All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [224]
I met Albert Cohen at his apartment in Geneva. Frail, gracious, wrapped in a silk robe, he transported his enchanted visitors to sun-soaked isles peopled with brave characters. I loved listening to his vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, even though I prefer Jeremiah. He was interested in my Hasidic masters and enjoyed talking about them. I remember the mysterious light that shone in his eyes.
I discovered Cohen while reading Solal, a grandiose work of fiction with a philosophical sense of humor in which Cohen’s imagination carries the reader along toward faraway and mysterious horizons, those of the soul as well as those of destiny. Later on, I devoured Mangeclous and Le Livre de ma mère. A Sephardic Jew, a romantic and an adventurer searching for absolute love as others chase after absolute truth, Cohen keeps us under his spell to the point that endless readers identify with him.
During this period my relations with Professor Saul Lieberman grew closer and more intense by the week. I studied with him as I had never studied before. The only subject of contention between us was Hasidism. As a good Lithuanian of the school of the Gaon of Vilna, he had remained a Mitnagged, a man of the Establishment and therefore an opponent of Hasidism and its leader, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, also known as the Besht. He knew little about it except what its original adversaries had said: that Hasidism, founded by ignorant men (beginning with the Besht himself), glorified ignorance. It took me many months to even start to sow seeds of doubt in his mind. First I urged him to read the scholarly works of the Besht’s companions, who were great masters. Would they have followed a man who was utterly unknown at the time if he, too, had not been versed in study? Indeed, all of them were Mitnagdim who had “converted” to Hasidism. (There were few instances of Hasidim converting to the opposition.)
Little by little my master accepted the idea that Hasidism and study were not incompatible, that Hasidic tales possessed not only a certain charm but also genuine depth.
He began to attend my 92nd Street Y lectures in which I explored Hasidic teachings through a series of portraits of the movement’s founders. He was intrigued by Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk and liked Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, whose knowledge and original discoveries he admired. A precursor of Franz Kafka, this great master and descendant of masters (he was the Besht’s great-grandson) was in my view the greatest storyteller of Hasidic literature. “He was also a scholar, an erudite man, a true talmid ’hakbam,” said Lieberman. Coming from him, this was a rare compliment.
In his office the day after the Bratslav lecture, when Lieberman treated me to a lecture on my lecture, I realized that he understood the Bratslaver Rebbe better than I did.
As I said, we met at least twice a week. Almost without preliminaries, we would sit down on opposite sides of his desk, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds open before us, along with the corresponding books of commentary. Each session lasted three hours. Some subjects were familiar to me, for I had already studied them, though badly and hastily. That was true even of my studies with Shushani. Shushani was an ilui, a genius of immense knowledge, but not a methodical teacher. Only at the end of his presentation would his perspective become clear to his students. Lieberman was an ilui too, but also a harif and a baki, a man whose brain encompasses everything and dissects it before your eyes. He would lead you and excite your imagination, but at every step you knew where he was taking you; at each turn you understood his intent. Where Shushani’s teaching was intense but disjointed, Lieberman’s was highly structured. With Shushani it was his erudition that fascinated you, while with Lieberman there was that and much more, including the beauty of his reasoning. He showed how everything is linked, how Greek culture and