SOURCE: Estess, Ted L. “Choosing Life: An Interpretation of Elie Wiesel's The Oath.” Soundings 61, no. 1 (spring 1978): 67-86.

In a recent lecture Elie Wiesel remarked that the task of the artist is “to ask questions. That is what he must do and all he can do. For he, too, has no answers.”¹ Consonant with this artistic self-understanding, Wiesel's literature sets forth the fundamental questions of human existence in the starkest of terms. Life or death, hope or despair, love or hate, involvement or indifference, community or isolation, God or man—Wiesel often positions his characters before these alternatives and confronts them with the Biblical injunction, “Choose you this day. …”²

Wiesel's literature does not always, indeed, typically it does not, render unambiguous decisions or answers. There is even a strong censure on the effort of thought to force clear-cut solutions to existential crises. Rather than disposing of issues intellectualistically, Wiesel's protagonists often struggle to come to terms with contradictions in the depths of the self; they often pursue the reflective process to the point at which the force of opposition is dispelled or contained within the wholeness of the self. A character in A Beggar in Jerusalem suggests this movement of the self when he speaks of coming to the place “where words and silence come to terms. I like them both. Here I'm not afraid of them” (BJ [A Beggar in Jerusalem] 21).

Despite the inadequacy of rationalistic solutions to many questions, and despite the recognition that the self contains within itself the very opposites with which it struggles, Wiesel's protagonists repeatedly find themselves in situations where they are asked to know and choose in life what they cannot know and choose in thought. I have in mind those points at which the protagonists are situated before the final court of the human enterprise, the court of action. There they come to terms with the questions, and while not unambiguously disposing of the matters by argument, they do somehow know and commit themselves in action. They know because they are called upon to act.³ Hence, while the stance of interrogation is focal to the spirit and substance of Wiesel's artistry, his literature also suggests that one cannot suspend living until he has answered or even dealt with all life's deepest questions. However much a person might insist that he “can do without solutions,” that “only the questions matter” (BJ 16), he does nonetheless commit himself, if not to answers, at least to one path rather than another.

For a fuller exploration of these ideas, I turn to Wiesel's recent novel, The Oath. In many respects this is his most satisfying work, for the defects which mar his earlier narratives are less apparent here. He is less given to preachy excursions; the tone is more evenly sustained; the style, while at times lapsing into the “tinny” quality which disturbs many readers of his earlier works, is on the whole more tensive and controlled; the narrative pace, particularly in the last two sections of the novel is extraordinarily well orchestrated, making these sections some of the finest prose that Wiesel has yet produced. In addition, the novel paradigmatically displays the judicial drama of which I have been speaking. In the agon of that drama, we see Elie Wiesel declaring himself as an artist who is coming to terms with some of the perennial options which trouble us in the human adventure.

THE CONTEXT OF THE CHOICE

Wiesel provides sparse information about the setting of The Oath. His neglect of orienting information reinforces our premonition that for Wiesel all places and all times are, to a large extent, the same place and the same time: after the Holocaust. His vocation as a specifically Jewish writer is to reimagine the possibilities for existence in this post-Holocaust context.

The Holocaust again hovers above The Oath, but here Wiesel is dealing with the struggles of persons who are “born after the holocaust,” who “have inherited the burden but not the mystery” of the atrocities. The specific character who is so situated is a young man, nameless throughout, whose mother survived the camps. He struggles with remembering his mother's memories. When we meet him in the novel, her past has robbed him of his present and future, and he is ready to commit suicide.

We can say more about this matter; for the context in which the deepest issues of one's life are finally adjudicated is for Wiesel that of the encounter of a single person with another. In The Oath the encounter is between the young man and Azriel, who, now close to eighty years of age, is an engaging mixture of saint and madman. Though not a survivor of the death camps, Azriel carries within himself the scars of his own holocaust: he is the sole survivor of a pogrom which destroyed the small village of Kolvillàg somewhere in Eastern Europe earlier in this century.

The context of encounter is fundamental to the vision which is mediated throughout Wiesel's literature. Though in all appearances occurring merely by chance, these events carry a density of significance, since “true encounters are those set in heaven, and we are not consulted” (O [The Oath] 70). “Chance” or “accident” are perhaps adequate to speak of those experiences one could as well have done without. But for those few occasions in life when a person senses that all roads have led to this single place, that all previous experience has been but a prelude to the present moment, that all which has come before has been but a preparation for action in this particular situation—for that type of encounter, Wiesel reserves the word “destiny.” In such a situation, the person becomes strangely “capable of embracing his whole life and considering it as one undivided destiny, hanging upon a simple alternative.”⁴

The response of Azriel to the encounter with the young man reflects this denseness of destiny: “Have I lived and survived only for this encounter and this challenge? Only to defeat death in this particular case?” (O 41). He resolves “out of gratitude” to help the young man, as much out of need to save himself as out of a need to deliver the other. He realizes that neither he nor the young man will ever be the same, for “man changes whenever he confronts his fellow-man, who, in turn, undergoes an essential change” (O 88). Azriel does change: he emerges out of the “closed world of memories” to act in behalf of his despairing companion (O 97). The young man changes as well: he is diverted from suicide and lives to become the narrator of the story which we read.

