Mon, 1 July 2019 = 28th of Sivan, 5779. Boker Mooar b'Or l'koolum! A bright morning to everyone!
We beg Hashem
We, we beg Hashem with the strength and greatness of thy right arm, untangle our knotted fate.
Accept your people's song, elevate, elevate and purify us
We beg Hashem with the strength and greatness of thy right arm, untangle our knotted fate.
Accept your people's song, elevate and purify us
Please, heroic one, those who pursue your uniqueness guard them as the pupil of an eye.
Bless them, purify them, pity them
May your righteousness always reward them. Powerful and Holy One
Powerful and Holy One, in goodness lead your flock.
Unique and proud one, to your people turn, who remember your holiness.
Accept our cries, and hear our screams, oh knower of mysteries. (Blessed is the name of his noble kingdom forever and ever.)
This mighty prayer helps one face the trials and tribulations of quotidian existence with the hope, pride, and strength of the Divine Being's most admired creation, the human being.
"Writing about my vulnerability to life's vicissitudes would mandate how I chose to deal with them as I recalled their dominant impressions and details. Then the question arises: Does my human vulnerability limit what I should address in writing according to my senses and the meaning I may attribute to the reality in which I live?
"A resounding 'no' rings true to this question of writing's being delimited by human vulnerability. All of my teachers have taught and written emphatically about their faith in the human being's ability to create. What is writing if not creating, whether it be a memory, a perception, an emotion, or some intuitive presentiment? The future--its condition, ramifications and impact--on the human context, viz., what might have been in addition to what might be. When I sit down and deliberate about how things might have been if only I had done or said so and so, or when I consider my options in the future, I frequently become excited at the prospects; for such awareness lets me think on the speculative level.
"This latter exhilaration truly provides my reason for writing. Of course, I love to write about what I know; yet I am enamoured of thise situations and persons I do not have any control over, for they have already said or done or occurred in the past, or they are yet to say, do, or happen in the future. Moreover, I know that I have written something of value when I am true to how descry what might have been or what might be, like a lookout who descries land from an elevated position atop the foremast."--Nitzarim, Yoel. Matrix. Fourth New Series. Volume I, Number I, Outrigger Publications, Hamilton, New Zealand, June, 2002. Ed. by Dr. Norman Simms.
"What Is Elie Wiesel's Legacy? Noted Jewish Writers Weigh In"
"A Haaretz tribute, by Eetta Prince-Gibson, on the incomparable pioneering writer of human experience, social activist, professor, humantarian, and mensch, Elie Wiesel, who passed away on July 3, 2016, at age eighty-seven and who taught the world so much about the cruelty and dignity of mankind.
"Epstein reflects on the impact that Wiesel’s novel, “Night” (first published in French in 1958, and in English in 1960) had on her life and “on the lives of so many young people, then and now. I have met young people from all over the world who, through Wiesel’s ability to communicate his experience, have learned about the Holocaust and about both human cruelty and dignity.
“'Indeed,' Epstein adds, 'Wiesel was so sure of his mission to keep memory based on experience alive that he gave birth to a genre, a Zeitgeist. He was a pioneer of this process. He found his own way to write his memories, and he encouraged others to find their way. He wrote of real events, but he was not writing history ... It is thanks to Wiesel that today we value memory as a genre.'"
"Wiesel also wrote, she says, 'because of his own internal conflicts, especially about Judaism and theology. He used his writing to come to peace with his own internal conflicts, especially about Judaism and theology. He never resolved these conflicts, perhaps he did not believe, after the Holocaust, that they could ever be resolved. Yet he came to live in peace with those conflicts.'”
"Israeli writer Michal Govrin – the award-winning author of 10 books of poetry and fiction, whose work has been anthologized in a collection, 'Hold On to the Sun' (2010) – says that Wiesel “'left us the responsibility to continue to hold the memories.'”
"In a most profound way, Govrin adds, Wiesel has left us to deal with the meaning of being a Jew after the Holocaust. 'He asked, "Who is a Jew? What is a Jew?" Because if they try to exterminate you because you are a Jew, then what is the meaning of your Jewishness? What is the meaning of being a human being, if they tried to erase you?'”
"For Wiesel, one meaning was remembering. 'Each survivor has a voice that tells us to continue to remember, and each of us remembers differently. But Wiesel’s death puts all of us who come after him at a crossroad. We, who did not experience the Holocaust, cannot remember. We cannot recreate the experience for others, we cannot create representations of the Holocaust.
"'We can only transmit memory, and we will have to find our way to do this. We must, so that the memory of the Holocaust will have meaning for the present and the future, and not only for the past.
“'This is the legacy that Elie Wiesel left us, and it is a heavy, heavy legacy,'” Govrin concludes.
"Best-selling novelist Waldman. Wiesel wrote "'his experience in a way that did not turn me into a voyeur and somehow made the incomprehensible accessible.'” Emil Salman
"A. B. Yehoshua, the renowned "'elder statesman' of Israeli literature, says that Wiesel 'set the first spark that lit the fire of writing about the Holocaust, burning deep in Jewish literature in Israel and abroad.
