People brought to him a man who . . . could hardly talk.
It’s the late 1950’s in Russia. Stalin is dead but his legacy of fear lingers. In a synagogue a rabbi is preparing for the annual Yom Kippur service – but the synagogue’s beadle (caretaker) Zalmen keeps disturbing him. There will be guests at the service, a touring theatrical group of foreigners including Jews – due to their bus breaking down. Zalmen sees an opportunity for the rabbi to appeal through these visitors to the outside world to pay attention to the plight of Jews (and believers?) in an atheist Soviet Union.
Thus begins a play called Zalmen or the Madness of God, written by the Auschwitz/Buchenwald survivor Elie Wiesel – a Romanian Jew who at 16 (after the deaths of his parents and sister) was liberated in 1944. He later seems to have agonized over the non-resistance of his people during the Holocaust and later, while attending a Yom Kippur service in Russia in 1964, imagined the current rabbi raising his voice in protest over the oppression of his people in Russia. But no such protest was made. So Wiesel revived the scene in his play to show the rabbi doing just that: crying out to reveal the pain, the agony of oppressed peoples everywhere.
In Wiesel’s play the rabbi has no intention of speaking out – but Zalmen keeps prodding him. The rabbi complains, “Zalmen, you’re disturbing me!” And Zalmen replies, “Good, Rabbi. I want to disturb you – I want you to do something else, something new . . . What better time to break with past habits – to say things you’ve never said, . . . I want an answer, Rabbi.” The rabbi’s answer is no; even the synagogue’s lay leaders want to play it safe – since a commissar will be monitoring the event. So the service begins with Zalmen still prodding the rabbi: “This is a unique occasion and you know it . . . Don’t let it slip away, Rabbi. If you do, you’re a coward.” This moves the Rabbi who says, “Is it our fault we have forgotten . . . how to take risks . . . we have forgotten how to shout, how to vent our anger, how to say no.” To which Zalmen says, “You lack imagination, Rabbi . . . we are the imagination and madness of the world . . . One has to be mad today to believe in God and in man – one has to be mad to believe.”
Then comes the climax. The rabbi, as he begins the hymn Kol Nidre, grows taller. The light changes. The rabbi breaks into spontaneous speech: “I say and I proclaim – that it is more than we can bear . . . brothers, who can see us now, hear the last cries of a shattered community! To you I say: the sparks are dying and our heritage, our very destiny are covered with dust. Broken are the wings of the eagle . . . the Torah here is in peril and the spirit of a whole people is being crushed . . . if you . . . forsake us, we will be the last of the Jews in this land who in silence bury the Jew within them. And know this, brothers, . . . that so much silence is breaking my heart . . . Know that it is more than I can bear . . .” Needless to say, there follows an investigation of the embarrassing outburst – and they conclude the rabbi had gone mad. Except that Zalmen leaves us wondering at the end whether the event ever happened. “And you believed me! That story . . . It could never have happened. Never! Not here! Not now!”
And yet quite often down through history human speech has burst forth eloquent and unimpeded – as in the Sermon on the Mount, spoken by that other rabbi who cured the stutterer in today’s Gospel.