Letters and Liberation
In his work Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, Elie Wiesel begins with a story that demonstrates the mix of reality and unreality that is typical in Hasidic stories. Hasidism, a major Jewish religious movement that began in the 18th century, spread rapidly throughout Eastern Europe and one of its methods of transmission was folk tales. These stories tell of rabbis and their devoted acolytes who would travel on wagons, through mountains and snow, just to spend days in devoted study with their teacher, and they accessed mystical states of transcendence. The first story Wiesel shares in this volume is told of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism.
In this story, the Baal Shem Tov has come up against divine punishment for attempting to hasten the messiah. Seeing all of the pain in the world, he urged the savior to come sooner, and nearly succeeded at bringing the messiah down to Earth. But Satan instructed the divine not to send the messiah yet, claiming “this generation is not ready.” So God did not send the messiah and the world was not yet saved. The Baal Shem Tov, who had spent his years of work traveling constantly between villages to teach and help strangers, was punished by confinement in a cave, with no one but his scribe to keep him company. Depressed by his situation, for once, the Baal Shem Tov could not conduct any magic to better their state. His scribe entreated him: can’t you do something? And the Baal Shem Tov said, “there may be one thing that can save us. Do you remember any of my teachings?” At first, the scribe refused, believing he had not learned anything. Then the scribe recited the alef beys, the single teaching from his master that he had retained. The Baal Shem Tov repeated each letter back to the scribe, and they continued to recite the entire alphabet until the Baal Shem Tov entered a trance. In this state, he was irresistible; he broke their chains and they both escaped confinement.
As an educator, my initial reaction to reading this story was that I strongly related with the power of hearing a student recite their teachings. While teaching Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete to college students, there would be days that I found myself so dismayed by the state of the world, I would show up to the classroom absolutely desperate to hear my students tell me they also understood the reading. The sensation, if I can attempt to put it to words, was: “I have spent all morning learning about the prison industrial complex—coming to realize all of the infrastructure that endows the world with unnecessary suffering, to which everyone else on Earth seems to be blind—please tell me that someone else understands this.” When my students (at least the ones who did the readings closely) would reply to my discussion questions and explain ways they saw the prison industrial complex in the world and in their lives, it was a tremendous relief; if I cannot solve the pain of the world, at least I can share the teachings that enable us to decipher what is happening.
I also wonder about the power of teaching and its relationship to confinement. In this tale, the Baal Shem Tov and his scribe are prisoners themselves. Ultimately, what liberates them is the power of language, and the relationship between teacher and student. These inner faculties then produce a state of transcendence, which empowers them to break their chains. In my course on kabbalistic meditation, the rabbi that taught us required that we not correct or aim to “fix” each other’s comments; rather we should trust that everyone has a “teacher within” that will impart the right lesson. Like psychoanalysis, meditation does not liberate the practitioner by simply listening to a teacher and internalizing the information. The lesson has to come from within oneself, even if a teacher is present to offer new ways of seeing and provoke the realization. Indeed, a teacher may even be necessary, opening the door to an entire world of internal self-discovery that might be a closed gate otherwise.
The story made me think of the Black radical author and philosopher George Jackson, who spent his entire adult life imprisoned in the Soledad and San Quentin facilities in Northern California. Arrested for a minor theft at age 17, he was sentenced to prison for 1 year to life, a sentence that was continuously extended until he died. He died trying to escape, after having nearly succeeded. His letters were published in the volume Soledad Brother, which I also recently taught to college students. Jackson’s writings transcend the prison in every way but the physical. His dynamic and ongoing relationships with his activist attorney, as well as Angela Davis and an unnamed person referred to in the letters as Z., were whole and complete relationships even though he was unable to interact with these others in the flesh. Jackson spent years in solitary confinement where he was held alone in his cell for 23.5 hours each day. He writes that he spent his time in “antithesis” —what he meant by that, I do not know exactly—but it is clear that he became a master of radical philosophy and political struggle, having studied Fanon, Lenin, Mao and other radicals. The strength he summoned in these torturous circumstances is an inspiration to many radicals today. I see the connection between what he learned through his study and the great psychic power he harnessed within himself. It was enough to at least make an attempt at his liberation.
The Baal Shem Tov and Jackson’s stories of imprisonment and liberation through learning seem to impart the interconnectedness of education, text, and freedom. When he tells his story about the Baal Shem Tov, Wiesel emphasizes that whether the events “really” happened is not necessarily to be confirmed. Given that he lived in remote, mountainous regions of Eastern Europe hundreds of years ago, we will never know exactly what happened in any particular reported incident of the Baal Shem Tov’s life. But the Baal Shem Tov taught us of the inner life of the soul, which makes its own journeys alongside the body. While the violent physical condition of imprisonment cannot be broken through study alone, perhaps there is a form of mystical transcendence which George Jackson accessed, a freedom or transcendence that his spirit did achieve while his physical form did not. Perhaps the dynamic of teacher and student can indeed break some metaphysical chains, if not the real ones just yet.
