The Memory Generation
Episode 6: Ariel Burger
INTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Today we are talking with Ariel Burger – author of the book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom.
Ariel is a writer. An artist. And a teacher whose work integrates education, spirituality, the arts and strategies for social change. He was a lifelong student of Elie Wiesel, the esteemed Nobel Peace Prize Winner who most famously authored the memoir Night. Night was released in 1956 and is one of the first published accounts by a Holocaust survivor.
In this conversation, Ariel and I talk about the integration of creativity into stories from the past. We talk about memory as an educational tool - something that occupied both Professor Wiesel and Ariel in their shared commitment to teaching. Ariel engages with communities around the world through his art and programming and currently runs The Witness Institute which is a 15-month fellowship for emerging leaders.
Ariel and I recorded this conversation on April 25, 2022 through Zoom. I was in Portland, Maine and he was in his home just outside of Boston, Massachusetts.
INTERVIEW
Rachael Cerrotti: Ariel, thank you so much for being with me. I'm so looking forward to this conversation.
Ariel Burger: Me too. My pleasure.
Rachael Cerrotti: I had very ambitious goals for today, which was to really define what I wanted to talk to you about. But as I started to reread your book and listened to all the various recorded conversations you've had in the past, I realized that if I wanted to get through everything I was interested in exploring with you, we would need to spend a full semester of learning together.
Ariel Burger: We should do that sometime.
Rachael Cerrotti: So, I'm going to jump in starting with your childhood. And I wanted to start with a little bit about your growing up. From the time that you were a child, you had an appetite for stories of the past and you spent your spare time reading mythology and folktales and fairy tales. So it seems that from a very young age, you were drawn to stories that had a backbone of morality and human nature.
Ariel Burger: Well, I think I wasn't aware of that category when I was young. I wouldn't have thought of it that way. And in fact, stories that appeared to be moralizing were less interesting to me. You know, there's a vast difference between a moral story or a moral reflection and moralizing, which is kind of finger wagging or telling us what we should feel, think, do. I was really interested in stories that had some what I now consider to be powerful moral weight, but that were couched in, really kind of fairyland. And what I mean by that is in Jewish tradition which is the tradition in which I grew up and still find myself deeply engaged with, things are often presented - and this is true for, I think, Western culture and traditions more broadly - but things are often presented in a kind of binary way. There's heaven and there's hell, even though those aren't particularly Jewish concepts, at least biblical concepts. But there's this kind of binary way of thinking that things are good or bad. And I was really interested in the stories that took place in a third space which is often symbolized in fairyland, which is kind of amoral, actually, beyond our normal morality, but still somehow point to deep themes of heroism or caring or loss in exile and return and things that have very powerful moral weight, but they kind of come in surprising forms. And I think this is true of a lot of good science fiction and fantasy writing and other genre fiction and good literature in general. It sort of bypasses the defenses we have against people telling us what to believe or what to think. And I had a very strong, acute sense of being allergic to people telling me what to believe. But I was also really interested in figuring out for myself, well what's possible when it comes to my beliefs and how I interact with the world.
Rachael Cerrotti: So you grew up as a self-described artsy kid in New York City, and although you were not raised ultra-Orthodox, you did attend an ultra-Orthodox school. Can you tell us a bit more about your childhood and the people that raised you?
Ariel Burger: Yeah, my parents are incredible people and really have interesting and sophisticated relationships with things like tradition and Jewish heritage and creativity and personal expression and community and individualism. And so I grew up going to a school that was staffed by Hasidic and non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox teachers, rabbeum - rabbis. And we were spending our time every morning, studying texts and studying Talmud and commentaries and things like that. And I really, really love that kind of study. I love the stories and I love the interface of story and legal conversations or practice conversations like, you know, how do we practice sacred eating as a community or sacred business practices and conscious awareness around daily life? And then these mythical legendary kinds of material that you find both in the Bible and in later Jewish sources. I loved all of that. But at the same time, as you said, I was an artsy kid and - or I guess, as I said, I was an artsy kid. You were quoting me - and so I was kind of doodling a lot and drawing a lot and creating worlds and stories of my own. So there was a kind of tension that arose for me at a certain point of trying to figure out, slowly and with difficulty - what's the relationship between this tradition that I'm a part of that I love, but is also kind of a weighty tradition. You know, it's got all these centuries behind it, millennia of conversations and practices and very specific skills and techniques of reading that are taught in traditional Jewish settings. What's the relationship between all of that? And then my drawing superheroes in the margin of the page of Talmud. And how do those things fit together?