The context of encounter should be distinguished from two other possibilities which are considered by Wiesel, yet finally rejected. At one extreme, there is the single individual who, having confronted and having been battered by the external world, retreats to the solitude of his own interiority to settle the large issues of existence. Moshe speaks for this option when he counsels Azriel, “This world is not beautiful to behold. You will come to prefer the one you carry inside you” (O 131). At the other extreme is the political activist who attempts to settle the fundamental matters in the societal order. Azriel himself followed this path when, many years earlier, he looked for salvation in revolutionary ideology. But by the time of the novel, he has long since rejected the societal for the personal: “These battles [political] no longer concern me. But your particular choice does. Here I am, responsible for your next step” (O 18).

The single encounter, while it might appear as basically a private affair, very limited in scope, does nonetheless carry a significance quite beyond the two lives which are involved. Indeed, “every encounter suggests infinity” (O 88). Azriel carries the motif further: “To turn a single human being back toward life is to prevent the destruction of the world, says the Talmud. Do something good and God up there will imitate you; do something evil and suddenly the scale will tip the other way. Let me succeed in diverting death from this boy and we shall win. Such is the nature of man … whether he celebrates joy or solitude, he does so on behalf of all men” (O 90-91). Such is the weighty significance which Elie Wiesel places on the genuine meeting of two persons; and in that meeting, as rare and mysterious as it is, the great issues of the human spirit are contested.

This imposing understanding of the encounter does seem somewhat at odds with other currents that move through Wiesel's literature. David at the end of A Beggar in Jerusalem decides to take up the rather ordinary life of his friend Katriel by marrying his widow; Gregor, at the conclusion of The Gates of the Forest determines to live a “normal life” by which he intends that he will work, have a family, be a citizen, and do other pedestrian-like things. We also find Pedro in A Town beyond the Wall teaching the virtues of “simplicity.” With these earlier characters Wiesel appears to be suggesting that the context for declaring who one is resides in the quotidian relationships to which we commit ourselves over a period of time. Indeed, on reflection, a notion of the momentous encounter does seem somewhat overdramatic, rather like something we would expect in the concentrated world of literature but scarcely anticipate in the more mundane patterns of ordinary life. Perhaps we reveal the true nature of our character in those countless deeds which we undertake, or fail to undertake, in behalf of the other without so much as a thought. Not the great moments, not the decision taken after reflection, not the momentous relationships—perhaps those are not the context for a test of our fundamental life options. Rather, that test occurs in the commonplace activities we do without thinking.⁵

Wiesel leaves us with these two possibilities; and he is not, nor are we, compelled to choose which is the arena where our freedom for authentic action is ultimately tested and tried. Though The Oath emphasizes the momentous, Wiesel's literature taken as a whole suggests that the extraordinary fructifies the ordinary, and vice versa. In order to have the one, you must have the other, and the loss of fidelity in either is a diminishment of the human spirit.

Nonetheless, we need fully to recognize the import of Wiesel's insistence on the extraordinary encounters, for that insistence is right at the center of his distinctiveness as a contemporary writer. Many contemporary artists obviate the truly extraordinary from the human scene, thus flattening human experience and giving the person no fulcrum around which to pattern the diverse moments of time. There is no before and after, only the interminably painful “in the middle of.” What is lost is storied existence. Storial consciousness, and that is what Wiesel's is, sees variegation in the human experience of time. A story, at least an interesting story, requires modulation between the crescendo given by the moment of high intensity, such as the encounter, and the diminuendo provided by the mundane. In preserving the salient moments of true encounter, Wiesel reveals his commitment to story as the basic model of the self. Those extraordinary encounters provide axial points around which to organize one's life; they are the occasions for the emergence into consciousness in dramatic fashion of the fundamental convictions which resonate through all of life; they bring the character to fresh understanding of who he really is and who he might become.

THE NATURE OF THE CHOICE

The focal choice in The Oath—indeed, in the whole of Wiesel's literature—is between life and death. By the time we meet Azriel in the novel he has resolved in behalf of life, while his companion has chosen death. Azriel insists that “death, on all levels, is not a solution but a question, the most human question of all” (O 65). He has come to this conviction largely because he has assimilated into his life the witness of Shmuel, his father, and Moshe, his teacher. We can better discern the nature of his choice and the lineaments of Wiesel's vision by attending to these two formative influences.

