All That You Leave Behind

“The Watch” is the name of an autobiographical tale told by Elie Wiesel in his 1965 book One Generation After. Wiesel shares the story of his first, and what would be his only, return to the town of his birth, Sighet, Transylvania, since the conclusion of World War II. For his bar mitzvah, Wiesel explains, he had received a beautiful gold watch, a gift he treasured dearly until a few years later when he had turned fifteen, and the Nazis came, followed by the edicts, and then the ghettos, the transports, and eventually the fateful hours just before Passover of 1944 when the 10,000 Jews of Sighet were sent to the camps. As the roundups began, but with the darkness of the night yet to come still beyond their sight, Elie and his family began to dig feverishly into the ground in order to bury the jewelry, the candelabras, the family heirlooms – anything and everything of value – in the naive hope that one day they would return to retrieve them. Elie had one and only one possession of value – his bar mitzvah watch – and so like the rest his family, he decided to bury it, three steps from the fence, beneath the poplar tree, to be recovered one day. 

Twenty years and an eternity later, Wiesel returns unannounced to Sighet with the mission of retrieving his cherished watch. It is the middle of the night as Elie cautiously enters the yard of his childhood, careful not to wake the family sleeping in the home that was once his. He retraces his steps to the exact location, and using his bare hands, begins to scratch and dig into the frozen ground as minutes, or maybe it was hours, pass. Suddenly his fingers hit something hard and metallic and he exhumes the box containing the relic from his past, the only remaining symbol of all that had been. The intervening years had not been kind to the watch: it was rusty and covered with dirt. Elie nonetheless touches it, caresses it, and raises it lovingly to his lips. At that moment Wiesel resolves to bring it to the best jeweler in the world to recover the luster it once had.

Sensing the rising of the sun and coming of dawn, Wiesel hurriedly stuffs the watch into his pocket and runs out of the garden and courtyard. He is halfway down the street when – inexplicably – he stops dead in his tracks. He does an about face, retraces his steps to that poplar tree in the garden, and in his words, “as at Yom Kippur services,” kneels down, places the watch back into the box, the box back into the hole, and then proceeds to once more fill up the hole with earth.

The story ends with Wiesel wondering to himself why he did what he did. Walking away, he imagines hearing the voices of his childhood village along with the tick-tock of the just buried watch. Leaving his village never to return, Wiesel concludes: “Since that day, the town of my childhood has ceased being just another town. It has become the face of the watch.” (One Generation After, pp. 60–65)

It would be altogether foolish, and not a little bit disrespectful, for one rabbi, in one Yom Kippur sermon, to presume to distill the breadth and depth of Elie Wiesel’s life into one short story. Author of over fifty books, writer of thousands of articles and lectures, spokesman for the Jewish people and moral compass to a generation, he left far too much, and it is far too soon to begin to assess the enormity of Wiesel’s legacy. By virtue of his own achievements, and as representative to an entire generation, Elie Wiesel was a singular figure and the implications of his passing, I believe, have yet to be fully absorbed by the world community. Wiesel was our watchman for collective conscience, our moral ombudsman obliging the Jewish and non-Jewish community to remember and bear witness for the dead and the living.

Which is why, I think, in the months since his passing, I have found myself returning again and again to this one story. Wiesel was our prophet of memory; he devoted his entire life to ensuring that the past not be forgotten. So sacred was his commitment to recalling those murdered in the Shoah, so egregious would be the sin of inattention to the six million, that he declared, “To forget would not be only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” And yet, embedded in his autobiographical tale, there is, I think, a lesson, a parable of sorts on the nature of remembrance, central to understanding Wiesel’s legacy. It is altogether natural to return, to seek to salvage the past, as Wiesel did with the watch that represented the treasure and trauma of bygone days. And yet, the point of the story, the take-home message, is not what Wiesel took, but what he left behind. One generation later, Wiesel understood that sacrosanct as the mitzvah of memory may be, some things must remain buried in the past. We retrieve, and we let go; we return, but we also move on. Wiesel is the prophet of memory not because he told us to remember, he is the prophet of memory because he taught us how to remember. His life an exemplar of what it means, given our obligation to remember the past, to always leverage that obligation towards building a vital present and future.

