Voices Amid Thunder

By Mayo Mohs

SOULS ON FIRE

by ELIE WIESEL 268 pages. Random House. $7.95.

For over a decade now, in nine books of fiction and nonfiction, Elie Wiesel (Night, A Beggar in Jerusalem) has been the dark poet of the Holocaust, a man brooding circularly upon the six million Jews who died in death camps. Now he has written a rich, warm book whose subject is religious joy, that mystical and ecstatic strain in Judaic history known as Hasidism.

The book is not so much history as artful evocation. Wiesel tells how Hasidism came to be, two centuries ago in those borderlands that were now Poland, now Russia. He also describes what Hasidism is. No matter that the movement's founder, the Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name") is already lost in legend. As Wiesel demonstrates, telling his tales learned from his grandfather's knee in Transylvania, Hasidism did not derive from fact or reason but from love and faith.

It was a rebellion against rabbinic legalisms, a rejection of the rationalistic Judaism of the 18th century Enlightenment. It was a cry of fierce optimism in the face of the tragedy that seemed to be man's--and especially Jewish man's--normal portion. In a fragmenting epoch, Hasidism asserted that all Creation is one, that God is good, that man serves him best by rejoicing in life, however difficult it may be.

Wiesel measures his story out in impressionistic vignettes from the lives and thoughts of the great rabbis who fanned Hasidism into a fire that roared through Eastern European Jewry.

There are wise smiles. One Hasidic master boldly tells God that he owes something to sinful man: "Without our sins, what would You do with Your pardon?" There is good counsel: "Every man must free himself from Egypt every day." And there are hard sayings: "Either God is king of this world and I am not doing enough to serve Him, or He is not--and then it is my fault."

The men and their words add up to something extraordinary. Stark figures on an uncertain terrain, they are voices amid thunder, and the voices stick in the mind. Wiesel, who calls himself a Hasid, has done honor to his past with a superb piece of narrative artistry and --more important--with a stunning affirmation of life. Mayo Mohs

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