Elie Wiesel Like any good teacher, Elie Wiesel freely acknowledges that he is still a student. Even if he did not mention it during his Sept. 18 lecture at Congregation Torat El in the Oakhurst section of Ocean Township, itwas easily noticeable in the very manner of the lessons Wiesel taught.
“I have been teaching for over 40 years, but still I ama student,” Wiesel said. “Whenever I open a book, I am a student of that book. And whenever I try to write my own work, I don’t invent. I simply repeat, which means we use the same words and the same lessons. But with some luck, and some grace, we can go deeper.”
For everything, all of the ideas that Wiesel holds so dear, there is a story or some sort of parable or joke for him to tell. It is the kind of accompaniment that gives his words deeper meaning, the kind he can’t get out of a textbook like he did as a young child.
“ ‘Hebrew Grammar,’ that book was the only copy in my whole town. You couldn’t find it. So I learned it by heart — big deal for aYeshiva student, to learn it by heart. Everything I learned was by heart,” he explained. “And, by the way, that was the wrong way. Today, I know as a teacher that rather than memorizing anything, you can find it on any computer.”
These stories were woven throughout Wiesel’s lecture. Hundreds of listeners in the main event room and more in a spillover roomwith a screen, sat in complete silence as Wiesel spun the story of his life, not as a Nobel Prize winner or a Holocaust survivor, but as a Jew living in the 21st century.
He looks at political debates and shrugs them off, calling for more intellectual stimulus.
“I understand the need for plurality. I’m told that democracy is the expression of diversity and plurality. Everyone has the right to speak,” he said. “But the level of the debates is so low that it’s embarrassing to listen to them. It worries me.”
He recounted, instead, the legend of Hillel and Shammai, two rabbis whose schools of thought could never agree on anything important.
“We are supposed to praise the bride the day of the wedding,” he said, as illustration. “We must come and give her compliments. The day of the wedding, she must get these compliments no matter what. But what if she is not beautiful? What do we do then?” he asked.
Like any good teacher, Wiesel becomes passionate about the things he hates just as much as he does about the things he loves.
He spoke very softly as he discussed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the “first president Holocaust denier in the world … who should be arrested wherever he goes and brought to the International Criminal Court and be indicted for incitement of a crime against humanity.”
ToWiesel, anti-Semitism is not only hateful and irrational, but downright stupid. “I’ve spoken to a few presidents of great nations and asked, ‘Why don’t we do that [arrest Ahmadinejad]? And they say, ‘It’s not that simple.’ But it is. If the will is there, they could do it,” Wiesel said.
Anti-Semitism is the topic that brought Wiesel to the tri-state area in the first place. He was due to speak on the proposed statehood for Palestinians at the United Nations summit in New York. Wiesel said he planned to speak on how anti-Semitism has managed to survive into the 21st century.
He said he planned to ask the United Nations, “Will the world ever learn? It did not. It has not. Had the world learned, there would be no Darfur, no Rwanda, no Cambodia. If Auschwitz hasn’t cured the world of anti- Semitism, what can? And what will?”
There was one story he told that, more than all of his other tales, seemed to encapsulate Wiesel’s life. He told the audience the story of the sage who visits a town that is dripping with corruption, from government down to the people who live there.
The sage “would go to the marketplaces and fromone street to another, saying to people, ‘Wake up! Wake up! Wake up to the needs of your fellow man!’
“In the beginning, children would gather around him because nobody had ever spoken like that. And he went on day after day for years and years,” Wiesel said.
Much like the old sage of his story, here Wiesel got quieter and softer as he continued.
“And years later, the children stopped him in the street and said, ‘Poor stranger, you speak and you shout, but don’t you see that nobody listens? And yet you keep going, speaking and shouting. Don’t you see it’s for nothing?’
“The sage said, ‘My dear child, I know it’s for nothing. They don’t listen and will never change. But I go on shouting louder and louder in this village and that village, on this corner and that corner, because ultimately, I don’t want them to change me.’ ”