In the year ahead, should you choose to dip into Wiesel’s writings, I suggest you begin with portraits he provides of Biblical figures and Hasidic masters. Time and again, Wiesel returned to those individuals who prove themselves able to reconstitute themselves after setback, struggle against melancholy, and live to brave another day. Most famously, Wiesel identified with the protagonist of the High Holidays – Isaac – whom Wiesel describes as “the first survivor.” Isaac, who survived a near death experience; Isaac, who by way of God’s cruel command, suffered an irreparably ruptured relationship with his father. Isaac had every reason to walk this world with a perpetually wounded sensibility. Nevertheless, Wiesel explains, Isaac did not rebel against life, he did not resign himself to oblivion. He settled on his land, he married, had children, and refused “to let fate turn him into a bitter man.” Isaac, the first survivor, has much to teach us about human resilience, perhaps most of all his name itself – Yitzhak – signifying laughter. Isaac would never forget, he never “freed himself from the traumatized scenes that violated his youth . . . yet he remained capable of laughter.” “In spite of everything,” Wiesel concludes, “he did laugh.” (MOG, pp. 96-97)

Wiesel writes of many such figures: Job, who experienced unspeakable loss but refused to renounce his faith; Jacob, who fought courageously with an angel to reconcile with his brother Esau; and Adam, who – though expelled from the Garden – did not, in Wiesel’s words, “wallow in self-denial – he had the courage to get up and begin anew.” These biblical portraits, mind you, are not mere studies of the ancient past; they are archetypes representing our most personal struggles today. In my mind, Wiesel saves his finest writing for his treatment of Joseph who – having been cast into the pit by his siblings, sold into slavery, imprisoned, and left to be forgotten – had every reason to hate. We would have understood had he chosen to repudiate his brothers, hate them, and drive them from house and memory; for him they represented a source of grief and evil. And yet, Wiesel explains, when given the opportunity for vengeance, “he succeeded in vanquishing his bitterness and . . . transforming it into inspiration and love, he became a reconciled, happy man.” Wiesel explains that for Joseph, or for us, “There is a rare virtue in forgoing justified reprisals, overcoming well-founded bitterness. It is not easy to resist dealing out deserved punishment.” Only a tzaddik, [a truly righteous person] forgives without forgetting. Joseph is a tzaddik, not because he kept his faith in God, he is a tzaddik because given every reason to give in to his hatred, he kept his faith in humanity. “What does this all mean [for us]?” Wiesel asks the reader. “That one is not born a tzaddik; one must strive to become one. And having become a tzaddik, one must strive to remain one.” (MOG, pp. 166ff.)

It is in this sense that Elie Wiesel taught us how to remember. Just a few years after the publication of One Generation After, Wiesel delivered a commencement address at City College of New York entitled “Hope and Fear.” While acknowledging the ruins of Eastern European Jewry, he went on to assert: “suffering gives man no privileges; it all depends on what he does with it. If he uses his suffering against man, he betrays it; if he uses it to fight evil and humanize destiny, then he elevates it and elevates himself.” (V. II, p. 155). Wiesel was no Wiesenthal; the latter demanded justice for crimes past, the former sought justice in the present, thus elevating his suffering and elevating humanity. Nor, for that matter, was Wiesel’s commitment to memory driven by a Jewish chauvinism; just the opposite – his activism on behalf of a global humanity was a direct consequence of his Jewishness. For Wiesel it was never either/or. From Argentina to Tibet, Cambodia to Nicaragua, the Jews of the former Soviet Union to the war-torn former Yugoslavia, Wiesel was the rarest of figures whose commitment to memory served as both the anchor to his identity and the springboard by which he transcended his personal and parochial hurt. Much in the same way that Mandela, King, and Gandhi were able to avoid “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” so too Wiesel was able to invoke the past in order to save the future. Altogether telling is the fact that in his 1986 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize he spoke not only of the divine gift of memory, but also of the human need to let go, the gift that permits humanity to continue living. It is only natural to go back, but we must learn, Wiesel teaches, to leave some things – watches and otherwise – behind.