We learn of Shmuel not so much from explicit descriptions, but from what he does: he is the Chronicler of the Jewish community. When, on the fateful night of the pogrom, Shmuel entrusts to Azriel the Pinkas, the book containing the deliberations of the community over the centuries, he bequeaths to his son a symbol of the principal values of his life. These values include memory, tradition, speech, community. Without them his life would be unimaginable. They constitute a destiny which he might deny, but never escape.

In dialogue with the values of Shmuel stands Moshe. In many ways Moshe does not belong in this world, for his sensitivities are attuned to eternity, not history. His energies turn toward transcending this world, not transforming it; he looks to the Messiah who is to come, not to the messianic community which is here already. His way is that of the mystic, of the person who secludes himself in order, paradoxically, to serve the community he shuns. He seeks to be the one person who, by the force and passion of his own religious intensity, rises above himself and compels the Messiah to come out of exile and deliver his people from the contradictions and sufferings of history.

In his visionary intensity Moshe edges toward madness. This is not surprising, for in Wiesel the mystic and the visionary are always somewhat mad. Indeed, “true madmen are as worthy as true saints” (O 178). There are for Wiesel, however, different kinds of madmen, some possessing insights which can be shared, others recoiling totally into themselves. The danger is that “madmen move inside a system all their own, where they alone can pass judgment” (O 178). Moshe's plan to avert future persecution through the oath of silence encompasses the entire community within his own self-justifying system. Through the force of his vision and personality, through the energy generated by his absolute commitment, he moves the community to sacrifice all its actual past in behalf of a fanciful future.

These, then, are the moments in the dialectic of Azriel's life. While Shmuel bequeaths to him the public record of the religious community, Moshe initiates his disciple into the esoteric, hidden tradition. While Shmuel directs Azriel to the words spoken on Mount Sinai, Moshe wants him to experience the silence which accompanied those words. While Shmuel is committed to what words reveal, Moshe is given to what they conceal. Moshe himself draws the lines of difference for his young disciple: “I like your father. He and I are trying to attain the same goal. Only our methods differ. He takes care of the past, my domain is the future. He trusts memory, I prefer imagination” (O 130). It is not the case, then, that one is for life while the other is for death; it is a question of whose way best serves life. On the night of the catastrophe in Kolvillàg, Shmuel speaks for the last time to his son; “Who is right, Moshe or I? Who sees further? … We shall know that when we know the continuation and end of this story” (O 268). Before getting to the end of the story and seeing, if not who is right, at least the nature of Azriel's choice, we need to explore further the ingenious strategy that Moshe proposes, the strategy of silence.

While the encounter of Azriel and the young man is the focal confrontation of the novel, the meeting of Moshe and Shmuel toward the end of the story is no less important. There in Moshe's prison cell the spokesmen for history and silence, for memory and imagination, for the past and the future come face to face. For Moshe, history must cease: “If suffering and the history of suffering were intrinsically linked, then the one could be abolished by attacking the other; by ceasing to refer to the events of the present, we would forestall ordeals in the future” (O 244). Silence, then, is the way to “resolve the problem of Jewish suffering,” “without the help of the Messiah” (O 244).

Why this fascination for silence? What is there about speech that leads Moshe to abdicate the word in favor of silence? Azriel suggests one reason when he asks, “How was I to speak of what defies language? How was I to express what must remain unspoken” (O 50). He realizes that language has limits, that “all experiences cannot be transmitted by the word” (SF [Souls of Fire] 257). Forced by experience against the boundaries of language, we must finally acquiesce to the finitude of our capacity to speak the reality which is ours. Moreover, the appeal to silence suggests that speech is always ambiguous. Azriel reflects this awareness when he remarks, “to speak of it [the pogrom] is to betray it” (O 17). Language both clarifies and obfuscates; it both brings to light and commits to darkness. Azriel himself recalls that at one point in his life he forgot the ambiguous character of language, persuading himself “that language was omnipotent as the link between man and his creator” (O 61). As Wiesel somewhat bitterly writes in another place, “language can mend anything”—or at least we trap ourselves into thinking that it can (LT [Legends of Our Time] 222). Another factor which surely figures in Moshe's abandonment of speech lies in the recognition that language, in part, creates the reality of which it speaks. The poor and outcast of the Jewish community have this insight when they vow not to speak of the impending disaster. Adam the Gravedigger seizes the thought: “In the beginning of evil and death there was the word. Read the Bible! It's all there! The word announces what it names, it provokes what it describes—didn't you know that?” (O 207). The simplicity of the beggars and the madness of Moshe coincide: if you do not speak of suffering, it will go away.

