All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [26]
Even more often I think of my friends of those days: Itzu Junger, Haimi Kahan, Itzu Goldblatt, Moshe Sharf, Hershi Farkas. For me friendship has always been a necessity, an obsession. Later I would come to love Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who posited friendship as an ethic.
Friendship or death, the Talmud says. Without friends, existence is empty, sterile, pointless. Friendship is even more important in a man’s life than love. Love may drive one to kill, friendship never. Cain killed Abel because Abel was only his brother, whereas he should also have been his friend. David shines in history not only because of his territorial conquests but because of the true friendship, noble and indestructible, that bound him to Jonathan. A man capable of such friendship could only be exceptional.
The Hasidic movement owes its success to its emphasis on friendship among the faithful as well as to fidelity to the master. Friendship is indispensable, essential. The Hasid comes to the rabbi’s court not simply to see him, hear him, and spend Shabbat under his roof, but also to meet with friends who come for the very same reasons. He feels an attachment to each and every one of them, through what Hasidic literature calls “the root of the soul.” Together they form a community whose members are equal before God, as before the rebbe. Granted, there are more poor than rich among them, and more are unhappy than fulfilled. But it is incumbent upon the rich to aid those in need, as it is incumbent upon the poor to accept without envy those more fortunate than they. In Brooklyn as in Paris, Hasidic solidarity is real. Whoever is in need, his friends come to his aid. A refugee arriving out of nowhere is immediately taken in, given food and lodging, a loan and a network of support.
To praise God the famous Rebbe Pinhas of Koretz said: God is not only the Father of our people, the King of the Universe, and the Judge of all men. He is also their friend.
As a child I needed friendship more than tenderness to progress, reflect, dream, share, and breathe. The slightest dispute with a friend gave me a sleepless night as I lay wondering whether I would ever again know the excitement of a nighttime walk, of discussions about happiness, humanity’s future, and the meaning of life. Disappointment in this domain caused me greater pain than a failure in school.
Shortly before my twelfth birthday I began to feel more sure of myself. I no longer sought to “bribe” my friends. Our bonds were strengthened by our common projects. A thousand memories tie me to them.
I would have loved to have deserved the friendship of young Dovid’l, grandson of the legendary Reb Shaye Weiss. A precocious Talmudist, he seemed destined for a dazzling future. Unfortunately, he was even more studious than I. In our community he was the child prodigy, impossible to tear away from his books. We became friends much later, when he was professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and I was professor of Jewish studies at City College.
Yerahmiel Mermelstein, the son of a melon merchant, had his whole career set out for him. An ardent Zionist, he was indefatigable in his efforts to “convert” us to the ideas of Theodor Herzl. On Saturday afternoons, when we were supposed to be at the synagogue, he insisted on treating us to socioeconomic disquisitions on Palestine. He decided to learn modern Hebrew and argued that we should all follow suit. But the poor boy got nowhere. None of us was tempted until my father persuaded us to learn it. My father found us a teacher and Yerahmiel managed to come up with a grammar—the only one in town—which he loaned to me. I learned it by heart, as though it were a chapter of the tractate of Sanhedrin.
When I first went to Israel, in 1949, my father and Yerahmiel were both in my thoughts. It was thanks to their obsession with modern Hebrew that I was able to become the Paris correspondent