Dawn Upshaw, as the unnamed sister of Simone Weil, and Michael Schumacher in the oratorio “La Passion de Simone.” Richard Termine
by Eric Herschthal
Simone Weil was born a Jew and, in near intellectual unanimity, died a saint. A French philospher, a highly principled moralist and later a Christian mystic, Weil is best known for the example she set. When the Nazis occupied France in 1942, she was in a hospital in London, being treated for tuberculosis. She refused to eat any more food than the rations given to French laborers, and died from starvation, at age 34. For this, and her essays published posthumously, Weil “was the last French saint,” as Patrice Higonnet affirmed in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books.
Few of Weil’s serious admirers, however, glide over the most troubling part of her legacy — her risible anti-Jewishness. That is surely
the case with the composer Kaija Saariaho’s spare, searching — and superb — oratorio “La Passion de Simone,” which had its U.S. premiere at the Mostly Mozart Festival last week. The Finnish composer Saariaho centers the piece on a skeptical but intensely loving and pained unnamed sibling of Weil’s. Sung by the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the oratorio addresses 15 aspects of Weil’s provocative life, the first of which is Weil’s uneasy silence regarding the deportation of France’s Jews. Saariho’s icy sheets of sound, layered with pre-recorded, digitally remixed readings of Weil’s work, and a live youth choir, do well to tie the contradictions of Weil’s religiosity with her cutting intellect, her belief in universal love with her cool asceticism.
Weil’s ideas, particularly her mysticism, get due consideration in the other 14 segments. But the question of Weil’s Jewishness is worth a further look here. Weil’s silence on the fate of the Jews during the war is not her only misstep. In fact, she wrote amply about Judaism, calling it “the Great Beast of religion,” saying its Bible was a “tissue of horrors,” and citing the ancient Hebrew faith as an exclusionary theocracy with parallels to Caesar’s Rome and Hitler’s Germany. That she was a self-hating Jew, there can be no question.
But her career was nothing if not stridently principled and intellectually coherent — so much so that her Jewish writings were, upon further review, more anti-Jewish than anti-Semitic. Her attacks were on the religion itself, rarely its people. They seem more an attempt to justify an unresolved self-hate within a broader intellectual belief system. They may still be morally dubious, but are at least a little less repugnant. If Weil was a saint, aesthetically speaking, then it’s worth remembering what that means. Saints, as Sontag once wrote about Weil, are “those which we regard with a mixture of revulsion, pity and reverence,” not which invite our imitation. “Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation,” Sontag continued, “was Simone Weil’s.” Saariaho seems to agree.
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