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Suddenly
the Master turned to his servant and asked: "Remind me of a prayer - any
prayer." "If only I could," said the servant. "I too have
forgotten everything." "Everything - absolutely everything?" "Yes,
except-" "Exept what?" "Except the alphabet." At
that the Besht cried out joyfully: "Then what are you waiting for? Begin
reciting the alphabet and I shall repeat after you..." And together the
two exiled ben began to recite, at first in whispers, then more loudly:
"Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth..." And over again, each time
more vigorously, more fervently; until, ultimately, the Besht regained his
powers, having regained his memory. I
love this story, for it illustrates the messianic expectation - which remains
my own. And the importance of friendship to man's ability to transcend his
condition. I love it most of all because it emphasizes the mystical power of
memory. Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a
prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the
living. Memory saved the Besht, and if anything can, it is memory that will
save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope. Just
as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams
reflect the past, hope summons the future. Does this mean that our future can
be built on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not necessary. The
two are incompatible. The opposite of the past is not the future but the
absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence
of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other. A
recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man
struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are
gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On
the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new
language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory
of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will
serve as a shield against death. This
he must believe in order to go on. For he has just returned from a universe
where God, betrayed by His creatures, covered His face in order not to see. Mankind,
jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel,
reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a
parallel society, a new "creation" with its own princes and gods,
laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. A world where the past no longer
counted - no longer meant anything. Stripped
of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a
social and cultural void. "Forget," they were told. "Forget
where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters." But
the present was only a blink of the Lord's eye. The Almighty himself was a
slaughterer: it was He who decided who would live and who would die; who
would be tortured, and who would be rewarded. Night after night, seemingly
endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky. Fear
dominated the universe. Indeed this was another universe; the very laws of
nature had been transformed. Children looked like old men, old men whimpered
like children. Men and women from every corner of Europe were suddenly
reduced to nameless and faceless creatures desperate for the same ration of
bread or soup, dreading the same end. Even their silence was the same for it
resounded with the memory of those who were gone. Life in this accursed
universe was so distorted, so unnatural that a new species had evolved. Waking
among the dead, one wondered if one were still alive. And
yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the
nightmare and began to search for meaning. All those doctors of law or
medicine or theology, all those lovers of art and poetry, of Back and Goethe,
who coldly, deliberately ordered the massacres and participated in them. What
did their metamorphosis signify? Could anything explain their loss of
ethical, cultural and religious memory? How could we ever understand the
passivity of the onlookers and - yes - the silence of the Allies? And
question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to
conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore,
everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one
stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a
consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we know is that
Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question
everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and
economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism,
mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz. The
next question had to be, why go on? If memory continually brought us back to
this, why build a home? Why bring children into a world in which God and man
betrayed their trust in one another? Of
course, we could try to forget the past. Why not? Is it not natural for a
human being to repress what causes him pain, what causes him shame? Like the
body, memory protects its wounds. When day breaks after a sleepless night,
one's ghosts must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves. But
for the first time in history, we could not bury our dead. We bear their
graves within ourselves. For
us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering
is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory,
reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so
frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember
the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered. New Year's Day, Rash
Hashana, is also called Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory. On that
day, the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our
salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be
well; if he refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes
a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars. Nothing
provokes so much horror and opposition within the Jewish tradition as war. Our
abhorrence of war is reflected in the paucity of our literature of warfare. After
all, God created the Torah to do away with iniquity, to do away with war. Warriors
fare poorly in the Talmud: Judas Maccabeus is not even mentioned; Bar-Kochba
is cited, but negatively. David, a great warrior and conqueror, is not
permitted to build the Temple; it is his son Solomon, a man of peace, who
constructs God's dwelling-place. Of course some wars may have been necessary
or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a
contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all
those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hakhamim shemarbin
shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps,
because wise men remember best. And
yet it is surely human to forget, even to want to forget. The Ancients saw it
as a divine gift. Indeed the memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us
to go on living. How could we go on with our daily lives, if we remained
constantly aware of the dangers and ghost surrounding us? The Talmud tells us
that without the ability to forget, man would soon cease to learn. Without
