Elie Wiesel (quotes)

Think higher, feel deeper.
No human being is illegal.
For me, every hour is grace.
The danger lies in forgetting.
Questions outlive the answers.
Every moment is a new beginning.
Peace is our gift to each other.
Humanity would never tolerate it
How can a human being be illegal?
A man can laugh while he suffers.
Not to remember is not an option.
Love makes everything complicated.
A word is worth a thousand pictures.
Holy War is a contradiction of terms.
I do not believe in collective guilt.
To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice
When adults wage war, children perish.
I was never without a book in my hand.
It always hurts when you lose a secret.
God means movement, and not explanation.
That [Exodus] occurred, I have no doubt.
Every moment contains a spark of eternity.
Some stories are true that never happened.
What I do, I want to do with all my being.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
I think [teacher] is the noblest profession.
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
The whole community must be saved [in Tibet].
One person of integrity can make a difference.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Even in darkness it is possible to create light.
Naturally, the human being wants to forget pain.
An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman
There are real people behind the [Bible] stories.
God made (human beings) because he loves stories.
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
War is like night, she said. It covers everything.
My anger rises up within faith and not outside it.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.
When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
Tibet’s a tragedy. It’s an insult to human decency.
I don’t want my past to become anyone else’s future.
There is no word in Hebrew for religion, by the way.
Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.
[The Bible] is been my passion almost from my youth.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
And to write is to sow and to reap at the same time.
It’s not hatred that kills people, it’s indifference
The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference
The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
There are no accidents, only encounters with destiny!
If the victims are my problem, the killers are yours.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Occasionally, I come to moments of anguish in the text.
When our center is strong, everything else is secondary.
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
After my father’s death, nothing could touch me any more.
The sins I regret the most are the one’s I didn’t commit.
Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?
Warmed-over loves and soups are generally not recommended.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.
I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people.
The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You dont die of it.
Whatever you think in life… think higher and feel deeper.
To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.
What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?
Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed.
What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.
Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.
I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.
I had my religious crisis after the war, not during the war.
Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Eternity is the place where questions and answers become one.
The primary task of a Jew in turbulent times is to be Jewish.
People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.
[Moses] Mendelssohn was a religious Jew. I felt sorry for him.
Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?
I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.
My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.
I believe in the story [ of Adam and Eve]. For me, it’s a story.
Because I survived, I must do everything possible to help others.
We’ve sort of agreed that the account of Adam and Eve is a story.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
I have to be self-conscious of what I’m trying to do with my life.
every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer . . .
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.
The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.
In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.
When I see a child who is hungry, I see a person who is humiliated.
Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.
In order to fly, you have to give up the ground you are standing on.
In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?
It’s not only America. Terrorism now is a threat to the whole world.
I respect scholarship. But I don’t like to do things half-heartedly.
The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.
I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
‘Indifference to evil is equal to evil’ because it strengthens people.
Weapons means killing. Weapons is ah, I’m simply sensitive to the word.
Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.
Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future.
Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as the answers.
Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees.
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children.
I learned to trust the threats of enemies before the promises of friends.
You’re at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.
If we want to know history, I would think there would be every reason to.
You cannot write in more than one language. Words don’t come out as well.
In the word question, there is a beautiful word – quest. I love that word.
Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.
What is man? Hope turned to dust. No. What is man? Dust turned to hope.
Take sides. Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming.
I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.
I’m not a military man. I wish I were, then maybe I could give some advice.
What is Scripture? The Hebrew word is torah. Torah means teaching, learning.
It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.
A religious person answers to God, not to the elected or non-elected official.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has escaped the kingdom of night.
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.
Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
Only the guilty are guilty: the children of killers are not killers, but children.
For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.
[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.
Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don’t know.
The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac are nowhere in any other tradition.
You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.
Knowledge does not corrupt, unless it is arrogant; but then it is not true knowledge.
Perhaps fate isn’t blind after all. Perhaps it’s capable of fantasy, even compassion.
