the end of his life. Themes of exile, sibling rivalry, liberation, memory, dreams, and the unfolding of a hidden but colossal destiny appealed to his sense of the romantic. The confluence of theological-metaphysical and sociopolitical elements in the Bible spoke to his own dual commitments to philosophical inquiry and practical responses to injustice. For Wiesel, the Bible was timeless, yet directly relevant to our own time.
Midrash: A Tradition of Creative Rereading
“To understand Judaism you need the totality, not only the Bible but also the Talmud and Midrash.” Wiesel spoke these words to a classroom full of students from many parts of the world and many different backgrounds. Indeed, while his values were shaped by the Bible, in order to understand Wiesel’s methods as a reader we must look to the Midrash (Hebrew for “seeking”), a set of interpretive approaches and techniques developed and employed by the Rabbis of the Mishna and Talmud. All the legends, all the stories retold by the Bible and commented on by the Midrash—and here the term Midrash is used in the largest sense: interpretation, illustration, creative imagination—involve us. . . . Everything holds together in Jewish history—the legends as much as the facts. Composed during the centuries that followed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Introduction | xvii
Midrash mirrors both the imagined and the lived reality of Israel, and it continues to influence our lives.5 The rabbinic authors of the first centuries of the Common Era responded to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the loss of Jewish autonomy in 70 CE by reimagining Jewish tradition for a new exilic reality. Through new religious structures, liturgical creativity, and practices, they produced the initial conditions for the survival of Jewish communities over the next two millennia of wandering, disruption, and change. They also dealt with the theological challenges of the destruction of the Temple (had God abandoned the Jews?), and several emerging supersessionist theologies, by rereading texts dealing with chosenness, suffering, and the future messianic redemption. Biblical texts, including passages like the Binding of Isaac, the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah 53, and the Book of Job (which were read by some early Church thinkers as Christological foreshadowing) provoked numerous creative rabbinic responses. These interpretations provided a nowexiled people with an identity and sense of purpose. As the rabbis developed their ideas, they also explicated and debated the methods to be used for creative interpretation of biblical texts, methods used to determine law and theology for the new era. They reflected on biblical verses, singly and in aggregate across scripture, and they reflected on the process of reflection; that is, they developed a meta-ethic of interpretation. Although the Talmud contains many controversies about which methods take priority in particular cases, certain methods became domi5. Wiesel, Messengers of God, xiii. Italics in original. xviii | Introduction
nant. One of them, the “Thirteen Principles of Rabbi Ishmael” is included to this day in the traditional Jewish morning liturgy, a daily reminder of an important classical hermeneutic method. At the heart of the Midrashic approach is a deep textual sensitivity, the art of noting slight nuances: repetitions, lacunae, subtle inconsistencies. These seeming glitches in the text are understood by the traditional Jewish reader to be deliberate expressions of the intent of the divine au-thor of the sacred text. Textual problems are opportunities, doorways into new ideas, and are therefore welcomed and embraced with curiosity and delight. In a telling example of Midrashic sensitivity and creative reading, Rabbi Shimon son of Pazzi, one of the Rabbis included in the Babylonian Talmud (which Wiesel studied every day) notes a contradiction within Genesis 1:16. The verse begins, “And God made the two great lights,” and then it continues, “The greater light . . . and the lesser light.” Rabbi Shimon wonders: Are the two lights equally great, as indicated in the beginning of the verse? Or is one greater than the other? Responding to this inconsistency, he tells a dramatic tale of the moon’s jealousy of the sun and its desire for preeminence, God’s seemingly volatile reprimand, and the moon’s punishment: to wane every month. This rabbinic tale ends with God requesting of the Jewish people that they “bring an atonement for Me for diminishing the moon.”6 Midrashic interpretations like this one stimulated later Jewish thinkers profoundly. Rabbi Shimon’s creative reading inspired a new perspective on atonement— 6. Babylonian Talmud Chullin 60b. Introduction | xix
1400 years later. In a Hasidic discourse by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, God’s request for atonement serves as a bridge between divine perfection and human imperfection. In this reading, we humans can approach the process of repentance with confidence in an empathic God who is portrayed as familiar with the experience of error.7 This nineteenth-century theological innovation was made possible by the fourth-century Rabbi Shimon’s creative reading of the verse in Genesis. There are numerous examples of this pattern of a rabbinic comment, founded upon a careful and sensitive reading of a biblical text, becoming the source for a much later comment that holds new theological, religious, and existential consequences. In the Jewish tradition of reading and rereading, the slightest nuance can have unforeseen effects over centuries. Midrash is a generative method for creative wrestling, and Wiesel used it as model and inspiration for his own radical rereadings.