Rachael Cerrotti: Do they fit together?
Ariel Burger: I think so. I think for a long time, I struggled with that gap between them and it really felt like the superheroes and spaceships I was drawing in my Talmud page in the margins were somehow subversive or didn't really fit. But I - I have come to really see how they absolutely do fit together. And there's so much in our tradition - in Jewish tradition - that celebrates creativity. And creativity is so deeply enriched by dialogue with tradition - any tradition. And there's a certain kind of liberation that comes with the responsibility to or fidelity to a tradition and there's still a tension between that kind of deep rootedness on the one hand and wild creativity and unfettered creativity on the other. There's certainly a tension there, but in my life, it's become a really creative, joyful tension where I think that because we all come from certain ancestries and traditions, even people who are relatively disengaged from those traditions, we all have ancestors and ancestral stories and ancestral traumas and ancestral triumphs that we carry. And so turning into that and leaning into that and acknowledging and celebrating that and using that as material for our own wildness and our own creativity, I have found to be really, really powerful as opposed to picking one side or the other of that tension.
Rachael Cerrotti: Jumping ahead in your studies, when you went to college, you wanted to study the history of human beings’ search for meaning. And there was no major in meaning studies and I think that there should be.
Ariel Burger: Me too.
Rachael Cerrotti: I think that that probably would have kept me very engaged in college if I had that option. But rather than that, you opted to study religion and you went to Boston University and took a class with the esteemed Elie Wiesel. And that relationship, which started when you were just a teenager, lasted until the end of Professor Wiesel's life. Can you tell us about that relationship and you said that you were his student from the moment you met him.
Ariel Burger: Yeah. I was 15 years old when I met him, and I was right in the middle of these questions and feeling these questions in my bones and feeling a lot of urgency around trying to resolve them and the kind of angst that you can only feel when you're 15 years old and asking existential questions about life and meaning and I was really looking for help. I was looking for teachers or guides who lived both sides of that tension we were just talking about from the inside. You know, I was looking for people who really knew what it was to be an artist and what it was to be engaged with the world in a very creative way. And people who are rooted in tradition and I didn't even know a lot within my own Jewish tradition about the mystical side or some of the storytelling elements that I've since come to know and love. And there weren't a lot of teachers in my life who knew both of those elements. And so I had a sense that Professor Wiesel really was connected to both of those elements. I didn't know how how deep that went until later, but I had a sense from from reading Night, his first book - his memoir of the Holocaust - and also a little bit of exposure to him in his public lectures in New York and so as soon as I met him, I had a sense that this is someone I can talk to. And much more important than all of that was that he was just incredibly kind and generous from the moment we met. And he just welcomed me into his life and said, come and see me and bring a question. And I was really blown away by that invitation because here I was, a 15 year old kid and he's a pretty busy person. This is four years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rachael Cerrotti: Wow
Ariel Burger And he was in high demand and a famous Jewish leader and confidant of presidents and prime ministers. And he's going to the White House and the U.N. And he made time for this kid to bring questions about tradition and creativity. And it actually took me a little bit of time to build up the courage to take him up on the invitation. But I did, and that started a lifetime of questions and responses.
Rachael Cerrotti: When you were 15, how did you meet him? What was the circumstance of that?
Ariel Burger: My stepfather knew professor Wiesel. My stepfather's name is Monty Lazar. He's a conductor and really a brilliant and powerful Jewish leader in his own right and Monty had worked with Professor Wiesel on a musical performance in, I forget the exact year but it was late 70s and Professor Wiesel had a musical side, too. He studied violin as a child and then after the war, he was a choral conductor and he loved music. And he always had - he told me he always had a song in his head, no matter where he was or where he was going. He had some sort of melody that kept him afloat in difficult moments. So Monty brought me to a lecture at the Y, the 92nd Street Y in New York, where Professor Wiesel lectured for many, many years. That's how we met.
Rachael Cerrotti: Do you think that developing that relationship with him before you had the wisdom or the life experience to really contribute to the conversations with confidence. Do you think that meeting him at that time where those questions were just forming was a really big part of that relationship?