Christians call it the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” and Jews call it the “Binding of Isaac.”
There is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.
Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion.
My faith is a wounded faith, but it’s not without faith. My life is not without faith.
If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?
Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
The story [of the Sacrifice of Isaac ] is much more a part of theology than of history.
I think [Sacrifice of Isaac] is the most important event in the Bible except for Sinai.
Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself
In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
I am much more afraid of my good deeds that please me than of my bad deeds that repel me.
This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story – and perhaps into a prayer.
The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.
You shouldn’t act as a spokesperson for someone who’s trying to impose his will on you.
I think so. 9/11 has been a turning point in American history, there’s no doubt about that.
I don’t believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.
Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.
..you do not leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, you are taking it with you.
You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.
Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other’s stories.
Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.
It’s easier to be conformist naturally; it’s easier except for those who don’t like conformism.
I belong to a tradition that believes that the death of a single child is a blemish on creation.
I’ll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.
Whether every story that’s there [in the Bible] is a historic truth … Again, I’m not concerned.
The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.
Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.
I’m not a political person, and their ambitions are not mine. They want power. I don’t want power.
One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.
The most important question a human being has to face… What is it? The question, Why are we here?
The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.
Whenever an angel says “Be not afraid!” you’d better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.
Only fanatics in religion as well as in politics can find a meaning in someone else’s death.
We still are looking for someone who knows the secret of immortality. Only God is immortal; we are not.
Every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.
The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.
There is not anti-semitism as an ideology. The civilized world must think that anti-semitism is stupid.
Anything you want to say about God you better make sure you can say in front of a pit of burning babies.
For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.
When I say it doesn’t make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.
There is much to be done, there is much that can be done… one person of integrity can make a difference.
Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.
Once upon a time refugee meant somebody who has a refuge, found a place, a haven where he could find refuge.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the happiness and humanity of the human being.
[Tibet] is a small country based on religious principle, religious traditions. It never wanted any conquest.
I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Yiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent.
I come from a tradition – from the Jewish tradition, which believes in words, in language, in communication.
He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Even if people tell me they have historical proof [that it is not historical], that doesn’t really bother me.
If you ask me what I want to achieve, it’s to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
In the beginning there was faith – which is childish; trust – which is vain; and illusion – which is dangerous.
A man who is fighting for the future of mankind is not waiting for torture, he’s waiting for — the Revolution.
Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?
My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.
We didn’t really differ [with Frank Moore Cross] because we have the same love of the text. We share that love.
It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.
Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.
It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.
Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.
It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.
Politicians, they give the visible aspect of the change, but the change, the root, the anchor are in young people.
Abraham is trying to obey God, but not to kill. I feel that moment is one of the defining moments of Jewish faith.
I developed an anger at [Moses] Mendelssohn. Later, I read the book. I realized there was nothing subversive in it.
Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.
When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.
I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .
Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren’t they one and the same?
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior.
My teachers [ had the most impact in my life]. Of course, my father and grandfather, but after my family, my teachers.
For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
Personally, as a student who loves words, who loves texts, I am concerned with finding something in the text from within.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
I believe in God–in spite of God! I believe in Mankind–in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future–in spite of the Past!
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
I remember when I heard the words “Biblical criticism” in my town, it was with disdain: “Biblical criticism? How dare you?”.
I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else’s suffering.
Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, The hater has power. All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.
All I hope is that the American coalition is doing its best to prevent civilian casualties and the killing of innocent people.
It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It’s a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
My students are very special. They are my source of pride, my source of joy, my source of hope. I am terribly fond of my students.
For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.
Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
I’m not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I’m not one of them. I have no political ambitions.
Except if it has some historical meaning for them to have Tibet under their control. I don’t understand why [ Chinese] want it so much.
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone – terribly alone in a world without God and without (hu)man(ity).
The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.
Man asks and God replies but we don’t understand his replies because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.
The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.
I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say “I hate you”, it’s not really hate, you know, it’s anger.
Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain
I believe a human being – if he or she wants to remain human, then he or she must do something with what we have seen, endured, witnessed.
Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.
I have tried to keep memory alive… I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn’t. The victims died but the haters are still here.
This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
More people are aware of the consequences of hatred. People are aware. Therefore more people are engaged in fighting … racism and so forth.
First we must understand that there can be no life without risk – and when our center is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.
What I don’t like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, “Teach me mysticism.” It’s a joke.
[Adolf] Hitler needed, he didn’t want to kill Jews, he wanted to expel German Jews, and therefore it’s not entirely corroborating your theory.
Human beings all change. Not what they are but who they are. We have the power to change what we do with our life and turn it into our destiny.
I don’t think I should accept other people’s suffering because I suffered. Just the opposite, because I suffered I don’t want others to suffer.
We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.
[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said “Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty”, and this is fanaticism.
In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.
For nearly 3,500 years Exodus has left such an imprint on people’s memories that I cannot imagine it had been invented just as a legend or a tale.
The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one’s shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.
The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough.
When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.
For us it’s not easy to be conformist, I cannot stand to be conformist, I don’t accept what it is, I like to say no. If I see an injustice I scream.
For me [Patriarchs] exist. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob exist today. They are people that you see with white beards. I have no doubt of their existence.
Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.
Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes.
Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.
You’re shaking,¶ so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.
One thing is that [Tibetans] should not give up hope. That’s – even [if] it lasts a century. My discussions with the Dalai Lama always were about that.
I really don’t teach the way Professor [Frank Moore] Cross does. I don’t teach the text the same way he does. I teach Biblical themes, Biblical events.
That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life – that is what is abnormal.
We’re both [with Elie Wiesel] a long way from the position of the so-called Biblical minimalists. Some of them see no history in the Bible until Josiah.
Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.
Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.
The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.
As you know, I describe Shirat ha-Yam as part of an epic story that has qualities of history and which also has qualities of the mythological, of an epic.
My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn’t divorce God, but I’m quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it’s a wounded faith.
I became one of [Moses Mendelssohn] defenders. But then I heard the words “Biblical criticism” again. And, of course, afterward, I studied it more closely.
If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.
The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
I’ve worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn’t the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz?
Every single human being is a unique human being. And, therefore, it’s so criminal to do something to that human being, because he or she represents humanity.
Josiah has a tremendous reputation in the text. He rediscovered the Book of the Law; you remember how Hilkiah the High Priest somehow found it [2 Kings 22:8].
In Talmudic literature, certainly in the beginning, he was like a human being – except he was a serpent. But he was talking and walking and probably dreaming.
I don’t think [governments] use [religious repression ] as a weapon, they use it as a as a means of – of oppression. To stifle opposition. To mute resistance.
Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.
If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life — mine or that of my fellow man — is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)
None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
Whatever we thought was certain is no longer certain, and therefore in science probably certain things must be correct, but in human behaviour I am not so sure.
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
No commandment surpasses the one concerning the liberation of hostages, for they are among the starving, the thirsting, the stripped, always in danger of death.
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories
The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.
Do you know what laughter is? I’ll tell you. It’s God’s mistake. When God made man in order to bend him to his wishes he carelessly gave him the gift of laughter.
I do not deal with the text [of the Bible] scientifically. I read it, I’m interested in its layers of meaning, but my relation to it is much more an emotional one.
Bite your lips, little brother…Don’t cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now…Wait. Clench your teeth and wait.
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.
Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.
Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.
I was there when God was put on trial….At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than ‘guilty’. It means ‘He owes us something’. Then we went to pray.
A voice behind me asked, “Where is God? Where is He? Where can He be now?” and a voice within me answered: “Where? Here He is – He has been hanged here, on these gallows.”
I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day.
Sometimes I am asked if I know ‘the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don’t even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn’t instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.
There is a coalition of anti-Semitism today, the extreme left, the extreme right and in the middle the huge corpus of Islam. I’m worried, I go around with a very heavy heart.
