NOBEL LAUREATE, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR ELIE WIESEL SPEAKS ON SURVIVAL OF JEWISH VALUES AT 2007 KORET PRIZE LUNCHEON

Koret Foundation President Tad Taube presented Nobel laureate and renowned Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel with the Koret Prize on Wednesday, May 9, 2007, at a private luncheon attended by some 250 guests at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The following is a transcript of remarks made by Professor Wiesel in accepting the prestigious award:

Thank you for the words, for the gift and for the extraordinary way you try to describe the function, the mission of Jewish writers today.

It so happens that (Rabbi Abraham Joshua) Heschel and I were very close friends, and I may disappoint you: I have his book inscribed to me.  But I will keep that because now it has your signature on it as well.  I am in San Francisco.  I have a few friends here and they are all here. Bill Lowenberg and I have been working for years in Washington on the (United States Holocaust Memorial) Museum, and then a young friend who has been my star student at Yale, Roger Barnett, and all of you have become friends simply because you are here today.  And how can I tell you what gratitude except by saying that I’m grateful? What you have given me, of course, will help my foundation and maybe you know what my foundation is doing. 

We are trying to bring people together from all spheres and simply decide together there are certain options that are not admissible. And one of them of course is the option of hatred. Hatred can never be a vehicle. Hatred is there, when it is there, only for us to fight it. And if we don’t do that preventively, we are in trouble. It’s very difficult to eradicate hatred. No rational method exists to eradicate hatred because hatred itself is irrational. The only thing we can say to the hater is that hatred ultimately does not only destroy the hated, it destroys the hater. The hater is destroyed simply by his own hatred. He is then like a fanatic because he is a fanatic and the fanatic is someone, someone who does not live in our world but he lives in his own. The fanatic lives in his own hallucinations. He wants to be superior and in order for him to be superior he treats us as inferiors. For him to prove that he’s always right is not to listen to our arguments, which may be contrary to his. He never has dialogues, only monologues. He never smiles, only sneers. So there are certain characteristics of the hater that we must always bring to the attention of anyone who is in danger of being seduced by fanaticism or hatred.

Now in doing that, actually I’m already touching the subject given to me.  It’s a very daunting subject. I was asked to speak about survival of Jewish values and culture. Three words. We can analyze each one of them. And the first one is survival. Survival actually is a component in Jewish history as a question mark.  How is it that we, the Jewish people, are the only people of antiquity to have survived antiquity? All the great empires vanished, even the smaller ones. I think of the Aztecs and the Incas in America. I think of the Etruscans in Europe.  I’m fascinated by the Etruscans because nobody knows why they were chosen almost overnight by the Romans to be annihilated, not only in their lives but also in their culture. To this day we have not yet deciphered the language, the entire language of the Etruscans. And we are still here. Why?

Now of course if you believe in God, then God is the answer. But I believe God is not only the answer, God is the question. Meaning (that) God says, when he says, or if you’re capable of listening, “You are there. Do you know why?” Work, work on the answer. In truth, logically we could have chosen a very simple way. We could have said to God, “Mr. God, you don’t want us around? Goodbye.” And we could have left Jewish history and history in general. There were times like that. 

Once in Talmudic times, in the times of the destruction of the Temple there was one sect call the Pharisees and they decided not to have children anymore because if the fate of Jewish children is to be destroyed, then why have them? Admit it that it is a logical, even rational response to tragedy. We don’t want more tragedy. It’s enough. But we were overruled. The Pharisees were overruled. Yes, the Temple was destroyed, but the only response to that tragedy was to create another form of culture, Talmud.

The Talmud, I believe to be the greatest corpus in world literature, one of the very great master works. It deals with every aspect of human endeavor. Literally, you have mathematics and astrology and astronomy and even culinary matters. Everything is in there. And what is the Talmud? The Talmud is the emphasis on dialogue. The entire Talmud is dialogue. And the dialogue there therefore implies not a certain “tolerance” — I don’t like the word tolerance because tolerance is condescending. It means I tolerate your views.  Who am I to tolerate your views? Your views are as good as mine — I prefer the word “respect,” and in the Talmud it’s always, both sides, always both sides, they’re constantly in dialogue and they respect each other even though in the practical life how they lived together, that their children “intermarried” so to speak, they ate at each other’s table, and although they disagreed on almost anything in life and in the book, that (respect) was the response. 

Later on, during the Crusades, Roger was my student at Yale and I taught one class. And I remember we taught the period of the Crusades. The suffering, the suffering that the chroniclers collected in that book, three books of methodology, were extraordinary. And what were the Crusades? Madness, total madness. The madness has erupted in history. And they all began, I think beginning 1092, they began walking, walking to Jerusalem to save the so-called holy sights. And on the way they killed Jews, destroyed communities and we compared the same period in the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Catholic Encyclopedia. Not the same story. In the Catholic Encyclopedia they saw pages of glory. In the Jewish Encyclopedia these were pages of sadness and melancholy. 

What was the response then? The birth of the mystical movement in Germany. During the pogroms, Hassidism was born. So the response to suffering was always not to create more suffering but to find a response to suffering, and that response in itself should be a celebration of humanity, the humanity in the other, that the otherness of the other is to be respected and always shared. 

So ‘why are we here?’ is the question. Why are we still here? And maybe this simply is a theme that should be taught, studied, explored in many schools today, simply not only collectively, but this is the philosophical question, the moral question that every individual has to ask himself or herself, “Why am I here?” We came from almost an unknown place and we go to an unknown place. We say, “from dust to dust.” The mystical saying is, “from nothingness to nothingness.” And between these two nothingnesses, there is a celebration of meaning, of creativity, of hopes, of fears, of conquests, of friendships, of covenants. So why am I here? This of course for us, my generation, even more so. Why did I survive?

