Is it possible that we take Elie Wiesel for granted? Child of Sighet, survivor of Auschwitz, chronicler of the Holocaust, Nobel Peace laureate, unofficial Jewish statesman, novelist, playwright, university professor. It seems like he is always speaking out, softly but pointedly, on issues of the day, from the uniqueness of the Shoah to the horrors of war in Bosnia, expressing his humanitarian concerns by focusing on his love for the Jewish people.
It is hard to believe that he just turned 68, for he is still our Jewish conscience writ large on the international scene, and no one else comes close to filling this role. In recent days, for example, he offered President Clinton advice on bringing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat together, attended a New York rally on behalf of Israel’s soldiers missing in action, and advanced his efforts to achieve freedom for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Just last week he returned from a brief personal visit to France, where he defended Israel’s actions during French President Chirac’s pro-Arab visit to the Mideast.
Amid all of this political activity, Wiesel has continued a 30-year fall tradition of offering a four-lecture series on the Bible, Talmud, Chassidism and current events at the 92nd Street Y. It is a Jewish cultural highlight of the year, attended by sellout crowds.
Wiesel is still passionately committed to translating the Jewish experience — the joy and pain and beauty — to the widest possible audience, but even after three decades, he says he approaches these spoken essays with trepidation.
“It gets more difficult every year,” sighs Wiesel during a conversation in his Manhattan apartment. In the early years, he recalls, his audience would include such scholars as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, as well as hippies and nuns. “You could feel the intensity in the auditorium.”
And now, almost 120 lectures later? “I am still intimidated,” he says.
Perhaps that is why he continues to spend an average of two months preparing for each of the four “Fascination With Jewish Tales” lectures he delivers at the Y every year, and why he has never repeated a lecture in the series.
“Of all the lectures I give, I am most committed to these,” he says, noting that six of his books have been based on the Y talks. In one lecture this month, he reflected on “what went wrong in my generation and the hope for the next.”
The austere format is always the same. He walks onto the stage in the darkened auditorium without any introduction, sits down at an ornate table, and begins to read his carefully prepared text. (Seventy percent of his material is written, and the rest is improvised, he says.)
At the first of this year’s programs, he chose the story of Creation, and sought to portray God’s qualities as revealed through His own accounting, by turns loving, judgmental and forgiving to Adam and Eve and their descendants.
Throughout his lecture, Wiesel blends humor and insight in the style of a master storyteller. “Adam and Eve were more interested in food than in God,” he notes. Later, he adds, “God only tells us He is; not where or why He is.”
He concludes with a midrash, or legend, of how God weeps when a great man dies. “I like this legend of pathos,” Wiesel observes, “but at times I wonder, why didn’t God weep when 6 million died?”
Wiesel answers himself, “Maybe He did, and the tears produced mighty sounds. And perhaps no one listened.”
On that haunting note, he gets up quietly and leaves the stage, leaving the audience to contemplate the meaning behind his words.
“I try to show the beauty in our literature,” he says during our conversation. “A midrashic legend has so much beauty, and often offers great joy. I try to make my passion for the text come through.”
Attending the annual lecture has become a religious rite for many people, some of whom have been coming for three decades and now bring their children. “There is a very close bond I feel with the audience,” says Wiesel, who enjoys hearing stories of how couples have met at these lectures and later married.
As someone who learns Talmud every day, he believes in the mitzvah, and communal power, of Jewish textual study. He suggests that study circles be formed around the country to discuss Jewish books and themes as a way of healing denominational discord.
“In learning together, all differences disappear,” he says. “The best way to bring Jews closer together is to have them meet over the pages of the Talmud or the prophets.”
Scholarship is primary to Wiesel, who acknowledges that his heroes are Jewish scholars like the late Saul Lieberman, with whom he learned Talmud on a daily basis, as well as such 18th century luminaries, and ideological adversaries, as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of chassidism, and the Vilna Gaon, a Talmudic authority who led the opposition to the Chassidic movement.
They may not have met in reality, “but they do meet — we bring them together within us,” Wiesel says.
And that is the key to his widespread influence, this ability to take wisdom from our tradition and distill it through his unique perspective as both mystic and statesman, as both advocate of silence — of listening, as he says, to the space between the words — and eloquent spokesman for a generation. Long may he continue.