When I was a child sitting in church, bored often enough with a sermon except for when the preacher was telling a story, I sometimes opened my mother’s Bible. Inside the front cover, taped to the right side at the top of the endpaper, was a saying, the gist of which is all I can remember. It went something like this: God gave us words and then he gave us music to expand the words.
Music, in fact any art form – painting, drawing, dancing, photography, etc., does precisely that to words.
The second to last chapter of Ariel Burger’s memoir-ish book about Elie Wiesel as a teacher, Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, gets the crisp title “Beyond Words.” It’s about art, and Burger fastens on this because he is himself also an artist.
But what struck me in this chapter as much as the art was the number of stories Wiesel told in his classes. As a young professor at another seminary one of my students complained to me because I “wasted” time telling some illustrative story. He was an exception, but a memorable for me. Humans are storytellers and straight information in a classroom robs the students and the teacher of a fuller experience. Yet, stories are words. Perhaps we could say one of Wiesel’s art forms was to turn words into stories that expanded what could be said in an indicative statement. His stories popped from my reading chair to a shelf in my library where I grabbed the two-volume set of Martin Buber called Tales of the Hasidim.
But the chp is not at all about the art of storytelling. The stories wrap around a discussion of art and how ethics and aesthetics are connected (and if they are).
It begins by informing us one day Wiesel began class singing because “Sometimes, we must move beyond words.” His singing was vulnerable and made more students in the class vulnerable. By the way, he tells us the original version of Night, a short little book, was “almost nine hundred pages long”!!! He had to strip to the essentials, which in the edition I first read was 120 pages. Somehow that version disappeared from my shelf and I now have the trilogy in one clothbound volume.
Language is both words and more than words because, as Wiesel said, “what is unsaid is more important [at times?] than what is said.”
Silence matters too. The danger of talking about something important (like the Holocaust for Wiesel) is banality, that is, desensitizing us to the horrors.
Sometimes the storyteller’s impact is minimal. He tells the story of a rabbi who before Passover sought to persuade his people to be generous for the poor. When he got home his wife said, “Nu, how was it?” “Did you accomplish anything?” He said, “Only half.” Thus, “I did not succeed in convincing the rich to give, but I managed to convince the poor to receive.” Quite a story there.
Truth telling matters in using words. We liberate language so it names “things as they really are” because distortions of language will never liberate reality.
In this chp Burger wraps in his own rediscovery of his art form of drawing and painting. His yeshiva experience was all words; no art; no creativeness. During his time as Wiesel’s TA he found his art again and it created a storm of creation.
Ethics, the discipline of learning and doing what is good and right and beautiful, can be distorted by art but art itself, when done well, can transcend the intentions. Art has its own power.
Here’s one: in a Jewish legend Solomon “knew the songs of birds and could interpret them.” A later Hasidic master was asked by a student how that could be, and he said, “When you know what your own soul is singing, you will also understand the songs of the bird.” Are those birds – ach, the warblers above all – singing something inherent, too, to who we are?
I learned that Wiesel only wanted to eat chocolate.
He advised Burger to postpone teaching until he was done with his studies. “But you have time, and you will find a way to share your voice.” With this chasing it down: “Your voice is as important as mine.”
What produces art?
Suffering.
Silence.
Friendship.
What produces art? We are made in the image of God. God creates, ex nihilo (as the church came to believe). We create, expand, on God’s creation by grace. Some of it is creative, artistic (I dare not define it). Not only artists have an innate need to create, to expand words, canvas, wood, body movements, stories. But all icons (broken as we are) have the innate impetus to do art, speak art or sing, or write. In education, some say creativity is squelched, because that box is little expandable. I get that. I remember at age 13 when my schooling was done (poverty does that), I awakened to musical talents. First, my friend introduced me to the harmonica, literally speaking words that vibrate into jointed melodies. Then, at 14, working to earn my keep I managed to purchase a brand new accordion (at 73 I still have it), then the piano, then lessons, then joy for over 50 years. It takes others to see in us sometime what we don’t ourselves see. And off to the races… Recently a few of my friends started gathering on zoom every two weeks on Saturday nights. We do an art project together based on a theme in art and talk about our experience and the theme. The participants are 20 somethings except me. Artists have perspectives much wiser than their age because suffering, contemplation, deep friendships, longings, spill out into varying art forms and expand the universe of God.
It must have been you, Scot, who brought this book to my attention (you've had a significant impact on my book budget for some time now) and I am grateful. It is filled with gems, some from Burger, others Burger's quote of Wiesel. Example: "You must tell your story. This is because, if even one person learns from it how to be more human, you will have made your memories into a blessing. We must turn our suffering into a bridge so that others might suffer less." (p. 20). Thanks again.