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Tonight, we shall tell tales, and nothing is more gratifying for a teller of tales than to bring people together, people from distant generations and contemporaries: Hasidim and philosophers, poets and dreamers, Jews and Christians and Muslims, students and teachers; we are all prone to fall under the spell of certain words, and we are intrigued by the density of certain silences. We see sentences that went through the fantasies of scholars and commentators centuries ago, and examine them as one examines rare stones. We chisel and polish them so as to catch in their facets the singular light which to us will continue to reflect the light and the mood at Sinai.
With these heartfelt sentiments did Elie Wiesel summarize fifteen years of lecturing at 92NY; the lectures would continue for more than thirty additional years, numbering over 180 presentations. He began lecturing in February, 1967; his final appearance took place in November, 2014. At the outset he was 38 years old and still a bachelor; at the conclusion he was well into his eighties, married with a son and grandchildren.
92NY was, in Professor Wiesel’s words, “a kind of second home,” “a sort of yeshiva,” a place of Jewish learning, an expansive classroom of Torah study. 92NY offered a forum to give expression to what he had learned from his teacher, Rabbi Shaul Lieberman—and to the teachers who had preceded him, including his parents and grandparents, hy’d.
The 92NY lectures also gave Professor Wiesel a place to establish his own traditions and rituals of learning: a regular yearly sequence of lectures on Tanach (Bible), Talmud, and Hasidism, with a fourth lecture featuring Professor Wiesel reading excerpts from a forthcoming or recently published book. The Torah lectures revolved around a portrait of the featured personage (or sage or master), together with the usually turbulent historical context in which he or she lived and flourished. Professor Wiesel blended this approach with an analysis of the central topics or themes —legends, fervor, silence, friendship, joy, and many more—spiced with stories or tales—or vice-versa. In the final lecture of the yearly series, Professor Wiesel framed the reading of excerpts from new publications (novels essays, or memoirs) with comments on the theme (for example, remembering and forgetting) and on the motivation behind it.
Generally, the four-part series of lectures commenced on the Thursday evening following the fall holiday of Simchat Torah (usually in October). The specific starting time of the series, according to Professor Wiesel, had its own logic and symbolism: “Why do we begin [the 92NY lectures] on the Thursday after Simchat Torah ? It’s symbolic, because on Simchat Torah we end the Torah and we begin again—which means we never cease to learn. You think you know everything? Begin again. To be a Jew is to be able to go on learning—and, to the last breath, to want to go on learning.”
The 92NY lectures were a premier forum for Professor Wiesel’s teaching—the vocation that, along with that of a witness, meant most to him. In time, he would become a classroom teacher. But the 92NY lecture series was his first regular teaching arena, and lasted almost until the end of his life. In 1972, Professor Wiesel began to publish the Torah-based lectures in book form (see link): first on Hasidism, then on Tanach. Later editions—Sages and Dreamers (1991) and Wise Men and Their Tales (2003)—added Talmud to the mix, and layered these three strands of Jewish tradition side by side.
The form and spirit of the 92NY lectures are distinctively Professor Wiesel’s own: that of portraits and legends. The portraits narrate the life of a biblical personage, Talmudic sage, or Hasidic master, whose contribution to the Jewish realm of experience has been profound, exemplary, and eternal. In some cases, the details of the life are fairly well known; often, they are obscure. Out of a multitude of sources, Professor Wiesel culls facts, legends, episodes, stories, anecdotes, distilling reams of information on the subject’s family and friends, teachers and students, obsessions and antipathies. His interest in doing so is not, however, mainly historical. He is rather intent on showing why it is important for us—today, now—to be aware of such a personage, sage, or master; he seeks, moreover, to examine how these spiritual giants may inspire us to emulate them in our own quest for knowledge, in nurturing an unbounded compassion for others, in setting forth a bold vision for the future of the Jewish people—and, in the case of some personages, in resolving to live a meaningful life after suffering immense personal loss or witnessing collective catastrophe.