Ariel Burger: I do. Although there were several kind of renewals of the relationship. You know, there was a point where when I was in college, he invited me to become his teaching assistant and I declined the invitation because I felt what you just said - I felt that I didn't have enough really to contribute to be his teaching assistant and to hold space for other students in the way that a TA really needs to do. And I was also on my way to Israel to study and I really felt that I needed to deepen my own knowledge base and relationship with Jewish teachings and develop my own thoughts and pathway for engaging, creating or evolving my identity. And so that was a very tough decision. And when I told him, he said, I'll wait. And I thought he was just being nice, you know, and kind and polite. But he really meant it and we were in touch the whole time. When he would come to Israel, we would meet in the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and we'd have some kind of, for me, life changing conversation. And then I’d go back to yeshiva where I was immersed in daily text study again. And you know, I was hanging out with hasidim and mystics and all kinds of spiritual seekers. And then I would meet Professor Wiesel and it was always very grounding for me. But when I came back to Boston to start graduate school and be his teaching assistant - this was now in 2003 - there was a kind of a restart, a reset of our relationship because now we were, we were working together. We were meeting on a weekly basis and there was a lot of personal conversation and a lot of studying together, but also some business to attend to around the classes in the syllabus and the students and student work. And then when I graduated, when I got my doctorate at BU and I was done with that phase. You know, Professor Wiesel said we've done some good things together and I felt very sad that I was ending this period. But it turned out that that kind of opened up the deepest period of connection where there was no more work to do together. We were just connecting. I guess this is true of any kind of relationship that you can get to a place where there's no agenda at all. And it's just the kind of deepest connection because you don't have anything you need to accomplish. And it just kept - it kept renewing. I really feel like since he passed, I've had the repeated experience of going back to something he said to me years ago - finding a journal note, something he said to me 20 years ago that I only now start to understand or remembering something he said to me or having dreams about him or watching a lecture online and just finding mind-blowing new wisdom and perspective that feels like I've - I’ve never heard anything like this before in my life. That keeps happening.
Rachael Cerrotti: I feel the same way with my grandmother. Depending what's going on in my life, it's like I find different seeds of her wisdom. I've often said that I actually feel closer with my grandmother now than ever when she was alive.
Ariel Burger: I remember that from your beautiful book and I remember that at the end of the book, I think you have a photo of her when she was young and you say - you have a little caption that says something like this is how I think of her.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah. Yeah.
Ariel Burger: Even though obviously I never saw her like this in life. And, that struck me. That really struck me - the kind of connection you can have to someone from well before you knew them. And the continuous unfolding of who they are to you even after they're no longer here.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah. It's really special that the relationship keeps building. And so that's a nice segue into the memory we have of people. And so Professor Wiesel considered memory to be an essential ingredient in educating people toward humanity. Those are his words. And often quoted the Hasidic saying, “forgetfulness leads to exile, memory to redemption.” And I know that he was very encouraging of Holocaust survivors telling their stories and would offer to write the forwards for their books. I'm curious what was his and what is your understanding of those who choose not to intentionally bring the past into their present? Because, you know, our memories can be really scary and our trauma can certainly take over. It can overwhelm us. So as much as memory can lead to redemption, it can also keep us shackled to the past. And, I’m wondering what the balance is there? How do we make sure that memory doesn't encourage revenge or fear rather than compassion and respect?
Ariel Burger: It's a great question. I think that unprocessed memory, unprocessed trauma is often what leads to revenge or bitterness or the kind of shutting down or putting on layers of armor, disconnection and in extreme form, xenophobia and hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, other forms of hatred. I think often it comes from the explicit decision or the automatic implicit choice not to address it. And one of the big questions is what are the conditions necessary for addressing really difficult and painful memories and especially those that are so excruciating that they're difficult to even acknowledge. So the first principle when it comes to survivors that I learned from Professor Wiesel and you know, it's true about many questions about survivors responses whether it's the choice to tell this story or the choice not to tell the story at all, whether it's the choice to live a life of faith or reject faith. The first principle is there's no way in any universe that we can imagine that we could possibly judge survivors and their responses. Having said that, I think we have a responsibility to consider what do we do with memory. How do we capture stories in a way that is redemptive and leads towards greater sensitivity and greater commitment to moral values like peace and human dignity and respect? How do we really do that in a way that's not invasive and that's healing. So the conditions are very important, and you know, there's part of this is psychological. If I tell a story of a difficult moment to use a very kind of modest everyday example. If I had a hard day and I share it with a close friend or partner and they're not listening well. You know, I might end up feeling more alone. And the pain might be worse. And if I'm listened to with empathy and there's space created for me to let out what I'm feeling and really be heard with a deep sense of respect and honor in my experience, then I can often let it go. And that's when it comes to very light kinds of suffering and everyday kinds of moments. But I think we can extrapolate that there is a process of learning how to listen. I was giving a talk in San Diego a couple of years ago and there was an elderly woman at the talk who spoke up during the Q&A and said, I'm a survivor and I've never told my story and she seemed very, from what I could tell, very bitter and angry and I responded in the moment and then afterwards I went over to her and said, ‘please - do you want to tell me your story? Is there something you've written that you can share with me?’ And she sent me her - part of her memoir and just kind of like melted. She had never, apparently never heard that from anyone before and just hearing that - I want to hear your story. I really want to hear your story. And I know that even when I hear your story, I'm not going to understand it because I can't possibly understand it. But I want to. I want to hear it anyway so that I can bear witness to it and carry it with me and maybe share it with someone else. Just that act of creating space seemed to be, from the outside, seemed to be very healing. And I think we need to consider how we create those kinds of moments. We know every human being has a story to tell and often those stories are filled with both suffering and joy. How do we do that? How do we create those spaces for each other?