What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.
The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.
His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
I would hesitate to give advice to the Dalai Lama and his people because they are suffering. The Dalai Lama suffered from exile and the people in Tibet suffer from oppression.
There is divine beauty in learning… To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.
Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn’t need him. And which will survive him.
In my little town, Sighet, which is in Romania, Hungary-Romania, but a real shtetl, a little [Jewish] village – and we began with the Chumash [Pentateuch], probably at age four.
I’ve organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn’t help but at least they explored it.
Emphasis must be put on learning: there is no substitute to education. It can be briefly formulated in a few words: always, whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.
Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in recorded history. And therefore, later on, if there will be a later on, anyone wishing to know will know where to go for knowledge.
Of course, afterward, I studied [commentary on the Bible by a Rabbi Moshe Dessauer] more closely. But, in truth, it doesn’t touch me. It doesn’t change my attitude toward the text.
Paris: city of encounters, of furtive and painful discoveries. All isms converge there, including the anti-isms, all the revolutionaries too, including the counterrevolutionaries .
I feel very close to French culture and to the French humanism, which occasionally one finds, even in the highest places. And therefore, all of my books have been written in French.
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.
Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.
The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek’s soul had become the bow. He was playing his life…He played that which he would never play again.
What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn’t express himself so he put images on walls.
In spite of despair, hope must exist. In spite of suffering, humanity must prevail. And in spite of all the differences in the world, the worst enemy, the worst peril, is indifference.
It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I say to myself, if the text was good enough for my father and grandfather, it must be good enough for me. I admit, that is a rather personal way of approaching the text – or a prayer.
I think those governments who resent religion, they’re afraid of religion because religion may be in their eyes, in their views be seen as a counter government or a parallel government.
I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that’s all.
They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)
I’ve been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.
Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.
Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war
It’s not a weapon, [governments] don’t kill, they don’t conduct massacres, although massacres have been committed and many people were killed, but they stifle religion, they’re afraid probably.
I don’t see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.
[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.
For the purpose of my life, I don’t ask the question. First of all, I believe. I think the Five Books of Moses are inspired. Call it divine. I don’t know. But I would certainly call it inspired.
If you make a determination that [story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac] is not historical, do you throw it away? I don’t think we can say whether it’s precisely, scientifically historical.
Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.
Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It’s very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there’s not much reason to.
We know, for instance, of “The Book of the Wars of the Lord.” It is mentioned in the text [Numbers 21:14]. There was a book: Where is it? One day you will dig and you will maybe find it. [Laughter]
The knowledge that I have acquired must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude.
Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations ¬ó not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.
Worse still is that mankind – the non-Jewish world – learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don’t know about it, or we don’t want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.
[Chinese] are a huge empire now, you’ll soon be – in a few years two billion people in the world. So, you should be more compassionate, more understanding. And above all, you don’t need all their trouble.
Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It’s knowledge. It’s truth.
We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.
I have an open mind – – I read, I study, I study your work and the work of other people with less talent. But that is not what I do in my writing and teaching. Still the love for the text we have in common.
The criminal is not alone when he returns to the scene of the crime; he is joined there by his victim, and both are driven by the same curiosity: to relive that moment which stamped past and future for each.
It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing. We always must remember that it is given to men and women to choose life and living, not death and destruction.
I’d rather speak as a student of philosophy. Philosophically it makes no sense, absolutely makes no sense. Why should people inherit evil things when their memories could contain and should invoke good things?
I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that’s all I think we can do and we should do.
No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?
[Tibet] never sought any territory. All it wanted is the conquest of the soul, that people should attain a kind of inner sovereignty, inner independence, inner freedom. And inner strength to attain the absolute.
What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.
My interpretation is different. God asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” [Genesis 4:9] And Cain answers “Lo yadati, “I don’t know” or “I didn’t know.” Then comes a period, followed by “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering… The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.