The losses experienced by ancient masters dovetailed with those of recent times—and with Professor Wiesel’s own: “Of course, we understand them,” he notes, commenting on what Rabbi Shimon and his Rabbi Eleazar encountered in the world at large when they emerged from their twelve years of isolation in the cave. “There were times, in 1945, when Jewish men and women came out of the darkness, and they realized that while they had been there, the world was going on, with weddings, Bar Mitzvah celebrations, and card games, and movies, and theater. I think what they felt is what we know that Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Eleazar felt.”
Over time, Professor Wiesel experimented with the format of the lectures: as interviews conducted by a friend or colleague (Ted Koppel or Marvin Kalb); as question-and-answer sessions with the audience; as featuring a thematic focus (for example, the four-part series Darkness, Struggle, Meaning, Faith in 1999-2000); and as an occasion for singing favorite Hasidic melodies. In 1983, 92NY added Thursday afternoon study sessions that guided the 150 or so attendees through the primary texts (the Akedah; the Book of Esther; etc) which later that evening would serve as the basis for Professor Wiesel’s lecture. There was always a quest to learn more. “To begin anew, to begin again,” is one of his recurring motifs. As he glosses one of Rabbi Tarfon’s famous teachings, “No one is asking you to complete the task, but you must begin it.” And Professor Wiesel adds: “So we are beginning and beginning, again stuand again.” This principle, “beginning and beginning, again and again,” likely inspired these experiments with approach and material, constantly in search of the most effective mode of conveying—in his precise vocabulary, of “transmitting”—his message of hope, memory, and the joy of study.
“Tonight will be different. You will see why.” So does Professor Wiesel begin the fourth lecture of the twentieth year. “Tonight,” he informs the audience, “I would like to read to you an excerpt from a cantata. It is called A Song for Hope.” With music composed by David Diamond and a libretto by Professor Wiesel, the cantata was commissioned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his lectures. The actual performance of the cantata took place the following spring.
Professor Wiesel fastidiously kept count of each and every succeeding year, and marked anniversaries with special remarks, with unexpected surprises (such as the Song for Hope cantata) and, beginning with the 20th year, with his soft yet passionate manner of singing of Kalev and Vizhnitz Hasidic melodies. Knowing precisely how long the lecture series had gone on was another kind of lesson he was transmitting; the passage of time deserved to be measured and respected: “At this moment,” he alerted the audience on the Thursday night anniversary lecture five years earlier, “perhaps we ought to stop briefly as usual and remind ourselves that this adventure of ours began here 15 years ago, and a Shehecheyanu is in order. . . .” Accumulating years was not something to be taken for granted; hence the Shehecheyanu blessing, which one recites to commemorate reaching an auspicious occasion. Ten years further on came a succinct summary of the goals that underlie the yearly study sessions: “And so, I could almost say that, what we have tried to do here in the last 25 years—four times on Thursdays in October and November after Simcha Torah—is first of all to inspire love for study, love for our people, and through it love for humankind.”
This year brought an extra tribute in the form of a book, Sages and Dreamers, dedicated to the 92NY lectures and the breadth of study they had spawned: “Twenty-five years later,” wrote Professor Wiesel in the preface to the volume, “I have collected twenty-five texts, one for each of those years. Each is about a man or a woman whose inspired life I found intriguing and demanding of investigation.” By the time the fortieth anniversary year came around, in 2006, the scheduled lecture merited a title that indicated the special nature of the occasion at hand: “The topic before us is ‘Come and Celebrate.’ So, let us celebrate.” Yet what might have been straight-forward became a catalyst for deeper reflection: “What should we celebrate? Should we celebrate the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, freedom and solidarity still exist here and there? In many places, in our own country surely. In Israel, certainly. Should we celebrate what we always try to celebrate until now for the last 40 years? The value, the attraction, the melodious inspiration of learning? And that “learning” has an appeal, and you here are the living proof that it has an appeal?” As Professor Wiesel makes vividly clear, the celebration at hand did not belong to the teacher alone; the students who had so faithfully gathered year after year should know that it belonged to them as well.
