Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives

2. Wiesel as Interpreter of Biblical Narrative

2 Wiesel as Interpreter of Biblical Narrative Everett Fox The Hebrew Bible does not exist in and of itself. As an anthology of ancient Israel’s literature, as an account of ancient hearers’ past and present, its reality and coherence depend fully on its audience, be they a community or an individual. In that sense it resembles our experience of a work of art. There is no such thing as the Bible any more than there is such a thing, in an abstract sense, as a Beethoven symphony. In that instance , despite the existence and appearance of a musical score, there are only performances , some of them live, some of them recorded, and some of them imagined, that bring the master’s creation into the human world of time. We can, to be sure, talk about musical structure, antecedents, tempo, and so on, but these remain in the realm of the analytical, not in the lived experience of the music. Similarly, I would argue, the Bible can be dissected, subject to his­ tori­ cal, comparative, philological, and archaeological analy­ sis, but in the end, it is the community of hearers and readers, whether in a liturgical setting, a study group, or the quiet solitude of a study, who put flesh on the bones of the text, and who blow into it the breath of life. As early Christians and Muslims well knew, and emulated, Jews have his­ tori­ cally had a performance relationship with the Hebrew Bible. By this I mean not merely the practice of reading the text aloud in synagogue on Sabbaths and holidays, but all the creative aspects of dealing with a canonical work, involving reading, hearing, recreating , fleshing out, and expanding what is on the printed page. A powerful stream in Jewish literature of all ages is the transformation of the biblical text, which began already in the period of Bible itself (for instance, in Deuteronomy’s reworking of earlier law). One could indeed characterize classical Judaism as a recasting of the Bible in its own image, in whichever period one finds oneself—­ so that rabbinic law and lore, medieval Hebrew poetry, mystical inner flights of imagination, and modern re-­ imaginings of Jewish identity, all clothe themselves in the outer garment of the Bible. Elie Wiesel belongs to this great tradition, in a particularly twentieth-­ century—­ that is, mass audience—­ manner. He deserves credit for bringing not only the text to 21 22 | Everett Fox the fore, but a particular and particularly Jewish approach to it, in which the reader or the listener is invited to sit up on the stage, as it were, and observe the characters and their situations at close range. Through the way in which he unfolds the text, Wiesel gives his audience the opportunity to ask the biblical actors questions about their motives , their emotions, their struggles, thus narrowing the gap between forbidding sacred text and reverential audience. He dares, as Jewish tradition has done since earliest times, to challenge the assumptions we bring to the Bible—­ and perhaps its own assumptions as well!—­ and to see the text anew as preeminently a bearer of eternal questions. This he accomplishes by honing in on biblical moments of decision—­ Hagar and Sarah with their sons, Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, Jacob confronted by the wrestler—­ and by skillfully weaving in provocative questions that have been asked by the rabbis of the Talmud and the medieval commentators. These latter fig­ ures have been, in a very real sense, his teachers, and their genius in finding the right questions has informed his fluency with the text’s delights and dilemmas. Wiesel articulates his approach in the introduction to Wise Men and Their Tales, to which he gives the title “And What Does Rashi Say?” Here he initially accesses his childhood feelings about the great medieval commentator—­ “I thought I loved Rashi because he made my life easier”—­ while revealing, through his lifelong relationship with the master, his own enduring relationship with Jewish texts. He puts it as follows: Commentary in Hebrew is perush. But the verb lifrosh also means to separate, to distinguish , to isolate—­ that is, to separate appearance from reality, clarity from complexity , truth from its disguise. Discover the substance, always. Discover the spark, eliminate the superfluous, push back obscurity. To comment is to reclaim from exile a word or notion that has been patiently waiting outside the realm of time and inside the gates of memory.1 In his writings...