The Vietnam War ended because of the campus situation. And so many other injustices have been corrected in the World today only thanks to the young people. So, young people especially have a responsibility for Tibet.
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.
Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
Be careful with words, they’re dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It’s up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words
I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming out base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
you can do something. You can, even for one person Don’t turn away; help. Because those who suffer, often suffer not because of the person or the group that inflicts the suffering; they seem to suffer because nobody cares.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.
Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one ‘last night’ to another?
I would say to [Chinese government], You don’t need Tibet really. You don’t need all the problems Tibet creates for you. It’s so small, so far away. Give them their religious freedom and I know that they wouldn’t misuse it.
Always remember, my good friends, that there is one sin we must never commit and it is to humiliate another person or to allow another person to be humiliated in our presence without us screaming and shouting and protesting.
You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee.
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Often I say to myself “Really, what are we doing on this planet?” We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes … Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
Nevertheless, we are led to believe that true words can communicate more than truth, they communicate what life is all about, that it’s threatened, when it’s threatened, when it’s in danger, then it becomes a curse or a blessing.
All those who love thrillers will find in Michael Alexiades’s first novel a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. It combines suspense and knowledge, experience and imagination. His grateful readers will now wait for the next.
There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can.
I am not so na√Øve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.
We are heading towards catastrophe. I think the world is going to pieces. I am very pessimistic. Why? Because the world hasn’t been punished yet, and the only punishment that could be adequate is the nuclear destruction of the world.
We live in the age of communication. Write letters to the editor. Speak to your congressman, to your senator. If you are young, especially young people are taken by this human rights activities. They should organize the universities.
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.
I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naivet√© [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.
[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer…. And why do you pray, Moishe?’ I asked him. I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.
In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves.
Fanaticism is the greatest threat today. Literally, the 21st century threatened by fanatics, and we have fanatics in every religion, unfortunately, and what can we do against them? Words nothing else, I’m against violence but only words.
At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.
I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like–free at last!
I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction–the Messiah.
I was inspired by the marvelous example of Giacometti, the great sculptor. He always said that his dream was to do a bust so small that it could enter a matchbook, but so heavy that no one could lift it. That’s what a good book should be.
No one has written the way Isaiah does. The royal style, the majesty of the language. He is called the prince of the prophets. No one has written like that. I’ve studied ancient literature, Homer, for example, but it’s not the same thing.
All those – or most of those – who went through the experience during the Second World War – they want to remember more – more and more. It’s never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully.
When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, ‘why didn’t you discover the cure for such and such? why didn’t you become the Messiah?’ The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is ‘why didn’t you become you?’
Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell. . . .Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you will never understand the executioners.
Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.
Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.
With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don’t think it’s human to become an agent of the angel of death.
Refugee today means somebody who has no home. No homeland. No security. No government to protect him or her. And it is of course one feels not only uprooted, one feels useless. One feels always surrounded by hostile forces. Arousing suspicion.
When I see what is happening all over the world today – the violence – the stupid, arrogant, grotesque violence that is dominating humankind. I cannot not remember that there were other times, of course [the Second World War]. I never compare.
Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.
I have absolutely no problem with the young Germans. I even feel sorry for the young Germans because to be maybe sons or daughters of killers is different than them to be sons and daughters of the victims. And I felt sorry for them. I still do.
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.
I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It’s a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.
I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how
I think he is condemned by himself to loneliness. God is One: he was, he is, he will be always One. One is so lonely. Maybe that is why he created human beings–to feel less lonely. But as human beings betray his creation, he may become even lonelier.
When I have my manuscript finished, more or less, I type it myself, with two fingers. I type fast with two fingers. And then when it’s ready, I reread, recorrect, and retype it. Everything is my own work. I do not give it to secretaries or to typists.
What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.
We’re alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, ‘I’m alone.’ Someone answers, ‘I’m alone too.’ There’s a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” There you have the whole Biblical understanding that you are your brother’s keeper. You also have a whole other understanding in which you are not your brother’s keeper. And I’ve heard some extremely bright people take this position.
