One Generation After (19 page)

This choice implies an experience on the levels of history and conscience. Nothing is certain, nothing is determined; at any moment, at any turning point, you may begin all over again. You commit yourself totally with your every decision, a commitment that has meaning only to the extent that it
springs from an eternally torn conscience, capable of surprising itself.

Ultimately, where does this adventure lead? No Jew can answer. No Jew knows.
Israel nikra holekh
, says the Talmud. The Jew is in perpetual motion. He is characterized as much by his quest as by his faith, his silence as much as his outcry. He defines himself more by what troubles him than by what reassures him.

The Russian, Pushkin once said, is born for inspiration. Unamuno stressed the sober and poetic quality of the Spaniard. To me, the Jew and his questioning are one.

When the debate is over, when everything seems to have been said and accepted, it is then that the Jew appears, and by his very presence, his very survival, reverses learned elaborate theories and doctrines. And one must start anew. Hardly is a structure completed than the Jew insists on altering its foundations. He devises systems and immediately questions their validity; he refuses to be categorized. Small wonder he is not liked: he disturbs and irritates even his protectors. With him, they must be ready for the unexpected. Rooted both in the contemporary and the timeless, he invites hesitation and doubt. He sows disquiet in the heart of the victor and undermines the good conscience of the vanquished. Two thousand years of exile have taught him to wait for the Messiah and to suspect him once he has arrived. Push interrogation to its limits and beyond, and you will do what the Jew has been doing for centuries.

To be a Jew, therefore, is to ask a question—a thousand questions, yet always the same—of society, of others, of oneself, of death and of God. Why and how survive in a universe which negates you? Or: How can you reconcile yourself with history and the graves it digs and transcends? Or: How should you answer the Jewish child who insists: I don’t want to suffer, I no longer want to suffer without knowing why. Worse: How does one answer that child’s father who says: I don’t want, I no longer want, my son to suffer pain and punishment without knowing that his torment has meaning and will have an end? And then, the big question, the most serious of all: How does one answer the person who demands an interpretation of God’s silence at the very moment when man—any man, Jew or non-Jew—has greater need than ever of His word, let alone His mercy?

As a Jew, you will sooner or later be confronted with the enigma of God’s action in history. Without God, Jewish existence would intrigue only the sociologists. With Him, it both fascinates and baffles philosophers and theologians. Without God, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry would be relevant only on the level of history—another episode in another inhumane war, and what war is not inhumane?—and would not require a total revision of seemingly axiomatic values and concepts. Remove its Jewish aspects, and Auschwitz appears devoid of mystery. Remember Sartre’s phrase: in love, one and one are one. For us, contemporary Jews, one and one are six million. Six million times one is God. For just as one cannot conceive of such slaughter with God, it is inconceivable without Him. This is perhaps the final absurdity of the event:
all roads lead to it; but all explanations fail. The agony of the believer equals the bewilderment of the non-believer. If God is an answer, it must be the wrong answer. There is no answer. If with the holocaust God has chosen to question man, man is left to answer with a quest having God as object. The interrogation is twofold, and it is up to you to claim it as your own and link it to the actions it calls forth.

But I repeat: we are talking about a double, a two-way, interrogation. It must not be divided. The question man poses to God may be the same God poses to man. Nevertheless, it is man who must live—and formulate—it. In so doing, he challenges God, which is permissible, indeed required. He who says no to God is not necessarily a renegade. Everything depends on the way he says it, and why. One can say anything as long as it is for man, not against him, as long as one remains inside the covenant; only if you repudiate and judge your people from the outside, will you become a renegade.

You will undoubtedly reply: Why speak about God, since I do not believe? Don’t worry, my purpose is not to give you back your faith. You are free to replace God with any word—or presence—you prefer. It would in no way alter my message to you.

Besides, I leave you the task of working out your own relationship with God. What matters to me is the relationship between the individual and the community.

To be a Jew is to work for the survival of a people—your own—whose legacy to you is its collective memory in its
entirety. No one has the right to dissect history, making personal choices, selecting this period, that personality. Your “I” includes them all. You have seen Moses at Sinai, heard David in his citadel, fought the Romans at Massada, felt the Crusaders’ sword. Whoever sees himself as a severed branch becomes
other
, the Midrash teaches us. Isolate yourself within time, and time itself becomes abstraction, and so do you. Time is a link, your “I” a sum total. Your name has been borne by others before you. Your fate is not yours alone. The questions asked by children and the answers they will be given were all heard at Sinai. Your doubts and turmoils, your victories as well, come down to you, in a direct line, from your earliest forebears.

You may call this phenomenon historic consciousness, or spirit of solidarity. Your kinship encompasses those who live in your time and those who survive within you. You cannot fulfill yourself as Jew if you feel no bond with those who share your dilemmas, your celebrations and even your contradictions: the Jews in Israel, in the Soviet Union, in the Arab countries, and even in the lands where they are not harassed.

As a Jew, you are entitled, indeed required, to speak in the name of all Jews. Your word, therefore, takes on immeasurable significance and ancient resonance; it involves others: your ancestors from the most distant past. For the Jew who denies himself denies more than his own person: he denies Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To betray the present means to destroy the past. Whereas to fulfill oneself means choosing to be a link between past and future, between remorse and consolation, between the primary silence of creation and the silence that weighed on Treblinka.

Because you too have lived the holocaust. You were born after? No matter. One can step inside the fiery gates twenty-five, fifty years later. Do you know Uri-Zvi Greenberg? That Israeli poet and visionary tells the story of a young Jew in King Herod’s time who left Jerusalem for Rome. He had taken along a pillow which remained with him always. One night, as he slept, the pillow caught fire. That very same night the Temple burst into flames in Jerusalem. Yes, one can live a thousand miles away from the Temple and see it burn. One can die in Auschwitz after Auschwitz.