the ability to forget, man would live in a permanent, paralyzing fear of
death. Only God and God alone can and must remember everything. How
are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget
that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox
with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the
living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to
madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky. They
needed to tell of the child who, in hiding with his mother, asked softly,
very softly: "Can I cry now?" They needed to tell of the sick
beggar who, in a sealed cattle-car, began to sing as an offering to his
companions. And of the little girl who, hugging her grandmother, whispered:
"Don't be afraid, don't be sorry to die... I'm not." She was seven,
that little girl who went to her death without fear, without regret. Each
one of us felt compelled to record every story, every encounter. Each one of
us felt compelled to bear witness. Such were the wishes of the dying, the
testament of the dead. Since the so-called civilized world had no use for
their lives, then let it be inhabited by their deaths. The
great historian Shimon Dubnov served as our guide and inspiration. Until the
moment of his death he said over and over again to his companions in the Riga
ghetto: "Yidden, shreibt un ferschreibt (Jews, write it all
down). His words were heeded. Overnight, countless victims became chroniclers
and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps. Even members of the Sonderkommandos,
those inmates forced to burn their fellow inmates' corpses before being
burned in turn, left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an
obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of novels,
some known throughout the world, others still unpublished. After
the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single
night in Treblinka, to tell of her cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and
the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word
and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its
indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. We thought it
would be enough to read the world a poem written by a child in the
Theresienstadt ghetto to ensure that no child anywhere would ever again have
to endure hunger or fear. It would be enough to describe a death-camp
"Selection," to prevent the human right to dignity from ever being
being violated again. We
thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke
over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put
an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" - whether black or
white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem - anyone whose orientation differs
politically, philosophically, sexually. A naive undertaking? Of course. But
not without a certain logic. We
tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed
us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were
inadequate, anemic. And
then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened
refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of
course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies
comprehension. Have
we failed? I often think we have. If
someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on
virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be
dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and
fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it. Nor
would we have believed that there would be governments that would deprive a
man like Lech Walesa of his freedom to travel merely because he dares to
dissent. And he is not alone. Governments of the right and of the left go
much further, subjecting those who dissent, writers, scientists,
intellectuals, to torture and persecution. How to explain this defeat of
memory? How
to explain any of it: the outrage of Apartheid which continues unabated. Racism
itself is dreadful, but when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just,
when a man like Nelson Mandela is imprisoned, it becomes even more repugnant.
Without comparing Apartheid to Nazism and to its "final solution" -
for that defies all comparison - one cannot help but assign the two systems,
in their supposed legality, to the same camp. And the outrage of terrorism:
of the hostages in Iran, the coldblooded massacre in the synagogue in
Istanbul, the senseless deaths in the streets of Paris. Terrorism must be
outlawed by all civilized nations - not explained or rationalized, but fought
and eradicted. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent
people and helpless children. And the outrage of preventing men and women
like Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir and Masha Slepak, Ida Nudel, Josif Biegun,
Victor Brailowski, Zakhar Zonshein, and all the others known and unknown from
leaving their country. And then there is Israel, which after two thousand
years of exile and thirty-eight years of sovereignty still does not have
peace. I would like to see this people, which is my own, able to establish
the foundation for a constructive relationship with all its Arab neighbors,
as it has done with Egypt. We must exert pressure on all those in power to
come to terms. And
here we come back to history. We must remember the suffering of my people, as
we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people,
Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian "desaparecidos
- the list seems endless. Let
us remember Job who, having lost everything - his children, his friends, his
possessions, and even his argument with God - still found the strength to
begin again, to rebuild his life. Job was determined not to repudiate the
creation, however imperfect, that God had entrusted to him. Job,
our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he
ever lose his faith? Is so, he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He
demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible
beyond despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because
I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
I
remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a
thousand and one reasons to hope. There
may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never
be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a
single human being, man can save the world. We may be powerless to open all
the jails and free all prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one
prisoner, we indict all jailers. None of us is in a position to eliminate
war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its
hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims. I began with the story of
Besht. And, like the Besht, mankind needs to remember more than ever. Mankind
needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war,
is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only
man can prevent. Mankind must remember that
peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.
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Last updated: March 26, 2000 |