Hasidism: Building on Ruins
Hasidism, the eighteenth-century popular mystical movement that transformed Jewish life in Eastern Europe, provided Wiesel with articulacy about unanswerable existential questions. As a Hasid, the grandson of a Hasid, who grew up in a culture infused with Hasidic teachings and tales, it was natural for Wiesel to turn to the mystical and existential tradition that shaped his childhood. 7. See Likutei Moharan, vol. II, Lesson 1.
xx | Introduction
Hasidism emerged from the ashes of the twin disasters of the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–57 and the false messiah Shabbetai Tzvi (d. 1676). To a dispirited and traumatized Jewish community, Hasidism offered encouragement and teachings and practices to cultivate joy, as well as tales, melodies, and dance. As Wiesel said in a classroom lecture, “Hasidism teaches how to build on ruins.” Its language is evocative, its tales haunting, its teachings mystical and psychologically astute. Hasidic teachings emphasize friendship, the master-disciple relationship, and inwardness—all themes that Wiesel returned to again and again in his teaching and writing. The fact that Hasidic communities were devastated by the Nazi onslaught deepened Wiesel’s sense of connection to a lost world and to his self-perception as a witness and storyteller with a responsibility to transmit the Hasidic tales he carried. These three roots provided Wiesel with the religious interpretive technology he needed to create his new bridge for a post-Holocaust era.
Wieselian Reading
At its heart, Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust interpretive approach places human beings, and therefore ethics, at the center. Because he saw the radical dehumanization of the Kingdom of Night, Wiesel committed himself to humanism with passion, consistency, and ferocity. This was expressed in his activism—his bearing witness to suffering around the world and his commitment to ending it—and it was the starting point for his way of reading the Bible. In
Introduction | xxi
his essay in Messengers of God on the Binding of Isaac, an episode to which he returned many times over the years, Wiesel wrote: “I have never really been able to accept the idea that inhumanity could be one more way for man to move closer to God.”8 Though history demonstrates far too many examples of war, violence, and persecution in the name of God, for Wiesel such actions are a betrayal of the core of religious faith. Inquisitors, pogromists, and theocrats victimize human beings; but they also victimize God, whose protest is silent until we give it voice. The duty of an ethical reader of the text is to question, in order to find (where they exist) or create (where they do not) internally credible understandings that lead to justice and compassion. To use a religious articulation Wiesel occasionally expressed, it is to ensure that God does not become an instrument of humankind’s evil. The goal of Wiesel’s project as a creative reader of text (which he saw as a form of public education) was to sensitize the reader and listener, to inspire in us reflection, compassion, and the courage to stand up for what is right. There is no such thing as a morally neutral reading. The tales we read must always arouse our compassion, must teach us empathy, and must provoke a newfound sense of responsibility. “Anything we study together here,” he repeated to his students year after year, “must make us more, not less, human. Knowledge must never be used as a weapon.” Learning must transform spectators—those who see the world at a remove and feel untouched by its sorrows—into witnesses, people who respond to the world’s need. 8. Wiesel, Messengers of God, 90. xxii | Introduction
The tales we read should disturb us, show us truths we tend to avoid. “What is the difference between a true and a false prophet?” asked Wiesel in his classroom. “The false prophet comforts; the true prophet disturbs.” But the tales we read must not bring us to despair, they must motivate us to act. “Why were the books of the Apocrypha not canonized?” he once asked his students. “Because they lead only to despair. The books that were included in the Bible move through despair to hope.” The tales we read must teach us to listen. As Wiesel said in his classroom at Boston University, “God speaks to the whole world, but only the prophet listens.” Like the prophet, we must be willing to listen: to the voice of the past in great literature, to the silences between its words, to our internal responses to what we read, to one another, and to those who suffer. As we read, we become better listeners, more open, more curious. We find ourselves becoming more humble, more willing to