All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [71]
It is difficult to describe our private sessions in Taverny, Versailles, and later in my room on the Rue Le Marois. His knowledge poured down upon me and I devoured his words. It was as though his words came to me from a distant sanctuary I could never approach. We would spend entire weeks on a single page of the Talmud, from the treatise exploring the problems of divorce, for instance, without ever veering from the subject. He spoke, and I followed him in a state of ecstasy and nostalgia. It is to him I owe my constant drive to question, my pursuit of the mystery that lies within knowledge and of the darkness hidden within light.
Why did Shushani accept—perhaps even choose—me as a pupil? Why did he think me deserving? What was it about me that interested him? I have no idea. In general, those are the words I speak most often when talking about him: I have no idea. His disappearances and reappearances, his changes of mood, his feigned or sincere outbursts of anger, all seemed incomprehensible. Why did he never talk about himself? Why did he shroud himself in so much mystery, concealing even his real name? Why did he hide his origins? Why did he live such a bizarre life? Why did he decline to reveal himself to the broader public he surely could have conquered?
I remember that, many years later, he refused to leave Montevideo and come to New York to give courses to a few dozen students. I had suggested it to him, and wealthy friends were ready to finance the project. “Out of the question,” he replied. “I swore I would never again set foot on American soil after I lost all that money in the stock market crash.” Was it true? Shlomo Malka, a French journalist, and I devoted some fifteen radio broadcasts to Shushani. The series generated voluminous mail from listeners claiming to know “the truth” about him. Now, an eternity later, I think I know the truth, or can at least roughly approximate it.
Born in Lithuania, young Mordechai Rosenbaum (his real name) dazzled relatives and teachers with his prodigious memory. He retained everything he read. Even before his bar mitzvah he could recite the entire Talmud by heart. People came great distances to listen to him, and his father took him even further afield, exhibiting him, for a fee, in various communities. That was how he got rich, and how he traveled the world. Everywhere he went he stunned and enchanted his audience, becoming a formidable acrobat of knowledge. Is there a knowledge that money can corrupt? Does the Torah contain unsuspected perils when turned into a money-making instrument? I have no idea. I still don’t know why he disappeared so often, or where he went, or why he left so abruptly for Uruguay. Did he fear another war in Europe? Was it his taste for uprooting himself or his constant need for new experiences? All I know is that he died one Friday afternoon in 1965 in Montevideo, where he was performing, according to some, as a sage, and according to others, as a beadle. I told the story in One Generation After. Seated under a tree, surrounded by pupils, he was teaching the Talmud. Suddenly, in the middle of a citation, his head fell upon a female student’s shoulder. An instant later he was gone. It happened shortly before the arrival of Shabbat. In Jewish tradition such a death is considered a mitat neshika, or gentle death: The angel comes, embraces the chosen one as one would a friend, and takes him away, sparing him every trace of agony and suffering. He was in full possession of his faculties. Since an essay I had written on his teachings was found in his pocket, I was asked to compose the Hebrew inscription for his tombstone: “The rabbi and sage Mordechai Shushani, blessed be his memory. His birth and his life are bound and sealed in enigma. Died the sixth day of the week, Erev Shabbat Kodesh, 26 Tevet 5726.”
To Shlomo Malka, who wrote a very good book about Shushani, I confided my conviction that this enigma must be respected. By what right would we seek to unravel it, thereby violating secrets of his personality that he himself protected so fiercely?