All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [201]
There is an anecdote about Martin Buber. Addressing an audience of priests, he said something like this: “What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?” Then he paused and added: “And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, ‘For the love of heaven, don’t answer.’” In matters ecumenical Heschel was even more direct and engaged than Buber.
At Stanford University in California a group of professors was dining with the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the highly renowned “liberation theologian” from New York. The conversation turned to Heschel, and everyone had an amusing anecdote or touching episode to relate. Coffin offered his contribution. “One day, during an ecumenical meeting in which the ever-present subject of anti-Semitism came up, Heschel turned to me and said, ‘Do you really think God wants His blessed people to be shamed, persecuted, and perhaps even wiped off the face of the earth? Do you think God would be pleased with a world without Jews?’ To which I replied: ‘Do you think it was God’s desire to see His son persecuted, humiliated, and repudiated by the very people He had come to save? Do you think the Father was happy to see His son rejected by His brothers?’ Heschel smiled: ‘Here I admit your questions pose a problem.…’” Everyone else at the table seemed to enjoy the anecdote, but I didn’t. I said to Coffin: “I don’t believe Heschel could have said that. Jesus would have posed no problem for a faithful Jew like Heschel.”
As in Buber’s case, the more Christians admired Heschel, the more certain Jewish circles distanced themselves from him and his teaching. He spoke of disappointments at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which had welcomed him during the war, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where until his death he held a chair on mysticism and ethics. He also taught human rights—by example.
In Paris I discovered Manès Sperber. It was inevitable that one day our paths would cross, though Manès did not believe in fate. A freethinker, his credo was liberty, a subject I loved to hear him talk about. In fact, I loved to hear him talk about anything. A peerless dialectician armed with Socratic irony and encyclopedic knowledge, he could move from Pushkin to the Besht to Adler almost without transition. Like a Tear in the Ocean is a dazzling work. Not even Itzhak Leibush Peretz, his hero and mine, could have written it. I remember with pleasure the hours I spent with him: they were always serene and soothing. We were never complacent.
Manès was important in my life. His intellectual rigor, literary talent, humanist vision—rarely have I found these qualities united in a single individual. Yet outwardly we were worlds apart. He had been a Communist, I had not; he was drawn to psychology, I to mysticism; he rejected religion, I had returned to it. But what bound us to each other was profound. I treasured his counsel. I was constantly asking for his views. After his death Jenka, his wife, told me he thought of me as a kind of younger brother. He was always critical, especially of those he loved, and never sentimental. I emerged from every encounter with him more lucid. I would not have written The Testament had I not read and heard his accounts of the years he spent working for the Comintern in Yugoslavia. I heeded his advice and warnings: not to go after