From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated¬óever.
Today there isn’t a university where they don’t have special courses [Jewish studies or Holocaust studies], hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.
Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember. The main thing is to teach them where not to go. Oppression, not to go; dictatorship, not to go; racism and prejudice, absolutely not to go. This is a moral plan [for society].
I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].
What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is – to use a word scholars love – problematic. Let’s say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That’s a historical issue.
A Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.
Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.
Man’s strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?
Today again the teacher is the important thing, but on the other hand anti-Semitism is growing today. No doubt about it. All over the world, especially in Europe, and it’s true they begin with anti-Israeli attitudes and then it’s so strong that it runs over and becomes anti-Semitic.
Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
In the word question, there is a beautiful word – quest. I love that word. We are all partners in a quest. The essential questions have no answers. You are my question, and I am yours – and then there is dialogue. The moment we have answers, there is no dialogue. Questions unite people.
How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?
I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.
I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don’t attach any importance to my life any more. I’m alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me.
I don’t speak about my pain. My pain is something that doesn’t need to be purged. I want to prevent people from suffering. I don’t speak about my suffering. Suffering is something personal and discreet. Also, I know it will never leave me. I don’t want it to leave me. It would be a betrayal.
But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.
Every nation has its prestigious military academies – or so few of them – that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?
I remember one day I came home and shouted to my grandmother, “Grandma, Sarah is pregnant!” Poor Sarah! For weeks before I had read how difficult it was for her to get pregnant. “Grandma! I have news for you!” “What did you learn?” “I have news, Grandma: Sarah is pregnant!” [Genesis 16 – 21].
There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It’s like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it’s raining today and it’s going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.
The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.
I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I’m behind the times. I’m still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.
My loyalty to my people, to our people, and to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of Israel outside Israel. As a Jew I see my role as a melitz yosher, a defender of Israel: I defend even her mistakes must identify with whatever Israel does even with her errors.
If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too. And another one replaced it, and that one is no longer the original text. These are questions that perturb me much more than whether it’s history or not history.
It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer Neither is resignation Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment.
I was involved in trying to save the Rwandan people and Sudan now. It’s a mass murder. Mass murder is a terrifying word. We don’t have to go further than that. Cambodia came close to, but what was it, Cambodians killing Cambodians after all. So therefore I think we should be very careful with vocabulary.
As for the discipline, we [me and Frank Moore Cross] belong to two different disciplines. One involves research and archaeological materials. Mine is more interpretive. But it is the love for the text that is there, and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.
Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.
In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One’s very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.
I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person weighs more than them all.
The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the … most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD’s and MD’s. Couldn’t believe it.
How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don’t know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for – for people who have faith should speak up.
I don’t know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that’s why I teach, I’ve been teaching all my life.
This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century – solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.
If you read Exodus 15 carefully, it describes a storm at sea. This is the old Yahwistic source. In the retelling of the story in the later Priestly source, it is more miraculous: The water stands up on either side like a wall. There are walls of water standing up. As you move back in time, oddly enough, the story becomes more historical.
If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we’ll have to fight again we wouldn’t have believed it. Racism, anti-Semitism, starvation of children and, who would have believed that? At least I was convinced then, naively, that at least something happened in history that, because of myself, certain things cannot happen again.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed….Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake? And the master of the good name said, When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake.
I am looking for the word which is there and shouldn’t be there. I wonder, why is it there? Or I look for problems: the Akedah [the Binding of Isaac – Genesis 22]. It still baffles me. Each time I read it – and I read it at least twice a year – each time I discover new layers in it. Always. So this is of more concern to me than the minimalists.
But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?
I was working as a journalist for an Israeli paper in Paris, and my salary at the highest was fifty dollars a month. At the end of the month I always had palpitations; I didn’t know how to pay my rent. Even after the war, I was often hungry. But that’s part of the romantic condition of a student. To be a student in Paris and not be hungry is wrong.
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.