Wiesel faced atrocities on a magnitude and degree of evil far greater than almost all of us – thankfully – can imagine. Yet it is the manner in which he navigated the question of memory, teaching us not just to remember, but how to remember, that provides us with the key to unlocking the door to the spiritual demands of the hour. Because on this Day of Atonement, on this Yom Kippur we too are called on to turn over the topsoil of our identities, our bowing to the ground signaling our reflections on the year gone by, digging up our past with an eye to determining what we will take with us into the year ahead and what we leave behind. History had its eyes on Wiesel; spokesperson for a generation, arbiter of global moral conscience, he lived in a spotlight far brighter than that which our quotidian selves are subjected to. But the question for us, nevertheless, is one and the same. What shall we take, and what shall we leave? We arrive here with a catalogue of wrongs and misdeeds, those we have committed and undoubtedly those committed against us. Hurts within families, offenses big and small, and no doubt, trusts broken and trusts we have broken. As my soon-to-be teenage daughter said to me last month, “Dad, we all have baggage; some fits under the seat, some in the overhead, and some needs to be checked, but we all have baggage.” We know the task at hand, we have high hopes for the year ahead, in our workplace, in our community, in our families and – despite our holiday finest – today our imperfections are readily apparent. All is not right, we know we have fallen short. We have the gift of this day, so let us use it wisely and well; we want tomorrow and the year ahead to be better than yesterday and the year gone by.

Powerful as this day of Yom Kippur may be, the rabbis teach, it does have its limitations. Our prayers, our confessions, our fasts are all acts of atonement for sins between humanity and God, not between one person and another. Some here, I hope, have reached out to loved ones and have responded to those who reached out to make amends. And some, I imagine, have relationships still in the breach. Perhaps the apologies we heard were lackluster, non-apology apologies that seem to be the coin and curse of our era. Maybe the hurt is too great, the betrayal of such a degree that any apology is insufficient, hurt of such magnitude that in truth we are better off walking away from that relationship entirely. I look back on this year knowing that on more than one occasion, I have fallen short of the hopes I have set for myself and the expectations of my loved ones, my colleagues, and my congregants. So too, I reflect back on this year as one that I will long remember for the hurts, both petty and momentous, that I have endured. Yom Kippur is no day of amnesty, nor for that matter is it a blanket of amnesia. To forget is neither a possible nor a desired outcome. As the American humorist Kin Hubbard once wrote: “Nobody ever forgets where they buried the hatchet.” We need to learn from the past and grow wiser from it; those hurts – painful as they were – have shaped our being and made us who we are. We must, as the philosopher Avishai Margalit explains – not forget the wrong done, but the resentment that accompanies it. (Ethics of Memory) The rabbis explain that today was not the day that the tablets were shattered at the base of Mount Sinai, but the day that the broken shards were collected and the journey of the Israelites resumed. Today is the day we move on, begin again, and enter this year constructively, aware of the past, but not mired in its hurt.

All of which is why, I believe, the real spiritual heroics of this day are to be found not in the theological calculus between humanity and God, nor, for that matter, in the forlorn hope that everyone who should apologize to us will do so in the hours to come. Today, we are called on to do the hardest thing of all, the thing that nobody can do other than you, the one thing that is in our power to do, what Wiesel taught us to do, and that is to liberate ourselves from the resentment, the incapacitating pain of having been hurt. Today we remember . . . and we let go. We dig up, but we also re-bury. We may or may not have heard the apologies we have been waiting for, but today we declare our auto-emancipation from the slavery of resentment. We boldly step into new emotional space letting go of our need for retribution and vengeance. It has always struck me as significant that in the Yom Kippur ritual described in the Torah, the goat upon which all the sins of Israel are placed is not sacrificed, but sent out, expelled beyond the communal boundaries. The symbolism could not be clearer: a grand intra-communal sacrament to “get over it.” The sin still remains; the goat, after all, is not slaughtered. Nothing is forgotten, but for the health of the individual, the health of the community, we must move forward. Our tradition could not be clearer on the misstep of bearing a personal grudge, on the toxic and corrosive effects of resentment. It is, no question, the most difficult thing to do. We must, nevertheless, take the high road, if not walk a new road altogether. Whatever the hurt may have been, whatever the past, we dare not permit it to bankrupt our future, we dare not let that individual or incident live rent-free indefinitely in our heads. Our eyes, to paraphrase Gandhi, may well be bloodshot, but we know, if we are to enter the coming year in strength, it is through eyes calm and clear that we chart our path forward.

