And the Sea Is Never Full (10 page)
Read And the Sea Is Never Full Online
Authors: Elie Wiesel
Dado arrives a half hour later. It is the first time I see him in civilian clothes. He has an open face with deeply etched features. His gaze is direct. We sit down in a corner of the lobby. He comes straight to the point: “I don’t know whether you know what is going on here. But you should.” From his briefcase he pulls several files and lays them out on the table. “Here are a few documents. Top secret. If any one of these had been submitted to me at the time, I would have had a clearer view of the situation. And the danger. These documents were received during the weeks preceding the start of hostilities by subordinates at Military Intelligence who gave them little credence. According to their chief, General Eli Zeira, the Arabs were neither ready nor capable of launching another war against Israel. I am not saying that he and his team should be blamed. I was their superior; I assume full responsibility for what they did. But why were
my
superiors whitewashed?”
For three hours, he pleads his innocence. Finally he bursts into sobs. After he leaves I tell Marion: “I have just seen a man with a broken heart.”
For a whole week I am ill, shaken by violent bouts of fever. My body aches; I hallucinate. What is wrong with me? Bollek Goldman, who has become a devoted friend, comes running from Tel-Hashomer. He can find no medical explanation for my ailment. Could it be psychosomatic? He comes to see me every day. His presence does me more good than his medications.
A short time later, swimming in his pool, Dado has a heart attack. He dies instantly. His military funeral is almost a state funeral. Did the government suddenly feel guilty? In Israel as everywhere else people mistakenly believe it is possible to make up for injustices with pomp and circumstance.
Later I question several members of the Agranat Commission: Why had they been so severe with Dado and so indulgent with his superiors? If one is to believe them, the commission’s charter forbade them to go beyond the military and to implicate the politicians. This was mined and dangerous terrain. I insist: “Was it just? Was it fair?” Their embarrassed replies do not satisfy me.
As for Golda, I saw her only one more time. Bitter, frail, she did not forgive those who had pushed her out. As a rule, Golda never forgave. As Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel observe in their excellent book
Le siècle d’Israël:
“Everything she believes in is white, everything she rejects is black.”
Now that she had fallen, did she expect me to defend her against her many political adversaries? Unfortunately, I could not. For I believe that because I am not an Israeli citizen, I must not interfere in Israel’s internal affairs. Moreover … Golda had not convinced me. Surely she was not the only one responsible for the disaster of the early days, but she should have borne some of the onus. The Agranat Commission should not have whitewashed the government. One day I said to Golda: “At war’s end, why didn’t you offer your resignation? The people of Israel would not have accepted.” Golda did not see it that way. She resented my question. In any case, since the Eban affair we had been less close.
I ask Moshe Dayan if he had agreed with the Agranat Commission’s conclusions. Yes, he had. And does he not feel responsible for what happened? No, he does not. And after a moment he adds very quietly: “If I had felt guilty, I would have put a bullet through my head.”
Dayan remained a stranger to me as long as he was commander in chief or minister of defense. Only later did ties develop between us. With rare exceptions I tend to appreciate political men and women more when they are out of office. I felt closer to David Ben-Gurion after he left office to live at Kibbutz Sde Boker. He seemed more human, more vulnerable. The man who had hated the “Stern Gang” to the point of throwing its leaders into prison now became a close friend of Yehoshua Cohen, the old Stern Gang member with a legendary “terrorist” past.
I remember my first encounter with Moshe Dayan. He was in the United States on a lecture tour and called me from Miami to invite me to lunch. “Just you and me,” he said. “We’ll be able to talk quietly.” We
made an appointment at the Regency Hotel in New York. The purpose? He explained: “As you know, all my life, I have fought against the enemies of Israel. Now I want to work on behalf of the Jews outside of Israel.” He told me his plan: to study from multiple angles this Jewish community that had survived, to understand the reasons for its endurance. If it were possible to discover which elements had saved it from extinction, we could apply this knowledge whenever the Diaspora found itself in difficulty.
The idea was bizarre. The destiny of a people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical, factors. But he believed in it. He gave up this project only when Menachem Begin, acceding to power in 1977, named him minister of foreign affairs. Later, if Begin was able to conclude a peace treaty with Sadat, it was largely due to Dayan.
The annual UJA conference is to take place in late 1973. For the second time its director, Irving Bernstein, invites me to give an address. His argument is almost the same as in 1972, after the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich: “The Jewish community is going through a moral crisis. It is therefore important that …” He is right; the Yom Kippur War still weighs heavily on our individual and our collective consciousness. What to say to our distraught friends from Israel? The theme becomes clear: “Against despair.” To be a Jew means not to despair, even when it seems justified.
