Craft Essay: Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea by Elie Wiesel

Immersed in mournful yearning Elie Wiesel in his memoirs, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea chronicles his story with a simplicity and composure; that is far beyond the horrors of the Holocaust.  Wiesel acknowledges much within the narrative about the man who would become the moralist and witness that would testify to the fate of his people.  Here is the Wiesel we all know, and for many the Wiesel we love.

            Early on in the text Wiesel addresses his critics:

“Memoirs?’ People ask.  ‘What’s the hurry?  Why don’t you wait a while?’  It puzzles me.  Wait for what?  And for how long?  I fail to see what age has to do with memory… You have plenty of time people tell me.  Time for what –– to let oblivion wipe out the victims final trace?” (Wiesel 15).

            A lot of writers, I am sure face this question. Even in the short time I have been telling people that I have begun writing my memoirs the response has been the same as Wiesel’s critics.  “Charlie, you have so much time.”  Really?  Wow!  Who knew?  Twenty-four with AIDS apparently isn’t enough time for me to be reflective.  This attitude of not having enough time seems to resonate with the very words within his text.

“Why did I survive when so many others perished?  But surely survivors bear no guilt for having escaped death.  They had nothing to do with their own survival.  Only the executioner had the power to decide who would live and who would die” (Wiesel 91).

            This is exactly why I chose to write about guilt in my creative work this packet.  For with memory, to some degree, may come guilt. What an odd sensation to feel guilty for having lived.  Wiesel, however, within his text brings not only grace, but also power to the singular word.  He turns any possible guilt into something so powerful, so universal that we cannot deny it ––– let them hear.  The words soar, because he somehow knows that he can and will be a voice for the voiceless.  Knowing even when so many questioned why he embraced his experiences.  “In the Jewish tradition we aspire to greater humility: Man’s aim is to be human” (Wiesel 271)

“I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival.  I wrote to speak to those who were gone.  As long as I spoke to them, they would live on” (Wiesel 239).

            Judaism, in its conception of humility as in its conception of many other things, stands between the two extremes of self-deification and self-effacement.  The Tanakh’s Jeremiah, in urging the quality of humility and in denouncing boastfulness, qualifies his statement by saying:

“Let not the wise man glorify himself in his wisdom, neither let the strong man glorify himself in his might, let not the rich glorify himself in his riches; but let him that glorifieth himself glorify in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am G-d, who exercises love, love, and righteousness” (The Jewish Bible: Tanakh The Holy Scriptures).

            The prophet does not consider it sinful for man to rejoice in his achievements ––which might be a stretch considering the circumstances that made Wiesel, Wiesel ––so long as he recognizes that all blessings ––– again another stretch in my opinion –– flow from G-d.  The Talmud has an even higher view of humility than the Tanakh, and the teachers of Jewish ethics urge upon man not to rely too much on his own merits, as this might lead to self-conceit or self-deification.  Our greatest merits are the results of G-d’s aid.

           

But amidst this humility does guilt still hide?  It is very common that survivors of the holocaust experience what is called “survivor guilt”. Survivor guilt is the word used to describe the feelings of people who survived a disaster, which killed others. On an irrational level, these individuals grimace at their privileged escape from death's clutches.  "Imagined" guilt ––– survivor guilt ––– includes the types of guilt that occur in the absence of having acted harmfully. Both types of guilt include self-condemnation, and either can result in harm to self or others –––punishing acts to self or others the action or elicitation of rejection, disdain and/or punishment. 
   Following traumatic events, guilt may be a complicated part of traumatic response; it is among the symptoms associated with more pronounced traumatic reactions. Guilt may intensify or complicate trauma and/or grief reactions

“For the camp survivor life is a battle not only for the dead but also against them.  Locked in the grip of the dead, he fears that by freeing himself, he is abandoning them.  Hence the near impossibility of loving, or believing in humanity” (Wiesel 299).

              When the death of someone close occurs even under normal circumstances, guilt is a common reaction at individual points in time. This is true even if the connection with the person was a negative one. Traumatic events can increase a sense of connection to those with whom the event was experienced or with people not well known before the event. Thus one can understand when Wiesel makes the statement that, “It’s in G-d’s nightmare that human beings are hurling living Jewish children into the flames” (Wiesel 78).  Previous interactions may become emotionally more significant including those with someone who was little known before a traumatic event who then died in the event. 
There are always regrets after someone dies--things said or not said, done or not done. Under normal circumstances, the people whom you cared for or loved knew that you cared even if you aggravated each other. The death of someone close amplifies our awareness of the finiteness of our earthly lives and current relationships.  Wiesel speaks of this amplified awareness of our finiteness:

“For me survivors constitute a family like no other, an endangered species.  We understand one another intuitively.  We are haunted by the same past, the same problems concern us, the same mission moves us.  We have the same friends, and always the same enemies.  There are all kinds of survivors” (Wiesel 339).

