All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (21 page)

As I sat there on the train, someone suddenly spoke to me in Yiddish in a hoarse, raspy voice. It was the man I had seen at Aya Samuel’s in Lyons. He was slovenly, and his ridiculous tiny hat and dusty glasses
made him more than a little conspicuous. “Come over here,” he said, looking at me. “There’s room.” When I didn’t move, he came and sat down next to me. “What are you reading?” he asked, as if we had known each other for years. Without waiting for an answer, he took the book out of my hands, glanced at the cover, flipped through the pages, and handed it back to me: “The only thing of value here,” he said matter-of-factly, “is an innovative commentary on the fifth verse of the fifth chapter.” Then he asked me why I was carrying Job around. “Because,” I stammered, “I have to give a talk about it tomorrow.”

“Oh, you’re teaching Job? You?”

“I’m just supposed to talk about it a little,” I said, lowering my head.

He asked me—was there a hint of sarcasm in his voice?—whether I knew the subject. Yes, I said nervously, but not that well.… “But you’ve studied it closely?” Well, maybe not closely enough. “In other words, you’re going to teach without having studied.” I was silent. “You probably figure you know enough to impress your audience, right? Or at least enough to have the right to discuss the subject, yes?” I couldn’t think of an answer so I said nothing, but he kept at me until I stammered a few words about the value of dialogue, silence, and the theme of friendship, and the power of Satan. Which was pretty much all I knew. He then proceeded to prove that I had understood nothing whatever about the marvelous Book of Job. In fact, I couldn’t even translate the very first verse to his standard. And if I was arrogant enough to believe that this was the only subject about which I knew nothing, I was sadly mistaken, as he now proved by subjecting me to a veritable examination strewn with traps and trick questions. It was clear I was an insolent ignoramus of the worst order. “And,” Shushani concluded, “you have the chutzpah to give a speech on Job in public?” All right, enough of that, I thought. I was eager for this ordeal to end. The train moved with agonizing lethargy, but to my relief we finally arrived in Taverny, where I could take leave of his sarcasm. I got up, shook his hand, and politely wished him a good Shabbat. “What do you mean, a good Shabbat?” he said. “We’re not done yet. I’m coming with you.”

That Shabbat is engraved in my memory like a punishment. No one had invited Shushani, and I wondered whether the sole purpose of his gate-crashing was to ruin my talk. That was his method. He liked to demolish before rebuilding, to abase before offering recompense.

I trembled as I began my presentation.
Ish haya be’eretz Utz…
. “There was a man in the land of Uz.…” A perfect and upright father, charitable and generous. Almost a
tzaddik
, a man so good that Satan was jealous of him.… Supreme injustice: Job suffers without having sinned, and God goes along with the game.… Job as a living example of the problem of theodicy.… My classmates paid no attention to the strange-looking man who had come for the talk and the meal but not for the service. Ensconced in a corner, he seemed to have dozed off. I half expected him to interrupt me, but he was charitable enough to let me finish in peace. He didn’t speak during the discussion either, but an ironic smile fluttered on his lips.

It was during the traditional third meal of Shabbat, late in the afternoon, as dusk gathered, that the thunderbolt fell upon the assembly. Breaking the silence between two songs, he began to talk about the prayers composed in honor of the final hours of Shabbat. His voice was husky, but it commanded attention. What was Shabbat, and who was the queen who bore its name? Over whom did she reign, and with what powers was she invested? Shushani juggled quotations drawn from medieval lyric poetry and the mystic sources of Safed, painting a vivid yet subtle portrait. All at once we pictured the queen; we could feel her presence, were intoxicated by her grace, and became her doting escorts.

Night had long since fallen. We could have recited the prayer of Maariv, performed the Havdalah, and lighted the lamps, but no one dreamed of it. While this orator spoke, we lived outside time in paradise.

In the end he broke the spell himself, putting his hands on the table, pushing himself up, and emitting a soft grunt as if to say, That’s it. We dropped back down to earth, and a new week began.