Special remarks, recollections, celebrations, tribute volumes: the 92NY anniversaries were accompanied by all of them. Yet at the conclusion of the 20th anniversary lecture, Professor Wiesel added a new wrinkle: singing Hasidic melodies. His delicate singing of any melody would have introduced a special dimension into the proceedings. But the melody he chose to sing, a Vizhnitz rendition of “Ani Maamin,” I Believe in the Coming of the Messiah, had its own story and its own lineage. The melody, commented Professor Wiesel, was “waiting for the proper occasion. First for my son’s Bar Mitzvah last year—and then it was waiting for the 20th anniversary. So maybe the surprise will be: I will sing it for you.” And he did. Moreover, he would sing it again at the conclusion of the 30th anniversary, and then one more time at the end of the 40th year lecture , “Come Celebrate.” Every tenth year the 92Y would, to paraphrase Professor Wiesel, become Vizhnitz. One of the wonders of the Wiesel Archive is that we, too, can, anytime we feel so moved, become Vizhnitz.
“This is the forty-seventh year,” begins his 2013 lecture on his newly published memoir, Open Heart, “that I am giving these lectures at the Y. Many of you haven’t been born then. Forty-seventh year: usually these are lectures about the Bible, Talmud, Hasidism, and modern contemporary things. Which means we took a character, either of the Bible or the Talmud or of Hasidic movement, and we did what we call in French explication de texte, only text. Tonight we make it different. Tonight the subject is not Moses. It’s not Rabbi Akiva. It’s not Rabbi Zusya. It’s me.”
The shift of focus is of course accurate; most of Professor Wiesel’s lectures do not place his own life in the foreground; the lectures were not, as he deftly puts it, about “me.” Yet at each lecture he offered what he called “preliminary remarks,” which, while not only about “me”, did include an account of events in his own life, in that of his family and friends, of his travels and conversations, his projects and consultations. They also allowed him to speak extemporaneously about his successes as well as shortcomings: “I’m very good at giving advice,” he wryly confessed, “which no one accepts.” He was a teacher speaking to, or, better, with students—who had a right to know what was taking place in his life.
The “preliminary remarks” regularly included other aspects: thank yous; comments on current events in the world; a succinct review of the previous lectures; and welcoming latecomers. In offering thanks to 92NY personnel and others, Professor Wiesel was showing his good manners and sensitivity. But behind and beyond that, the giving of thanks occupied an essential place in his estimation of what made a Jew a Jew and what made his life meaningful. “No one is as grateful as a survivor,” he commented about the Biblical Noah—but expressed himself in a similar vein on many other occasions as well. “He or she knows that every moment means grace, for he or she could have been in another’s place, another who is gone.”
The preliminary remarks had one final segment: a cue to welcome latecomers waiting outside the hall for the doors to open. The manner in which Professor Wiesel brought up the cue could be—and often was—disarming. Concluding his introduction to the Biblical Ezekiel, for example, Professor Wiesel draws attention to the prophet’s unique stature: “And so we intend to meet one of [the great Biblical figures] tonight. Ezekiel: a unique teller of unique tales. A man whose sense of timing was also unique. He seemed to forever address himself to people who were not there. Which reminds me: what about those latecomers who are not here?” From Ezekiel’s absent audience to the latecomers at the Y in one fell swoop! This typifies Professor Wiesel’s untypical—funny, clever, almost daring—welcome to the latecomers; late though they may have been, they too were deserving of the opportunity to study. Lecture after lecture, year after year, he always tendered this invitation with humor and affection—affection for both the latecomers who had waited for the doors to open as well as for the well-honed custom itself.
In the published versions of the lectures, the “preliminary remarks” were mostly eliminated. This is understandable. Since the remarks were joined to the occasion of the lecture itself, to the time and place it was given, it didn’t make sense to leave them in. But now, in presenting the lectures as they took place, we give the preliminary remarks back, as it were, to the lectures and thereby offer the listener or reader a fuller context. We can see that much more what was on Professor Wiesel’s mind at the time that he gave the lecture.