 Recognizing this is an opportunity to honor the deceased and others who are close to us by valuing life and relationships and behaving accordingly.  Some kinds of guilt, however, are more complex. A sense of guilt may become entangled with other post-trauma issues such as an amplified sense of connectedness to others with whom the trauma was experienced and/or a disruption of trust and beliefs. Traumatic stress shakes up multiple relationships including with oneself, those closest, and the community.

“Tell your stories, even if you have to invent a language.  Communicate your memories, your doubts, even if no one wants to hear them… it is incumbent upon the survivors not only to remember every detail but to record it, even the silence” (Wiesel 339).

          Hillel says: “Be one of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, be one who loves the other creatures, and bring them close to the teaching.” He used to say: “Who inflates his name, loses his name. Who does not grow, decays; who does not learn, deserves to die; and who exploits and abuses the crown (of learning), vanishes.” He used to say: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am just for myself, what am I.”  Wiesel in his own wisdom expands this thinking when speaking about survivor’s memories:

“The witness has nothing but his memory (Wiesel 336).  To write your memoirs is to draw up a balance sheet of your life so far… Memory, after all, may well prove voracious and intrusive.  Remembering means to shine a merciless light on faces and events” (Wiesel 16).

Hillel in his wisdom said, "Him who humbles himself, the Holy one, blessed be he, raises up, and him who exalts himself, the Holy one, blessed be he, humbles; from him who seeks greatness, greatness flees, but him who flees from greatness, greatness follows; he who forces time is forced back by time, but he who yields to time finds time standing at his side."  This is the example of not only Wiesel’s writing but also his life.  He has fled greatness and has yielded to time thus drawing on his experiences during the Holocaust.  The Holocaust turned Wiesel’s life upside down but it is Wiesel who molds what he makes of himself.

“I would love to rediscover, to recapture, if not the anguish and exaltation that I once felt… to write your memoirs is to make a commitment, to conclude special pact with the reader.  It implies a promise, a willingness to reveal all, to hide nothing.  People ask, ‘Are you capable of that? Are you ready to talk about… the people who have helped or denigrated you” (Wiesel 16).

I am reminded of the Tractate Megilla –– from the Mishnah (24b) –– that reflects metaphorically on the life sustaining power of being seen: “Rabbi Yose said ‘All my days I was troubled over the meaning of this verse Deuteronomy 28.29: And you will grope at noonday as the blind man gropes in darkness’. (The Jewish Bible: Tanakh The Holy Scriptures).  Now, I wondered, what difference is there between darkness and light to a blind man? Why does he grope more in darkness, as Scripture implies, than in daylight? Until I witnessed the following incident –– which illuminated the verse for me: One time I was walking in the darkness of nighttime, and I saw a blind person who was walking on the road, and he had a torch in his hand. I said to him: My son, why do you need this torch? He answered me: As long as a torch is in my hand, people see me and save me from harming myself in ditches, thorns, and briers.”

Being seen by the other gives to life protection and meaning ––– this is the real meaning of the light. It protects from those abysses we are talking about today. The tie in to the text is when Wiesel continues speaking about writing honestly, when he says:

(Can you speak of) the children dead of starvation and old men blinded by pain? You have yourself written that some experiences are incommunicable, that some events cannot be conveyed in words.  How can you hope to transmit truths that you yourself have said lie beyond human understanding” (Wiesel 16)?

Honesty and integrity are main values in Judaism. "You shall not give a false testimony" can be found in Exodus 20: 12 (The Jewish Bible: Tanakh The Holy Scriptures). 
But moral dishonesty is also strongly condemned by Judaism. The Hebrew expressions for that kind of dishonesty is Gnevat Daat, literally "stealing of the mind", and Hon'aat Dvarim, which can be translated as deceit, cheating. 
  Wiesel expounds on the idea of while retaining honesty, we may not want to reveal everything.

“I must warn you that certain events will be omitted, especially those episodes that might embarrass friends and, of course, those that might damage the Jewish people.  Call it prudence or cowardice, whatever you like.  No witness is capable of recounting everything” (Wiesel 17).

            Critical honesty is not about pushing the envelope. It's about throwing the envelope away and starting all over again. It's possible to be critically honest and be within the methodological bounds of a tradition whose inner vitality has other sources, but it's not possible to do both things at one and the same time. They are two different enterprises.  This is why a writer should do their very best to have the spoken word and the written word reflect the same experience.

“Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love.  What does it mean to remember?  Is it to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it?  It is fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events” (Wiesel 150).

Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is... conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words - in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, an oneness, primarily with self but also with life.  Honesty is the virtue describing reality exactly as it is, of telling the truth. In this day and age, when there is so much confusion as to whether or not there even is such a thing as truth, it is refreshing to see the place of honesty restored to the list of important human virtues.  For Judaism, truth, emet, is more than just a virtue. It is one of the three fundamental principles, along with justice and peace, upon which the world stands. In the words of the Talmud, "The signature of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth."

