A Hasidic legend tells us that the great Rabbi
Baal-Shem-Tov, Master of the Good Name, also known as the
Besht, undertook an urgent and perilous mission: to
hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, all
humanity were suffering too much, beset by too many
evils. They had to be saved, and swiftly. For having
tried to meddle with history, the Besht was punished;
banished along with his faithful servant to a distant
island. In despair, the servant implored his master to
exercise his mysterious powers in order to bring them
both home. "Impossible", the Besht replied. "My powers
have been taken from me". "Then, please, say a prayer,
recite a litany, work a miracle". "Impossible", the
Master replied, "I have forgotten everything". They both
fell to weeping.
Suddenly the Master turned to his servant and asked:
"Remind me of a prayer - any prayer ." "If only I could",
said the servant. "I too have forgotten everything".
"Everything - absolutely everything?" "Yes, except -
"Except what?" "Except the alphabet". At that the Besht
cried out joyfully: "Then what are you waiting for? Begin
reciting the alphabet and I shall repeat after you...".
And together the two exiled men began to recite, at first
in whispers, then more loudly: "Aleph, beth, gimel,
daleth...". And over again, each time more vigorously,
more fervently; until, ultimately, the Besht regained his
powers, having regained his memory.
I love this story, for it illustrates the messianic
expectation --which remains my own. And the importance of
friendship to man's ability to transcend his condition. I
love it most of all because it emphasizes the mystical
power of memory. Without memory, our existence would be
barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light
penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. Memory
saved the Besht, and if anything can, it is memory that
will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like
memory without hope.
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live
without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons
the future. Does this mean that our future can be built
on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not
necessary. The two are not incompatible. The opposite of
the past is not the future but the absence of future; the
opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of
past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of
the other.
A recollection. The time: After the war. The place:
Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His
mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is
alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give
up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the
living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few
friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of
evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory
of death will serve as a shield against death.
This he must believe in order to go on. For he has
just returned from a universe where God, betrayed by His
creatures, covered His face in order not to see. Mankind,
jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an
inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but
toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel
society, a new "creation" with its own princes and gods,
laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. A world where
the past no longer counted -- no longer meant
anything.
Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the
prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void.
"Forget", they were told, "Forget where you came from;
forget who you were. Only the present matters". But the
present was only a blink of the Lord's eye. The Almighty
himself was a slaughterer: it was He who decided who
would live and who would die; who would be tortured, and
who would be rewarded. Night after night, seemingly
endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up
the sky. Fear dominated the universe. Indeed this was
another universe; the very laws of nature had been
transformed. Children looked like old men, old men
whimpered like children. Men and women from every corner
of Europe were suddenly reduced to nameless and faceless
creatures desperate for the same ration of bread or soup,
dreading the same end. Even their silence was the same
for it resounded with the memory of those who were gone.
Life in this accursed universe was so distorted, so
unnatural that a new species had evolved. Waking among
the dead, one wondered if one was still alive.
And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards.
As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for
meaning. All those doctors of law or medicine or
theology, all those lovers of art and poetry, of Bach and
Goethe, who coldly, deliberately ordered the massacres
and participated in them. What did their metamorphosis
signify? Could anything explain their loss of ethical,
cultural and religious memory? How could we ever
understand the passivity of the onlookers and - yes - the
silence of the Allies? And question of questions: Where
was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive
of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without
God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because
everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's
achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a
consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we
know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into
question as it called into question everything that had
preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and
economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious
fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their
ultimate expression in Auschwitz.
The next question had to be, why go on? If memory
continually brought us back to this, why build a home?
Why bring children into a world in which God and man
betrayed their trust in one another? Of course we could
try to forget the past. Why not? Is it not natural for a
human being to repress what causes him pain, what causes
him shame? Like the body, memory protects its wounds.
When day breaks after a sleepless night, one's ghosts
must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves.
But for the first time in history, we could not bury our
dead. We bear their graves within ourselves.
For us, forgetting was never an option.
Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of
memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn
of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so
insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to
remember the good we have received, and the evil we have
suffered. New Year's Day, Rosh Hashana, is also called
Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory. On that day, the day of
universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our
salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our
suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be
lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine
curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters,
past wars.
Nothing provokes so much horror and opposition within
the Jewish tradition as war. Our abhorrence of war is
reflected in the paucity of our literature of warfare.
After all, God created the Torah to do away with
iniquity, to do away with war1.Warriors fare poorly in
the Talmud: Judas Maccabeus is not even mentioned;
Bar-Kochba is cited, but negatively2. David, a great
warrior and conqueror, is not permitted to build the
Temple; it is his son Solomon, a man of peace, who
constructs God's dwelling place. Of course some wars may
have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever
regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction
in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases
all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei
hukhamim shemarbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who
will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men
remember best.
And yet it is surely human to forget, even to want to
forget. The Ancients saw it as a divine gift. Indeed if
memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on
living. How could we go on with our daily lives, if we
remained constantly aware of the dangers and ghosts
surrounding us? The Talmud tells us that without the
ability to forget, man would soon cease to learn. Without
the ability to forget, man would live in a permanent,
paralyzing fear of death. Only God and God alone can and
must remember everything.