Evident throughout the nearly five decades of lectures was Professor Wiesel’s protective loving gaze of Israel and Jerusalem. Professor Wiesel’s lectures began in 1967—the very year of the June Six Day War, the result of which being that Jerusalem and the Western Wall once again came up under Jewish authority. He, though no soldier, heard of the outbreak of war and headed for Israel. He thus arrived at the Western Wall within days of its liberation and began, then and there, to compose the book that became A Beggar in Jerusalem.
He shared his passion for Jerusalem in countless lectures: “’Wherever I go my steps lead me to Jerusalem,’ said the great Hasidic storyteller Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. As for myself, I can say that whenever I speak, I speak always of Jerusalem. Whatever words I use, I try to move them for Jerusalem. . . So, there could be no book written by me without it containing at least one chapter about Jerusalem . . . The leitmotif is “In the beginning was Jerusalem, in the beginning was Jerusalem.” He also reflected on the wondrous opportunity given to Jews of our time: “Don’t you wonder occasionally what it was that made our generation worthy of witnessing some of the greatest upheavals in history. What my grandfather and his and yours did not see except in their prayers or in their dreams we see with our own eyes. The rebirth of an ancient nation in its ancient land, the restoration of its sovereignty, the new splendor of all Jerusalem. What have we done to deserve all that?”
Far from being simply history, his studies of ancient Israel—in this case, the 1990 lecture on Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai—provided lessons for today: “whatever was to happen in Jewish history has already happened then. How are we to understand the assault on Israel for wanting to remain in Jerusalem, if not within the context of a historical assault on the Jewish people because of its allegiance to Jerusalem? What is happening now is not new. For hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, from so many quarters, came attacks — well-organized, well-financed, well-arranged, well-armed — to take Jerusalem away from the Jewish the people. They didn’t succeed then, nor will they succeed now.” And, some ten years later, in his 2001 lecture on the Biblical judge Gideon, Professor Wiesel spoke in a similar vein: “What have we learned from Gideon and the story of Gideon? We have learned that we must recognize when Israel is in danger, and when we recognize that Israel is in danger we must commit our lives to Israel. And then [we must] stop being judges, only being what we are supposed to be: the allies of Israel. And these days Israel is in danger.” With Jerusalem and Israel as with so much else, Professor Wiesel joined fervor and eloquence with witness and study, harnessing the wisdom of ancient Jewry to the present reality of Jews today.
In contrast to other lecture settings, there was at the Y normally no introduction—except, of course, for his own.
All this and more awaits the students of today who yearn to sit at the feet of a master. For them, for us, the Elie Wiesel Living Archive at The 92nd Street Y, New York makes available an unparalleled entry to Elie Wiesel’s teaching career. Featuring presentations, as noted, from 1967-2014, the archive offers unique possibilities, revealing multiple dimensions of his concerns and their evolution over nearly 50 years. Certainly, these lectures recorded at Professor Wiesel’s “yeshiva” offer a key resource for Jewish Torah education. This is clearly a major contribution in its own right. Yet there are other treasures to be mined. Presented year after year by one of world’s most revered teachers of what he referred to as “the art of morality,” the Living Archive’s cache of lectures can also serve as an essential guide in ethics, human rights, and memory in the wake of the Holocaust.
In addition, this trove of Professor Wiesel’s lectures provides a singular resource for becoming aware in an authentic manner of Elie Wiesel’s biography, wherein Jewish study and practice are preeminent concerns. His portraits of great Jewish Torah luminaries that comprise most of the 92NY lectures become the gateway to our fuller appreciation of Professor Wiesel as a great Jewish Torah luminary. 92NY’s Wiesel Living Archive thus promises to play a leading role (perhaps, the leading role) in continuing to educate Jewish communities and the world at large according to the style and content of his voice and vision. We look forward to learning with you.