We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear – the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)
One day – I remember it was a Sabbath afternoon – I came to the synagogue with a book in my hand. I saw a commentary on the Bible by a certain Rabbi Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An elderly man came up to me – I was then maybe 10 or 12. “What are you studying?” he said. “Dessauer’s commentaries,” I said. So he gave me a slap on my face.
The Bible is interpreted by the Talmud. Except, in Rabbinic tradition, a Talmudic law has the weight of the Biblical law. Sometimes we say in a prayer, “Blessed are Thou, O God, who has ordered us and commended us,” to do something. But you don’t find that “something” in the Bible; you find it in the Talmud. So Talmudic law becomes as important as Biblical law.
I would not like to draw analogies, with the past.Governments, leaders, intellectuals, mainly intellectuals who should know the ethical dimensions, are so important, so essential to culture, religion, to civilization, and to our own lives. And that means what? It means not to be indifferent, not to stand idly by. That is a biblical commandment that we are committed.
Remember also that it is not knowledge but the yearning for knowledge that makes for a complete, accomplished man. Such a man does not stand still but perseveres in the face of adversity, nor does he remain untouched by the pain cause by absence. On the contrary, he recognizes himself in each cry, uttered or repressed, in the smallest rift, in the most pressing need.
The term is piqua nevish [?] it means to save a soul, to save a life. And that commandment supersedes all others. It means literally you may violate almost everything except, I think, three commandments of the heart, 613, – you may do anything, violate any commandment and the injunction simply to save a human life. And there are enough lives to be saved in – in Tibet.
Still I believe that Hanna Arendt, she was wrong when she tried to say that we are all actually capable of this, it’s not true. I think it’s not true. There are certain things human beings are not capable of. I mean people, even normal human beings. You have to do certain things in order to become what the enemy was and I didn’t accept her philosophical outlook on that.
I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.
Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, ‘That’s not it.’ So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn’t it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
John XXI was a very great pope and he’s the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don’t speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed.
Take the story of Cain and Abel. Why were we given that story? Scientifically, you may have an explanation for it, but I’m not approaching it from the scientific point of view. I’m saying: Why do we need that? It’s a sordid story, a depressing story, a dark story. Why should I believe that I’m a descendant of either Cain or Abel? Thank God there is a third son! [Genesis 4:25]
In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. … We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source‚ if not the cause, of all our misfortune.
The American and the British armies liberated camps, there wasn’t a single order of the day: Let’s go and liberate the camp. They stumbled upon the camps. Same thing with the Russians, I asked the Colonel who liberated Auschwitz, they didn’t, there wasn’t a priority. But I feel that that was a mistake, it was a sin because they could have saved so many people and they didn’t.
The Tibetan religion has a past. And furthermore it has such an appeal. There again young people today are drawn to Buddhism and to Tibet. It’s not only because of the Dalai Lama. It’s because of what Tibet represents. There is a vast reservoir of knowledge, of mystical knowledge, which can be found in Tibet.The Chinese shouldn’t be afraid of that really. They have other means of survival.
My good friends, we are all waiting. We are waiting, if not for the Messiah, as such, we are waiting for the messianic moment. And the messianic moment is what each and every one of us tries to build, meaning a certain area of humanity that links us to all those who are human and, therefore, desperately trying to fight despair as humanly as possible and – I hope – with some measure of success.
Everything is in it: the promise and the hope and the fear and the challenge and the defiance. The test is a double test: Just as God tested Abraham, Abraham tested God: “Let’s see if you really want me to go ahead with it and kill my son.” Then the angel says, “Do not raise your hand against the boy” [Genesis 22:12]. It was the Angel of God who says this, not God. God was embarrassed. [All laugh]
My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I’m doing. I don’t innovate anything. I’m just repeating.
[My approach to the Bible, history does really matter.] Everything matters. But I have priorities. For instance, for me to know whether there were two Isaiahs or one is less important than the text itself. Of course I read the arguments for and against. But it’s not my task in life to say there were two or three authors of Isaiah’s book, or how many authors there were of Deuteronomy. This is not what I’m doing.