Rachael Cerrotti: Going back to you when you're growing and your experiences in being a student for all of these years, what is a memory of yours that has shaped who you are today?
Ariel Burger: One of the things I wrote about in my book was maybe the most kind of searing moment from my time with Professor Wiesel in a shared space in a classroom was the last day of class when a student asked him to show his tattoo to the class. And -
Rachael Cerrotti: And just for our listeners, the tattoo that Professor Wiesel got when he was in Auschwitz.
Ariel Burger: Right. It was such an intense moment, the space between that request and his response was very fraught. I didn't know how he was going to respond. It felt so intense and I knew that Professor Wiesel felt a little bit, umm, not self-conscious, not shy, but just sort of - the sacredness of that evidence on his body of the Holocaust - he didn't like talking about these things or sharing these things. It wasn't something that he did easily. But he did. And without saying anything, he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve and turned so that the whole class could see the number on his arm. And then he rolled his sleeve down, buttoned his sleeve, put his jacket back on and said, next question. This was kind of an open Q&A at the end of the semester. And it was such a searing moment for me and I saw the students as well. I always sat on the side of the room so I could see Professor Wiesel and the student’s faces and pay attention to the dynamics and exchanges between them. The student who asked the question turned bright red as soon as he had asked it and sort of slumped down in his chair. Like he couldn't believe he had asked this question or made this request. Other students were holding their breath and what's so powerful about that to me is that it really embodies what Professor Wiesel taught about memory, which is that even though we can't fully understand the experience of another person, much less the experience of someone who went through an extreme event like the Holocaust, memory is somehow transmittable. And we can carry other people's memories. We can carry other people's stories. We can bear witness to their experience second hand. And though we lose something in that transmission because we can never say, ‘well, I know what it's like to be a survivor.’ I can say I saw the number on Professor Wiesel's arm because he showed it to us. And I didn't put this in the book, but it's - it's another element of the story that that same year a Holocaust denier wrote a letter to Boston University faculty and the administration claiming that Elie Wiesel was never in the camps. He doesn't have a tattoo on his arm. The whole whole thing is made up. And this is a crazy person who dedicated a lot of time to denying the most well-documented crime against humanity in human history and created a website about this. And, just was, like, on a rampage trying to really persuade, I don't know, persuade faculty or administration that the whole thing is not true. So against that backdrop. Seeing Professor Wiesel make the choice to share this very for him, I think, intimate reality with the class meant that he was kind of deputizing them to hold memory and to be witnesses to the witness. You know, he's the witness of his own experience and of the Holocaust and he was known as a witness and his memoir Night and so much of his other work and his teaching and his activism and his peacemaking efforts were driven by that experience. They were motivated by that experience and somehow he was able to transform something so dark, something that defies any sort of belief or faith in goodness, anything divine or anything human. He was able to transform that somehow into a source of great positivity and positive action on behalf of communities around the world. And he believed that we can transmit that memory. And the 65 or 70 students in that room can now stand up against Holocaust deniers and say, I was there and I saw the number on his arm. And even though I think it cost him something to do that to share that it was worth it.
