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185 pages

English

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Elie Wiesel identified himself as a Vizhnitzer Hasid, who was above all things a witness to the testimony and teaching of the Jewish tradition at the core of the Hasidic tradition. While he is well known for his testimony on the Holocaust and as a messenger to humanity, he is less well known for his engagement with the teachings of Jewish tradition and the Hasidic heritage that informs that engagement. Portraits illuminates Wiesel's Jewish teachings and the Hasidic legacy that he embraced by examining how he brought to life the sages of the Jewish tradition. David Patterson reveals that Wiesel's Hasidic engagement with the holy texts of the Jewish tradition does not fall into the usual categories of exegesis or hermeneutics and of commentary or textual analysis. Rather, he engages not the text but the person, the teacher, and the soul. This book is a summons to remember the testimony reduced to ashes and the voices that cry out from those ashes. Just as the teaching is embodied in the teachers, so is the tradition embodied in their portraits.
Preface
Acknowledgments

A Post-Holocaust Hasidic Legacy

The Portrait of the Who

Portraits from the Torah

Portraits from the Prophets

Portraits from the Writings

Portraits from the Talmud

Portraits of the Hasidic Masters

The Messiah: Portrait of an Anticipation

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Judaism

The Holocaust

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438483993
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Portraits
SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Thought

