A Theology of Meaning: Hasidism and Deconstruction in Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire, released in 1972, is a personal retelling of the lives and legends of the early Hasidic masters of Eastern Europe. The novel begins with the movement's founder, the Baal Shem, and chronicles the rise and development of the movement through the teachings and lives of those who followed him. Although these lives are filled with fantasy, paradox, and contradiction, Wiesel's account has one constant message: in the suffering of exile, every Jew can speak for God. When Souls on Fire was released, Victor Malka asked Elie Wiesel, "What is, for you, the greatest Hasidic saying?" and Wiesel replied, "There is much to choose from. Without doubt, one that I find beautiful and like very much is the saying of this master: 'I have always sought to discover what man is, and finally I have understood. He is the language of God'" (Malka 37). And this is the message that Wiesel explores in Souls on Fire as he presents the words of Hasidic masters who taught that, despite God's absence, every Jew can give meaning to existence and provide comfort in suffering through word and deed. Stated more simply, Wiesel's Hasidism teaches that through speech and action, man can become the language of God. For this paper, I would like to explore in Souls on Fire how it is that man is the language of God. And in exploring this question, I would also like to illustrate the resonances between this aspect of Jewish theology and deconstruction, by drawing from Derrida's "Edmond Jabés and The Question of the Book." For, the correspondence between these two illustrates that in the absence of God and all that He symbolizes, writing can be a form of prayer that can begin to redeem both man and God.

In "The Question of the Book," Derrida argues, much like Wiesel, that in the absence of God, it is both the freedom and responsibility of man to speak. He argues that language, as both speech and writing, in fact, is only possible in this absence. For Derrida, God's absence signifies the impossibility of literality within language and the absolute illegibility of being that all men seek to overcome. Just as the exiled Jew seeks to return to God's presence, Western thought seeks to achieve the fullness of being through absolute presence. Therefore, Derrida argues, God, as the ultimate signifier of logocentrism, is universally absent. This absence opens up the very possibility and freedom to question and to play, and thus creates the very possibility and impossibility of meaning. Derrida writes, "God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us…This difference, this negativity in God is our freedom" (67). God's absence then opens the empty, non-space of différance, wherein absence and difference give breath to language. As a result, all language has a negative origin in an inherent lack; it does not begin in a center, but in the absence of a center; not in God, but in the absence of God. Most of Derrida's works focuses on the necessity of this absence to allow for the questioning, the difference, and the play that produce meaning. The absence of God, or the lack that He symbolizes, is not a failure or an impairment to be overcome, but it is the freedom that forces men to take on the responsibility of speaking in the void, of being the language of God. Rather than destroying the possibility of truth and ethics, this view of absence creates an ethical call to meaningfully fill the void, to speak and act humanely while struggling in an abyss.

Wiesel's portrayal of the Hasidic masters in Souls on Fire exemplifies this view of man's relationship to absence and also argues that, within it, men can and should speak in place of God. In Wiesel's account, men are not only free to speak in the absence of God, as Derrida argues, but they are responsible to...