Wise Men and Their Tales
Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters
by Elie Wiesel
Schocken, 336 pp., $26
ELIE WIESEL always held the respect of my peers as a chronicler of Jewish agony when I was a young Yeshiva student. The mopiest of my classmates loved to punctuate bouts of self-pity with a passage from Wiesel's Night: "Suicide is not the answer. There is no answer." Yet, to suggest that he might offer a valuable perspective to the study of Jewish texts--legal, philosophical, ideological--would have been dismissed with a guffaw.
We may have been wrong. In Wise Men and Their Tales, Wiesel grants us an acquaintance with the great thinkers of Jewish history. The first half of the book explores Biblical figures. These characters--familiar well beyond Jewish parochial precincts--have captivated the imaginations of untold billions. Still, they yield new dimensions when viewed under Wiesel's microscope. Take the story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael. The conflict between Isaac and Ishmael has never been fully resolved, the author notes. Israel and the Arab world seem doomed to continue hashing out the resentments of Ishmael's abrupt expulsion.
Wiesel locates the rebelliousness and pride of Hagar in the Talmudic tradition that her father was pharaoh, then fleshes out the conflict between high birth and low station in the servant princess. The character of Sarah is vested with nuance as we trace her desire to please her husband, to bear children for his sake and the sake of Jewish destiny. When loss of personal dignity becomes the price for importing the surrogate child, she bristles, and the seeds of an intricate historical schism are sown.
This is covered with admirable thoroughness. Wiesel even quotes the remarkable Midrash that interprets Balaam's prophecy as predicting that the final clash of the Jews in history will be with the Arabs, who come armed with Ishmael's godly component. I would only append to that discussion the equally prescient seventh verse of Psalm 120, which is interpreted by the classic commentator Rashi to mean: "I am at peace (with the Arabs), but when I speak (of formalizing the peace in a treaty), then they go to war."
Rashi's role as commentator to both scripture and the Talmud is the subject of a special introduction in Wise Men and Their Tales. It includes the delightful tidbit that Nicholas de Lyre, an early fourteenth-century priest, quoted Rashi so often that his colleagues berated him as Simius Solomonis--the ape of Solomon (Rashi's first name). Wiesel rhapsodizes, "His commentary is never an end but a beginning, an eternal beginning. It begs for more, always more. Thus the student, the reader becomes his associate, his fellow seeker. Together they go deeper and deeper into the secret workings of seemingly simple words."
Approaching Talmudic figures, he is no less inquisitive. His disquisition on the career of the versatile Rabbi Yehoshua ben-Levi is a gem, citing Longfellow's beautiful poem about this fascinating figure who bridged the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras. Rabbi ben-Levi was a master of law as well as theology and history. He prescribed Torah as a medicine for all physical ailments--yet, he risked his life to minister to the quarantined bearers of contagious diseases.
Wiesel leaves us to ponder the offbeat Talmudic tale where Elijah the Prophet introduces ben-Levi to the messiah. The Rabbi asked, "When will you redeem us?" The Messiah answered, "Today." The rabbi reported to Elijah, "He lied to me." No, explained Elijah, he meant, "Today, if everyone mends their ways."
SIMON WIESENTHAL, in his memoir, mentions "a Rabbi Silver" who visited the camps after the Holocaust, distributing money and encouraging people to reclaim their Jewish observance. Wiesenthal had received no religious training, but he picked a fight, anyway, proclaiming his disgust for a man who had smuggled a prayer book into Auschwitz and sold a page per day for an extra ration. The rabbi was Eliezer Silver of Cincinnati, a major Talmudic scholar and a supporter of Republicans. And Silver answered Wiesenthal, "Why look at the one scoundrel selling the pages? Why not look at the many heroes who were willing to forgo a meal in extreme hunger, just for a single page of prayer?"
Elie Wiesel looks to have arrived after his long search, getting beyond the lost rations to the treasured pages. Perhaps there is an answer after all. The answer is life. The life of the heart and, yes, the life of the mind.
Jay D. Homnick is a columnist for JewishWorldReview.com and author of several books in Hebrew on scripture and the Talmud.