“'He was a true emissary of his experience and the experience of the Holocaust,'" Yehoshua says. "'And that was a tremendous achievement for his time, because no one wanted to read him. Like a prophet, he went from town to town, making himself heard even when no one wanted to hear him.'”
"Yehoshua reveals that he was 'angry at Wiesel because he didn’t live here in Israel, and it is only here in Israel that one can live a full Jewish experience. But Elie Wiesel was a kind and gentle man ... and he was very hurt by cynical comments that he was making ‘Shoah-business.’ He, the most famous Jew in the world, a man whose very being was Jewish, could not live here. We in Israel should think what that means for our society.'”
"'Yet, even though Wiesel was such a gentle man,' Yehoshua continues, 'he was a man of great courage. He stood up to presidents and world leaders. He condemned and denounced injustice. He set an example for us all.'"
Honoring experiences
"Ayelet Waldman, best-selling Israeli-American novelist and essayist, says that Wiesel 'affected my writing in a most profound way.'
"First, she says, 'it was Wiesel that taught me about the Holocaust. Like many teenage girls, I was obsessed with the Holocaust, and I read 'Night' at that point in my life – it was the tale of someone who was my age ... Wiesel had the ability to write his experience in a way that did not turn me into a voyeur and somehow made the incomprehensible accessible'.”
"At the same time, she continues, 'he taught me the limits of what I can write ... If you are not Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, how do you write about these experiences, without being exploitative? How can you write with authenticity? That does not mean that we cannot write about things we have not experienced ourselves, but it does mean that we must never exploit our ability to write to trivialize an experience we do not know'.”
"She faced these issues, Waldman says, when writing her best-selling book, 'Love and Treasure,'a tale based on the Hungarian Gold Train in World War II. “There were scenes that I wrote ... that I had to take out because Wiesel’s writing challenged me to find a way to write to honor an experience, not to exploit it.'"
Waldman has also been influenced and inspired by Wiesel’s stands on human atrocities perpetrated, for example, in Rwanda and Bosnia.
“'As writers, we scramble to write in a way that will do justice to the magnitude of the Holocaust or other atrocities. Yet we know that there is no way we can really do them justice. Wiesel’s legacy is that we most know and accept this, and that we must continue to write to honor those experiences.'”
"Israeli poet, writer, editor and lecturer Hava Pinhas Cohen, recalls when she first read 'Night.' 'As an Israeli-born teenager, the daughter of a family who fled Europe, this was the first time that I could begin to understand what it meant to be a Jew abroad. My family never spoke about what they had gone through. When I read Wiesel ... I felt the hatred that Jews had experienced. I felt his helplessness, his vulnerability, his most primordial feelings of persecution – these were new experiences to me, growing up here, and they made me much more humble.
“'As a writer, Wiesel didn’t write about – he wrote the experience itself. I learned that the role of literature, and my responsibility as a writer, is to bring to readers the opportunity to identify with something they cannot experience. Indeed, that is the meaning of all art.'”
"Eliaz Cohen, a poet and peace activist from the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank, says that the world did not appreciate how great an author Wiesel was.
"Cohen: 'I spoke to him about the fact that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and not the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he told me that he didn’t mind, because the goal of all literature is to be an emissary of the spirit of humanity.
“'And he truly saw himself as an emissary of humanity, as a man of mission. In our days, terms like "emissary" and "mission" have a negative connotation, as if we are supposed to write only about ourselves.'”
"'But Wiesel, says Cohen, knew better: He saw himself, he says, as “’the Watchman of the House of Israel’ (Ezekiel 33:7). He understood that his story was even more significant because it was part of a whole. He brought his own voice, yet knew that it echoed through the universe of voices that surrounded him.'
"Cohen believes that Jewish writers in the Diaspora may be returning to find that voice, but that in Israel, 'we have cut ourselves off, elevating our single experiences. The legacy of Elie Wiesel can bring us back to our mission as writers. He understood, as we must, that each word he wrote was resting on the words written before and after him.'”
<https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-what-is-elie-wiesel-s-legacy-noted-jewish-writers-weigh-in-1.5405663>
My dear Reb Eliezer,
Although we are not approaching your Yahrzeit, the date death in the Hebrew calendar, I wish to greet you from This World of the Living with love and respect. You are truly missed in this world as a leader in moral thinking and reasoning, as a compassionate lover of the Jewish people and people throughout this world, and as an empathetic listener to those whose voices have been silenced due to oppression and persecution. As a devoted student, Reb Eliezer, my mentor and beloved Levi, my hope is that you are continuing to write words of profound perspicuity and pellucid humaneness and sharing your ideas with your reading and listening audiences in the World To Come. A lesson I learned from you here in this World of the Living is the following: lead a humble life of transcendent persuasions to gracefully prod the living into more humane interactions, interconnections, and introspection. From your teachings, may we here in the World of the Living reach higher and higher from strength to strength to a better, improved path toward the Messianic Era.
May the L-rd G-d bless you always.
Yoel David Nitzarim, the Kohen
The following is a video of Elie Wiesel's remarks at his tribute dinner sponsored by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum at the Park West Hotel in Washington, DC, on May 19, 2011:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpnC7RpZ-aE>
---------------------------------I will return to Linked-in on Monday, July 29, 2019. Have a blessed, enjoyable, productive month of July, everyone!