Reexamining the Tradition

...Yet he apparently emerged from the devastation determined to keep alive the process that has been responsible for Judaism's survival...

...On another level, we have to ask whether from him this is enough...

...The ancient teachers, of course, saw the essential story as having already been told in the Bible, which it is incumbent upon Jews to constantly retell...

...Even more prophetically, it cautioned that this new power, like all power, could be corrupting...

...Since the world has in effect ignored the cataclysmic happening—has not been totally changed by it—the writer struggles with the question of whether he is guilty not only of failing to communicate its significance but of helping to domesticate it...

...Wiesel attempts in this book to reinterpret the lives of seven Biblical figures from Adam to Job...

...It is possible to live with death...

...The Gates of the Forest examined the residual plausibility of redemption and the danger that memories of death might drag the living into despondency—that, paradoxically, excessive grief and too vivid recollections could lead to the triumph of the forces opposed to life incarnated in the Holocaust...

...The one exception, The Oath, is an exploration and interior dialogue concerning whether he should have written about the Holocaust...

...The book's soul is divided between love of tradition and affirmation of Jewish faith and frequent flashes of dark light emitted by the Holocaust...

...Why did the victims, instead of helping one another, adopt the methods of their enemies...

...If we look back at his work over the past 20-odd years, it becomes clear that he has set himself a two-fold goal: to tell the story of the Holocaust and to explain its meanings...

...Should not a work whose way is lit by the Holocaust flames be harsher, more denying, more subversive...

...Only as we tell them now in the light of certain experiences of life and death, do we understand them...

...strict literary canons could not be applied to it...

...And this is the undertaking Wiesel began shortly before the end of the last decade, when he indicated he would henceforth not write about the Holocaust and turned away from the novel...

...The result is a contemporary Midrash, more unified and focused than the classical works, but its special dimension is the impact of the Holocaust on our reading of the Bible...

...Messengers of God confirms Elie Wiesel's place in the ranks of great -Jewish teachers who have arisen in every crisis to renew the bond of life between the generations...

...In the novel sequence that followed, starting with Dawn and The Accident, Wiesel traced the further implications of the horror...

...Wiesel's claim was that the Holocaust was such a watershed event, nothing would ever be the same...

...Only today, after the whirlwind of fire and blood that was the Holocaust, do we grasp the full range of implications of the murder of one man by his brother...

...But in classical Jewish terms, telling a major story—even with the narrative skill exhibited in these novels, whose subtleties and dialectal force defy any brief expository summary—is only half the job...

...But what about my dead children, do they forgive You...

...The sledge hammer of the Holocaust destroyed that world, and he himself was shattered...

...In Wiesel's view, Job in a paroxysm of rebellion unmasks not merely his friends but "God?his true adversary," who is absent from His creation...

...And he wasn't even Jewish...

...Moses in Egypt "tried to comprehend the cruelty of the oppressors and that of some of the overseers chosen from the ranks of the slaves...

...Dawn explored the reality that to avoid future holocausts, Jews (and, one might add, other persecuted minorities) would have to take over their own defense, that the day of the passive galut (Jewish exilic) mentality was over...

...My favorite line is about Adam: "Poor man: punished for nothing...

...It brings us a message aptly summarized in the section on Isaac: "It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime, and still not give up the act of laughter...

...Beginning with the Bible, they have relied on the story—not philosophical exposition—to touch levels of the unconscious and conscious, the cultural and personal, no rational argument could reach...

...the other because from the outset teachers have shaped and guided the Jewish response to often seemingly incomprehensible events...

...all one needs to do is to turn one's back on the living...

...They appeared to recognize that the sheer power of the story it told defied their normal categories...

...In his new phase Wiesel has set out to reexamine the tradition...

...Using his imaginative gifts and an event he has placed at the center of our vision, Wiesel has given new life to an ancient Jewish form and enabled it to speak to us...

...It is a stark and hypnotic narrative of the Holocaust that conjures up the kingdom of darkness and plunges the reader —Jew and non-Jew alike—into a fire that burns the soul...

...They viewed their task as commenting on individual verses, searching for nuance, casting new light on the characters and happenings of the past to help interpret the unfolding present and keep alive the promise of ultimate delivery...

