[Introduction to Part I: THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM, by Bernard-Henri Levy.
This book was lent to me by the president of the Jewish Club in my city of residence. I recognized the author from his photo on the inside cover flap as someone I had just recently watched being interviewed on CNN, possibly about this recent publication dated 2017. As we often do with MUST READ endorsements, we’re featuring here what we call the “bookends” — the Prologue and the Epilogue — to whet your appetite, dear reader. Sometimes we add excerpts or whole chapters, although we would rather that you add this to your personal collection of worthwhile literary acquisitions.—-Admin1.]
EPILOGUE
One last word.
And one last return to Nineveh.
I must admit I sometimes get tired of Nineveh.
It is not a question of time.
Nor of what changes and what remains.
The lassitude was already on, when my Mukti Bahini companions in the resistance cells of Jessore and Khulna, in Bangladesh, would test me by quoting anti-Semitic verses from the Koran.
No, I am weary of the night that hangs over Nineveh.
Weary of the darkness of the executioners and, sometimes, of the executed.
Tired of telling myself, over and over, that this time we have the real thing, the real Edom, the real Ishmael, the one that Maimonides himself recognized in the enlightenment of Averroes, Avicenna, and Al-Farabi.
And always it is the same tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Sometimes, though, I tell myself that I have understood.
Yes, sometimes I have the feeling of knowing everything that it is the burned bodies of the Jews of Auschwitz.
Everything that it is humanly possible to understand from the voices of the unnamed, unburied, unnumbered dead of Lviv or Libya—I tell myself that the day will come when I will have understood it.
And, as for the duty of moving toward the other, as for ht obligation of the Jew toward the non-Jew, that responsibility-for-the-nations that is so essential to the Jewish person and that we do not always embrace firmly enough, haven’t I done my share and more? Haven’t I paid my dues? Can’t I call myself even?
I have done the tour of Nineveh not once, not twice, but forty times—enough!
On days like that, I tell myself that Johan as right about not going to preach in the great city.
I tell myself that I understand his resistance, his strange way of balking, of staying in Jaffa, of leaving for Tarshish to hide among the sailors—anything but Nineveh!
And I tell myself that, if you have to remain in the dark, you might as well stay in the wet but (at least initially) agreeable shade of the belly of the whale.
He did not have it too bad there.
It was large enough, spacious enough, for him to be happy there.
Was that not where, after all, he composed his most beautiful song?
“This room isn’t so bad”, one of his distant descendant will say from a room in Sarajevo where he prefers to keep his own company rather than go out, to play the prophet in Nineveh for the umpteenth time rather than sing.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be yourself.
A man is more than his deeds, contrary to what the young Sartre and the old Sartre believed.
Once he has done and risked much, is it not time for that other encounter, the last one, which is not necessarily death (or at least not the death that men fear, where their work is halted)?
That is what a great French writer, Michel Leiris, a toreador of sorts, was saying when he confided to me in his last years that, essentially, there is no bull’s horn more menacing than a face-to-face encounter with oneself.
That was the thinking, according to the old dame of Torcello in Venice who was one of the last people to speak with him (and who reported it to me), of the great American writer and matador Ernest Hemingway when he said that it was the only appointment one must not miss. Hemingway missed it, alas, several weeks later in Ketchum, Idaho.
And perhaps it was Jonah’s last thought as well, the one note reported in the Book because God himself breathed back the answer, not in a whisper but in a spiriting away.
In such moments, I hear the voice of my father, which is the one thing of his that for me has remained alive.
I hear the voice of his own father as well, nearly as alive—I had forgotten it, but now suddenly it has come back to me.
Is he speaking to me or to his son?
Disciplining me or pursuing the endless argument in which father and son engaged?
I hear them calling me by the name they gave me, which is another name for Cistercian solitude.
I hear the angel of that given name and of that family name who, further away in me than i will ever be able to go, whispers that all detours are permitted, because detours are minor matters that take little time, after which we all regain the humble beyond the chimeras of splendor. Ultimately, the last word comes back to the secret name that awaits each of us beyond ourselves and that, one day, must be allowed to speak.
It is indeed to me that they both are speaking.
What are they saying, exactly?
“You have wanted to rescue many people. Now we want you to rescue yourself. We want you, just this one, to leap to the very bottom of the sea into the belly of the whale that you have been outsmarting by pushing yourself ever closer toward the lands of Nineveh. We do not want you to visit a dangerous land but to sojourn in (and not detour from) a dangerous you, a vegetative you, a fallen, lost you, a you severed from the fleeting successes that pose a great danger for you. There, in that you, we want you to learn from Jonah the art of singing in the night”.