These factors all figure in Moshe's choice against speech. But are there not some features of silence which commend it as a way of serving life? Is not silence more than the negative of speech, with a power and a domain creatively its own? In The Gates of the Forest Clara suggests as much when she counsels Gregor: “You stop at words. … You must learn to see through them, to hear that which is unspoken” (GF [The Gates of the Forest] 176). Similarly, Moshe maintains, “When the Messiah will come … man will be capable of understanding not only the words but also the blank spaces of the Torah. Yes, yes, they are important, those blank spaces” (O 163). It is, however, self-contradictory to attempt in language to give an argument for silence, and Moshe wisely does not try to convince the community of the superiority of silence over speech. His only claim is that silence is the one weapon against unjust suffering that the Jews have not tried. Words have failed; the stories of the storytellers have only sparked the imaginations of the oppressors to even greater injustices. Perhaps silence is the “language” of “a new era” (O 246).

Another contemporary master of silence, Samuel Beckett, counsels us, however, that “it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.”⁶ Katriel, Wiesel's protagonist in A Beggar in Jerusalem, provides us with two kinds of silence when he remarks: “I love silence. … But beware: not all silences are pure. Or creative. Some are sterile, malignant. … There is the silence which preceded creation; and the one which accompanied the revelation on Mount Sinai. The first contains chaos and solitude, the second suggests presence, fervor, plenitude. I like the second. I like silence to have a history and be transmitted by it” (BJ 131).

Now, which is the silence to which Moshe compels the community? To the silence of chaos and solitude, or the silence of presence and plenitude? In the confrontation with Shmuel in prison, Moshe initially suggests, as if remembering Katriel's distinction, that he favors the latter: “The words pronounced at Sinai are known. … Not the silence, though it was communicated from atop that same mountain. As for me, I like that silence, transmitted only among the initiated like a secret tradition that eludes language” (O 194). With these words, Moshe petitions the way of the mystic who moves through the active powers of his own inward receptivity into the unspoken, unspeakable divine presences. But he does not stop here: “But even more, I believe in the other tradition, the one whose very existence is a secret. A secret that dies and relives each time it is received, each time it is invoked” (O 194). This is not the silence which accompanies speech, which a community shares and passes along through the discipline of meditation. This, rather, is the “pure” silence which is altogether discontinuous, which breaks periodically upon only the few ecstatic souls whose disaffection from this world is total. It is the silence of chaos and solitude; it is the silence, not of the mystic, but of the madman. It is into this silence which is silent even about itself that Moshe initiates the community of Kolvillàg. About this silence Azriel must make a decision.

We come to see, then, that silence, just as speech, is ambiguous. Azriel admits as much when he remarks, “I should like to remain silent without turning my very silence into a lie or betrayal” (O 51). By silence as well as by speech one can inauthenticate oneself. Kaiser the Mute, a character who has for years practiced the purifying discipline of silence, finally breaks into language to remind the community of this. To the religious leader, he shouts: “It is by keeping silent that you are perjuring yourself, Rebbe!” (O 229). We begin to realize, as perhaps does Azriel, that “man is responsible not only for what he says, but also for what he does not say” (O 163).

Moshe does perhaps also understand the ambiguous character of silence, but he is willing to sacrifice the gifts bestowed by language in one last desperate effort to free his people from death. He is willing to sacrifice the essence of his community in order to save that community. Celebrated as the distinctive blessing of Israel to the human situation, historical consciousness only guarantees, in Moshe's view, further persecutions. We Jews, he insists, turn suffering into a story, and thereby “shout our attachment to history.” “Now the time has come to put an end to it” (O 243).

After this long excursion into the strategy of Moshe, we can now step back to the nature of Azriel's choice in the encounter with the young man. Azriel hears two voices: “Memory, insisted my father, everything is in memory. Silence, Moshe corrected him, everything is in silence” (O 284). Azriel must choose the way to serve life: through history, or through an end to history; through relationship, or through solitude; through the past, or the future; through memory, or silence. Azriel of course, as does Wiesel in writing the novel, comes finally to speak and thus to repudiate the madness of Moshe. In assuming his destiny as a member of the people of memory, Azriel sides with Shmuel: “Is oblivion not the worst of curses? A deed transmitted is a victory snatched from death. A witness who refuses to testify is a false witness” (O 193-194). Azriel realizes that language, especially storytelling, is one of the surest ties to and signs of life; that “one does not commit suicide while speaking or listening” (O 22); that the oath of silence is itself a type of suicide pact for the community; that language, even with all its dangers and ambiguities, is a path to healing relationship; that language provides not only the boundary for human understanding, but a bridge to other persons. To speak is, for Azriel, to voice Lehaim! Lehaim!

