Story and Silence: Transcendence in the Work of Elie Wiesel
By Gary Henry
Elie Wiesel's literary work prompted one reviewer to recall Isaac
Bashevis Singer's definition of Jews as "a people who can't sleep themselves and let
nobody else sleep," and to predict, "While Elie Wiesel lives and writes, there
will be no rest for the wicked, the uncaring or anyone else." [1] If uneasiness is the result of Wiesel's work, it is
not a totally unintended result. Since the publication of Night in 1958, Wiesel, a
Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, has borne a persistent, excruciating literary
witness to the Holocaust. His works of fiction and non-fiction, his speeches and stories
have each had the same intent: to hold the conscience of Jew and non-Jew (and, he would
say, even the conscience of God) in a relentless focus on the horror of the Holocaust and
to make this, the worst of all evils, impossible to forget.
Wiesel refuses to allow himself or his readers to forget the Holocaust because, as a
survivor, he has assumed the role of messenger. It is his duty to witness as a
"messenger of the dead among the living," [2]
and to prevent the evil of the victims' destruction from being increased by being
forgotten. But he does not continue to retell the tales of the dead only to make life
miserable for the living, or even to insure that such an atrocity will not happen again.
Rather, Elie Wiesel is motivated by a need to wrestle theologically with the Holocaust.
The grim reality of the annihilation of six million Jews presents a seemingly
insurmountable obstacle to further theological thought: how is it possible to believe in
God after what happened? The sum of Wiesel's work is a passionate effort to break through
this barrier to new understanding and faith. It is to his credit that he is unwilling to
retreat into easy atheism, just as he refuses to bury his head in the sand of optimistic
faith. What Wiesel calls for is a fierce, defiant struggle with the Holocaust, and his
work tackles a harder question: how is it possible not to believe in God after what
happened? [3]
It is not enough merely to value Wiesel for the poignancy of his experience and then
summarily write him off as another "death of God" novelist. As bleak and
nihilistic as some of his work may be, taken as a whole his writings are intensely
theological. The death of God is not of more interest to Wiesel than the impossibility of
God's death. And if this paradox is bewildering, it must be remembered that the Hasidism
in which Wiesel's work is rooted is fascinated, rather than repelled by a paradox. Wiesel
himself says, "As for God, I did speak about Him. I do little else in my books."
[4] How Elie Wiesel speaks about God is the concern
of this essay.
Elie Wiesel was born on Simchat Torah in 1928 and named
"Eliezer" after his father's father. Sighet, an insignificant Hungarian town in
an area which now belongs to Romania, was the place of his birth and early childhood. He
was the only son among four children in his family. The father was an intelligent,
religious man, a hard-working storekeeper and an important leader in the Jewish community
of Sighet. The mother, too, possessed a warm Hasidic piety and was a cultivated woman. She
was the daughter of a renowned rebbe and was, Wiesel says, "a strange mixture of an
educated person and a Hasid, with the fervor of a Hasid, a firm believer in the Rebbe and,
at the same time, open to secularism." [5]
Wiesel's own life as a boy was also something of a strange mixture. On the one hand, he
gave himself fervently and almost completely to the Hasidic way of life. From early till
late each day, ten or eleven months out of the year, he studied Torah, Talmud, and
Kabbalah. He prayed and fasted and eagerly longed to penetrate the mysteries of Jewish
mysticism, firmly settled in the conviction that he would be drawn "into eternity,
into that time where question and answer become one." [6] His study and piety were of such intensity that he
had little time for the usual joys of childhood and he became chronically weak and sickly
from his habitual fasting.
Yet, both his mother and father urged him to combine modern secular studies with his
devotion to Talmud and Kabbalah. Of his mother, he says, "Her dream was to make me
into a doctor of philosophy; I should be both a Ph.D. and a rabbi." [7] And his father made him learn modern Hebrew, a skill
with which he was later able to make his livelihood as a journalist for an Israeli
newspaper. Wiesel remembers his father, an "emancipated," if religious Jew,
saying to him, "Listen, if you want to study Talmud, if you want to study Kabbalah,
whatever you want to study is all right with me and I'll help you. But you must give me
one hour a day for modern study." [8] In that
hour a day Wiesel digested books which his father brought him on psychology, astronomy,
modern Hebrew literature, and music.
All of this study came to a halt in 1944 when, at the age of fifteen, Wiesel was
deported with his family to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buna, and
Buchenwald. There he and his father were separated from the mother and the girls. Early
on, Wiesel's mother and youngest sister were killed by the Germans, and before the
prisoners were liberated by the Allies, his father died of malnourishment and
mistreatment.
After the liberation, Wiesel was sent to France along with four hundred other orphans.