And there is more: “You put your head into the lion’s jaws, you went toe-to-toe with the worst, you entered the labyrinths of terror and evil? We are here to tell you this: No Maidan, no Tahrir Square, no forum or gathering place in Burundi or Bosnia was a real lion’s mouth—the real lion’s mouth was and will always be your own. You can’t save Nineveh unless you are part Nineveh; you can’t preach to Nineveh if you are incapable of putting yourself in the position of having forty days to wait, to hang on, and to hope—before being destroyed; Nineveh will be no more than a word or an image unless you decide one day to go down into the belly of the whale in some manner and there face yourself, trapped, immobile as time passes, like a plant half-alive and half-dead, like a lost animal, like a man without reason or goal, like a wayward question without the answers provided by culture, words, and love—then, alone, with no way out, you will encounter the Jew in you”.
And they continue: “On that day, when you are relieved of the fortunes and favors of this world, you will have to resolve to honor your name, not because it is yours or ours, but because it is the name of one of the sons of Jacob who did not worship the golden calf, who commanded that another name, that of Dinah, that of his sister and also of your mother, not be dishonored.”
In such moments I think again of Solal’s two glories. The vain and illusory glory of the prince among princes, lord of Samaria, of which he will be deprived at the appointed time as one snatches a paper crown from carnival king. And the other, hidden glory, but true glory, that of the Jew among Jews, “strangers in their exile” but “firm in their strangeness”, which he regains at the end of the story.
I think of Abraham, alone in the oven of Ur Kasdim, so alone, so fragile on the land that his vision offered him. “I am a stranger and reside with you”, he says to the children of Heth in order to purchase the cave of Machpelah in which to bury his wife. And they: “Yes, of course, you are a prince among us; you are a prince of God and here can feel at home”. Well they know, these hypocrites, these kings of doublespeak, that a prince of God does not consume much bread. He’s not such a big deal and, in any case, he won’t cost much. He’ll be quiet—until the other glory, the living one, which shine from his abuse, becomes too burdensome for those around him; and then they abuse him, spurn him, and the wheel of human anger and violence reengages; and how they are torn apart, the little princes of God, put to death, like Rabbi Akiva, for the sanctification of the Name!
And then I think of Benny Levy and the trap he set for me (set in the sense of holding up a mirror) on the day when he urged me to go deeper into the joy of study and, in the same breath, extolled what he called my “lordship”. It was indeed a mirror. For, obviously, it had been I who had set the trap at the outset. Vanity. Pride. Idolatry of the great and the loud. Relationships with powerful people, carried on without illusions but cultivated all the same: Are they not useful when it comes to obtaining for those who have little as much space as the vast metropolises can offer them? But, still, they will be an obstacle for me—this, I have always known—if I want to go further, to push beyond the bounds of this book and leave for good the path of arrogant men.
I also know that I will have to convene Datan and Aviram one last time, the accomplices of Korah, the anti-Moses conspirators, those servants of nothingness, consumed by use of the wrong language, the sociopolitical language spoken in the palaces where the fate of the world is decided but on which the true salvation of humanity does not depend.
Will I have strength, one day, to separate myself from them?
The strength to understand that the true glory of the Jews, the glory that is like the light that turns a blade of grass, wet with due, into the true scepter of the splendor of things, has but one real obstacle: the false language, the wooden language that, when it burns produces an acrid fire with sickly flames and a smoke so heavy with soot that it leaves a bitter taste and poisons even the most beautiful of books?
Will my ear be keen enough, against the din of the Sicarites to hear the voice of Moses?
His law and his voice?
Not only the hard and inflexible law brought from heaven to give wings to ordinary people who know how to use it, but the music of his true voice?
A part of me hopes so.
When exactly, I could not say, because in such matters one cannot prejudge or swear before committing oneself.
But one day, yes, this is my hope.
Even though I well know that I have work yet to do (a little? a lot?) before I, too, will be able to say that my other journey, the present journey, is over.
Even though the world, with its marvels and misery, with its petrified people yearning to live continues to call to me in a voice that I have never been able to ignore.
And even if I am well aware that, with all that I still need to learn, understand, absorb, and pass on, I am for the time being worth about as much as the little Jew who, in Leonard Cohen’s song, thought he had written the Bible.
Other battles await.
Other Ninevehs to which I shall have to report.
But I have all the time in the world.
We always have time, until we are one hundred twenty, to finish learning that a life of mind and spirit is an astounding exception, wrested, not only from the order of death, but also from that of the most noble tasks.
The trip has only just begun.