We should not think, however, that Azriel's choice to break the oath signals an absolute refusal of silence; for he no doubt realizes that what storytellers have to transmit has to do “with silence as much as with words” (BJ 60). The silence of the storyteller is linked with words and becomes present only in tandem with words. To unite one's words with one's silence is for Wiesel to move toward that place, perhaps unreachable, where one's speech does not betray that which one speaks. Even if not attainable, this surely is what Azriel and Wiesel wish their testimony to be. Their attempt reminds us to “be careful with words, they're dangerous. … They beget either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other” (LT 31).

DIMENSIONS OF LIFE

A choice of life is not made apart from some vision of the life one chooses. Indications of the kind of life Wiesel chooses have emerged in the preceding discussions; but to deal with this issue more directly, it might be illuminating to petition the well-worked categories of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious. In Wiesel these dimensions are in conversation, not competition. All three are essential dimensions of the human, the loss of any one being a reduction in the wholeness which is a person.

In many respects, the Holocaust declares an end to what we can expect from the ethical dimension of life. The pogrom in Kolvillàg serves the same function, for it displays the bankruptcy of a vision which lauds the innocence and perfectability of the human. The atrocity indicates that all things are possible, precisely because all ethical ties were so radically violated. The Rebbe sees this clearly when he comments, “A Jew must not expect anything from Christians, man must not expect anything from man” (O 257). To place one's faith in man is, to the Rebbe and to Wiesel, foolishness; for Jewish history, if it teaches anything, indicates that mankind is a capricious deity in which to trust. There are persons, however, who persist in an improper elevation of the ethical capacities of man. For instance, the enlightened Stephen Braun, having disassociated himself from his tradition, embraces a facile humanism by saying “I believe only in man …” (O 216).

While it is foolish with Braun to expect everything from man, and while it is shortsighted with the Rebbe to expect nothing from man, we can in Wiesel's vision expect something from man. We can do so because of conscience, that human capacity which is proper to the ethical dimension of life. Nurtured in a community, tempered by action and failure to act, sustained through the shared memory of one's people, conscience is at once the apex of man's dignity and the occasion for his debasement.

In Wiesel, conscience is not an individual affair; and, to be sure, the word itself connotes a “knowing with” (con-scientia). The relational—that is, the dialogical—grounding of conscience is suggested when the narrator remarks, “Whoever says ‘I’ creates the ‘you.’ Such is the trap of every conscience” (O 17). Conscience makes possible a meaningful and responsible existence, for conscience is that which goads the self to see that it is in danger of existing meaninglessly, non-responsively, negatively.

As an accomplishment of humanity which is passed on through the fragile linguistic connections linking generation to generation and person to person, conscience is not only inextricably connected with a community but also with the past. For Wiesel, memory sustains the conscience, individual and corporate. The association of conscience and memory is explicit in several places in The Oath, as when Azriel reflects on his memory of the pogrom: “What then is the significance of this mute testimony deposited within me? An invisible force compels me to walk a stretch of road, my head bowed or held high, alone or at another's side—and we call that life. I look back, and we call that conscience” (O 78). The memory of what has been and what might have been allows Azriel to envision possibilities for what might yet be. Conscience, then, is in Wiesel as much retrospective as it is prospective; indeed, its being the latter is dependent on its being the former.

The ethical dimension of life of course is principally concerned with present action in behalf of the other. For Wiesel, apathy typically deters persons from such action. Azriel remarks, “I am afraid of only one thing: indifference” (O 201). This finally is why he tells the story of Kolvillàg: to save the young man from the deadliest death-in-life, that of apathy and boredom and detachment. Habits of perceiving, of valuing, of acting, of hoping and failing to hope keep persons chained to indifference. Azriel's story breaks the habits into which the young man has fallen and restores his attachment to life, enabling him to re-envisage his world. As he listens, his conscience is awakened, and he is released from indifference and delivered into the suffering and vulnerability of being with others.

The awakened conscience propels persons to the liveliness of action, moving, for instance, Azriel to tell his story. To be sure, the voice of conscience speaks ambiguously. On the one hand, it counsels Azriel to keep his oath of silence; on the other, it urges him to speak in behalf of life. Azriel cannot expect unambiguous direction; for we are “all too weak, too ignorant to foresee the outcome of our plans” (O 70). But in the struggle of life with death Azriel realizes, “One must act, do something” (O 22). He must do something because he is called to do so. The call of conscience—it is an important notion in Wiesel—comes to the self, from within the self, asking for response. “Every word is a call and every call is an adventure,” a call to venture one's self in being with another (O 55).