On Sunday he treated us to a “real” lecture—on Job, of course; to “rehabilitate him,” as he put it. It was a dazzling, stimulating, provocative, enriching exposition the likes of which I had never heard: Job and Abraham, Job and the Prophet Elijah, Job and Balaam; the language and philosophy of Job; the Jewish attitude toward suffering and injustice; the commentaries of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish; truth and myth; the possibilities of the Midrash, but also its limits. Of course everyone looked at me almost as much as at him, as though deriding me: now that’s what you call an analysis of Job. I felt ashamed. Having lost face, I wanted to flee. But I stayed, and afterward he buttonholed me as we filed out. “Now at least you’ll be able to talk about
Job a little more intelligently,” he said. I made an attempt to pull away, but he held my arm and added, “Admit you haven’t learned anything yet.” And I heard myself answer, “Help me learn.” He made one last nasty comment and disappeared. It was a game that went on for several days.

But I refused to give up. I sensed in him such great intellectual power and such a deep fund of knowledge that I actually began to pursue him. In fact, I already belonged to him. I gave him my reason and my will. His words banished distance and obstacles. It was as though he were explaining to the Creator Himself the triumphs and defeats of His creation. If he shook my inner peace, that was what I wanted. If he overturned certainties, so much the better, for they were beginning to weigh heavily upon me. Man is defined by what troubles him, not by what reassures him. I needed to be forced to start all over.

In Shushani I had found a master. I would later discover that he had also taught the great French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and that his disciples included renowned professors who paid him fabulous fees. What he did with all that money I’ll never know.

Everything about him was a mystery. Where had he come from? Philosophy, Marx said, has no history, but what about philosophers? Don’t they have a history? This one seemed not to, or else he meant to keep it secret.

No one knew his real name, his origin, or his age. What kind of family did he come from? What was he seeking to achieve, or to forget? Had he ever known happiness, had he ever known a woman? He spoke of himself only to obscure his tracks. Where did he acquire his immense knowledge? Who had ordained him a rabbi? Where had he learned all those ancient and modern languages? Where and toward what end had he studied Sanskrit? He mastered Hungarian in two weeks, just to surprise me. He knew the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds by heart; also Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Crescas, not to mention Yehuda Halevy, the poems of Ibn Gabirol, and the Greek and Latin classics as well. One Shabbat afternoon in Taverny he gave an entire lecture about the very first verse of the Book of Isaiah:
Khazon Yesbayahu ben Amotz
… “The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” It lasted four hours, and even single words were courses in themselves.
Khazon
means “vision,” but is it an image or a word? Was it received from outside or did it come from within? In a waking or a dreaming state? What is its relation to
individual piety and organized society? What is the difference between prophecy and vision, vision and hallucination? Can it be that one must be a Jew to have visions? What about Balaam in the Bible or the oracle at Delphi? And who was Isaiah? And why is he called the prince of prophets? What were his complaints against his people? Why was he so harsh with them? If we compare him, say, to Jeremiah, which of the two touches us more deeply? How to define his relation to language and to prophecy? Didn’t other prophets, like Moses himself, or Jonah, try to escape their prophetic obligation? More generally, does a prophet have the right to reject his role and mission? Doesn’t the law say that a prophet who rejects his prophetic mission merits death? Is that why he died an unnatural death, his body cut in two by King Manasseh? Why did all the prophets die tragically? Without ever departing from the verse, Shushani swept us along at a dizzying pace, as other realms and horizons opened before him and before us. He left us breathless, hovering between the summit and the depths of knowledge, the one as disturbing as the other.

One day he asked us to question him about anything we wanted, the Bible or politics, history or the Midrash, detective stories or the Zohar. He listened to our questions, eyelids drooping, waiting for everyone to finish. And then, like a magician, he gathered it all together to create a mosaic of stunning richness and rigor, harmoniously weaving our questions and his answers together. Suddenly each of us realized that all these themes, raised at random as if for his amusement, were in fact linked to a center, to a single focus of clarity. Yes, Cain’s murderous act contained that of Titus. Yes, Jacob’s wrestling with the angel heralded the adventure of the Jewish people defying their fate.

