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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 7, 2008 / 6 Menachem-Av 5768

The return of a prophet

By Paul Greenberg


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This is an abridged version of a column that originally appeared in 1994, when the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday at 89, returned to Russia from his long exile.


It's like reading that Tolstoy is touring Soviet Russia to see the Moscow subway and the Gulag. It's like having Dickens arrive in 20th-century England to catch the Beatles.


Alexander Solzhenitsyn has come back to the Big Gulag he left in 1974 (Leonid Brezhnev, secretary-general and chief warden) to find it wide open, flying the old czarist flag and hurling off in all directions. It's as if Ivan Denisovitch, the hero of his classic book about the Gulag, had grown old, free and a stranger in a not quite strange land.


That this climactic return should be seen by so many as anti-climactic — as just another writer going home after his glory days — only adds to the extraordinary ordinariness of a story that could be called "The Return of S." By Gogol, probably.


Neither the Russians nor the world may know quite what to think of Solzhenitsyn, or even want to. He has always been a man out of his time, plodding along the most unexpected paths, remaining obscure when one had expected him to take center stage, only to emerge into the news long after interest in him had waned.


It's a toss-up whether Solzhenitsyn has more grievously offended East or West. The political and cultural elites of both don't know quite how to classify him, even if they pretend to. The reservations routinely attached to their praise rings much louder than the praise. "He was a courageous man, but ..." But he's a fascist, an imperialist, a crank, an anti-Semite, an ingrate, an eccentric, a loner, a hater, a nationalist ... pick your own snap judgment.


What he is, is his own man. Which is why he got in trouble over there and disappointed over here. He is a great resource, but one that can be tapped only on its own terms. He will always disappoint those who think they can use him to reflect their own, conventional wisdom.


Solzhenitsyn's politics are simple: He hates revolution, having seen its results. He despises ideology and the other savageries of modernity. He loves tradition, stability and time in which to make things, like books and peace.


Because he loves Russia does not mean he hates others. And he can chastise his countrymen as only a lover can. He would have Russia cleanse its air, water and conscience; tend its own garden and rediscover its soul. A familiar messianic vision. Only this time it comes from a prophet unarmed—except with words. Being Solzhenitsyn's words, they were enough to threaten a vast tyranny.


Twenty years before it dawned on many others that freedom cannot have much meaning in a cultural and spiritual vacuum, Solzhenitsyn was being irritatingly candid about the society that had given him refuge — its empty materialism, its mundane obscenity, its substitution of cheap sentimentality for abiding faith, and its worship instead of "imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity and dozens of other defects."


Solzhenitsyn took especial aim at American society's loss of "civic culture," especially among its "ruling and intellectual elites." And he said these things at Harvard. In short, he wasn't the sort of guest who can be counted on to ignore the peeling paint and cracks in the walls.


It was Solzhenitsyn who wrote in "First Circle" that every real writer is "a second government." Whereupon the usual solemn idiots speculated about his platform, his appointees, his polls, as if he had been referring to the kind of transient power that politicians exert, rather than the transforming power of real words, of a Thoreau or Orwell or, yes, a Solzhenitsyn. Not even the Gulag was ever the same after "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch." Words change things.

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