engage with other viewpoints with respect. The tales we read must give us courage, the courage that comes from memory of the past. Awareness of the dark potential in human societies may cause us to awaken from moral slumber. The prophet’s cry is a call to wake up, and when we encounter it, we find ourselves more willing to take risks for the sake of other people and our values. In short, the tales we read, when presented as Wiesel presents them, provide us with an education in humanism. This humanistic basis can be seen for example in two of Wiesel’s comments on prophets and their legacies. First, a prophecy is not a prediction about the future; it is a message about the present and its moral concerns. “A prophet is forever awake, forever alert; he is never indifferent, Introduction | xxiii
least of all to injustice, be it human or divine, whenever or wherever it may be found.”9 Second, Wiesel’s emphasis on Elijah’s anonymity in his chapter on that prophet’s literary afterlife contains a moral message with daily relevance. Why does Elijah appear in various guises and contexts? asked Wiesel in the classroom. His answer: “So that we will hesitate to dismiss anyone we might encounter: a beggar, a stranger, an outcast—anyone may be Elijah in disguise. Better treat them with respect—just in case.” His overarching goal of sensitizing readers to be moral agents—witnesses—may explain why Wiesel chose these five characters to include in this collection. None of them are founders or defining leaders like Abraham, Moses, or David; none established a new religion, revealed a new Law, or oversaw the foundation of a new era of Jewish history, though each played a critical role in his own time. We must not underestimate Wiesel’s playful curiosity, which often guided him in his choices of subjects. But if we look for a unifying theme of Five Biblical Portraits, we find one: leadership and its complexities. What does it mean to be a leader with an anger problem, or to stand in the shadow of a great predecessor, or to simply flee the call of God? What does it mean to be human? Joshua, Saul, Elijah, Jonah, Jeremiah: each of these heroes is flawed, human, and relatable. In their stories we witness brutal militarism, furious rage, the condemnation of the wicked, failure, melancholy, and flight. The Hebrew Bible does not hide the failings of its heroes; even Moses is not beyond critique. We learn as much from the flawed 9. Wiesel, Messengers of God, 39.
xxiv | Introduction
and tragic humanity as from the exemplary behavior of the Biblical characters. As Wiesel noted in his introduction to Messengers of God: They [the biblical characters] were living men and women, not symbols. The most pure, the most just among them knew ups and downs, moments of ecstasy and confusion; we know, for they are described to us. Their holiness was defined within human terms of reference. . . . They are human beings: people, not gods.10 I love them because they spring from ordinary life and remain profoundly human; that is, though endowed with spiritual authority, they are subject to all the flaws and weaknesses that characterize the human condition.11 In Wiesel’s religious attitude, the path to holiness must travel through, rather than eclipse, our humanity. As the rabbis teach, we receive the Torah precisely because we are human and not angels.12 Each of the essays in this book deals with power in a time of crisis. Joshua leads the Israelites into the Promised Land, Saul establishes the kingship, Elijah fights the idolatrous threat of a corrupt court, Jonah resists his role as
10. Wiesel, Messengers of God, xii. 11. Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers: Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Portraits and Legends (New York: Summit Books, 1991), 13. 12. Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 88b.
Introduction | xxv
international diplomat, and Jeremiah first warns against and then witnesses the destruction and exile. Joshua’s and Jeremiah’s stories bookend the biblical tale from arrival to exile. In each crisis, these leaders must traverse the establishment and the margins, must negotiate the gap between vision and reality, and must move the covenantal vision forward. Taken together, this book offers a portrait of leadership and the struggle for moral clarity. Along the way Wiesel analyzes the nature of prophecy and the prophet, the master-disciple relationship, and the role of the survivor and witness. These examples of human struggle, defeat, and (rarely) triumph instruct, inspire, and warn us to question ourselves and our leaders, and to recommit ourselves to developing true moral leadership informed by responsibility, compassion, and justice.