Rachael Cerrotti: Listening to a witness makes you a witness. That's such a cornerstone of what he believed and one of the reasons your book was titled Witness. But there is this point to be made that there's a difference of being a witness versus being a spectator? And I'd love for you to speak to that - what are the difference of those two roles and specifically in the context of our family history because I think there's something about witnessing the story of a stranger and trying to understand the other, which is incredibly important. And then there's - there’s also the responsibility of witnessing our own history. I do imagine that there's a way to be a spectator of our own history and not a witness of it. So from the idea that witness is a verb, that it's something that we engage in, it's something that we do. What do you understand being the difference there?
Ariel Burger: Professor Wiesel taught us that the opposite of a witness is a spectator and a spectator is someone who looks at reality, looks at the reality of human suffering and feels unmoved by it. Feels unimplicated in it. Feels it exists at a distance and therefore it doesn't call me to do anything in response. So it's a kind of unresponsiveness in the face of human suffering or any kind of suffering. And being a witness is all about sensitivity. It's all about taking things personally, feeling implicated in events, feeling that if I see suffering, there's a reason that I'm seeing it. There's a call to me to respond not necessarily to react, to be reactive, but to respond thoughtfully. Not necessarily to answer it or to explain it, but to respond in some sort of embodied way. To turn the experience of witnessing suffering and the call that comes with that into positive action at whatever level. At whatever scale. It can be something very small. But I have to do something in response if I'm a witness. And of course, it's not like you know, you get your witness card and you're a witness and you've graduated from being a spectator for all time. It's a constant practice and there's a constant pull to go back to sleep so being a witness is kind of waking up to the reality that we are interconnected and if I see something, I have to respond. And the choice really is over time in my life, fundamentally at a kind of meta level like at the executive functioning level of my life - do I want to cultivate being a witness? Do I want to cultivate becoming ever more sensitive? Or am I satisfied living a life of numbness and trying to avoid being implicated or responsible for others or for the world around me? And it's hard. It's not something light to choose to lean into that sense of responsibility and implication. But, I think it's in addition to leading to more positive efforts in the world, which is good, I think it also is good for us as individuals. I think ultimately that kind of responsibility is liberating. I often think about the inverse of the Spider-Man principle, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
Rachael Cerrotti: Comes great responsibility. Yeah.
Ariel Burger: So I also think it's true that with great responsibility comes great power.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah
Ariel Burger: And every parent knows this when you have a child and you're suddenly responsible for another person. You find power in yourself. You find capacities that you didn't know you had. Or if you volunteer for the community, you find something in yourself that you didn't know was there. And you know, I think that that's an experience we all have as human beings over and over again. And so waking up and choosing to cultivate that over time is really good for us. It's really healing. It helps us solve our own small problems because we're living for something bigger. And I think also - the other thing that you alluded to is that when it comes to our own story, you know, shifting from being a spectator to being a witness to our own story and then other people's stories. One of the core teachings of Professor Wiesel, one of the most important ones, I think for our time is that there's not really a bifurcation or a binary choice between choosing my particular family story or my tribal story and choosing humanity as a whole. I think he taught us that the more we connect to our own story, our own experience, our ancestors, our - our roots, our community, that the teachings and traditions of our family whether that's watching the Super Bowl together or Thanksgiving dinner or something more traditionally religious or, you know, reading together at night before bedtime, whatever it is, those family traditions and stories that ground us in a particular identity. The more we open up to the universal human commitments, too. And so the more I'm connected to myself as a Jew, the more I'm connected to humanity and the more inner resources I find and strength I find and rootedness I find to then show up for other people. And so practicing or exercising the muscle of bearing witness in one arena really helps me do it everywhere else. And you know, that's an essential part of Professor Wiesel's own life. You know, drawing on his particular experience, his ineffable, incomparable experience of the Holocaust led him to universal commitments and standing up for people in Cambodia and Yugoslavia and Rwanda and Darfur and so on. And it was because he was a Jew. And it was because he was rooted in both the celebration of Jewish experience and also the horrors of the Holocaust that he was able to transcend the normal limits of human behavior and sleep very little and fly around the world wherever people were suffering to try to bear witness and bring attention and give voice to the voiceless and all of that amazing work that he did. The particular led to the universal. I think that's something that we often get wrong in our culture today. We think that we have to choose between a tribal identity and universal commitments, but they're really, really mutually reinforcing. I think we have to reexamine and reclaim that.
Rachael Cerrotti: Can we talk about Judaism for a minute or two?
Ariel Burger: I think I'm willing to talk about Judaism.