I know that you read this book Nacht (Night) that came out again and again after 40 or 50 years, but I don’t speak about that period. I rarely speak about the Holocaust. I have written, of my almost 50 books, very few that deal with that period because I want to create a certain aura of sacredness around that subject. The moment I will be able to say “Auschwitz” without fear and trembling I will stop talking altogether. Is this the response, the response? I don’t know. Some people feel that they must speak all the time and they are right. If they have the strength to do that, good for them. I have never taught the subject. When I say never, I am sorry. When I became a professor almost 40 years ago, for two years there were very few courses if at all in American universities so I had to give every year at least one course on the subject. And then I stopped. I stopped simply because I couldn’t do it. Too personal, and also I didn’t know how to deal with the subject academically. What if a person knows the names of all the (concentration) camps? That person gets an A? What is the criteria? I have students, always I love my students. I have a profound affection for my students. I feel responsible for them, for all of them. 

Before I came to Boston (University) I taught at City College and that was early 70s, the hippies were still on, very much in favor everywhere. And one of my students was a hippie, and the best student in class. And I would see every student alone. To this day I like to see every student alone. And that student came into my study, and all of a sudden he began sobbing. I had never seen a young person sob like that. I let him. I didn’t say a word. I waited literally as long as it took and it took a long time. He sobbed, and then he began talking.  He said, “My father was married before the war. He had children. His wife and his children died. My mother was married before the war. Her husband and her children perished.  They met in a DP camp after the war. They had a son: me. But I know that whenever they look at me, they don’t see me.“

What do you do with that story? What does one do with memories of suffering? How does one introduce them, research them, within the framework of culture? What is culture? This is simply the ensemble, the sum total of all the endeavors in poetry, in literature, in novels, in philosophy, in theology, sciences.  It’s the sum total culture. What is the definition of culture? We have seen, of course, what culture does, can do in some situations, to some people.

One of the worst pains that I endured after the war was that I came to America and I began studying even more than before everything about that subject. I found out that the officers of the so-called Einsatz Commanders, they were the worst. They killed the Jews not in gas chambers, but with machine guns. Babi Yar, Minsk, Ponar… most of them had college degrees. Some of them had PhDs, MDs, doctorates in the arts, doctorates in theology. And I couldn’t accept that. I believe — I still believe in spite of everything — that culture is a shield. A cultured person cannot do certain things, cannot, cannot kill a child. Cannot.  And they proved they could and they did. 

What was lacking? What was lacking there was the ethical dimension.  What is, let’s say, the task of anyone who deals not only with culture, but with transmission of culture — an educator, a spiritual leader, a communal leader — is to take information, and today we live in an age of information. Never before has the information traveled so fast, covering so many grounds. But it’s not enough. There is a difference, if not an abyss, between information and knowledge. Knowledge has already a kind of metaphysical meaning. So how does one transform information into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity, and sensitivity into commitment? 

And here we come to the third word, values. Values add a moral dimension. A human value means a moralistic approach to life. Can values change? Of course they can because people change. History produces changes. But the basic belief must be, no matter what, a value cannot go against the humanity of the human being. 

And therefore we come now to the last question: And what about Jews in all that? Do we have a different history from others? Do we have different culture from others? Do we have different values from others? Is our attitude toward suffering and the response to suffering ours alone? What we say, does it apply only to us, not to anyone else? And my answer there really is, of course, no. God gave the law. He gave it to the Jewish people. According to our tradition, no other people wanted it. It’s got too many crazy things in that law.  “Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery.” Really what kind of life is that? And we accepted it. It doesn’t mean we obey by it, but at least we accepted it. But it has been given to everybody else. It’s ours. God gave us the law. And we said, “Please, it’s everybody’s.” That’s the Jewish approach and by the way, the only regret I have is that we do not claim copyright for the Bible. My friend (Koret director) Abe Sofaer, if you could take that on, if we could ask copyright for the Bible, which is the best seller of all centuries, we could help America get out of trouble, even financially.

This is really what I believe. I believe in it firmly and fervently. It is because I am the Jew that I am that I try to be sensitive not only to Jewish causes but to human causes in general. I could have really taken another attitude and said, “I grew up before the war studying only religious texts — Talmud, Bible, prophets, mysticism, only that.” And I could say I have the right now to go on doing nothing else. If other people suffer, I’ve suffered more. It would be wrong because we should never compare suffering. We should only feel sorry. I’m sorry in the noble sense of the word — empathy, sympathy, meaning with pathos, with feeling, with anyone who suffers, be he or she Jewish or not Jewish. If anyone needs it, we must be there. If we cannot help everybody, at least we can try, help one and one and one. 

So this is, I imagine, why you, Tad (Taube, Koret President) and you, friends, have chosen to help my foundation, because this is really what we are doing. Now our major effort is to bring more hope to the Palestinian and Israeli people by bringing them closer together. And that doesn’t mean that we give up other things. Oh, no. At the same time, at least personally I feel threatened as a human being, not only as a Jew, by a man who is the head of a great and old nation, Ahmed Ahmadinejad, the President, the democratically elected President of Iran, the number one Holocaust denier in the world, who says it again and again, that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth, that he wants nuclear weapons in order to destroy the Jewish nation in Israel, and if that would come to pass it would destroy more than one nation. It would be a danger to the whole world.

Therefore, we believe in the culture of memory and see in memory not a source of suffering for others but a suffering of others, and I think our story would be a story of great hope, filled with promise and rooted in friendship.

I thank you.