The Call to Subjectivity
A key component of Wiesel’s post-Holocaust, humanistic interpretive approach is his unapologetic restoration of subjectivity to the process of rereading text. In Souls on Fire, Wiesel’s first book of celebrations of Jewish tales and personalities, Wiesel wrote, “The Baal Shem’s call was a call to subjectivity.”13 Building on the founder of Hasidism’s call, and on his own grandfather’s comment that “an objective Hasid is not a Hasid,”14 Wiesel foregrounds his per-
13. Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 7. 14. Wiesel, Souls on Fire, 7
xxvi | Introduction
sonal reactions and responses. His lectures are filled with expressions of concern, agitation, even outrage: “I have problems with [a biblical character] . . . ,” “Come on, really?,” “I don’t understand!”—these and other phrases like them appear often, reminding listeners of the value of their own response. Such expressions are peppered throughout Five Biblical Portraits: “Saul continues to move us.”15 “One reads [of Joshua’s brutality] with embarrassment.”16 “Poor Joshua.”17 “Poor Jonah.”18 “How can one not love Saul for [his] questions? . . . We are moved by his humaneness. Between a king who is too cruel and one not cruel enough, we prefer the latter.”19 “We cherish Jeremiah.”20 And consider this defiant statement, in response to the biblical text’s treatment of the first and second Israelite kings: “No. Of the two, David has the less appealing role. We weep for Saul and withdraw from David. And we disagree with history’s choice.”21 This “No,” this willingness to, in Wiesel’s phrase, resist the text, liberates us from the constrictions of the tradition while allowing us to claim our place within it. These and other statements like them remind us that we, too, are invited to respond personally, subjectively, humanly, to the text—an element often lost or elided in religious hermeneutics. Wiesel’s unapologetic
15. See 85 in this volume. 16. See 19 in this volume. 17. See 28 in this volume. 18. See 128 in this volume. 19. See 80 in this volume. 20. See 111 in this volume. 21. See 82 in this volume.
Introduction | xxvii
assertions affirm our human agency as readers, and the power and legitimacy of our responses to the text. Wiesel’s embrace of the subjective extends to a special identification with certain biblical characters. He expressed love for each of the biblical characters he explored. But in his classroom he expressed a special identification with Jeremiah. There are many parallels, hinted at in this text, between the author’s life and that of the prophet of loss and survival. Jeremiah appeals to us as a writer, a modern chronicler, above all; his obsessions are ours. And so are his themes.22 Among those themes are doubt and self-doubt, solitude, despair, loss of faith in humankind, protest against God’s action and inaction, testimony, and, finally, consolation. For Wiesel, the survivor is a perpetual outsider, never fully able to belong because never able to fully communicate. A person whose life is defined by the incommunicable will always be alone, even as he lives among people—like Jeremiah. But, like Jeremiah, he doesn’t stop there. Wiesel moves through darkness toward consolation, even joy. For there is delight here, the delight of a brilliant and agile mind steeped in legend and lore, and in the interpretive methods and frameworks of a magnificent culture, one targeted for destruction that somehow has survived, and even thrived, expanding beyond the geographic and literary bounds of 22. See 113 in this volume.
xxviii | Introduction
the old world. The wonder of this, against the backdrop of exile and Holocaust, is itself an important message.