Rachael Cerrotti: OK, cool. Umm so I have to admit I have a complicated relationship with my Judaism which I think is fairly common for many of us. And I think also very welcomed in our culture, to have a complicated relationship with our own identities.
Ariel Burger: Yeah
Rachael Cerrotti: But, you know, it wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties that I kind of had my aha moment which I'll get to in a minute of like what it was about Judaism that made me feel connected. But I feel like up until that point, and probably still to this day, there's this, like, constant conversation around me of like, what is Judaism? Is it a religion? Is it a culture? Is it tradition? Is it an ethnicity? Is it a race? Like, what is it? And probably the answer is all the above and I think I had a hard time figuring out my relationship with it because I didn't have an answer to that question. So then, you know, somewhere along my journey to retrace my grandmother's Holocaust survival story, I had this moment where I was like, Oh, Judaism is all about storytelling. And we actually have this value - this concept of l’dor v’dor - from generation to generation. And it's actually, like, embedded in our culture and our tradition to pass stories from one generation to the next. And I love that so much. And it was suddenly this moment where I was like, I suddenly felt so cozy in my Judaism for the first time.
Ariel Burger: Yeah.
Rachael Cerrotti: And so I was just wondering, you know, from the perspective of someone who has really studied Judaism, if you could share a bit about this value and why do we hold it as such an important piece of our identity as passing stories from one generation to the next?
Ariel Burger: Yeah, I love that. I love that you brought in the cozy factor. I think that's really really important. I want to start by saying that, in my humble opinion, Judaism is incredibly misunderstood. Mostly by rabbis, but also by you know, the general public in the Jewish community and outside and another time we can go into this more deeply in that semester long study we do, maybe.
Rachael Cerrotti: Please. I can't wait.
Ariel Burger: About how Judaism has been transmitted in modernity and in North America in particular. But just to give one little example, if you listen to Professor Wiesel and others who experienced pre-war Eastern European Jewish life, there was a lot going on. So this is a little bit oversimplifying, but there's absolutely an element of radical coziness and warmth as a kind of supreme value. And hospitality and welcoming and humor that in my experience of Judaism, growing up wasn't the main characteristic I would associate with Jewish life and Jewish experience. You know, in synagogue life or organizational life or whatever. And so I think there are ways that we've lost some essential things and part of our job today, considering Judaism is to really not only celebrate questions which we do and that is a very strong Jewish value, but to really recognize that we have to discover what Judaism is. And I don't mean just people who don't have a lot of Jewish education. I mean everyone. We have to kind of reexamine and reevaluate fundamental categories and maybe unlearn some things and some associations that we have because a lot of those associations are not inherent to Jewish tradition or Jewish texts. And if you look into Jewish texts, you see there's so much complexity and there's so much humor and there's so much paradox and there's so much mystical, contemplative stuff. And there's so much practice towards healing self and integration of self. There's so much that has psychological value. I'm talking about pre-modern stuff, ancient stuff. And there are so many stories that live in that kind of fairyland space I was talking about - that kind of third space that's not moralizing. And we have to relearn how to read and how to explore all of that. So I resonate a lot with what you're describing in terms of kind of rediscovering the cozy factor. One metaphor, among all those other metaphors of Judaism as a people, as a religion, as an ethnic group, as a tradition, whatever is - there's another one which is to think about Judaism as a method and a specific method or a set of methods for questioning and investigating and storytelling. That's how I relate to a lot of this. And the element of storytelling that you're pointing us to is often seen as just a kind of conservationist agenda. You know, we want to make sure we don't lose stuff from the past. But I'm always interested in the question of why. Why don't we want to lose stuff from the past? And, you know, if it doesn't actually help us solve our problems right now, then maybe we should let go of the past. And I have a lot of reverence for the past for sure, but it's not a satisfying answer to say that we hold on to things because of tradition like that Fiddler on the Roof kind-of philosophy doesn't cut it for me. But you need those old stories to tell you that you can do that. To tell you to be creative, to tell you to do something totally new. So if you lose the traditional stories, you lose a lot of models for how to do radically creative stuff individually and communally to make the world better. And that's what a lot of Jewish tradition is about is, you know, tens of thousands of stories and case studies for how people have tried to solve problems, including really difficult theological problems and practical problems and how to build communities of giving and generosity and how to balance competing values. All the kinds of things we're dealing with always in human history and especially right now. And if we lose those stories, we lose, you know, tons of tools and methods for making things better.