An example: In a sealed cattle car an old Jew cries out: “Today is Simhat Torah, the festival of the Law. We must rejoice.” He pulls a small Sefer-Torah from his bag and begins to sing. Another example: In a barracks,
over there
, men are wondering how to celebrate the festival of the Torah without a Sefer-Torah. One of them glimpses a young boy and signals him to come over: “Do you remember what you learned in
heder?”
“Yes, I remember
Shma Israel,”
the boy replies. “Then recite it.”
“Shma Israel, adoshem elokhenu, adoshem ekhad….”
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One…. “Good,” says the man, lifting up the boy, as if he were the Sefer-Torah itself, and he begins to dance and sing the traditional prayers.
In our tradition celebrating life is more important than mourning the dead. The law is strict: When a wedding procession crosses a funeral procession, the former has the right-of-way.
Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav—you may remember my love for his
teachings—often said:
“Gvalt yidden, seit eich nisht meyaesh….”
For the love of heaven, Jews, do not despair…. In his memoirs, the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum refers to a Bratzlav
shtibel
inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Over its entrance was the same inscription: JEWS, DO NOT DESPAIR. For a Jew, who bears a four-thousand-year-old memory, despair is equivalent to blasphemy.
Invited soon after to address the annual FSJU (French UJA) conference in Paris, I develop the same theme: the struggle against despair. The speaker who follows me to the podium is the Israeli ambassador, Asher ben Nathan. I did not know that he had just lost a son in battle. Had I known, I would have remained silent.
In 1974, after the Yom Kippur War, Israel is constantly shaken by revelations of scandals linked to the military debacle of the early days of the war. In the United States it becomes impossible to open a newspaper without feeling shame and distress. Israeli morale is at its lowest, and it affects ours in the Diaspora. Irving Bernstein comes to see me several times, accompanied by other leaders of the Jewish community, urging me to speak up. One morning Irving arrives with an invitation to address the board of governors of the Jewish Agency, which is about to meet in Jerusalem. “It is a kind of a superparliament of the Jewish people,” explains Bernstein. “It includes Israelis and non-Israelis. For you, for us, it is the ideal platform.” I ask Golda’s advice and that of my Master, Saul Lieberman. Both urge me to accept, though Lieberman warns: “They will be sure to criticize you. But that is the price one pays for living in the Diaspora.”
As I prepare my speech I strive to be frank without hurting my listeners. How am I to put my questions so as not to offend them?
After arriving in Jerusalem the same day as President Nixon—you can imagine the traffic!—I call Golda and read her my text. She is not pleased and admonishes me: “Is that all you have to say to them? Why don’t you remind them of what they did to me?” Taken aback, I reply: “Golda, I haven’t come here to fight for you, but for those of us in the Diaspora.”
To say that my words were well received would be not an exaggeration but a lie. Of course the listeners applauded, but out of courtesy, with little enthusiasm. The next day the Israeli press settled its score with me: “How dare someone who lives in America tell us what to do! Since when is a Jew from the Diaspora entitled to preach to us?” The following is part of what I managed to say:
There are questions we must ask ourselves at times, and we must do so without complacency. They may well irritate you; would you prefer self-censorship? Pushkin claims that a beautiful lie is superior to a debasing truth. I don’t agree: Truth alone elevates man, even when it hurts. The task of the writer is, after all, not to appease or flatter, but to disturb, to warn, to question by questioning oneself.
All this, as you may have guessed, is the prelude to a few criticisms. I dislike having to articulate them; it is a role that does not suit me. Yes, such is the price I must pay for living in the Diaspora: I never criticize Israel outside Israel.
We are Jews, you and I. You are Israeli; I am not. You represent a state, a group, a nation, with its structures and institutions; I represent no one but the characters I have created or who have created me. You have found; I am still seeking. You have been able to make the break; I have not. As a Jew assuming his Judaism, why have I not settled in the land of our ancestors? That is a question you have asked me often. It annoys you, and I understand why. The Diaspora troubles you. Just as Israel challenges its validity, it represents a challenge to Israel. We are united by the past, divided by the present. Whose fault is it? We blame nobody. We each have our contradictions. Each solves them or claims them in his own way. Yet you show your disapproval in periods of crisis, while we tell you of our concern in periods of calm.
What is this all about? Our arguments are well known. Let us start with yours. Opposed as you are to the Diaspora—historically, philosophically—you say that its Jews are riddled with complexes and paradoxes. In spite of being personae non gratae for centuries in numerous countries, they still choose to stay there—to cling to what? What was it that prevented us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from following a Rebbe Gershon Kitiver or a Rebbe Mendel of Vitebsk to the Holy Land? Between one pogrom and the next, one massacre and the next, we knocked at exile’s every door rather than return to our home.
