The moral of the story comes first

“The Judges” is a parable-like story of five people trapped and compelled, by an enigmatic figure of great malevolence, to examine their lives. The novel resembles a lengthy version of a Hasidic tale, and it recalls a particular piece of Hasidic wisdom: If you saw everyone’s sorrows hanging like clothes on a rack and were given the opportunity to choose, you would always take back your own.

The meaning seems to be that, though you might suffer more than some people, you can comfortably wear only your own suffering, for it is inseparable from the motion of your own life. And so you cannot surrender your well-worn, specific sorrows without severing the strings that tie you to existence itself.

Elie Wiesel, besides having written more than 40 novels, books of nonfiction and plays -- the novel-memoir “Night” and the play “Zalmen, or the Madness of God” are his two masterpieces -- was raised in the Hasidic tradition and its import lies deep in his heart. The theme of “The Judges” is, as the narrator writes at one point, a question “at once so simple and so complex: Why do you cling to life?” Wiesel’s answer, with a heavy Hasidic inflection, is that we cling not to life in general but to our own particular life, and only because familiarity builds a shelter out of our very pain.

“The Judges” has a familiar plot: Five strangers find themselves trapped in a kind of hell from which they cannot escape and where they are forced to confront themselves and to ponder first and last things. The plot is so familiar that one of the novel’s characters acknowledges to the other characters -- and to the reader -- that Jean-Paul Sartre used the identical situation in his play “No Exit,” except that whereas Sartre’s characters enact their drama in hell, Wiesel more practically sets the agonizing in Connecticut.

After a plane headed to Tel Aviv is forced down in a blizzard, the five find refuge for the night in a house owned by a mysterious man who insists that they refer to him as “The Judge.” Predictably, each of the five is representative of some sort of general human type or dilemma. There is Claudia, the divorced and brokenhearted theater director who has finally found the love of her life; Yoav, the tough, tender, cynical, world-weary Israeli ex-commando, who is dying of cancer; George, the librarian harboring a revelation about a European politician’s crimes during the Holocaust, a revelation George feels he must pass on to someone in Israel; Bruce, a “playboy,” as Wiesel calls him, who now feels conscience-stricken and -- incredibly -- is traveling around the world to make amends to the women he’s seduced; and Razziel, a renowned Talmudic scholar and humble teacher in a Brooklyn yeshiva, a former political prisoner on his way to meet Paritus, a spiritual genius who helped Razziel survive his imprisonment.

The Judge begins by interrogating his captives -- he has locked them in his house -- and making each one justify his or her life. He is reluctantly abetted by “The Hunchback,” the Judge’s pathetic and gentle-hearted servant, whom the sadistic Judge manipulates and tortures. After a time, the Judge announces to the five that, to live, they have to murder one of the group. Thus, each one has to become a judge of his or her own life to justify, to his or her own conscience, killing someone else in exchange for being allowed to live. Along with the question of why life is worth living, their ordeal leads to other ultimate riddles: Does life need to take life to survive? Does good need evil to preserve itself?

Such imponderables deal with essential relationships, which is to say, they are the stuff of wisdom. And “The Judges” is structured like a wisdom tale, with the malevolent figure finally confronting his pure-hearted antagonist in an old story of good versus evil. However, this novel’s attempt to express profundity makes it impossible to read “The Judges” as a novel. The burden of wise reflection has, over the years, made it harder and harder to read Wiesel as a writer of fiction.

Fitting wisdom into the vestments of art is no simple matter. Wisdom is unconcerned with appearances or extenuating circumstances or unforeseen consequences. Wisdom is indifferent to style, technique, modes of expression -- it goes right to the core of the matter. And because wisdom is experience refined into consciousness, its fruits don’t always feel as profound to the person receiving it as to the person doing the original experiencing and refining. In other words, wisdom doesn’t always mix with art, which concerns itself with appearances, extenuating circumstances and unforeseen consequences, not to mention style and technique. The literary artist’s job is not to impart profundity but to imagine an original experience, which readers themselves can refine into profound or playful sense.

A Holocaust survivor, Wiesel has had to pay a price for the triumph of his mind and his imagination. Whether he is writing about the Bible or contemporary politics or present-day Judaism, Wiesel is wrestling with the problem of evil, and having had such an elemental experience, he has to express himself in an elemental way. Wisdom writing -- terse, aphoristic parables, studded with moralizing universals -- has become for Wiesel a defensive literary manner. It is as if he hoped that the images of evil lodged in his memory could not destroy a style so compressed into the barest simplicity -- as if evil could not destroy a style that had already been so carefully destroyed.

The sublime -- which is art as terror-provoking, not beauty-producing -- is an exceptional aesthetic experience, especially in our day, and Wiesel is one of the rare writers who has, in “Night” and “Zalmen,” expressed sublimity. The power of those two works lies in Wiesel’s ability to convey an experience rather than to relate conclusions drawn from experience: He allows readers the freedom to distill their own wisdom. He lets life breathe unobstructed, as it were, by essential truths about life.

In too many other works, however, Wiesel seems to be using wisdom to punish experience. Wiesel the artist assumes that by stating a universal, he is allowing readers to share the power of Wiesel’s original apprehension of it: From “The Judges”: “The key, my dear fellow, the key, never forget, is in you, it is you.” But Wiesel seized that truth from raw life, and he has to make it rise out of a story that re-imagines raw life -- if, that is, he wants readers to have an experience rather than merely receive a lesson. Otherwise, the universal falls to the ground like a deflated balloon. It is remarkable how fragile the distinction is between a profundity, which reveals truth, and a banality, which reiterates it.

In “The Judges,” Wiesel’s profundity seems to have exhausted his creative plenitude. The novel’s giant meanings have driven away what should have been its small, absorbing fictions. For some reason, this author has decided to dress up his cosmically resonant tale with references to contemporary situations and, the truth is, Wiesel is indifferent to the details of contemporary life. He writes in a quaint, old-fashioned idiom, as if, content with having grasped essential relationships and ultimate questions, he felt it sufficient to borrow the particulars of his fictions -- judgments, psychology, dialogue -- from 19th century novels. One cannot blame the translation -- from Wiesel’s French -- for everything:

“A gigolo perhaps? Is this a profession for a decent man? Is it an ideal to be lauded and even encouraged?”

“Stop shouting! In this place the walls very likely have ears.”

“My body’s hungry for pleasure, hungry for love, it’s unfulfilled, and so am I.”

Yoav, the professional soldier, “trusted actions more than words.” Bruce, the gigolo, is “a sweet talker.” The Judge himself is a figure out of Grand Guignol -- “To do evil and to serve evil is to recognize its timeless value” -- and, Razziel, his adversary, is no less a stock creation -- “I may often be wrong ... but not about the fact that evil is the rejection and the negation of good....” Now, the experience of evil as the rejection and the negation of good has to be a shattering and, ultimately, inexpressible experience. But what Wiesel knows about existence has outpaced his capacity to re-imagine existence.

“Free as artists are, who see farther than prophets” is a sentiment that Wiesel puts in the mouth of Paritus, who is something of a persona for Wiesel in this novel. But Wiesel doesn’t seem to believe in the superiority of artists over prophets. In fact, he is a prophet searching for a form of sacred expression at a time when art has usurped the sacred. It is hard to think of another writer alive today who shares Wiesel’s dilemma: that of a man whose wisdom is precious and life-giving, yet whose art is trite and unapproachable. But perhaps that loss is the price memory finally pays for healing itself. *