Chaim Grade's Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner

The Jewish Enlightenment on trial

I’ve been reading Chaim Grade lately. It took me 43 years to encounter his work, and now that I have, I can’t put it down. The Quarrel is as good an encapsulation of the Jewish encounter with Western modernity, culminating in the Holocaust, as I’ve come across, and I thought it worth reviewing.

Get this one, the free translation available online is of much lower quality

The narrator, Chaim Vilner, a stand-in for Grade, encounters his former friend Hersh Rasseyner in post-WW2 Paris. Vilner and Rasseyner had been study partners, havruta, in a Lithuanian yeshiva before the war. Vilner had left the yeshiva and Torah observance in the 30s to become a secular writer and poet. Rasseyner had stayed religious. Two hostile pre-war encounters serve as a prelude to the main story, which takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between the two.

Lithuania had been a center of Jewish life and learning with roots going back 600 years. A third of the city had been Jewish. The Germans and their Lithuanian assistants murdered 90% of the population, most by shooting in Ponary. Only those remained who had survived the death camps, joined the partisans or hidden out in the sewers under the ghettos. After the war, many of the survivors took the opportunity to leave; life in a mausoleum occupied by the Lithuanian compatriots of their families’ murderers was not very enticing. Poland, to which Grade’s hometown of Vilna had historically belonged, was not a very welcoming place either, for similar reasons.

Grade had spent the war in the Soviet Union; he escaped the advancing Germans by a miracle and suffered immense privation in Central Asia. His wife and aged mother had not been able to flee with him and remained behind, and were murdered. After the war, he moved West, passing through France and ultimately ending up in America, where he spent the rest of his life as a secular Yiddish writer. It is briefly mentioned that Rasseyner had married before the war; it can be surmised that his wife and any children they may have had had been murdered. Rasseyner spent the war in the death camps. He had formed a circle of young Jewish men around himself there, risking his life to save them from physical and spiritual death, hiding a Torah scroll to read on the holidays, smuggling them out of the death block on his back when they got sick and were condemned to death. Freed from the camps, he dedicated his time to bringing Jews and Jewish texts from Europe and Morocco to yeshivot in Israel and America-in other words, to rescuing Jewish souls from the wreckage.

Their conversation begins in the chthonic underground metro, where they run into each other, and moves up into the square beneath the Hotel de Ville, beneath the gaze of hundreds of statues representing the finest qualities and intellectual achievements of the West as seen through its own eyes. They speak throughout the afternoon and the golden hour of the sunset, and past nightfall. Their conversation is decades old-both men had spent the war thinking of the other, engaged in an imaginary debate with him.

Vilner speaks as a secular Jew, enamored with the humanism of the West. The evil of the Holocaust has made him lose his remaining faith in God. He claims to believe in art and literature, which depict the complexity of the soul and the struggles faced by all men, good and evil. He proclaims the values of the Enlightenment, centuries of heroic struggle for liberty, equality and brotherhood, “so that the masses should consist of free and happy individuals”. He believes in the inner goodness of the goyim, as exemplified by a Polish doctor who’d risked his life to save Jews for his faith and a Lithuanian woman who was an atheist and yet risked hers to save not only Jewish lives but also Jewish texts. And he believes in the inner goodness of the Jews, even those who do not follow the Torah. He begs Rasseyner not to judge them harshly, or cast them away.

Rasseyner sees things differently. Before the war, he hid from the world and its evils in his Torah learning. “Then came the German. He took me by my Jewish beard, yanked my head up, and ordered me to look him straight in the eye. I had to look into his evil eyes and into the eyes of the whole world.” To him, “the German himself is the Enlightenment.” The dead statues of goy philosophers, writers and scientists are a mockery, putrid idols. All of their beautiful words are lies. In their heyday, they lived on the patronage of kings who massacred cities, women and children included, and who then used the spoils of their robbery to buy off these whorish intellectuals. Pandering to their patrons, they made excuses for the evils of the latter. They wrote fine, beautiful words, and built elaborate systems of justifications for their sins, so that they could commit those sins in public, and repent in public, and enjoy the display of their repentance. They hated the Jews for saying that some things were forbidden, and then stole those prohibitions and paid them lip service while violating them.

The intellectuals of the goyim thought that their reason would lead them to the good, but actually their reason was like a dog, obedient until it smells a bitch in heat. Their reason followed their desires; they would duel, kill and die for their pride, to keep others from mocking them. They ended up groveling in the mud before Stalin and Hitler, mustached tyrants, in order to save their lives. The intellectuals’ claims of loving the truth, goodness, reason more than life itself were all lies-the wise men of the Enlightenment only loved their own self-image. The promise of the Enlightenment was to make men gods, and it made them into devils.

The Jews who had bought what the Enlightenment was selling were worshipping a false god, and falsely at that. “An enlightened man would talk in the most elevated rhetoric about the Enlightenment, but what he really had in mind was to become a pharmacist.” They’d started off promising to be Jews at home and goyim in public, and threw off their Jewish language and manners. After the Holocaust they ended up in the opposite situation-having abandoned their faith, they could no longer be Jews at home, but having had their families murdered, they could no longer pretend to be goyim in public. Rasseyner brings the parable of a dog, invited to two weddings, who runs first to the further one and is late, then runs back to the closer one, and is too late there as well, and is chased away with kicks.

The very attempts of the Jews who’d abandoned Judaism to assimilate and find material success in the ranks of goyim angered the goyim and caused the Holocaust. In its aftermath, the Poles and Lithuanians forgave the Germans for everything except for failing to finish the job. They dealt in the property of dead Jews while living in their houses. They would attack and even kill any Jew who survived and came back, in order to keep his property. Nothing was done to most of the murderers; the victorious nations had mercy on them and even resented the Jews on whose behalf they had been forced to execute a small handful.

And still the secular Jews wish to live with these people and accommodate them, so that they can snatch a scrap of material pleasure. Some attempted halfway accommodations, rejecting those parts of the Torah which were too onerous, as opposed to trying to make their burden and their sacrifice for God heavier, “both praying and sinning in secret.” But you can’t be like the other nations, neither by outright betrayal, nor by half measures. We are the Chosen People, and we can’t abandon our destiny. A religious man can go on doing his work, calm in the knowledge that the day is coming when God will extract His full justice for what was done to His people. But how can a secular one live, knowing that there is no justice to expect from the goyim whom he seeks to join? How can he continue to seek their favor?

Grade meant Rasseyner as a proxy for his own conscience, and gives him the victory, ending the story by asking for his kindness and mercy upon himself, the other secular Jews and the good Gentiles. In his real post-war life in America, Grade lived suspended between the Litvak Judaism of his youth and the secular intellectualism of his milieu. In his own words, when he was learning Gemara, he would feel as though he ought to be reading Dostoyevsky, and when he was reading Dostoyevsky, it was with the feeling that he ought to be learning Gemara.

In My Mother’s Sabbath Days, Grade mentions that a rabbi who came to Vilna after the war and claimed that its Jews had been slaughtered as a punishment for lack of sincerity in their Judaism. Grade told him that in 1943, when the Germans forced the surviving Jews to excavate the mass graves at Ponary and burn the victims’ bodies, many of the dead were wrapped in their tallit, their prayer shawls. In their last moments alive, they’d found the time to put on a tallit. As per his request, Grade’s body was buried wrapped in his tallit.