He spent two years as a ward of a French Jewish welfare agency, attempting to resume his
religious studies. As the result of the publication of his photograph in a French
newspaper, his two older sisters, who had survived the camps, were able to make contact
with him. He had learned French and assumed French nationality by 1947 when he entered the
Sorbonne. There he studied, among other things, philosophy and psychology. The Tel Aviv
newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, hired him as a Paris correspondent, and because of the
hard work of supporting himself as a journalist, he left the Sorbonne without submitting
the six hundred-page doctoral dissertation he had written comparing Jewish, Christian, and
Buddhist concepts of asceticism.
His journalistic work became his occupation and carried him to the Far East, to
Palestine, and finally to New York in 1956. He was critically injured in an accident in
New York and, unable to return to France, he became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He settled in
New York and has lived there since with his wife, Marion, whom he married in 1968. Wiesel
became a teacher in 1972 when he was invited to be Distinguished Professor of Jewish
Studies at City College in New York. He filled that position until recently when he became
Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University.
Wiesel's literary output has been enormous. In addition to his sixteen books, he has
written a steady stream of essays and articles in a variety of publications, he has given
numerous addresses and lectures, and he has been the subject of more than a few interviews
and documentary films. Along with all this teaching, speaking, and writing, Wiesel has
given generously of his time to a host of projects within the Jewish community. He is a
man clearly possessed of a drive to justify every second of his existence.
Wiesel's literature is all of a piece with his life. His books, even the novels, are
autobiographical. And each of them is a vital part of the mosaic formed by his past
experiences, his spiritual growth, and his present activity. His books are far from being
the products of some peripheral avocation, and still farther from being mere entertainment
pieces. They mirror his own soul, and they were written in fulfillment of a mission which
encompasses not only his writing, but everything else he does.
Since his books are so autobiographical and so intimately connected to one another and
to his life, development is to be expected within Wiesel's work. Read in the order they
were written, his books trace the torturous odyssey which has been his inner struggle to
deal with the Holocaust. The early works are saturated with black despair, but by small
degrees the successive pieces move toward Wiesel's triumphant achievement of faith in Ani
Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again. Even the titles of the early books suggest this
progression: Night, Dawn, Le Jour (unfortunately entitled The
Accident in the English edition).
Wiesel's first book, Night, is at the center of all he has written since. It is
a somber, moving memoir of his faith-destroying experience in the death camps. Wiesel says
of this book,
Night, my first narrative, was an autobiographical story, a kind of testimony of
one witness speaking of his own life, his own death. All kinds of options were available:
suicide, madness, killing, political action, hate, friendship. I note all of these
options: faith, rejection of faith, blasphemy, atheism, denial, rejection of man, despair
and in each book I explore one aspect. In Dawn I explore the political action; in The
Accident, suicide; in The Town Beyond the Wall, madness; in The Gates of the
Forest, faith and friendship; in A Beggar in Jerusalem, history, the return.
All the stories are one story except that I build them in concentric circles. The center
is the same and is in Night. [9]
In addition to this successive exploration of possible responses to the Holocaust,
there is another pattern to Wiesel's work: namely, the successive treatment in an entire
book of one of the characters in Night.
Night was the foundation; all the rest is commentary. In each book, I take one
character out of Night and give him a refuge, a book, a tale, a name, a destiny of
his own. [10]
This structural center of Elie Wiesel's entire literary corpus comprises only 127 pages
in its English paperback edition. When it was originally issued in Argentina in 1955,
written in Yiddish, it ran to some 800 pages. The material cut out for the French edition
in 1958 has provided the substance of much of Wiesel's subsequent "fiction"
so the novels are quite literally, as Wiesel says, commentary on Night.
Night, of course, stands for the Holocaust. The book poses the problem and depicts
the abysmal blackness out of which Wiesel has struggled to free himself. In Night
the young faith of the Hasid is devoured in the fires of the crematoria. God dies, and
Wiesels life is cursed.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget
that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never
shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to
dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God
Himself. Never. [11]
Among other horrors, Wiesel and his fellow prisoners were forced to watch the hanging
of a young boy by the Germans. The child was still alive when he filed past the scaffold
and heard someone behind him wonder aloud, "Where is God? Where is He?"
