All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (63 page)

She was wrong. Though I had prepared as well as possible, I got stage fright when I saw the couple in the audience. Was I now to talk about the Talmud in the presence of my generation’s greatest Talmudist? I began by citing the maxim that a disciple who dares teach the Halachah (the Law) in his master’s presence is guilty of a capital crime. As it happened, Dr. Lieberman was not (yet) my master, and I proposed to treat not the Halachah but the Aggadah, the Talmud’s legendary aspect. I don’t know how I managed to concentrate, but I do know that Dr. Lieberman waited for me outside after the lecture.
Friends who heard him couldn’t believe their ears. A compliment from Lieberman was not only the most prestigious of honors, but also extremely rare. “Do come and see me tomorrow,” he added.

Anxiously, I knocked at the door of his office at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He himself answered and invited me to follow him in. It was my first visit to this room, which looked ready to burst if just one more volume were added to it. I was to return to that room twice and sometimes three times a week for seventeen years, literally until the day he died.

He began by questioning me about my past and present life. As I answered, I wondered what he had really thought of my lecture, whether I had not in fact made many mistakes. I was eager to hear his commentary and criticism, but he hadn’t yet finished his introductory queries. He had read my articles on Russia, in Yiddish in the
Forverts
and in Hebrew in
Yedioth Ahronoth
. He was pleased that I spoke Hebrew. He spoke of Motele, his hometown near Pinsk, and asked me about Sighet. I mentioned that a childhood friend, David Weiss-Halivni, had been a pupil of his at the seminary. Finally, almost in passing, he came to the subject I yearned to speak of. “Toward the end of the first half of your lecture,” he said, “you explained an apparent conflict concerning a text of the Mekhilta. Was that explanation your own find?” “I think so,” I stammered. “I see,” he said. “You think so.” He stood up, took a dusty volume from the very top of a bookshelf and flipped through it, until he found a certain page. “Look,” he said. “Your finding dates back … six centuries.” I told him I was pleased to walk in such footsteps, but the impish look on his face suggested he only half believed me. He returned to the attack: “A little before the conclusion you presented a solution to the problem raised by Maimonides with regard to Aristotle. Did you also think this solution was your own finding?” I nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see.” This time he opened an even older and dustier volume and pointed to an annotated page: “Here it is.” Disappointed? On the contrary. I repeated my defense, adding that for me study meant not discovery but rediscovery. My purpose was not to answer questions but to know them, and if possible to invent them. My mother never asked me whether I had given the melamed good answers, but whether I had asked a good question. As I answered him, I was staring at my feet, speaking hoarsely in a tone I hoped was convincing. Lieberman was silent at first, then he said, “Is twice a week all right with you?” All right? Joy flooded through me. I wanted to shout and dance.

What I learned from him is what, of all my knowledge, I value most. He made me aware that to be a Jew is to place the greatest store in knowledge and loyalty, that it is because he recognizes divine justice that he speaks out against human injustice. That it is because a Jew remains attached to his God that he is permitted to question Him. It is because the prophets loved the people of Israel that they admonished them and reprimanded their kings. Everything depends on where you stand, my master used to say. With God anything can be said. Without God nothing is heard. Without God what is said is not said.

Le Chant des morts
was published in 1966. In English the collection was entitled
Legends of Our Time
. “For our time” would have been more accurate. How to prevent the past from receding too rapidly into the distance? How to keep alive the dead who, beyond time and speech, beckon us, not to torment us but to reassure us that they reproach us not for clinging to life but for living in forgetfulness? And yet, I don’t know what a son can do or say to commemorate a father who died in the camps. I pray, light candles, say Kaddish, try to see his face as I meditate, but I know it is not enough. It can never be enough.

How to evoke a childhood buried in ashes? How to speak of masters whose eyes are veiled forever and yet whose glance still burns into ours? What to make of the silence wrenched from the blackness that covered heaven and earth in those days?

To forget nothing, to efface nothing: that is the obsession of survivors; to plead for the dead, to defend their memory and honor. So much has been said about them. They have been subjected to countless analyses, dissected, exhibited, and made “presentable” for theological, scientific, political, and commercial purposes. Treated like objects, they have been insulted, belittled, and betrayed. To resist this tide survivors—and they are becoming ever fewer—have only words, poor, ineffectual words, with which to defend the dead. So some of us weave these words into tales, stories, and pleas for memory and decency. It is all we can do, for the living, and for the dead.

In 1967 the Six-Day War stamped a whole generation of Jews with its halo of glory. I remember every phase and aspect of the war as if it were yesterday, as if I had fought in it myself. I remember the three somber, tension-laden weeks that preceded it. I remember the outrageous words, the overt, brutal threats of our enemies, and the silence of our friends and allies. And I remember Israel’s solitude.

It started one spring day in 1967. Israel was celebrating the nineteenth anniversary of its independence. During the military parade in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Eshkol received a brief military report that something was afoot with the Egyptians in the south. The next day there was talk of troop movements. The gravity of the situation quickly became clear. Cairo announced the beginning of its policy of aggression: the blockade of the Strait of Tiran, the revocation of the demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula. To facilitate the massing of his armies there, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded the evacuation of the UN units. Secretary-General U Thant’s hasty submission to Nasser’s demand surprised the international community. There was no longer any doubt about Egypt’s offensive aims. The situation deteriorated daily. When would war break out? In fact, it had already begun with the blockade, a
casus belli
under international law.

