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our people to messianic experiments—as did the pogroms, though on different levels and under different guises. Collective pain produced works of contemplation, poetry, and philosophy. Why? We felt the need to understand. To turn experience into knowledge—and then, only then, knowledge into experience. Why should pagans say, “Where is your God?” was a question we used to address to God as well as to ourselves. Why, why are we to be singled out, always, for all woes? Why are we in a situation which allows other nations to mock us, ridicule us, saying, Where is the Jewish God? Out of so many questions, many hypotheses—if not many answers—were formulated. Mostly religious ones, involving the age-old concept of sin and punishment: we suffer because we have sinned. There was—there is—a logic in our trials. Why were we sent into exile? Because we have sinned. But then—if we have sinned, we should be humble. We were not; strangely we took credit for our very punishment. God punishes only those He loves, we were told. He must have loved us very much. And we were right in feeling pride. Not for having suffered, but for having felt the need, for having had the strength, to explore the history of thatsuffering: for having managed to understand it—thus disarm and even conquer it. For having had the obsession to record that history in books.
    When I travel, I am always afraid of running out of books. Half of my luggage consists of reading material and the other half of writing material.
    If I had to describe hell, it would be as a place without books. What would life be without their appeal to our fantasy, without their power to change things simply by revealing their hidden message.
    Both Hitler and Stalin understood the importance of books for the Jew. That is why they burned them in Germany and destroyed them in Russia. Stalin’s police went so far as demolishing the Jewish presses in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. His pathological hatred was vented on both the Jewish faith and Jewish culture: the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabet annoyed him, angered him, defied him—that is why he condemned it to death. Except … he did not succeed. Like Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, we can testify: yes, the parchments may burn, but not the letters—not the spirit—not the vision—not the soul of a people, a people committed to eternal values, and thus to eternity.
    And yet, there has been a certain reluctance among some of the masters to write books. The Ari Hakadosh never wrote anything; nor did the Besht; as for Rabbi Nahman, he ordered his faithful scribe Reb Nathan to burn his writings and send them backto heaven. Rabbi Bunam of Pshiskhe wrote a book entitled
The Book of Man;
it was meant to include everything concerning life and man, history and faith, past and future—a grandiose project whose stunning aspect was that the author wanted his book to consist of one page alone. So every day he wrote that page, and every evening he burned it.
    As for the celebrated solitary visionary of Kotzk, he once explained why he refused to write books: Who would read them? he asked. Some villager. When would he have time to read them? Not during the week. Only on the Sabbath. In the evening? No, too tired. In the morning, then? Yes, after services. After the Sabbath meal. He would take the book—my book—and lie down on the sofa, ready and willing to see what I had to say about Torah and Talmud. But then the man would be so tired that, after glancing at the first page, he would doze off, dreaming about other things—and his book, my book, would fall to the floor. And for him I should write books?
    But what about all those books that were not written? Our history has been preserved elsewhere, through other methods, too, we know that. In liturgical chants we learn more about the life and the lore, the anguish and the defiance of Jewish communities than in precisely edited volumes. In the
responsa
we discover more about the problems that agitated