Particular and Universal
Wiesel’s humanistic concerns are rooted in and informed by his particular Jewish identity. But humanism is a universal concern, and Wiesel’s post-Holocaust interpretive approach bridges the particular and the universal, posing human questions about Jewish characters to diverse audiences. This was not always the case; Elie Wiesel was not always a universalist. As a child, Wiesel shared many of his contemporaries’ fear of the local Christian community. Speaking to a group of Christian students, he said, “I must confess, as a child I did not see your tradition as a promise of friendship but as a threat. When Easter came we would hide, because the Christian children, and sometimes the adults, would celebrate their holy day by attacking us.” The Jewish ghetto in which he grew up was psychic as well as political. And yet, an exceptional early positive encounter shaped his views. The family housekeeper, a devout Christian, offered the Wiesel family sanctuary in her cabin in the woods as the walls of the ghetto closed in. Had they accepted her offer, the family might have avoided deportation. Wiesel was always grateful to her. I think of Maria often, with affection and gratitude. And with wonder as well. This simple, uneducated
Introduction | xxix
woman stood taller than the city’s intellectuals, dignitaries, and clergy. . . . It was a simple and devout Christian woman who saved her town’s honor.23 After the war, the young survivor met other Christians, each of whom was Wiesel’s conversation partner over many years. These included François Mauriac, who encouraged him to write of his experiences (and offered a foreword to Night), Robert McAfee Brown, Harry James Cargas, John Cardinal O’Connor, and Father Theodore Hesburgh. Father Hesburgh, Catholic priest and president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, was a driving force behind the publication of this and one other volume of Wiesel’s, Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy. Hesburgh was involved in many social and humanitarian causes, including civil rights, immigration reform, and anti-nuclear proliferation, sometimes in affiliation with Wiesel. In his foreword to Four Hasidic Masters he writes: Wiesel spoke to the Notre Dame community in a way that few have or could. . . . At no point in the dialogue between Wiesel and Notre Dame were the distinctions blurred. . . . Wiesel spoke as a Hasid . . . that is to say, from a standpoint so totally unfamiliar to the bulk of his audience as to constitute an apparently separate universe of discourse. The names, the
23. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1995), 70.
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places, even his clearly accented cosmopolitan English spoke of Central and Eastern Europe to listeners predominantly, though not exclusively, Western European, and only Western European at several generations’ remove. . . . . . . In the midst of the first lecture he broke from his text and said: “I marvel. What is a Hasidic Jew doing here? Why am I speaking at Notre Dame, following an introduction by Father Hesburgh? But it is right.”24 Wiesel’s expression of surprise emerges from his early parochial identity, shaped by centuries of the Eastern European Jewish experience. His acceptance of his role as a messenger across faith communities represents both a personal revolution and a new post-Holocaust expression of Hasidism. Wiesel was occasionally asked by interviewers who he would have become had the Holocaust not taken place. He consistently answered: “I would still have been a teacher. But I would have been a teacher in a yeshiva. I would still have been a writer. But I would have written commentaries on the Bible and Talmud—for a much smaller audience.” As an author and public teacher addressing himself to a diverse readership, speaking and writing mainly in French and English, Wiesel became a modern, universal teacher who bridged Jewish commentaries with contemporary concerns. 24. Elie Wiesel, Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), xi–xii.
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This is fitting, as Wiesel rejected what he saw as a false choice between particular and universal commitments. He was preoccupied not only by his past but by the world’s future; not only by the Jewish experience of suffering but by all communities threatened by destruction. The Holocaust challenges parochialism and requires us to renegotiate our relationship to particular tribal identities. It demonstrated the acute dangers of nationalist xenophobia and tribal hatred. But for Wiesel, the lesson was not that we must renounce all particularity in favor of a globalist ideal. Instead, it is precisely through our particular commitments, lineages, and sources of wisdom that we arrive at and embrace universal commitments to humanity. Without the universal, tribes too often transform into racist and oppressive factions. But without the particular, universal commitments mutate into abstractions, in the name of which atrocities may occur. His works of exegesis and storytelling, including Five Biblical Portraits, were meant for both Jewish and nonJewish audiences. Wiesel was against triumphalism or evangelizing. As he said in a classroom lecture, “The goal of my tradition was never to convert others to Judaism. It was to help the Christian to become a better Christian, the Muslim to become a better Muslim, the Buddhist to become a better Buddhist.” Instead his goal was dialogue, in which each person could learn from the “otherness of the Other,” the unique and individual views of people with different backgrounds and beliefs. Through such encounters, he believed, participants would deepen their connection to their own traditions, as well as to all human beings.