Israeli correspondents and all those sympathetic to Israel reported on the debates in the UN Security Council with mounting unease. Ahmed Shukairy, Yasir Arafat’s predecessor as head of the PLO, made no secret of his dream of witnessing the demise of the state of Israel. Soon, he declared, there would be no further Jewish problem in Palestine: The Jews would be driven into the sea. No one silenced him. No one protested. Gideon Rafael, Israel’s permanent ambassador to the UN, a seasoned diplomat, exposed the Arab countries’ objectives. His words fell on deaf ears. Most delegates tended to mind their
own business, perhaps vaguely pleased that the Middle East was once again relieving their boredom. There was, however, one exception: Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice who had been named U.S. ambassador to the UN by President Johnson. He fought day and night for Israel’s security and survival.

The Eshkol government undertook intense diplomatic activity in Western capitals, exhausting all its resources in an effort to forestall armed conflict. Eshkol abhorred war, and he believed that if the great powers did their duty, it could be averted. He sent Abba Eban, his minister of foreign affairs, to Washington, London, and Paris. His was a tough assignment, though some top-level meetings were less discouraging than others; a few were even cordial. But no one was prepared to intervene. The so-called great powers suddenly seemed very small. Leading officers of the Israeli general staff urged Eshkol to unleash a preventive war: Every day’s delay threatened to carry a greater price in human lives. One young general burst into the prime minister’s office, tore the epaulets from his uniform, and threw them on the table, lecturing the head of the government, who was also the minister of defense: Failure to order an immediate attack would mean the destruction of the Third Temple and the end of the Jewish state. But the cautious Eshkol temporized, especially since the war option did not have the unanimous support of his cabinet. General Yitzhak Rabin, chief of the general staff, put on civilian dress and journeyed to a kibbutz in the Negev to solicit the view of David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion counseled patience, urging that war be avoided as long as possible. He recommended a strategy of retrenchment, using the term
titkhapru
, meaning “dig defensive trenches.” He felt that a war at that moment could lead to national disaster. “The chief we once worshipped had lost confidence in the army,” Rabin later told me. His intense disappointment drove him into a depression that, fortunately, lasted only twenty-four hours.

Saul Lieberman was more confident. His argument was based not on military science but on theology—and economics. “The Lord,” he said, “is also a banker. He has invested so much in our people’s history that He can no longer turn away from them without forfeiting His capital.”

On Sunday, June 4, 1967, I felt anxious but content as I went to the graduation ceremony of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The chancellor, Louis Finkelstein, had invited me to deliver the commencement address. In a sense, I was one of the graduates, for I was to
receive my first honorary doctorate. The Israeli ambassador, Gideon Rafael, was among the invited guests.

My address was later published in
One Generation After
, under the title “To a Young Jew of Today.” In it I spoke of commitments and obligations to our own community and to the human community at large, of our common memories and hopes. In the printed text I deleted a brief exhortation, a call to the students to stand by Israel, now threatened by so many enemies. “Should war break out tomorrow,” I told them, “we must come to Israel’s aid.” I was speaking, of course, only of a hypothetical tomorrow.

Very early the next morning I was awakened by Rafael, who asked me how I knew. “Knew what?” I asked sleepily. “That there would be war today,” the ambassador replied. In other circumstances I would have laughed, but I didn’t feel like laughing on that day, one of the worst since 1945. The news was depressing, Jerusalem’s silence ominous. We didn’t know that the new minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, had ordered a strict blackout on news from the front. The only available information came from Arab capitals. Radio Cairo, Damascus, and Amman were jubilant: The Israeli front had collapsed, Beersheba was about to fall, the army was disintegrating, Tel Aviv would soon be in flames.

In fact, the Egyptian air force having been annihilated in the first three hours of battle, Egypt had already lost the war. As yet, the Arabs didn’t know it. Neither did the American public.

In Brooklyn (with the exception of the anti-Zionist Hasidim of Satmàr and the Neturei Karta, who hailed the supposed Israeli defeat), Jews gathered in the Houses of Study to recite psalms. Forty-seventh Street, the heart of the Manhattan diamond industry, came to a virtual standstill as groups formed to discuss the situation. Emergency funds were collected everywhere, from rich and poor alike. Senators and representatives were besieged with requests to intervene. Doctors volunteered to fly to Israel to help their overwhelmed colleagues.

The entire Jewish population now offered its unconditional support to Israel. The Diaspora communities, as if lifted by a tidal wave of solidarity, rose to the occasion. Even intellectuals who had suffered their Jewishness as an embarrassing contradiction now openly proclaimed it. Assimilated Jews forgot their complexes, sectarians their fanaticism. There was a sense of responsibility for the survival of Israel. American Jews called Israeli relatives and friends offering to take care of their small children as long as necessary. Isaac Stern canceled
his concerts and flew to Tel Aviv, declaring: “Our enemies say they will exterminate two and a half million Jews. Well, let them add one more to the list.”

I knew I had to leave for Israel. I made the decision in the first hours of the crisis, even though I had no illusions: Israel did not need men like me. I had no experience with weapons, and would probably even be a burden as a soldier. But I had to go anyway, determined to stay to the very end, which I feared would be bitter. Deep within myself, I was convinced this war would mark the end of the Jewish state, the death of a dream. I should have had more faith in the Israeli army, I know. But at the time I was terrified. As I listened to Arab speeches and observed the passivity of Western governments, I told myself it was happening all over again. Clearly the Jews would fight courageously, as they had in the Warsaw ghetto, but they would be outnumbered, as before. The well-equipped Arab armies would crush Israel in the end. Then the so-called civilized world would shed crocodile tears and deliver grandiloquent funeral orations on our death. I say “our” death because, like so many of my contemporaries, I associated mine with Israel’s. For me it was inconceivable to wish to live in a world that had no place for a sovereign Jewish state.