And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is He is
hanging here on this gallows..." That night the soup tasted of corpses. [12]
It is a long distance between this bitter, raging despair and the eloquent hope
expressed in Wiesel's cantata, Ani Maamin, written for the hundredth anniversary of
the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and performed at Carnegie Hall in
November, 1973. The title of this work means "I Believe" and refers to one of
the thirteen Maimonidean Articles of Faith: "I believe in the coming of the
Messiah." The cantata portrays the complaint to God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in
behalf of the Holocaust victims. When their plea is answered only by God's silence, the
patriarchs turn away from God to share the fate of the victims. Ani Maamin becomes
not the affirmation of the pious Jews who went to their deaths singing these words as a
hymn, but a defiant "I believe" in spite of what man has done and God has
allowed to be done. In this statement of faith, which is the culmination of Wiesel's
struggle with the Holocaust, there is neither superficial piety nor facile atheism.
Instead there is the vigorous determination of a "survivor of the holocaust who does
not put up with faceless fate but struggles for redemption with and against
our 'cruel and kind Lord' whose revelation in our times is only a deepening of his
hiddenness." [13]
Elie Wiesel is a witness, a teller of tales, and a writer, in
that order. Each of these roles is determined by the Holocaust. As a survivor, Wiesel has
no choice but to tell all who will listen what the silenced victims would tell if they
could speak. He is a self-appointed witness in their behalf.
I remember; during those years, when we were dreamless old children in a kingdom called
Night, we had but one wish left but it was a burning desire: to bear witness. [14]
To that painful task of witness-bearing Wiesel is giving his life. His books, all of
them, point to the Holocaust, and even the works of fiction are "not novels but pages
of testimony." [15]
Wiesel has become the "spiritual archivist of the Holocaust" [16] for profound reasons. As we have seen, he believes
he owes this work to the victims. Their dying wish was that at least one of their number
might live to tell how they died and Wiesel senses an awesome responsibility to
testify for them. But also, he has said, "I write in order to understand as much as
to be understood." [17] His testimony has been
a means of coming to terms with the events themselves. And most fundamentally, he
cherishes the hope that his witness may diminish the amount of suffering in the world. He
can say bluntly of himself and other witnesses who carry the same burden, "We didn't
write for any accepted purpose except for the extraordinary purpose of saving
mankind." [18]
Wiesel's witness as survivor is twofold. There is a witness he must bear, certainly, to
the non-Jew, the "executioner." But, as well, he must witness to the Jew, the
"victim." In each case the testimony pricks the conscience.
Mainly, my position in the Jewish community is really the position of a witness from
within and a defender from without. This goes, of course, along with my ideas about the
duties and the privileges of a storyteller of a writer. From the inside, from
within the community, I am critical. If Jews are criticized or attacked from the outside,
then I try to defend them. What I try to do (it's very hard) is to reconcile the two
attitudes: not to be too strong, too sharp, too critical when I am inside and not to be a
liar on the outside. [19]
Wiesel's book, The Jews of Silence, is an illustration of the kind of thing he
wishes to do. In testifying to the plight of Soviet Jewry, a situation with many parallels
to the German Holocaust, Wiesel hotly denounces the non-Jewish community for its injustice
in this affair, but he also has sharp words for the world-wide Jewish community and its
indifference to the problem. When evils of such magnitude are occurring, no one is
completely innocent and Wiesel has taken it upon himself to witness in such a way
that our guilt can never sink into unconscious forgetfulness.
But Wiesel is more than a bearer of testimony. He is an artist a storyteller, a
writer. True to his Hasidic roots, he believes in the power of the tale.
When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was
his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a
fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune
averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the
same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and
say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am
still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still
later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the
forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I
know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was
accomplished.
Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair,
his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not
know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the
story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.
God made man because he loves stories. [20]
In the Kabbalah, there is the story of shvirat hakelim, "the breaking of
the vessels." This is the story of what went wrong at the Creation, the cosmic
cataclysm. Wiesel says that his tale, and it is the same tale in one form or another, is
of another cataclysm which took place a generation ago in the Holocaust. In a time when this
tale can and must be told, all other stories become insignificant.
Wiesel's work renders the tale of the Holocaust into literary art. But because of the
subject, the art is more than art. Since Auschwitz, literature can no longer be a mere
diversion. The writer must write as witness.
We are witnesses in the cruelest and strongest sense of the word. And we cannot stop.
We must speak. This is what I am trying to do in my writing. I don't believe the aim of
literature is to entertain, to distract, to amuse. It used to be. I don't believe in it
anymore. [21]
When asked what it means to be a writer today, Wiesel has consistently said that it
means to correct injustices, to alleviate suffering, to create hope. Precisely for this
reason, the witness/storyteller/writer's work is disheartening. It so rarely accomplishes
what it must accomplish.
All this will tell you why a person of my time who has to be a witness for himself (and
I try to do it in my writing as much as I can), literally feels despair. I think that
never before has Judaism reached such a spiritual low. There is no idealism anymore. There
is no awareness. [22]
Wiesel's role as witness so thoroughly governs his role as writer that he must continue
to write whether his testimony meets with any response or not.