How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards
memory with the need to forget that is essential to life?
No generation has had to confront this paradox with such
urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything
to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the
tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the
doomed beneath a fiery sky.
They needed to tell the child who, in hiding with his
mother, asked softly, very softly: "Can I cry now?" They
needed to tell of the sick beggar who, in a sealed
cattle-car, began to sing as an offering to his
companions. And of the little girl who, hugging her
grandmother, whispered: "Don't be afraid, don't be sorry
to die... I'm not". She was seven, that little girl who
went to her death without fear, without regret.
Each one of us felt compelled to record every story,
every encounter. Each one of us felt compelled to bear
witness, Such were the wishes of the dying, the testament
of the dead. Since the so-called civilized world had no
use for their lives, then let it be inhabited by their
deaths.
The great historian Shimon Dubnov served as our guide
and inspiration. Until the moment of his death he said
over and over again to his companions in the Riga ghetto:
"Yidden, shreibt un fershreibt" (Jews, write it all
down). His words were heeded. Overnight, countless
victims become chroniclers and historians in the ghettos,
even in the death camps. Even members of the
Sonderkommandos, those inmates forced to burn their
fellow inmates' corpses before being burned in turn, left
behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an
obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and
fragments of novels, some known throughout the world,
others still unpublished.
After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be
enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of
the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage
born of indifference: it would be enough to find the
right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake
humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer
from torturing ever again. We thought it would be enough
to read the world a poem written by a child in the
Theresienstadt ghetto to ensure that no child anywhere
would ever again have to endure hunger or fear. It would
be enough to describe a death-camp "Selection", to
prevent the human right to dignity from ever being
violated again.
We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal
wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men
everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to
hatred of anyone who is "different" -- whether black or
white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem - anyone whose
orientation differs politically, philosophically,
sexually. A naive undertaking? Of course. But not without
a certain logic.
We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the
language; language failed us. We would have to invent a
new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate,
anemic.
And then too, the people around us refused to listen;
and even those who listened refused to believe; and even
those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they
could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps
defies comprehension.
Have we failed? I often think we have.
If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime
religious wars would rage on virtually every continent,
that thousands of children would once again be dying of
starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism
and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not
have believed it. Nor would we have believed that there
would be governments that would deprive a man like Lech
Walesa of his freedom to travel merely because he dares
to dissent. And he is not alone. Governments of the Right
and of the Left go much further, subjecting those who
dissent, writers, scientists, intellectuals, to torture
and persecution. How to explain this defeat of
memory?
How to explain any of it: the outrage of Apartheid
which continues unabated. Racism itself is dreadful, but
when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just, when a
man like Nelson Mandela is imprisoned, it becomes even
more repugnant. Without comparing Apartheid to Nazism and
to its "final solution" - for that defies all comparison
- one cannot help but assign the two systems, in their
supposed legality, to the same camp. And the outrage of
terrorism: of the hostages in Iran, the coldblooded
massacre in the synagogue in Istanbul, the senseless
deaths in the streets of Paris. Terrorism must be
outlawed by all civilized nations - not explained or
rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can,
nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and
helpless children. And the outrage of preventing men and
women like Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir and Masha Slepak,
Ida Nudel, Josef Biegun, Victor Brailowski, Zakhar
Zonshein, and all the others known and unknown from
leaving their country. And then there is Israel, which
after two thousand years of exile and thirty-eight years
of sovereignty still does not have peace. I would like to
see this people, which is my own, able to establish the
foundation for a constructive relationship with all its
Arab neighbors, as it has done with Egypt. We must exert
pressure on all those in power to come to terms.
And here we come back to memory. We must remember the
suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the
Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people,
Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian
"desaparecidos" - the list seems endless.
Let us remember Job who, having lost everything -- his
children, his friends, his possessions, and even his
argument with God - still found the strength to begin
again, to rebuild his life. Job was determined not to
repudiate the creation, however imperfect, that God had
entrusted to him.
Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal
concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith? If so,
he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He demonstrated
that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is
possible beyond despair. The source of his hope was
memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I
despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject
despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims,
even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons
to hope.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent
injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to
protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single
human being, man can save the world. We may be powerless
to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by
declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all
jailers. None of us is in a position to eliminate war,
but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in
all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
I began with the story of the Besht. And, like the Besht,
mankind needs to remember more than ever. Mankind needs
peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened
by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A
destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his
creatures, it is our gift to each other.
1. The Torah is the Hebrew name for the first five
books of the Scriptures, in which God hands down the
tablets of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In
contradistinction to the Law of Moses, the Written Law,
the Talmud is the vast compilation of the Oral Law,
including rabbinical commentaries and elaborations.
2. Judas Maccabeus led the struggle against Antiochus
IV of Syria. He defeated a Syrian expedition and
reconsecrated the Temple in Jerusalem (c. 165 B.C.).
Simon Bar-Kochba (or Kokba) was the leader of the Hebrew
revolt against the Romans, 132-135 A.D.