The village clock in the distance had long since tolled midnight, but the inexhaustible orator talked on, endowing his words with a thousand shining highlights and his thought with as many shadows, and it was our common prayer that his rough, monotonous voice would never fall silent.

Detractors called him a modern-day Faust. Had he sold his soul to Satan in exchange for limitless knowledge? A daring hypothesis, but I rejected it. I don’t know if he was a holy man in disguise, a kabalist wandering the earth to gather “divine sparks” so as to reconstitute the original flame, or an eternal vagabond, the timeless outsider who embodies doubt and threat. But I am sure he did not belong to the powers of “the other side,” that of darkness.

One day, unable to contain my curiosity, I foolishly violated his sanctuary, asking him the question that haunted even my dreams: “Who are you? Who are you really? If I have children someday, I would like to be able to tell them about you.… I mean later …” He froze, and a cruel expression came over his face. I could hear his rasping breath. Then he unleashed his fury: “And who says there’ll be a later?” Fortunately, his anger subsided as quickly as it had been aroused.

I sometimes talk about Shushani in my writings and in my lectures. Whenever I mention him, strangers write to me or come up to me adding this or that detail about his life and his mystery—a young rabbi in Connecticut who had met him in Montevideo, a merchant in Paris who told me that Shushani gave him financial advice, the mother of a Jewish beauty queen in North Carolina who remembers listening to him in Taverny. In San Francisco and Montreal, Caracas and Marseilles, when I mentioned Shushani, a smile would appear on some listener’s face, and I knew I had just rekindled a spark.

Haim-Hersh Kahan, a childhood friend, wrote from Oslo that he had attended one of Shushani’s courses in a synagogue near the Rue des Rosiers: “Everything I had learned till then was as nothing by comparison.”

The latest to date is a nuclear physicist, Jacques Goldberg, who shared with me a
khidush
(a finding in biblical exegesis) that he attributes to Shushani. Knowing nothing about physics, nuclear or otherwise, I cannot claim to understand the implications of his communication. In fact, I often felt that Shushani’s words were beyond understanding. In fact, I think he liked to be misunderstood.

Menashe attended his courses for a while, but eventually gave up. “Be careful,” he warned me. “This man wants to shake our faith. He scares me.” Menashe emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, where he became a
rosh yeshiva
, the head of an academy, and one of the great Halachic arbiters of his generation. Nevertheless, I stayed with Shushani.

I couldn’t leave him and didn’t want to. He was one of those men who stay with you, inhabiting you and troubling you long after they have gone. Few people have so disconcerted and fascinated me. Clearly, in his role as teacher and master he was intent on transmitting and sharing something, but to this day I don’t know what. His certainties? I don’t know if he had any. Perhaps his doubts. He used his abilities to perturb established truths.

What were his complaints about man? What did he demand of Jewish thought and history or of man’s destiny? On his lips the words “yes” and “no” were equivalent. He developed his own theories and systems in one bold sweep, and used the same arguments to defend or destroy them, leaving the subjugated pupil feeling as though he had been led to the threshold of an adventure that now might cast him into an abyss or take him to towering heights. He was contradiction personified, with all its allure and danger. How to explain his apparent poverty, when his suitcase (which I once chanced to glimpse open) contained a quantity of jewels and foreign currency? What accounted for his taste for wandering? Was he one of those Hasidic masters who must wander in exile before revealing himself, one of the thirty-six hidden Just Men thanks to whom the world exists as a world? I knew of no country he hadn’t visited. He had been seen in Algiers, heard in Casablanca, spotted in Nepal. Like the
na-venadnik
of legend, he never slept in the same place two nights in a row. Was he a vegetarian? He refused to take his meals in public. How did he sustain his strength? He could speak for eight hours at a stretch without showing the slightest physical or intellectual fatigue.

During the Occupation he was arrested by an officer of the Gestapo. In perfect German he declared that he was Alsatian, Aryan, and a university professor to boot. The officer guffawed at the sight of this vagabond. “You, a professor?”

“Yes, me.”

“And what do you teach?”

“Higher mathematics.”

“No luck. It just so happens that I myself am a professor of higher mathematics in civilian life.”