The ethical dimension, which includes memory and conscience, thus is central to the life which Azriel chooses in The Oath. With an insistence on these elements, Wiesel stands against a tendency over the past two centuries to free Western man from conscience. Some persons have viewed conscience as a tyrannical force, foisted on a spontaneous, truly human existence. Conscience, some have suggested, has contributed to a morbid self-consciousness characteristic of a stage of history which needs to be left behind. We surely cannot deny that conscience in the West on occasion manifests the excesses of a life-denying rigidity and of an enervating scrupulosity. Conscience sometimes reduces individuals to a self-enclosed narcissistic fascination with their own interiority. But a thorough-going rebellion against the excesses of conscience in Western culture contributes, as Erich Kahler observes, “not just to a devaluation of specific values, not a mere invalidation of a world of values.” Rather, there can be, and Kahler argues that there has been, “a dwindling of the faculty of valuation altogether … a devaluation of valuation as such.”⁷

In retaining conscience as an essential element in the life he chooses, Wiesel reminds us that we cannot, or ought not, avoid judging the life we lead. To recoil from judgment through an escape into indifference, or through a retreat into the supposed freedom of momentarism or a thorough-going relativism, is to abdicate a human life in favor of one less than fully human. Without judgment we retreat from the possibility of a meaningful existence; we abandon the responsibility of distinguishing that which serves life from that which serves death. Moshe himself makes this explicit: “To be Jewish is to be able to distinguish. … In our tradition, danger is called mixture, the enemy is called chaos. … His whole life long the Jew is committed to separating light from darkness, Shabbat from the rest of the week, the pure from the impure, the sacred from the profane, the return from the exile, life from death. … ‘And thou shalt choose life’ means you shall separate it” (O 196-97). Neither Azriel nor Wiesel would agree with Moshe's passion for clear separation, for a fundamental element of Wiesel's vision is that life within history is always a mixture. While we might reject Moshe's concern for precision as an indication of his madness, we cannot in Wiesel obviate the insistence on judging. To distinguish that which diminishes evil from that which increases it, to discriminate that which contributes to community from that which undermines it, to judge between that which engenders hope from that which erodes it—such judgments of conscience are essential to the life Wiesel portrays.

While linking the ethical with memory and the past, Wiesel integrally connects the aesthetic with imagination and the future. The association of the aesthetic with imagination might at first seem to contradict his insistence that storytelling is essentially an act of testifying, that repetition is more important than creation. What Wiesel says of Zalmen, or the Madness of God applies to all his works, that each is “conceived as testimony rather than as a work of the imagination …” (Z [Zalmen, or the Madness of God] ix). As one character remarks in The Oath, “All has been said, I can only repeat” (O 89). In the art of Wiesel the past does seem to dominate over the future, and certainly, “a man without a past is poorer than a man without a future”—or, memory without imagination is preferable to imagination without memory (O 76). Yet, in the life that Wiesel affirms you do not have one without the other. Memory and imagination, conscience and dream, past and future work together, each tempering the other against excess and absolutization. Moreover, the act of witnessing to the past is not solely an act of memory; it is also an act of imagination. To witness to the past is irrevocably to imagine the past.

The interdependence of the aesthetic and the ethical is apparent in The Oath, for the novel is about enlivening the imagination of the young man as much as it is about resensitizing his conscience. Just as an awakened conscience is the antidote to indifference in Wiesel, a revitalized imagination is the antidote to despair. Conscience is necessary for action; imagination is necessary for hope; both are necessary to sustain one through a lifetime of action. Azriel remarks to his companion, “You have not yet lived and already you hate life” (O 68). The reason he hates life is that he fails to see alternatives for the future; for without imagination, no person can project possibilities in the context of life's necessities. Azriel says, “Make him dream. … If I succeed, he is saved. One doesn't kill oneself while dreaming, not even while dreaming to kill oneself” (O 64). Azriel tells the story, and Wiesel writes the novel to make us dream, to vivify the imagination, to evoke visions of another kind of world, to add “what might be” to “what already is.”