My faceless neighbor spoke up: Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve. I exploded: “What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?” His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily: I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that’s all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It’s the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.
It has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary’s past, namely the wartime Hungarian governments’ involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens. I found it outrageous that the Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly could participate in a ceremony honoring a Hungarian fascist ideologue
For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek’s soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings–his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again…When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.
I’m a privileged person, I feel privileged because of who I am. I write books, I write novels, I write essays and I teach and I go from university to university. I’m one of the old, but I still go around, but I only see those who are not like that, I don’t see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.
I read the text; and then I come to the Shirat ha-Yam, to the Song of the Sea [Exodus 15], to the poetry. Who could have written such a poem except someone who went through it? It is so full of life, so full of truth, of passion, of concern. And the thousands and thousands of commentaries in the Talmudic tradition that have been written on it. It had to have happened. But even if not, I would attribute the same beauty to the text as I do now.
I believe in books. And when our people [coughing] – our people of Jerusalem, let’s say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that’s all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book – the little book – and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.
But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living – to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. (vi)
Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations.
There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I’ve learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn’t all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries. And where am I in all this?
The Pope going to Jerusalem, the Pope recognising the State of Islam, the Pope going to the wall organising a concert for the Holocaust in the Vatican, going to the synagogue in Vatican, and that happens in Protestant service as well. That doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism disappear, but it is on certain level that Jews all the time, or with Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, meeting all the time, studying together, signing petitions for all kinds of causes.
If enough people are sensitive to the tragedy of Tibet, I think it will produce a change politically as well. But furthermore, it’s important for the people in Tibet. Now communication is such [that] people know what is happening. Even Tibetan people would know that the Interfaith or the international group of religious people – that everybody who is religious is taking up their cause. It would help them a lot if we give them courage, and that in itself is enough.
I’d almost say hope isn’t what it used to be. It’s very difficult today to be a teacher. I speak to children. And tell them, look, no matter what, you must have hope. You must. When I invoke Camus, who said when there is no hope, you must invent hope. . .hope is something that is not what God gives us. It’s like peace. It’s a gift that one can give to one another. Only another person can push me to despair. And only another person can push me to hope. Its my choice.
And I, the for¬≠mer mys¬≠tic, was think¬≠ing: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve de¬≠ceived You, You chased them from par¬≠adise. When You were dis¬≠pleased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your fa¬≠vour, You caused the heav¬≠ens to rain down fire and damna¬≠tion. But look at these men whom You have be¬≠trayed, al¬≠low¬≠ing them to be tortured, slaugh¬≠tered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray be¬≠fore You! They praise Your name!
I may be a descendant of Seth. I say to myself, What does [the story of Cain and Abel] teach me? So I go back to all the interpretations in the Talmud, which to me are a source of pleasure and joy. Then I say, maybe this story is not for then; maybe it’s for now! It’s possible for brothers to kill one another in civil wars. But most important, whoever kills, kills his brother. That’s a moral conclusion that may not be there; but that must be my conclusion. Otherwise, why read it? Whoever kills, kills his brother.
In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it’s stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?
There is much to be done, there is much that can be done… One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
[The Book of the Law]was lost for so many years. And then Josiah decided to celebrate Passover. The text says that “The Passover sacrifice had not been offered in that way … during the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah” [2 Kings 23:22]. What do you mean? Not in the days of David and Solomon? Never before? And what of the days of the prophets? What happened? That’s what I’m anguishing over. If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too.
… True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. True, we are too poor to eliminate hunger; but in feeding one child, we protest against hunger. True, we are too timid and powerless to take on all the guards of all the political prisons in the world; but in offering our solidarity to one prisoner we denounce all the tormentors. True, we are powerless against death; but as long as we help one man, one woman, one child live one hour longer in safety and dignity, we affirm man’s [woman’s] right to live.

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