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It was the rare combination of Wiesel’s rootedness in Jewish sources and his genuine openness and respect for others that was the foundation for his dialogue with members of other faith communities. He believed that, rather than being a barrier to contact with other cultures and belief systems, particular identities can enable and support such contact. In his classroom at Boston University, students of many faiths, including many ministry students, were drawn to Wiesel as a sympathetic and honest transmitter of a Jewish and universal perspective. Upon hearing of Wiesel’s death, one Christian student remarked simply, “He was my priest.” Where the young Wiesel’s readings took place in the vast but parochial world of Jewish texts, the post-war Wiesel read voraciously: Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, Bhagavad Gita, the Gospels, the Quran, Milton, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Camus, and many others. These sources made appearances in his writings and lectures on the Hebrew Bible. As a teacher, Wiesel incorporated literature from many times, places, and cultures: myths and folktales from around the world, classics from Euripides to Shakespeare, modernist authors like Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and the occasional newly released novel or play.
Post-Holocaust Midrash
Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust Midrash departs from centuries of emphasizing the answers to questions posed by scripture. Whereas Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and other commentators usually presented questions as setup for and
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prelude to the essential—the answers—Wiesel is more moved and inspired by the questions themselves. There are several reasons for this. He shared one in the classroom: after a day in cheder (Jewish elementary school) his mother would not ask her young son whether he answered well in class. Instead she would ask him, “Did you ask a good question today?” Her question shaped him. But he also learned another, more difficult lesson about the dangers of seeking definitive answers to enduring questions. Human beings are defined by the limits of our knowledge. Only tyrants claim omniscience, as the perpetrators of the Holocaust did. Perhaps based on the contrast between his mother’s question and his knowledge of the events of the twentieth century, Wiesel valued questions more than answers. He taught his students: “Answers are dangerous; questions are not. Answers can divide us; questions bring us closer.” He also said that “fanatics have all the answers, and I have only questions.” His celebration of questions was a defining feature of his approach to teaching, lecturing, and writing. The essays in this volume reflect that focus on questions, which serve as building blocks for his intimate portraits of the biblical characters. (Characteristically, and mirroring the text of the Book of Jonah, the only book of the Bible to end with a question, Wiesel ends this book with a question . . . about sacred texts and questions!) Wiesel saw Judaism as a tradition of honest and responsible inquiry, of a willingness to challenge even the most venerated ideas. This is rooted in the Bible itself. When Jews read about Abraham arguing with God on
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behalf of Sodom (Gen. 18), or Moses challenging God to “erase me from Your book” if God refuses to forgive the Israelites for worshipping the Golden Calf (Exod. 32), or Job refusing the Deuteronomic theology of reward and punishment offered by his visitors, the seeds of theological defiance in the service of morality are planted. In fact, rabbinic commentators point out that at the very center of the Torah scroll are two twin words, darosh darash, which refers to the act of emphatically seeking understanding. The quest for insight is at the heart of Jewish tradition.
Eruption
As you read this volume and Wiesel’s other works of nonfiction, you will notice occasional references to the Holocaust. These are often implicit, subtle, written in a whisper. Rather than words like “Holocaust,” Wiesel uses phrases like “over there,” “in that place,” or “in the Kingdom of Night.” A powerful example in this volume is the very end of his essay on Jeremiah: And what are we doing, we writers, we witnesses, we Jews? For over three thousand years we have been repeating the same story—the story of a solitary prophet who would have given anything, including his life, to be able to tell another kind of tale, one filled with joy and fervor rather than sorrow and anguish. But he transmitted only what he received— and so do we. And if God was angry at him for not weeping, we are not. Quite the contrary: we are proud