Richard A. Cohen, editor
Portraits
The Hasidic Legacy of Elie Wiesel
David Patterson
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Patterson, David, [date] author.
Title: Portraits : the Hasidic legacy of Elie Wiesel / David Patterson.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Jewish thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056927 (print) | LCCN 2020056928 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438483979 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483993 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Wiesel, Elie, 1928–2016—Criticism and interpretation. | Hasidism.
Classification: LCC PQ2683.I32 Z84 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2683.I32 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056927
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056928
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Post-Holocaust Hasidic Legacy
The Portrait of the Who
Portraits from the Torah
Portraits from the Prophets
Portraits from the Writings
Portraits from the Talmud
Portraits of the Hasidic Masters
The Messiah: Portrait of an Anticipation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
A lthough I never had the honor of sitting in one of Professor Elie Wiesel’s seminars at Boston University, I have counted him among my teachers ever since one of my own students placed in my hands a copy of Night in 1978. Reading his first book not only set me upon a path of reading everything he published, but it also launched me on a never-ending journey through an ocean of Jewish texts and teachings, as well as Jewish thought and testimony. I began corresponding with Professor Wiesel in 1982, whereupon he graciously invited me to meet with him should I ever be in Boston or New York. In 1984 I had my first meeting with him in New York; as a result of that meeting I wrote a now-obscure book, In Dialogue and Dilemma with Elie Wiesel , which consists of transcripts of our conversation followed by my reflections on his words and works. With his characteristic generosity, he told me that he regarded that book as an expression of friendship; those who knew him know that friendship meant a great deal to him, and his words meant even more to me. Over the subsequent years I was blessed to sit with him and to learn from him on many other occasions.
Although I could never attain the merit of calling myself a Hasid, I count myself among the heirs to Wiesel’s Hasidic legacy, and my own embrace of Jewish tradition has been shaped by that legacy. Therefore this book is, in a deep sense, the work of one of Professor Wiesel’s students and not the work of one who comes to this subject matter with the cold distance of scholarly objectivity. The Baal Shem’s call, Wiesel insisted, was a call to subjectivity, to passionate involvement. This study of Elie Wiesel’s teachings, as they unfold through his personal engagement with the portraits of Judaism’s sages and dreamers, is an attempt at just such an involvement. Years ago a critic once said that to read Wiesel is to burn with him. And so, at least for me, it is true: my attempt to convey the Hasidic legacy of this soul on fire is an attempt to transmit the fire he has transmitted to me.
I should also note that when, for example, I refer to “Jewish teaching,” I am aware that my understanding of Jewish teaching is not the only legitimate one; it is my best understanding, informed by my own study of Judaism, as well as by what I have learned from the Hasid Wiesel. Indeed, Wiesel’s portraits of biblical figures and Talmudic sages are rooted in his Hasidism; so all of these portraits, not just the portraits of the Hasidic masters, belong to his Hasidic legacy.
One other thing: the Holocaust. If there can be a post-Holocaust legacy, it must include a Hasidic legacy, a legacy that stems from that segment of world Jewry so profoundly and so brutally ravaged in the Shoah. And if it can be expressed as a Hasidic legacy, who better than Elie Wiesel to give voice to that expression, to that summons? A legacy is above all an inheritance, and an inheritance is a summons. It is a call, even a commandment, to zakhor v’shamor , to remember and to observe; it is a commandment that, says the Talmud, is woven into in a single utterance from Mount Sinai ( Shevuot 20b). Turning to Mount Sinai—turning to those who turned to Mount Sinai—Professor Wiesel bequeaths to us an inheritance couched in the commandment to remember and observe voiced in a single utterance. His Hasidic legacy is a summons to remember what happened and why it matters. It is a summons to remember the testimony reduced to ashes and the voices that cry out from those ashes. It is a summons to remember and observe—to remember and watch over —the teaching and tradition consigned to obliteration as the Jews made their way to the gas chambers under the towers that watched over them in Auschwitz. Just as the teaching is embodied in the teachers, so too is the tradition embodied in their portraits.
Dallas, Texas 2020
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest thanks to SUNY Press and to Rafael Chaiken, James Peltz, and Richard Cohen for their support, encouragement, and insightful suggestions in the preparation of this book. I am also grateful to the readers who took the time to review the manuscript and offer valuable recommendations to make this a better book. Most importantly, many thanks to Alan Rosen, who had the great blessing of being one of Professor Elie Wiesel’s students and who has become one of my teachers. A great scholar, a true Hasid, and a dear friend, Alan has been a profound inspiration for this endeavor.
A Post-Holocaust Hasidic Legacy
Where are we going? Tell me. Do you know?
I don’t know, my little girl .
I am afraid. Is it wrong, tell me, is it wrong to be afraid?
I don’t know. I don’t think so.
In all my life I have never been so afraid.
Never . …
Say, do you know? Where are we going?
To the end of the world, little girl. We are going to the end of the world.
Is that far?
No, not really.
You see, I am really tired. Is it wrong, tell me, is it wrong to be so tired?
Everybody is tired, my little girl .
Even God?
I don’t know. You will ask Him yourself.
—Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today 1
A legacy is not only something that we preserve in the mind. It is something that we receive into the heart and the soul. We embrace it in our words and in our deeds. We hold it in our arms and in our hands, like a weary child who asks whether God is weary, too. Elie Wiesel’s friend Nikos Kazantzakis once commented that perhaps God is not so almighty after all but is as helpless as a child—and if we do not save Him, He will die: “He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggle; nor can we be saved unless He is saved.” 2 So we see what is at stake in receivng Wiesel’s Hasidic legacy, for it is just such a struggle. And it is just as fragile as the imperiled God, who is as weary as a child.
To acquire a sense of the post-Holocaust context of Weisel’s Hasidic legacy, we turn to the Hasidic master, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, who was murdered in the camp at Trawnicki on November 3, 1943. On February 14, 1942, he wrote, “A Jew, tortured in his suffering, may think he is the only one in pain, as though his personal pain and the pain of all other Jews has no effect above, God forbid. But … we learn in the Talmud ( Chagigah 15b; Sanhedrin 46a) … God, as it were, suffers with a Jew much more than that person himself feels it.” 3 Whereas Rabbi Yose “heard a Divine Voice like the cooing of a dove” over the ruins of the Temple, the Rebbe goes on to say, we know from Jeremiah 25:30 that “God roars, howling over His city.” 4 And yet the Midrash tells us that God sits in silence over His city ( Eykhah Rabbah 1:1:1). Why in silence? Because, as the Hasidic master Menahem-Mendl of Kotzk once said, the scream we hold back is more powerful. 5 If “God is silence,” as Wiesel declares, 6 in a post-Holocaust world His is the silence of a silent scream. For there are times when, like the five-year-old Joel the Redhead in Wiesel’s A Jew Today , 7 like the child Hanna in his drama The Trial of God , 8 God, too, screams without a sound. How, then, does God roar? He roars not only through the screams of “Mama!” that reverberate throughout the camps and ghettos, screams that threaten to undermine the very fabric of creation, but also through the whisper of a child who, like a Hasid shouting out a silent prayer, wants to know if God is weary, too.
Elie Wiesel begins his testimony in Night with a reference to a “Hasidic house of prayer.” 9 His Hasidic legacy is one of prayer, without which we are left utterly homeless. These words, indeed, embody the primary targets in the Nazis’ project to annihilate the teaching and tradition of the Jewish people and with them the Hasidim of Eastern Europe. “Most of the victims who ascended the burning altar were Hasidim: the killers and they could not coexist under the same sky,” Wiesel has attested. 10 And so the killers transformed the sky into a cemetery. “For Hasidism,” as David Biale and others have said, “the Holocaust meant decimation.” 11 It meant the decimation of everything that the word Hasidic signifies.