Although I refused to make this first editorial of Plurielles an occasional piece, I was nonetheless led to write it on the basis of a particular event.
At the end of October, I was attending a lecture given by Elie Wiesel on the theme: Memory against Oblivion. It was not, in truth, an ex cathedra lecture, but rather an evening organized at the Sorbonne as part of a colloquium (the 3rd of its kind, I believe) on success in society — an evening in the course of which the Nobel laureate had agreed to be questioned on the subject of his own choosing, and to answer all the questions put to him, both by the audience and by groups of students selected from business schools or from the Université Dauphine.
The Richelieu amphitheatre had been literally stormed by an audience of all ages and all walks of life. A student put the following question to Elie Wiesel:
– Monsieur Wiesel, does the fact that you cannot forget the questions the Shoah has been posing to you since the end of the war not stand in the way of your work as a writer?
There was, in this question, as much innocence and youthful candor as there was ignorance and blindness.
Elie Wiesel replied that the questioning — often unanswered — that he carried regarding the Shoah was the very foundation of his work; that he wrote not in order to “forget,” but to keep memory alive; not to erase the misery the Jews had endured in living and dying in the Europe of the Third Reich, but to perpetuate the lessons that every misfortune engenders, and, a fortiori, this one, which was a unique event in the “historical” unfolding of all humanity.
I deliberately began this first editorial of the journal of the AJHL — an association, let me recall, that is secular and humanist — by citing this anecdote, for several reasons:
First of all, one cannot deny the fact that Elie Wiesel is a writer inhabited by the idea of God, a believer, after all, who holds dialogue with Him — he himself underscores this.
And so, for example, he goes on tirelessly questioning Him, even if what has been called “the silence of God” at and after Auschwitz remains an enigma with no liberating answer.
I offer this clarification because our Jewishness — I mean the Jewishness of all Jews — contains both the Judaism of Maimonides and that of Freud (I say this to make the point), and so it is not a betrayal of one’s secular commitments to cite Wiesel, or even the Maharal of Prague.
Secondly, the question put to Elie Wiesel contains one of the foundations of our association’s existence and functioning, namely: how to go on living without forgetting yesterday, how to go on living while projecting toward tomorrow.
The third reason, directly tied to this question posed by the young student from Dauphine, is a sentence uttered in a small town that is nonetheless geographically very far from the Sorbonne. The sentence was more or less as follows, and I beg you to excuse me for being unable to give you its exact transcription:
“You, sir, are of the Jewish faith. Your country is therefore Israel. How, then, do you explain the violence taking place in the occupied territories of Palestine?”
I do not wish to dwell, in this question, on either its provocative component or the reality of its content, quite simply because it gave rise in me to reflections far more fundamental than political or anecdotal. (As it happens, a similar question was also put to Elie Wiesel that same evening.)
What I want to say, at the outset, is that this question was formulated in German, by a German member of parliament, addressed to the President of the Jewish community of Germany, who had come to visit the town of Rostock with the aim of easing the tension following the shamefully racist violence that had taken place there. Let me recall that this violence, at the hour when I write these lines, was at least condemned by Chancellor Helmut Kohl on the one hand, and on the other by the demonstration against xenophobia and discrimination that brought together more than 300,000 people. As for me, I think that racism, whether muffled or overt, remains the eleventh plague of Egypt.
Unfortunately, it has reached the whole world, and those who spread it go on striking, as ever, at the places that hurt the most.
In the second place, this question, so crudely posed by the German deputy, would imply that one must recognize, or attach, nationality to belief if not to religious confession. In that case, with regard to France, for instance, one would be entitled to count 3 or 4 French “nationalities,” at the very least. Better still, one would be justified in demanding that all the Christians of the world go and live on the land where Jesus was born, taught, and died. The famous Middle East problem would then become, quite simply, an insoluble planetary problem. A holy mess, if not a sacred shambles, no!
Finally, to make of every Jew, practicing or not (and I happen to know that the President of the Jewish community of Germany is precisely not practicing), to make of every Jew, I say, and therefore of this German Jew an Israeli citizen, betrays, on the part of this deputy, not only the most primary antisemitism but also a sumptuous ignorance of the very History of his own country. Would the poet Heine have been an Israeli today? And the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who went off to die voluntarily in Brazil? And would Georges Henein, poet of Egypt, have sung of his native land… in Israel? Should we make an Israeli of the Frenchman Marcel Proust, of the Swiss Albert Cohen, of the German Albert Einstein? Should we, must we, associate the Spinoza of Amsterdam with the Jerusalem of today otherwise than through the medium of the Jewishness in which, precisely, Jerusalem is included?
In reality, each of the creators I have just named, whether or not they were born long ago in their respective countries, were simply confronted with this necessity, in order to guard against the harmful — and, alas, sometimes deadly — effects of a society that wished to reject them: the necessity of climbing its successive steps, and, when they could, up to the very highest. Even when these creators, like Freud or Kafka for instance, did not openly claim allegiance to the Jewish community. Let us not forget, all the same, that many of them also had to confront what is today called the institutional lobby, within that very community — a lobby that had pronounced against them the verdict of assimilation, and cast the anathema of exclusion (see Spinoza).
The immense majority of Jews who live in France today — those who live with God, as well as those who live simply alongside Him, or those who live without Him — all share this common point, which, by dint of being repeated, becomes a commonplace: they are all Jewish beings.
A secular and humanist association, we are partisans of no anathema. We know that we are part of a whole, and that within this whole we have the good fortune to be bearers of a music bequeathed to us by our parents, our books, our history, our joys and our sorrows. This music is itself multiple and diverse, but it is also different from the one that the contemporaries of Pepin the Short deposited in the heads of young Burgundians or mixed into the milk of Breton babies. Sometimes the two musics blend, sometimes they do not. And it is no debasement of the Loire to receive the waters of the Allier, any more than it is of the Allier to go and enrich the waters of the Loire.
This does not prevent either of the two rivers from having its own course. This image, however classic it may be, can also fit the relations that exist, or ought to exist, between those, within our community, who believe in heaven and those who do not.
We express ourselves in the language used by both Molière and Captain Dreyfus. Let us therefore bring to the country of which we are citizens the musics that shape us, and let us welcome with respect and love the fragments of the magnificent universal gift that France represents — and you will see that we will still have room for other musics. Why not those of Greenland, for instance?
To live in broad daylight both our Jewishness and our citizenship — that is what ought to be, for us secular Jews, our profession of faith. If I may put it so.