We are all survivors. And since holocaust there was, I prefer not to have experienced it from afar. Does that shock you? With its full burden of distress, shame and horror, the experience the survivor draws from it makes of him a privileged person: a witness.

And do not consider this an attempt to glorify Jewish martyrdom. I do not believe in martyrdom. It belongs to our past, not to our destiny. The Jews never sought to be martyrs; they never equated suffering with sanctity. Asceticism was viewed as alien to our tradition, which sees sin in mortification. Refusal of life and earthly sustenance does not lead to God. God dwells only in joy. God is joy, God is song and fervor. The need to suffer? Invented by those who for two thousand years caused us endless suffering. Martyrdom is only one of many myths attributed to us. It provided our persecutors with a clear conscience, since it permitted them to say: “Yes, we punish the Jews, but it’s for their own good, their ultimate salvation.” Or: “Our hostility is what keeps them alive.” Well, we say: “No!”

The Jews would gladly have forgone the persecutions. Contrary
to generally held notions, we do not need anti-Semitism in order to affirm themselves and flourish. We do not need outside stress to enhance our creativity. The image of the hunted Jew, cringing with remorse, finding happiness only in expiation and sacrifice is not of our making. Study it carefully and you will see who created it: our enemies. We attempted to destroy this image as best we could. By laughter. And revolt. Since society considered the Jews’ existence incompatible with its own, it was natural that the Jews endeavored to change society. Which explains why so many revolutionary movements, in every sphere, counted so many Jews among their pioneers and apostles.

This brings me back to the question in your letter dealing with the rebellious spirit among your friends. You ask me what your attitude should be.

Rebellion is rooted in the very origins of Jewish history, as you probably learned at school. Abraham breaking his father’s idols, Moses rejecting slavery, the prophets criticizing—most disrespectfully—kings and power-seekers: they were true rebels. As were those Jews who, though exiled and oppressed, refused to join the ranks of their oppressors. By their stubborn faith, they contested the validity of the system. Their presence became protest and summons. Each Jew who did not take the easy road of conversion transformed his heresy into an act of defiance. Today’s rebellion fits into this pattern. Moreover, I believe it is directly linked to the tragic repercussions of World War II, or more precisely, to the holocaust.

Distrust and rejection of authority, the disturbances and riots, the craving for escape, the urge to abolish uniforms and
taboos: the shadow of concentration-camp reality influences the aspirations and actions of your comrades. They may not be aware of it, but even their terms of reference apply more to my generation than to theirs.

It was at Auschwitz that human beings underwent their first mutations. Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Hiroshima. Or genocide in Africa. Or attempts to dehumanize man by reducing him to a number, an object: it was at Auschwitz that the methods to be used were conceived, catalogued and perfected. It was at Auschwitz that men mutilated and gambled with the future. The despair begotten at Auschwitz will linger for generations.

With Auschwitz in their past, your comrades—Jews and non-Jews alike—rebel against those responsible for this past. Parents, philosophers, teachers, profiteers, opportunists, leaders without ideals, preachers without souls, institutions and organizations without purpose—in short: the discredited and exposed generation of adults that gave you birth. Had it not been so blind, so dishonest, so uninspired, it might have avoided the unleashing of hell, or at least kept some measure of control. By undermining the present, your friends denounce the past, a bankrupt past tottering under its own guilt and revealing anew man’s bond to Cain. Every field, every sphere of activity is suspect. A society, a civilization, that could lead to such degradation has, in fact, issued its own verdict, a verdict without appeal.

If your comrades invent new gods, it is because the old ones begot Eichmann and Treblinka. If they lack respect for their elders, it is because the latter lived in the era of Sobibor and
Babi-Yar. The anger of the young is a rebuff to the complacency they see in the way their parents choose to live—and die. If they aspire to a new language, it is because their parents’ was used in Majdanek. They opt for poverty and anonymity because they want to resemble those who lived in ghettos, and were poorer and lonelier than they will ever be. They allow themselves to be clubbed without responding, so as to follow the example of millions of Jews who, before them, practiced nonviolence with the same inefficiency and futility.

You tell me Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin no longer inspire your classmates. Why? Because they were part of the system of varied and contradictory ideologies that paved the way for Birkenau, simply by preceding Birkenau. If the new saints are called Mao, Che or Zen, it is only because nothing associates them with the holocaust.

Yes, I remain convinced that the current wave of protest calls into question much more than the present. Its vocabulary takes one back a quarter of a century. Factories and university buildings are “occupied.” The Blacks rise up in the “ghettos.” Prague is in the headlines and so is Munich. The police use “gas” to disperse demonstrators. Concentration camps in Egypt and in Greece. The Watts and Harlem riots are compared to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Biafra is referred to as another Auschwitz. Political analysts talk of nuclear “holocausts.” Racism, fascism, totalitarian dictatorship, complicity, passivity: words heavy with past significance, which explains their impact on your comrades. By criticizing today’s regimes, they indict yesterday’s corruption. That is why it is important to put society on trial, this society which was—and still is—ours.
By scorning its defenders, you place yourself on the side of the victims.

But remember: the Jew influences his environment, though he resists assimilation. Others will benefit from his experience to the degree that it is and remains unique. Only by accepting his Jewishness can he attain universality. The Jew who repudiates himself, claiming to do so for the sake of humanity, will inevitably repudiate humanity in the end. A lie cannot be a stepping stone to truth; it can only be an obstacle.