To consider imagination in Wiesel is immediately to enter upon a discussion of the messianic theme in his literature. Without being able in this context fully to explore that theme, we must in passing observe that the Messiah is inextricably linked to the imagination and connotes a realm so grand that we call it “eternity”: “The Messiah will not die. He is our link to eternity” (O 132). Importantly, Wiesel often associates the messianic theme with the image of the child. As Moshe says: “We think he [Messiah] is in heaven; we don't know that he likes to come down disguised as a child. And yet, every man's childhood is messianic in essence. Except that today it has become a game to kill childhood. Thus it is hopeless” (O 132-133). The death of the child signals, for Wiesel, the death of the imagination, the future, and the Messiah. The Oath is in large part concerned with saving the child. Part I of the novel is called “The Old Man and the Child,” and Azriel himself refers to the young man on several occasions as “child.” Of course the young man is not literally a child, yet Azriel's story is directed to the element of childhood which in every person is on the verge of extinction. To save the child is to sustain hope; it is to free the imagination to create a future; it is to join one's present with the messianic possibilities which are one's future.

The imagination, and with it the aesthetic dimension of existence, is not, however, sovereign in Wiesel. “To dream,” Azriel says, “is to invite a future, if not to justify it …” (O 64). To justify or to legitimate the creations of one's imagination is the task of conscience. The mistake of Moshe lies precisely in the fact that he comes to the place where he is unwilling to submit his imaginings to conscience for evaluation. He assumes what every madman assumes, that imagination provides its own justification. In The Oath the retreat into pure imagination is rejected, for unbounded imagination often teeters into destructive madness. When the imagination is loosed from every claim of memory, when dream is severed from any restraint of reality, madness—or at least, irrelevancy—is the consequence.

In this rejection of a pure aestheticism, Elie Wiesel again declares his distinctiveness as a contemporary writer. Starting with certain of the Romantics, art has at times been viewed as a way out of history, as an exit from the alienating and alienated condition so characteristic of our culture. Often art has emerged as a self-justifying activity, accountable solely to its own criteria of judgment. In this retreat into the realm of pure imagination, it is difficult at times to discern anything resembling a firm connection with the fullness of human life. Much of recent literary art consequently seems suspended in a self-contained, hermetically sealed world, whirling on its own axis, revolving around and into its own proliferation of contradictions. Such art often is tedious, at least in part, because it turns from, rather than serves, life in history.

It is his insistence that history and memory be at all points linked with imagination that guards Wiesel from a retreat into an absolute reliance on imaginative powers. We see this in the treatment of Moshe in The Oath. As the spokesman for the way of imagination, Moshe's final answer to the problem of Jewish suffering is to put an end to history. This is the import of his strategy of silence, for silence is the speech of the atemporal, of the non-historical. Silence is, in a sense, the medium of the purest art work, for silence stands outside the ineradicably historical character of all human speech. In the aesthetic dimension, Wiesel rejects the pure art work, just as in the ethical, he rejects the pure life. For him, all art and all life are a drama of good and evil, of time and eternity, of history and imagination. This mixed world may not be the best world that imagination could devise or that conscience could envisage, but it is more truly a human one.

As important as the ethical and aesthetic dimensions are in the life envisaged in Wiesel's literature, we cannot overlook the importance of the religious. It is perhaps as much a deep awareness of the inadequacies of a reductionistic humanism and an expansive aestheticism as it is explicit theological commitments that compels Wiesel to preserve a creative place for the religious. Life is too mysterious, too fraught with ambiguities for him to relinquish the religious. Man is too frail, too given to destructive passions and false idols to be the sole repository of one's fundamental commitments.

While the scope of this essay does not permit an adequate treatment of this aspect of his vision, we can note that the religious in Wiesel is the sphere of the inexplicable and the mysterious. The symbol for this dimension of experience is God, and the response to that experience is faith, which takes variously the forms of rebellion and defiance, gratitude and expectation. The symbol “God” names a character in the story of Judaism, and as such it points not so much to a being as to levels of experience which defy commonsensical explanations. The symbol is an encompassing one, evoking a depth in a large range of experience. We see this in a remark of the young man's mother in The Oath: “Memory, conscience, the past, fate—God. I am helpless against God” (O 95). In the syntax of the first of these statements “God” encompasses the previous four realities, which is not to say that God “equals” the four. Rather, the symbol “God” is needed adequately to speak the density of the experience involved in each of these separate realities. Also, for Wiesel, the Jew finally is “helpless against God,” which does not mean that the Jew is necessarily for God. Indeed, in Wiesel, the stance is often against God; but finally the Jew cannot be without God.⁸

Wiesel's religious vision, for all its defiance and questioning, does finally come to imbue ordinary existence with revelatory potential. Azriel reports, “It was my Master who had taught me the art of tracking down the presence in our surroundings: all is life, all is symbol” (O 149). “The presence” is the dimension of God in all that is; this is the Shekhinah, the divine presence which always lies in wait for the attentive spirit.

