Somewhere-A Master:
Riemer, Jack
Confrontation with the masters SOMEWHERE-A MASTER Elie Wiesel Summit, $13.95, 221 pp. Jack Riemer THERE are those who write about Hasidism from the outside. And there are those who write about...
...Watching and listening to Reb Moshe Leib he realized his mistake...
...Several years ago he gave us Souls on Fire, a series of portraits of the Hasidic masters...
...And he is now the one who goes about the ashes, looking for the fire...
...They were an extraordinary collection of spirits, these Hasidic masters of the last two centuries...
...They don't know what we used to do, and where, once upon a time...
...Consider his chapter on Moshe Leib of Seshov, for example...
...One who wishes to know their innermost being should come here...
...What an actor, he thought...
...One must hear what is said, and one must also listen for what is left out...
...Often the one who denies that he is...
...Each chapter is a kind of a confrontation...
...How could he be so happy...
...His joy was neither subterfuge, nor pretext, nor vehicle-it was an end in itself...
...The chapters in this book are not essays, not formal biographies...
...Now he gives us a sequel, a second collection of these portraits...
...Who is a real master...
...Wiesel confesses that his attitude towards him has undergone several radical changes during the time that he has studied him...
...We should say not that "they were" but "they are," for their tales are still being told, and as long as they are these masters still live, these messages still reverberate...
...Often the one who seems the most simple...
...One who wishes to learn all of the factual details of these masters' lives is advised to go elsewhere...
...He manages to fool all these people...
...Each one revealed a little and hid a lot...
...And who possesses the profoundest truths...
...And I was grateful...
...He still is, and he always will be, the child who absorbed Hasidic tales and Hasidic values in his first formative years...
...Rebbe Moshe Leib, who seemed so carefree and so at peace with himself, was neither...
...In him, I said to myself, I had found, at last, one great Master who was not involved in messianic conspiracies like the Seer of Lublin, who did not repress anguish like the Rebbe of Berditchev, who was not engaged in endless battles against despair like the Rebbe of Kotsk...
...In this book we do not study about them, we study them, and we study together with them...
...They are portraits, closer to paintings than to photographs, closer to works of music than to still-lifes...
...But wait, do not jump to conclusions...
...Many years later, when he was a celebrated Master in the Hasidic kingdom, one of his former companions came to Sehsov out of curiousity...
...And there are those who write about Hasidism from the inside...
...When I first discovered him, I was happy to have found a Rebbe who was happy, I mean, really happy, totally happy with his lot...
...They were people who inspired others and yet suffered loneliness themselves...
...Later I became annoyed...
...And so one must listen carefully to the tales and one must read between the lines of the writings in order to find the real master...
...And for Wiesel, and hopefully for his readers too, the tense of the verb in that last paragraph is not quite right...
...Elie Wiesel writes about Hasidism from the border...
...Then came the third stage...
...As I went over the texts and the testimonies again and again I recognized my error...
...I wondered...
...It is as if the author has summoned up the master from the grave in order to ask him a question, the question: what can your life teach me about my life, what wisdom do you have that can help me here and now...
...He was eager to see this Rebbe who could attract so many followers...
...For example, Wiesel recounts, "of Moshe Leib it is told that in his youth he associated with boys his own age, which was natural, except that they spent their energy, not on Torah but on pleasure...
...How could he-the master and friend of his followers-be happy when they were not...
...They were people who led groups and yet hungered for privacy, people who sustained others and yet lived with heartache themselves...
...He remembered Moshe Leib immediately, and remembered the good times they had had together...
...But he is also the adult who saw simple faith and simple atheism go up in smoke together at Auschwitz...
...And I began to love him...
...Moshe Leib had indeed fooled him-but not now- thenl When he and the others were young and foolish sinners, Reb Moshe Leib had already been a tsadik, a Just Man in disguise, a hidden Rebbe who stayed with them in order to keep them from further degradation - and only now did he realize it...
...He is now the one who goes back to the world of his childhood, not to stay there, but to search for the scraps of truth that are stored there, that he brings back to sustain us who live out here...
...And so it is in each chapter...
...It is a spiritual search, almost a detective story, an effort to catch the echo of the soul beneath the words, beneath the stories...
...Could he have been that insensitive, that self-centered...
...Could he have been blind to their woes...
...This very serenity that had appealed to me earlier began to disturb me...
...They were originally meant to be heard, not read...
...Rebbe Moshe Leib seemed to me full of true joy...
...But then something happened to him...
...Each of these masters lived at many levels...
...This is not a work of objective history, that records dates and facts and figures...
...He would leave the House of Study in the evening after a day of learning and join them in the taverns and stay with them until the early morning hours...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 16