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of him. The world was not worthy of his tears. Or ours.25 The Holocaust permeates Wiesel’s oeuvre. It is ever-present, often silent, implicit, occasionally erupting into our consciousness. As a survivor addressing himself to questions that can have no definitive answers, Wiesel’s project is unprecedented in Midrashic literature, just as the Holocaust was unprecedented in history. Read Wiesel’s linking of Jeremiah’s description of quaking mountains and Babi Yar, and you will never read that section of the Bible in the same way again. Quaking mountains? What did Jeremiah mean to convey? I never understood the meaning of these words until I visited Babi-Yar. Eyewitnesses had told me that, in September 1941, when the German invaders massacred some 80,000 Jews—between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur—and buried them in the ravine, near the center of Kiev, the ground was shaking for weeks on end. The mountains of corpses made the earth quake. . . . And I understood Jeremiah.26 The Bible can help us to understand the world; but sometimes it is only through the terrible events of history that we may come to understand the Bible. In Wiesel’s rendition of the imagined farewell address by the prophet Elijah to his disciple Elisha, the role of the survivor comes into focus: 25. See 116 in this volume. 26. See 115 in this volume. xxxvi | Introduction
I am your master but you are the survivor. I thought I was alone, and I was—and still am—but now you are with me and you too will be alone, you already are. You will speak and you will need great strength and good fortune to make yourself heard. You will tell people what you have seen, what you have lived—and what I have seen and endured—and you will tell of my departure, you will describe my destiny and how it became flame, you will tell of the fire that has carried me away from you, and the others will refuse to believe you. And I feel sorry for you.27 Without stating it directly, Wiesel is viewing the ancient prophet and his disciple through the lens of the experience of the Holocaust survivor and witness. He is teaching us to allow historical experience to shape the way we read ancient texts, and to allow those works to illuminate our own times and the struggles we face. For this is the ultimate significance of Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust Midrash: it teaches us not only how to read the Bible but also how to read the world. A late Hasidic master, Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin, wrote that the Torah is a commentary on the world, and the world is a commentary on the Torah. Just as students have pored over sacred texts for generations, asking questions and seeking new understanding, our world is in need of interpretive understanding. It is a beautiful but difficult text: often puzzling, sometimes heartbreaking, frequently offensive to our sense of justice. How are we to understand the realities of war, hunger, and preventable suffering? How are we to choose joy or hope in a world in which those ills persist? How are 27. See 61 in this volume. Introduction | xxxvii
we to end them? The ultimately difficult chapter in the book of the world, the Holocaust, defies all answers, all systems of belief. But it provokes us, forcing us to renounce easy answers and superficial attitudes, pushing us to go deeper, always deeper, into the questions. At its heart, this volume and Wiesel’s collection of portraits and commentaries as a whole is a vehicle for his message that humanity must take responsibility for our world. Bertolt Brecht’s theory of theater, as taught by Professor Wiesel, comes to mind here. Unlike Aristotle, whose understanding of theater shaped the work of dramatists and the expectations of audiences for several thousand years, Brecht argued that the purpose of theater is not to offer catharsis to the viewer. For audiences to experience extreme emotions vicariously and feel a dramatic release of pent-up stresses leads only to obedient and docile citizens, slaves to the corrupt state. Well-behaved citizens become bystanders who enable atrocities to take place. Instead, for Brecht, theater is designed precisely to build up tension. By increasing theatergoers’ experience of anxiety, indignation, and moral concern, theater productions would prepare citizens to be activists. The goal is not docility but outrage, and when the play is over and the doors open, morally activated people will flood the streets and protest oppressive powers. Brecht’s play Mother Courage, which Wiesel included in his teaching syllabus several times, is devoid of theophany or cathartic moments. Instead, we see the death of children and a mother’s grief. The only way for audience members to release such emotional weight is to do something, anything, however modest, to make war less inevitable. Theater is the act of drawing xxxviii | Introduction
back the bowstring. The arrow is released in the streets, in society, in protest and political struggle. Wiesel follows Brecht in his belief in the power of literature to galvanize moral action. In his view, the Bible calls for our response, lest we forget that every human being is infinitely precious, worthy of life, and deserving of respect. The text is not—cannot be—neutral, nor is it an end unto itself: it must serve to humanize our society.
What do we learn from Wiesel’s methods not only about the Bible but about our world? That we must be creative. That we must balance honesty and conscience, the actuality of the text with its potential for harm. That we must celebrate questions and learn to be more comfortable with unresolvable problems. That we must place humanity at the center of our efforts to interpret religious texts and the world around us. For Elie Wiesel taught us, and continues to teach us, that the way we read the text shapes the way we interpret the world, and the way we interpret the world will shape its future. To paraphrase a quote by Elie Wiesel in this volume: What does one do when confronted by a difficult and obscure world? One reads it again and again, seeking moral clarity and hope.28 Ariel Burger
28. See 108 in this volume. Introduction | xxxix