In repudiating Moshe, Azriel chooses against what, in the broad sweep of Wiesel's literature, appears as a distortion in the religious dimension of existence. The distortion is to seek an unmediated experience of the divine, to bypass the human and aim directly for the high prize. The Rebbe reflects this aberrant religiosity when he remarks, “Consolation can and must come only from God” (O 257). “God” symbolizes the ultimate source of all consolation in Wiesel, but that consolation is made present only through human relationships. Moshe, in his speech to the community, signals the excesses of pure religion when he proclaims, “Better to speak to God than to man, better to listen to God than to His spokesman” (O 241). The strategy of silence is itself a discipline of pure religion, for in Moshe's vision, God understands silence, while man does not. Silence sacrifices the relationship with man in behalf of an unalloyed relationship with God, and in so doing it distorts a life-serving religiosity. Moshe's religious response abstracts itself from history in order to enact the trans-historical “city of the sun” (O 147). While the pogrom is raging, he is already imaginatively transported to another place and time: “Moshe in his cell was working on the speech he planned to deliver to the Celestial Tribunal” (O 259). There perhaps comes a time, as it has with Moshe, when one's advocacy for justice before the terrestrial tribunal has met with such failure and rejection that one, if only as an act of despair, not of faith, sets his sight on the celestial at the expense of the terrestrial. Yet, Azriel's choice suggests that one can never be sure that he has done all that he can in the historical; hence one must never totally desert the human city in order to secure a place in the divine.

Though it is not explicitly stated as such, it is appropriate to see Azriel's choice of life as a choice in behalf of God. In his effort to dissuade Moshe from being a martyr for the community, the Rebbe makes the correlation: “You shall live your life, you shall protect it. Whoever renounces his life, rejects life, rejects Him who gives life” (O 152). Life is to be protected, enhanced, celebrated, and sanctified precisely because it is given by God: “Life is a gift, and not a piece of merchandise” (O 267). This means that finally life is not at one's disposal, one's own life or that of another. Life is not chattel to barter away by compromise with false idols, or to sacrifice to the wild imaginings of madmen.

What is God in Wiesel's literature? He is the giver of the mysteries which compromise life; and, as such, he contains within himself the gifts which he bestows—good and evil, suffering and joy, exile and return, being and becoming, laughter and tears. And, “what is man? A cry of gratitude. … Because of it all, in spite of it all” (O 175).

These, then, are features of the life which Azriel, and by implication, Wiesel, chooses in The Oath. It is clear that with this vision he attempts to enhance our awareness of our shared humanity and to deepen our commitment to time and history. With this vision Wiesel is perhaps not so much saying “this is my world,” as “this is the world toward which I move; it is a world toward which I, in the art of speaking, feel, yearn, and strive.” Perhaps his literature will not attain the stature of true genius, but perhaps that is not his intention or desire. He seems, rather, to have taken the role of, in the words of W. H. Auden, “the less exciting figure of the builder, who renews the ruined walls of the city.”⁹The Oath itself is about the destruction and recreation of a town. The larger city, of course, is the human city. In committing himself to modest changes in the realm of the human, Wiesel risks his artistry in behalf of work which will not endure but which will be forever in need of renewal and repair. It is, however, a risk worth taking, for to him any other is a choice of death over life.

Notes

1. “Two Images, One Destiny,” (New York: United Jewish Appeal, 1974), p. 2. Hereafter all references to Wiesel's writing will be noted parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations and editions are used: BJ = A Beggar in Jerusalem, trans. Lily Edelman and the author (New York: Avon Books, 1970); GF = The Gates of the Forest, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Avon Books, 1967); LT = Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon Books, 1970); N = Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960); O = The Oath (New York: Avon Books, 1974); OGA = One Generation After, trans. Lily Edelman and the Author (New York: Avon Books, 1972); SF = Souls of Fire, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); TBW = The Town beyond the Wall, trans. Stephen Becker (New York: Avon Books, 1970); Z = Zalmen or the Madness of God (New York: Random House, 1974).

2. Joshua 24:15. I have previously explored the dimension of questioning in Wiesel's literature in “Elie Wiesel and the Drama of Interrogation,” The Journal of Religion, LVI (January 1976), 18-35. The present essay continues the discussion which was begun in the earlier essay and hence is, in some respects, a companion piece.

3. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, cited by Edward Engleberg, The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience: Goethe to Camus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 28.

4. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 103.

5. For a fuller discussion of these matters, see James Wm. McClendon's critique of “decisionism” in Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today's Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974), pp. 18-28.

6. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 309.

7. The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into Transformation of the Individual (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1957), p. 203. Emphasis is Kahler's.

8. Wiesel himself makes this point in “Storytelling and the Ancient Dialogue,” lecture delivered at Temple University, November 15, 1969.

9. Quoted by Robert Currie, Genius: An Ideology in Literature (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 211.