Out With the Old, in With the New

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999 | by Suzanne Fields

Wrinter is here with its short days and long nights, and this year with the end of one millennium as we wait for another It's a time for sitting by the fire, roasting chestnuts, popping corn, drinking hot chocolate and telling stories, reflecting on the past and contemplating the future, to gather insights to store away as a squirrel hides nuts for savings and sustenance. We could read Ecclesiastes about "a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." Or pick up Shakespeare's Richard H, who craved "sad stories about the death of kings." Or recall with Dylan Thomas the wonders of childhood:

"Forgotten mornings when he
walked with/
  his mother/
  Through the parables/
  of sunlight/

And the legend of green
chapels."

We can weave fantasies about the six new planets orbiting distant stars, newly discovered by astronomers. Five may have water, suggesting the possibility of life. (Shall we wish upon a star?) Will a beautiful Narcissus fall in love with his reflection in a pool of water? Might a mermaid ride a tantalizing wave to tempt a sailor? Is there a new Adam there?

The end of the century inspires such reveries.

I've been reading And the Sea is Never Full, the latest memoir of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who as much as any man alive can testify to the paradoxes of humanity as it has encompassed good and evil during the past century. He rose like the phoenix from the ashes of Auschwitz where family and friends were put to death. He has lived through the darkest night and risen with the sun in the morning. He is a man who believes as it is written in the Talmud: "Silence easily becomes acquiescence."

Wiesel tells the story of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, a wise man locked in a St. Petersburg prison after being denounced as an enemy of the czar One day the warden of the prison visits the rabbi in his solitary cell. He is perplexed by a passage in Genesis and wants to know what the rabbi can tell him about it.

"After Adam bites into the forbidden fruit and flees" he says, "the Lord cries out: `Ayekha, where are you?'" Asks the warden: "Is it possible, even conceivable, that the Creator of the world did not know where Adam was hiding?"

The rabbi smiles with the wisdom of the Bible behind him and explains the real meaning of the question. "Ayekha signifies: `Where do you stand in this world? What is your place in history? What have you done with your life, Adam?' These are the fundamental questions that every human being must confront sooner or later... It is to each of us that God speaks when He says, 'Ayekha.' Where are you, Adam?"

The 20th century arrived with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900. "God is dead," said the philosopher, "and we have killed Him." For many, Nietzsche was the father of an atheistic existentialism. One professor compares him to the canary in the mine shaft, so sensitive to poison gases that it dies before the miners do, warning them to flee.

It's an ironic comparison. Many Nazis took Nietzsche as their hero. They were the ones who turned the gas on others to purify the race for Aryan supermen.

Nietzsche did not see man made in God's image, because he did not see God. Instead he saw man like an animal, only a little more complicated. Nietzsche wanted art and poetry to replace religion. It didn't happen. Aesthetic appreciation lacks ethical understanding. Today the Brooklyn Museum sponsors a show called "Sensation" in which an artist decorates the Madonna with elephant dung. It creates a sensation, but few take it seriously enough to call it art. We gawk, but we don't revere.

Elie Wiesel found that many of his college classes were made up of students who were children of survivors of the Holocaust who came to him to learn what their parents dared not discuss. They want Wiesel to give them insights in understanding their parents' silence about the evil they endured. For many he becomes a substitute father, a man who's been where their parents have been and who is not afraid to talk about it. He must bear witness to their parents' pain.

A burning question sears the teacher's conscience and intellect: "How was I to convince them that in spite of everything, mankind deserves our faith?" He anticipates the terror of his revelations. He tells his students this:

"Together we are going to encounter madness on a global scale. We must take care not to be contaminated. What are we about to learn here? To read, to weep, to dream the end of the dream. And later, to fall down, but also to rise again, to take one step and then another."

Not bad advice for the rest of us Adams, as we near the approach ramp to the bridge to the 21st century.