            Integrity is the ability not only to say what you mean, but also to mean what you say. It is the quality of conforming one's actions to one's words, of reliably following through on one's commitments. It is more than the ability to make things happen; it is making your own promises happen.  Biblical teachings insist that the words we express must be taken very seriously; indeed, we are taught that our words are sacred. Once a person, young or old, simpleton or scholar, utters a commitment, they are duty-bound to honor that commitment –– in Hebrew it is said as: Motza sefatecha tishmor ve'asita - "That which your lips express must be honored and performed" (The Jewish Bible: Tanakh The Holy Scriptures).  If you want to hold the attention of the reader, your sentences must be clear enough to be understood.  They must be enigmatic enough to raise curiosity.  “Writing for me is a painful pleasure.  The most difficult part is to begin.  Once the sentence appears on paper, the rest follows.  The path is clear” (Wiesel 320).  A good piece of writing combines style and substance. It must never say everything, while nevertheless suggesting that there is everything in which we could write.

“The Zohar speaks of galut hadibur, the exile of the word for words, too are exiled.  A chasm opens between them and their content; they no longer contain meanings they once harbored.  Having become obstacles in them… Human words are too impoverished, too transparent to express the Event” (Wiesel 151).

The definition of "integrity", it is also deceptively simple. There is so much more that we need to know about integrity; and about "honesty", for that matter.

 

          For one thing, honesty and integrity are not just descriptors of an individual person's character. Rather, they are social values, which ideally should define the essence of human communities and entire societies. From a Jewish perspective, "honesty" and "integrity" cannot be restricted to individual paragons of virtue, saints and holy men, but must become universal cultural norms. That is why the laws of vows, unlike all the other laws of the Torah, are explicitly given to rashei hamatot, the chieftains of the tribes. It is to emphasize that the sanctity of speech is not just a goal for a few spiritually gifted individuals. It must be enunciated as one of the essential mores of the entire tribe.

“Everything had to be said swiftly, in one breath.  You never knew when the enemy was might kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness.  Every phrase was a testament.  There was no time or reason for anything superfluous” (Wiesel 321).

The first creation was Time. It began and it will end and then it will be no more. Each breath, each tick, each beat of the heart comes only once. None will ever repeat itself precisely. Every instant of life is a raw but precious stone, beckoning, saying, "Unleash my potential, unlock my secret, do with me something to reveal my purpose of being! For I am here only this one time, and then never again."  And so that is our primary mission: To elevate time and make it holy.  In every point of time, all of time is there.  After all, at every moment, as the previous moment and all its history is cancelled into naught, He must regenerate the entire cosmos anew out of the void. And so He must renew along with this moment all of its past and all of time from its beginning to its end.  If so, He has rendered us masters of all of time in a single moment, of the present, of the future, and of the past as well. Wherever we steer this moment now, there rushes all of time.

“Words must not be imprisoned or harnesses, not even in the silence of the page.  And yet, it must be held tightly… To write is to plumb the unfathomable depths of being… lies within the domain of mystery.  The space between any two words is vaster than the distance between heaven and earth.  To bridge it you must close your eyes and leap.  A Hasidic tradition tells us in the Torah the white spaces, too, are G-d given” (Wiesel 321).

           

All too often we are dragged helplessly by the current of time, mercilessly ripped from our hold on the past that fathered us, forcibly confronting a future with no chance to prepare. We are the intimidated victims, servants and prisoners of time, forever bowing to the pressures of the moment.  But there are souls that remain beyond the realm of time and place, even while they enter into it. They know time as one who looks down from the highest mountain, watching as snow becomes creek becomes river becomes sea. To them there is no dissonance, no conflict --only the movements of a magnificent symphony.

“The witness has nothing but his memory.  If that is impugned, what does he have left?  For some people it is easier and more convenient to say that the event never happened… I therefore understand why survivors irritate certain writers, who see them not as individuals who have suffered, but as symbols, guardians of the flame… Survivors are a bit like parchment.  So long as they exist, so long as some of them are still live, the others know –– even if they don’t always admit it ––– that they cannot trespass certain boundaries (Wiesel 336-337).

Wisdom lives in the future, and from there it speaks to us. There is no such thing as wisdom of the past.  Wisdom preceded the world and wisdom is its destiny. With each passing moment, wisdom becomes younger as we come closer to the time when it is born and breathes the air of day.  Our ancient mothers and fathers, the sages, all those from whom we learn wisdom -- they are not guardians of the past; they are messengers of the future.

Works Cited

The Jewish Bible: Tanakh The Holy Scriptures. The Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

Wiesel, Elie. Memoirs: All Rivers to the Sea. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.