All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [152]
“But only the Jewish people offered the world and its history the man capable and desirous of saving them from themselves.”
“Jesus of Nazareth? I know you believe that. But for me—forgive me for repeating it—he is not the Savior.”
“For me He is. I recognize it by His suffering, his agony. I belong to Him because he is Love.”
“The Jew in me is obliged to say that he belongs only to God. And God is one.”
“Any Christian believer would say the same. For us too, God is God, and He is one. But Jesus is His son.”
“All human beings are His sons.”
“In that case, how do you explain the existence of evil?”
“I distrust explanations.”
“And the Nazi hangmen? Those who massacred the Jewish children you knew? Were they, too, God’s sons?”
“That is for God to answer.”
“Sometimes God prefers to ask questions.”
“The answer is beyond me, Maître. But I do know that the Nazi killers and torturers were baptized.”
A long silence.
“Let us not blame Jesus for that,” Mauriac said, lowering his voice. “It is not His fault if we betray His love for us.”
“I’m not blaming Jesus. He was crucified by the Romans, and now it is Christians who torment him by committing evil in his name.”
At La Méditerranée restaurant:
“I brought you here so you could finally eat something. They don’t serve meat. Just fish.”
“I am grateful.”
“So how would you like some lobster?”
“Sorry, that’s not kosher.”
“But it’s not meat!”
“Some seafood is also forbidden.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s complicated. It’s a matter of having scales or not.”
“Shrimp?”
“Forbidden.”
“It sure is complicated being a Jew.”
“And not only in restaurants.”
I settled for a cheese sandwich.
“How did you manage it?”
“Manage what?”
“To survive.”
“I don’t know.”
“It was God. God’s will. The Lord chose you.”
“No, don’t say that.”
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“Yes, I do.”
“It was your faith that saved you.”
“Don’t say that, I beg you.”
“Faith can offer support and comfort. It can be a kind of nourishment, a higher nourishment. Faith embodies life and life’s power. Perhaps it was faith that made you strong.”
“Strength had nothing to do with it.”
“Or God?”
“Not God either.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a long sigh, followed by his usual little smile.
“It is when one knows not that faith arrives.”
I felt obliged to reply: “Does that mean when faith arrives, you do know?”
Mauriac, a man of tolerance, never sought to entice me toward Christianity, never made any attempt to proselytize. In one of his columns he recounted a conversation we had about Jesus. I told him that in my view Jesus surely began as a pious Jew who put on his phylacteries every day and that it was because he was a Jew that the Romans condemned him to death and crucified him.
Let me quote from Mauriac’s text, for it requires some commentary:
Wednesday, May 29, 1963.
Never have I felt such joy in crowning a book, or rather, a work. The Prix de l’Universalité de la Langue Française, awarded annually to a foreign author writing in our language, was given this year to my friend Elie Wiesel, born in a Jewish community in Transylvania, now an American citizen, New York correspondent for an Israeli newspaper and French novelist.
In a preface to his first book, Night (Éditions de Minuit), I told of how we met. When I described to this young journalist from Israel, who had come to interview me, the train packed with Jewish children that my wife saw in the Austerlitz railway station during the Occupation, he said to me, “I was one of them.” Our friendship was born of those few words. Elie Wiesel returned from the camps after seeing his whole family burned—a mystic child having lost, or believing to have lost, his faith in the God of love and consolation.
How I love Jewish mystics, witnesses of the first love! Perhaps many still exist, but not within the Israel we know today, whose genius is wholly devoted to conquest and domination.…
Someday Elie Wiesel will take me to the Holy Land. He desires it greatly, having a most singular knowledge of Christ, whom he pictures