...At the same time, it is informal and mellow in tone, clear and studded with humorous touches—a side of Wiesel that is winning and relatively unknown...

...In the binding of Isaac, Abraham conducted a test: Would God allow the drama to reach a tragic end...

...The Town Beyond the Wall took up the problem of the apathetic bystander—a universal moral question and the central pedagogical challenge to religion and culture in the wake of the Holocaust...

...I demand that justice be done to them, if not to me, and that the trial continue...

...Night, his first book, originally published in 1958, has been one of the most influential works of this Jewish century...

...Some will be put off by the meandering style of Midrash, the play of possibilities within the text...

...This forces God to enter the dialogue, yet Wiesel then devastatingly lashes out against Job's surrender to the intervention: "Job should have said to God: Very well, I forgive You...

...Yet the world has done its best to go on with business as usual, and most critics have returned to judging this author's books as standard literature...

...Then in an overwhelming, final ironic twist, Wiesel suggests: "By justifying a sorrow he did not deserve, he communicates to us that he did not believe in his own confessions...

...Under the impact of the renewed awareness of Israel stimulated by the Six Day War of 1967, Wiesel, in A Beggar in Jerusalem, concluded there was still the possibility of redemption even on the national level (meaning, in the Jewish context, the cosmic level...

...On one level, Messengers of God is a great triumph...

...Messengers of God—the second volume in this series that began with Souls on Fire, a retelling of Hasidic tales—reveals the author's underlying drive more openly than anything he has written to date: "In Jewish history all events are linked...

...Traditionally, such teachers were priests or prophets or rabbis...

...Past occurrences must be reinterpreted in the light of the rare decisive event that changes everything...

...Wiesel grew up in a milieu where the seamless web of history and the pattern of continuity, redemption and story telling was coherent and strong...

...To properly understand what Wiesel is trying to do, one must see him as a link in the chain of Jewish teachers who have passed on the tradition, and who have shared the conviction that this was critically important to the Messianic deliverance of all mankind...

...Apparently Wiesel wishes the tradition to be a source of healing and insight for a generation that is remote from it, so he yields some of the raw power total invocation of the Holocaust might have conferred on the book...

...We have known Jews," he writes, who "wished to become blind for having seen God and man opposing one another in the invisible sanctuary illuminated by the great flames of the Holocaust...

...Thus Job stands up to God and forces Him to look at His creation...

...Isaac, who narrowly escaped immolation, is the survivor who is a blessing, for while "suffering confers no privileges...

...they meet in man, not in God...

...The one was necessary because the event is the revelation, and there is no other way to do justice to it...

...His [the story-teller's] story does not begin with his own...

...In the thunderous final pages of the essay on Job we see the ferocious intensity the book might have maintained...

...This book is not for everyone...

...New insights come at us with startling power throughout the book...

...His tools are the text, the time-honored Rabbinic writings and the Holocaust illuminations his creative vision brings to the subject...

...Reviewed by Irving Greenberg Chairman, Department of Jewish Studies, City College of the City University of New York Elie Wiesel's writing has always posed a problem of understanding'—not the least perhaps because he is perceived, and to some extent presents himself, as a literary figure...

...He had the courage to get up and begin anew when He created man, God gave him a secret—and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again.' Cain became "the first idealist or nihilist revolutionary" who rebelled against God—killing in order to destroy the creation whose imperfections he could not suffer any more...

...I forgive You to the extent of my sorrow, my anguish...

...Victims could become brutalizers...

...After the blow dealt to established structures by the Holocaust, however, Wiesel has predicated his life and writing on the belief that a more secularized voice would have to teach this generation...

...Isaac knew how to transform it into prayer and love rather than rancor and malediction...

...Adam "though defeated by God did not wallow in self-denial...

...Early reviewers treated his classic Night as fiction, then drew back...

...What right do I have to speak on their behalf...

...After the sin, Eve "suddenly realized that life and death are not separate domains...

...it is fitted into the memory that is the living tradition of his people...

...Indeed, the role of the story is clear from the admonition in the Passover Haggadah, read by Jews each year to recall the central tale of Israel's slavery and redemption: "In every generation a person must see himself as if he personally went out of Egypt...