An offer that must be refused
Elie Wiesel’s newly-published book, illustrated by Mark Podwal, is heart rending.
In his Torahic foundational writings, medieval philosopher and physician Maimonides ruled that a Jewish community must face certain death rather than identify and surrender a member to a savage foe. It may do the latter if and only if the villain names a particular Jew already liable to the death penalty for a heinous crime.
Reading between the lines: Who is to say communal leaders get to decide whose blood is redder than whom’s? That’s true though their choice may lead the aggressor to spare countless others. (Darth Vader’s “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further” comes to mind.)
I’d studied this Maimonidean writing many times, and I’ve long found it a theoretical curiosity. It forms the basis of the late Elie Wiesel’s new book “The Tale of a Niggun” (Nov. 17, 2020/Amazon) with introduction by his son Elisha and Mark Podwal’s illustrations. (Niggun is Hebrew for “melody.”) Like many of Wiesel’s and Podwal’s collaborations, this short volume is hauntingly beautiful.
The story—composed as a narrative poem—is set from the start in “A ghetto,/ somewhere in the East,/ during the reign of night,/ under skies of copper/ and fire,” where the community’s leaders, “good people all,/ courageous all,/ fearing God and loving His Law,” come to their rabbi.
Their dilemma is a most dire emergency and virtual twin to the scenario Maimonides addressed. “The enemy demands/ ten Jews,/ chosen by us/ and handed over to him/ before tomorrow evening./ Tomorrow is Purim,/ and the enemy,/ planning to avenge/ Haman’s ten sons,/ will hang ten of our own,/ says the oldest/ of the old Jews.”
The Purim liturgy centers on the Book of Esther—wherein Haman tries to kill all the Jews in Ahasuerus’ kingdom only to find himself and his family in jeopardy—and evidently the enemy laying siege to this Eastern ghetto wanted to restore Haman’s original ploy and reverse the reversal.
The new book—which Dr. Ruth Westheimer recommends to her Twitter followers—has many powerful illustrations, both Wiesel’s text and Podwal’s art. One thing that stands out is the way it explores dialogues across history between legal minds. It’s easy to read the Talmud and take it at its word, that Rabbi A debated Rabbi B. But sleuthing reveals that the two lived in different places and often in different centuries; the dialogue is composed.
The rabbi in Wiesel’s story asks his colleagues to give him time to research the problem, so he turns to his bookshelves and reads prior Jewish responsa. This includes Maimonides: “who has foreseen/ all situations/ of all societies;/ his decisions are clear/ and precise,/ simple and human,/ humanly simple.”
At issue here for the rabbi is the difference between being amid an actual dilemma and having thought theoretically about and issued a ruling on that dire situation ahead of time. As he consults more and more predecessors, who come alive as he removes their writings from his shelves, the rabbi and they struggle increasingly with the answer to this barbaric challenge.
Podwal’s drawing—which also forms the cover—illustrates this collapse of time well. Around the stack of books, portraits of four rabbis appear framed. Clockwise from the top right are Maimonides, the Baal Shem Tov, Vilna Gaon, and Rashi. In the bottom left, the Vilna Gaon appears to write one of the books in the stack. Life imitates, or at least is written by, art.
“Righteous people, even in death, are considered alive,” per Jewish tradition. I can’t think of a better concept to understand this illustration of a central message of the book.
As Elisha Wiesel explains in the introduction, his father penned this poem in the late 1970s, and the younger Wiesel hadn’t known about it until a bookseller in Jerusalem found it in an out-of-print volume and shared it. The son reveals that his father based the story, set during World War II on Purim eve, loosely “on actual, horrific events that had occurred during the war in European ghettos—most notably in two towns in central Poland, Zduńska Wola and Piotrków.”
The layering here is extremely complicated. The poem is sort-of creative nonfiction, which Elie Wiesel, who knew too well the trauma of the Holocaust first hand, based upon real horrors. In this inspired tale, Wiesel wrote of a rabbi grappling with the rabbinic rulings upon his life-and-death decision penned by prior colleagues, who hadn’t been required to make such decisions. For us readers, who hopefully will never know from such evil, we can learn both from the real events and intergenerational debate anticipating them.