All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [216]
Anxiously, I knocked at the door of his office at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He himself answered and invited me to follow him in. It was my first visit to this room, which looked ready to burst if just one more volume were added to it. I was to return to that room twice and sometimes three times a week for seventeen years, literally until the day he died.
He began by questioning me about my past and present life. As I answered, I wondered what he had really thought of my lecture, whether I had not in fact made many mistakes. I was eager to hear his commentary and criticism, but he hadn’t yet finished his introductory queries. He had read my articles on Russia, in Yiddish in the Forverts and in Hebrew in Yedioth Ahronoth. He was pleased that I spoke Hebrew. He spoke of Motele, his hometown near Pinsk, and asked me about Sighet. I mentioned that a childhood friend, David Weiss-Halivni, had been a pupil of his at the seminary. Finally, almost in passing, he came to the subject I yearned to speak of. “Toward the end of the first half of your lecture,” he said, “you explained an apparent conflict concerning a text of the Mekhilta. Was that explanation your own find?” “I think so,” I stammered. “I see,” he said. “You think so.” He stood up, took a dusty volume from the very top of a bookshelf and flipped through it, until he found a certain page. “Look,” he said. “Your finding dates back … six centuries.” I told him I was pleased to walk in such footsteps, but the impish look on his face suggested he only half believed me. He returned to the attack: “A little before the conclusion you presented a solution to the problem raised by Maimonides with regard to Aristotle. Did you also think this solution was your own finding?” I nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see.” This time he opened an even older and dustier volume and pointed to an annotated page: “Here it is.” Disappointed? On the contrary. I repeated my defense, adding that for me study meant not discovery but rediscovery. My purpose was not to answer questions but to know them, and if possible to invent them. My mother never asked me whether I had given the melamed good answers, but whether I had asked a good question. As I answered him, I was staring at my feet, speaking hoarsely in a tone I hoped was convincing. Lieberman was silent at first, then he said, “Is twice a week all right with you?” All right? Joy flooded through me. I wanted to shout and dance.
What I learned from him is what, of all my knowledge, I value most. He made me aware that to be a Jew is to place the greatest store in knowledge and loyalty, that it is because he recognizes divine justice that he speaks out against human injustice. That it is because a Jew remains attached to his God that he is permitted to question Him. It is because the prophets loved the people of Israel that they admonished them and reprimanded their kings. Everything depends on where you stand, my master used to say. With God anything can be said. Without God nothing is heard. Without God what is said is not said.
Le Chant des morts was published in 1966. In English the collection was entitled Legends of Our Time. “For our time” would have been more accurate. How to prevent the past from receding too rapidly into the distance? How to keep alive the dead who, beyond time and speech, beckon us, not to torment us but to reassure us that they reproach us not for clinging to life but for living in forgetfulness? And yet, I don’t know what a son can do or say to commemorate a father who died in the camps. I pray, light candles, say Kaddish, try to see his face as I meditate, but I know it is not enough. It can never be enough.
How to evoke