Rachael Cerrotti: Wisdom
Ariel Burger: Yeah. But if we only repeat those stories over and over again
Rachael Cerrotti: Right
Ariel Burger: And were just kind of rehearsing things that we've heard before, then we're missing the point of the story. So I think to bring it full circle is a real creative tension there between tradition and our own personal creativity and the wildness and new thinking and new living that we really need.
Rachael Cerrotti: You were talking about uhh, maybe there's a point where certain stories get left behind and they don't need to come move forward with us and that's on my long list of questions for when we spend more time together because that's such a big question for me as somebody who works in the field of family history and preserving stories of the past and collecting testimonies of today to be there for the future. This question of, at some point certain things don't need to come forward with us, but that such a large conversation. But I'm putting that out there for you and I to come back to at some point together.
Ariel Burger: Yeah, yeah. I'd love to. I think there's also that kind of middle step that we talked about briefly earlier of taking a story that might seem to be somehow destructive or that invokes despair or something and turn it into something else. Interpret it. And that's part of the toolkit. The methodology that's very pronounced in Jewish tradition is the methods of interpretation that we've developed over many centuries. It's an explicit part of the tradition that's incredibly well developed. And there's so much humor about that. The kind of crazy analysis up the wazoo and the way in which, you know, analysis - psychoanalysis was created by a Jew and other forms of analysis. They're sort of offshoots of that tradition of considering how do we interpret things. How do we interpret not only text and sacred texts, but how do we interpret life and history and the experiences that we have? And again, I return to Professor Wiesel as an example of somebody who took his experience. He could have said, the lesson of my experience is to avoid other human beings and circle the wagons and focus only on Jewish causes or only on my own life and safety and security or success. And he did the opposite, he created a life that was so committed in such a broad way to all kinds of different causes in an incredibly value driven and reflective way. There was an interpretive move in that. If you asked him about that, he could tell you. Here are some of the moments when I had a choice to make about whether to invest in hatred or not, whether to see my experience as the end of a conversation or the beginning of a conversation, whether to ask questions about God and answer them or whether to ask questions about God and commit to continuing to ask them for the rest of my life. You know, those kinds of interpretive moves are rooted in Jewish education, his Jewish education and the tools that he learned as a young person. And then after the war, he deepened those. And that's part of our treasure kit here. Our treasure house is, you know, we've got these tools that we can use and we need. We need a lot of help right now, I think, interpreting events.
Rachael Cerrotti: So, speaking of Professor Wiesel and his contributions. I was hoping that you would read just a short section of your book for us.
Ariel Burger: Sure
Rachael Cerrotti: Your book is called Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel Classroom, and it's a beautiful book that weaves together your time being his student, his teacher’s assistant, his friend, as well as some of your own journey throughout that time. And I'm gonna ask you to read from Page 192, and I'm just going to set it up for our listeners who aren’t familiar with the book that at this point in the book, you're writing about the limits of language and how Professor Wiesel navigated that in his work. So you're writing about how, in his original version of night, it was originally written in Yiddish and was nearly 900 pages long. But the memoir was published in English in just - just over 100 pages. And you quote from one of his lectures, “Look, language is essential. It is more than a vehicle to transmit ideas or memories; it is a desire of the human being to transcend his own limits. Language is composed of words but is more than words. It is also the white spaces between letters, words, people.” And so I'm hoping you could continue his words for us Ariel starting at the bottom of Page 192 with the great stories are alive.
Ariel Burger: Sure. And this is from my classroom notes. This is something he said in class around 2005 I think.
“The great stories are alive. They are moving, not fixed, not static. You can almost hear them breathing, and they enfold you. So that as you read, you find yourself inside Sophocles’s imagination, inside Shakespeare's mind – and you are different, you have new thoughts and feelings. This is how moral evolution truly happens, not through natural selection, but through stories.
“Therefore we must tell the stories. There is a Yiddish saying: ‘God created the world because He loves stories.’ Even God needed language to create the world. Since my childhood, I learned to respect language.
“But language can be corrupted. It can be contaminated by human cruelty. A Chinese legend tells us of a dragon that does not shed blood but nonetheless commits murder – with words. The language of the victimizer is not the same as the language of the victim. After the events of the 20th century, words like selection, collaborate, purify take on new meaning. I cannot hear these words without shivering. Remember, when you read, that every sentence has a past. After the war, we were alienated from language. Fire, hunger - who can know what those words mean who did not experience what we have experienced? If I waited ten years before writing, it was because I wasn't sure I could find the words to communicate. Some writers like me committed suicide. Perhaps it is because they understood the frailty of language. And so sometimes you must reach beyond language, to silence.”