Later, during the emancipation, our newly acquired civil rights led us to dilute or even shed our Judaism rather than use it to fulfill ourselves. The historian Simon Dubnow
stresses the point that upon contact with individual liberties, Judaism weakened. Once admitted into the Christian milieu, the Jew often came to look upon his Judaism as a blemish, an obstacle. Emancipation drove us to assimilation, not to nationalism; it brought about a setback rather than a rebirth of our spirituality. Instead of revolutionizing our own history, we set out to change that of others. We absorbed every culture, excelled in every tongue, interpreted all the signs, and took part in every battle; no other people has, either by necessity or vocation, been as universal or as universalist. We hoped to save humanity even as it was bent on our destruction. We were determined to accept nothing less than absolute salvation for all nations; we exerted ourselves more for others than for ourselves.
Israel belongs to all Jews. But is the reverse true? How, then, is one to explain our reticence to join you there permanently? You condemn us. At worst, you consider us hypocrites; at best, you consider us weaklings. Nor do we think that you are entirely wrong. Israel exists, and we live elsewhere; therein lies an anomaly. Of course, there are all sorts of alibis, excuses, justifications to be invoked: We help you, we act, we use our influence on your behalf. What would Israel do, what would Israel be, without the Diaspora? Yet the fact remains: The Jewish people, dispersed as it is, does not live in a state of siege, while you, in Israel, have made your homes on the front lines; your children, not ours, confront perils every day; you, their parents, not we, endure anguish every night.
If you reproach us for our failings, you are right. We don’t deny them. As we stand before you, we feel inadequate.
As for us, for what do we reproach you? This may sound absurd and surely unjust to you: We blame Israel for having happened too late. Too late to save the millions and millions of Jews who needed its protection the most. I know it is not Israel’s fault. And yet it hurts. Not only do I wish to love Israel, I want to admire it, hold it up as an example, find there what cannot be found elsewhere: a certain sense of justice, a certain sense of dignity. I want to find
there a society ruled by a vision of probity, justice, and compassion.
It is a paradoxical yet understandable demand. The more we in the Diaspora fall prey to materialism, the more we yearn to see idealism flourish in Israel; the more passive we are, the more we would like Israel to be creative; the more earthbound we are, the more anxious we are that Israel be ethereal and sovereign. In short, we would like Israel to be what we are not. And if we sometimes voice our disappointment, it is because its reality dangerously resembles ours. Perhaps Kafka was right: Man’s weakness lies not in his inability to obtain victories, but in his inability to make use of them.
We follow your current events and frequently fail to understand them. The tone of your debates, the recriminations, the animosities remind us of other societies, other lands. Is it wrong of us to expect so much of Israel? To place you on what amounts to a pedestal?
Try to understand us as we try to understand you. In a world gone mad from feeding upon falsehood and greed, we look upon Israel as a haven where the cycle of cynicism and nihilism will be broken. As people who live in a discredited, disintegrated society, we see in Israel proof that man can and must win the battles within himself. Call me romantic or naive, but I see Israel, surrounded and besieged by hatred, as an ancient laboratory eternally renewed. I see Israel as a country in which victory does not necessarily signify the defeat of the enemy and in which true triumph means triumph over oneself. And in which friendship is possible and irrevocable. And in which everything that is tainted by banality, by vulgarity, is outside the law.
Are we wrong to raise you so high, thus asking Israel to be a model nation? Are we wrong to seek there signs heralding a social messianism or a messianic humanism? And to ask you—though we dislike interfering in your internal affairs—to disagree less frequently and less noisily? And to prepare a friendlier welcome for new immigrants? And to treat Russian Jews as brothers, even when they change their minds on the way and decide to settle in
America? Are we wrong to ask you to adopt a more Jewish attitude toward Palestinian Arabs and, particularly, toward Israeli Arabs? To be less intransigent, more receptive? From Israel we expect no more, no less than the impossible.
Let us open our eyes, my Israeli brothers. As a Diaspora Jew, I live the life and the destiny of Jerusalem. And I should like you to understand us. We are responsible for each other; you do not deny it. If the principal task of the Diaspora is to protect Israel, yours should be to become a new source of life to the Diaspora. Let us assume the dialectics of our so singularly Jewish and so Jewishly singular condition: that we both live on two levels simultaneously; that we both lead a double life; that we be each other’s heart and conscience, constantly questioning and enriching each other. Without the Diaspora, Israel would have no one to question and no one to be questioned by. Without Israel, the Diaspora would know nothing of victory but the anguish that precedes it.
In these extraordinary times our generation is at once the most blessed and the most accursed of all. Some thirty years ago Jewish heroes wept every time a courier brought them a weapon; today strategists marvel at the Jewish army’s military genius. Fifty years ago nobody imagined that Russian Judaism could survive Communist dictatorship; today we are witnessing its rebirth. A generation ago we discovered the ruins of the world and the dark side of God; today it is on them that we are building future Jewish history.