Short of a handshake or two, I cannot claim to have “known” Elie Wiesel. Momentous and sorrowful as his passing was for our people, for me it was not personal. As yet as fate would have it, this past summer did deal me the loss of a loved one who, long ago, taught me on a far more intimate scale how to remember as Wiesel did. He was my teacher, mentor, and friend, Cantor Leopold Szneer, who died this summer at the age of 94. Decades ago, as a rabbinical student, I worked for Cantor Szneer for a number of years, calling pages and delivering sermons in a service he conducted at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Los Angeles. Having led that service for decades prior to my arrival, he needed me much in the same way that George Michael needed Andrew Ridgeley, which is to say, not at all. In his own words, he hired me “because everyone needs their start,” and he saw it as his duty to provide that – for me and other rabbinical students. The service brought together the Los Angeles survivor community: survivors, their children, and grandchildren. Born in Munich, Cantor Szneer had been a musical prodigy, singing in the synagogue choir, with dreams of becoming a cantor, dreams interrupted by the Shoah. Like so many, he lost everything. Never before had I participated in a Yizkor service like the one led by Cantor Szneer in those years. The listing of the names of the camps, the El Moleh prayer that tore into your soul and brought down the heavens, the unrestrained weeping of every person in the room, each congregant personally affected by the Shoah. It remains an experience that, to my dying day, I will never forget.

I worked for Cantor Szneer for only a few years, but in the decades that followed our relationship grew stronger, and on every visit to my hometown of Los Angeles, I would pay a visit to Cantor and Mrs. Szneer. I remember introducing them to my girlfriend, who would become my wife, and then to each of our children as they entered the world. Their wedding gift to us, a challah plate, adorns our table every Shabbos. We would speak of family, of my career; we gossiped about rabbis and cantors; and Cantor Szneer would regale me with stories of his decades of service to the Jewish community, including his friendship with Wiesel. Cantor and Mrs. Szneer were never blessed with children of their own, and as we built trust and a bond formed, he would speak to me openly about his experience in the Shoah. That fateful night of Kristallnacht as he watched the synagogues of Munich burn, the months he and his family hid in an abandoned dog shelter, his deportation to Dachau and then four other concentration camps. The feel of the brass knuckles striking his chest as he leapt to pry a Nazi officer away from his mother, and then the discovery that his parents had been gassed and burned at Auschwitz. All this and much, much more, Cantor Szneer shared; all this and much, much more, Cantor Szneer committed me to remembering.

But since his passing this summer, my thoughts have turned repeatedly not to his sorrow, but to his faith. I think of the secret High Holiday service Cantor Szneer conducted from memory in Auschwitz. I think of the fact that upon arriving in the states in 1952, having lost everything, Cantor Szneer regrouped on his childhood dream, going on to serve the Jewish community as a hazzan for the next sixty-one years. I think of the over three thousand Bnei Mitzvah students he trained and the generations of couples at whose weddings he officiated. Most of all, I think of the strength of Cantor Szneer’s faith, a man who, having earned every right to reject God, the Jewish People, and humanity, chose, nevertheless, to affirm his faith, to build up a new Jewish generation, and to always stand before God, humbly representing the hopes and dreams of the Jewish People before the Almighty.

More than anything else, my thoughts since his passing have turned to one particular visit a few years ago. Travel was by then out of the question for Cantor and Mrs. Szneer, so before my oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah, I brought my children to his apartment, along with a Sefer Torah. My daughter chanted her portion for him; as fate would have it, it was the story of Joseph. Cantor Szneer lovingly coached her, correcting her on the very aliyah, the very sentence, the very word va-yishkahehu, meaning “and he forgot him,” referring to the sin of Pharaoh’s cupbearer who had forgotten Joseph. Subtly delivered, the message was nonetheless clear – we all understood that we would not make the same mistake, we would not forget. As Lucy finished and we rolled the Torah back up, I asked Cantor Szneer for the kindness of blessing my children. Like a patriarch of old, he gathered all four near, kissing each child on the forehead (and me as well), and he blessed us, instructing us to be good Jews, to never lose our faith in God, to love and care for each other, and then – and this is the part I will always remember – to always be a mensch. That no matter the offense, no matter what the world throws at you, no matter the setback – always, always, always – carry yourself as a mensch. With the tick-tock of our life ever audible, we dare not carry the hurts of the past forward. Life is just too short and too precious to let it be filled with resentment, bitterness and anger.

Friends, today is Yom Kippur. The year gone by is littered with hurt, and the length of our years ahead, their quantity, we know, is not for us to decide. So let’s make the quality of every second count. Even as we remember, let us begin anew. Even as we learn from the past, let us nurture our capacity for future laughter. Most of all, let us strive to be a community of tzaddikim - righteous ones, vanquishing bitterness, transforming it into love, and greeting this year as the menschen we aspire to be.