Rachael Cerrotti: Beautiful, thank you. It reminds me of like the great dualities of life, the way that both naming something and silencing something can have equal intrinsic value in our journey to to nurture compassion and empathy, to understand each other that what we say and what we don't say both matter so deeply?
Ariel Burger: Yeah, and they can be shaped so much by our intention. You can weaponize language and you can weaponize silence and laughter.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah
Ariel Burger: And other things. So, Reflecting on what's our real purpose in speaking or remaining silent is so important. I think that's a big part of what he was wrestling with as a teacher and especially as an author.
Rachael Cerrotti: Ariel you've been so generous with your time and thank you so much for being in this conversation with me today. I think stopping here gives us a good runway to continue the conversation in the future. But before we say goodbye, I just wanted to end with one more question. So we're currently paving the path for the next generation and every day as a society, we're making choices and navigating difficult situations that most certainly are going to have long lasting impact. So I'm wondering what is something that's happening in your life or in the world as you are experiencing it that you believe will become a memory that outlives you, you know, perhaps a memory that is taught by a future teacher to a future student.
Ariel Burger: What comes to mind is really something that feels very modest and also very critical right now, which is we created an institute based on Professor Wiesel's teachings and his methods for interpreting life and current events and using great literature and moral teachings and philosophical teachings to do so. So we have a fellowship for emerging leaders to really investigate our own roles as witnesses or spectators and to ask questions about hope and despair. And how do we generate and choose hope no matter what? And how do we refuse to look away from the world but not fall into despair? And then what are some specific tools that we can use to grow our courage and our compassion? And, as we say, to place our courage in the service of our compassion. To do good things in the world. And so we have two cohorts of fellows now. And what I hope will be a memory that lasts is the very simple experience of having small groups of people, small circles sitting together. Facing each other, asking questions together with honesty and vulnerability. And then turning to face outward - remaining in a circle, but turning to face outward to go do things in the world. To try to make things better. To make a contribution. Knowing that you've got a circle of people behind you who have your back, who are supporting you, who are there to help you clarify your own thinking and sympathetically critique your work. And then turning towards each other again to learn and to find support and to investigate more. That is a modest step toward the kind of reflection and action that I think can set us up as a society - a global society, as a species to do a better job at addressing all the challenges we're facing. So it gives me a lot of hope to think about where are people gathering. You know - in libraries and bookstores, in homes, online, around dinner tables to ask questions and have the kinds of conversations we're having here. And without it, I think we're going to continue to act on autopilot and keep recreating the kinds of problems and challenges that we're seeing in the world over and over again. So let me not end with that negative.
Rachael Cerrotti: Okay
Ariel Burger: Let me just end with one more positive. It's an important Jewish teaching to always end on the positive. With that kind of community of support, with those circles of inquiry and learning and sharing and contemplation. I think we can really radically and creatively find new approaches and responses to all of these challenges and do it without falling into the trap of isolation and trying to be a superhero. We can really do it in community and get help and support and not be alone in it.
Rachael Cerrotti: I love that you circled back to the superhero.
Ariel Burger: It wasn't conscious. They keep coming back.
Rachael Cerrotti: It was perfect. It was perfect. Ariel, thank you so much. I was so looking forward to this conversation, and I just feel so grateful. What a wonderful. It's a Monday and what a wonderful way to start the week. So thank you.
Ariel Burger: Thank you so much, Rachael.
ELIE WIESEL
Elie Wiesel: Children began reading it. And the children brought the books home. And the parents were embarrassed after that the children read and they shouldn’t. They also read a page. And that’s really what happened that the children forced their parents to remember. Now today, I am of course grateful to you that you read that book. But please don’t stop with it it because if you are teacher’s here. If you will give Night to your students here and they will read nothing else, I think it would be a sin. Towards you. The world has not stopped at Night. The world continued. It’s true that somethings stopped. Some lives were broken. It is true that some world’s were crashed. Shattered. Some idols disappeared. Vanished. Some suns were extinguished. But life does continue.
OUTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: That was a clip of Elie Wiesel back in 2011 speaking at an event hosted by the organization Facing History and Ourselves.
Thank you to Ariel Burger for joining me today. You can learn more about his work on our website including a link to his book, Witness: Lesson’s from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom.
This podcast was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.
You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.
I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.