One must write out of one's own experience, out of one's own identity. One must cater
to no one; one must remain truthful. If one is read, it's good; if one is not read, it's
too bad. But that should not influence the writer. [23]
And, most important, the witness' work as writer demands that he write as a moral man.
The literary artist can no longer be excused if he writes one way and lives another. Life
and story must blend in ethical harmony. The writer is bound in a moral commitment by the
very tale he tells. The making and reading of literature is no frivolous business.
True writers want to tell the story simply because they believe they can do something
with it their lives are not fruitless and are not spent in vain. True listeners
want to listen to stories to enrich their own lives and to understand them. What is
happening to me happens to you. Both the listener and the reader are participants in the
same story and both make it the story it is. I speak only of true writers and true
readers and true listeners. As for the others, they are entertainers and their work
doesn't really matter. I don't want to go into names but there are very few great
storytellers and great writers today. Actually, I believe that today literature has
changed its purpose and its dimension. Once upon a time it was possible to write l'art
pour l'art, art for art's sake. People were looking only for beauty. Now we know that
beauty without an ethical dimension cannot exist. We have seen what they did with culture
in Germany during the war; what they called culture did not have any ethical purpose or
motivation. I believe in the ethical thrust, in the ethical function, in the human
adventure in science or in culture or in writing. [24]
The witness begins with his testimony. In Wiesel's case this testimony concerns the
Holocaust. He becomes a true writer when his testimony is a tale, a story. The art of the
witness, then, is a rendering of testimony into story. The difficulty of this lies in the
attempt to juxtapose past event with present situation in a story which is truly artistic:
that is, not merely beautiful, but ethically significant. Wiesel is cut off from the
victims whose tale he tells (he survived), and he is cut off from his readers (they have
not seen what he has seen). The monumental task which Wiesel has attempted has been to
bring together in his tales the disparate worlds of the Holocaust victims in the past and
of his post-Holocaust readers in the present. Wiesel lives in both worlds, yet hardly
belongs to either. His effort has been to force into an imaginative form, a story, these
disjunctive worlds. The result has been something of a literary anomaly:
"autobiographical" novels.
The survivor's alienation from both past and present and its implications for the
witness as writer are best seen in Wiesel's use of the concept of "madness." The
witness as writer is in the position of Moshe the Beadle in Night. Able to return
to Sighet as a survivor from an early deportation, Moshe was disbelieved and considered
mad when he tried to tell the tale of those who did not escape. Moshe the Madman
appears in nearly all of Wiesel's work, and he even becomes the main character in one
novel, The Oath. As a "messenger of the dead among the living," who
attempts with his tales to save the living but is regarded as insane, Moshe is a paradigm
for Wiesel of the madman as witness.
Wiesel is qualified to speak of madness. During his three years at the Sorbonne, he
specialized in clinical psychology, and the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists has
honored him for his perceptive treatment of madness in his writing. [25] This work, his concentration camp experiences, and
his Hasidic background unite to make madness one of the leading motifs in his books.
According to Wiesel, there are several kinds of madness. First, there is clinical
insanity. Wiesel cautions, however, that what is often considered madness in this sense
may not be insanity at all, but merely dissent from the "collective neurosis" of
society. In a society gone "mad," the sane person will be judged mad, even
though it is society and not he that suffers from skewed vision. Just as a sane inmate in
an insane asylum would be judged mad by the other inmates, so anyone whose vision is
threatening or disturbing to "normal" society is considered mad. Wiesel tells a
Hasidic tale to make the point.
Once upon a time there was a king who knew that the next harvest would be cursed.
Whosoever would eat from it would go mad. And so he ordered an enormous granary built and
stored there all that remained from the last crop. He entrusted the key to his friend and
this is what he told him: "When my subjects and their king have been struck with
madness, you alone will have the right to enter the storehouse and eat uncontaminated
food. Thus you will escape the malediction. But in exchange, your mission will be to cover
the earth, going from country to country, from town to town, from one street to the other,
from one man to the other, telling tales, ours and you will shout, you will shout
with all your might: 'Good people, do not forget! What is at stake is your life, your
survival! Do not forget, do not forget!'" [26]
Of course the plan was unsuccessful. The man's tale was disbelieved and he was
dismissed as a madman. This is the position the Holocaust witness finds himself in when he
tells his tale.
This madness of the witness is a "prophetic" madness. It is the madness of an
individual who has seen things inaccessible to others, and is therefore separated from
other men by the very fact of his closeness to God. Wiesel views this type of madman as a
messenger of God and says, "God loves madmen. They're the only ones he allows near
him." [27] The strangeness of his tale renders
the prophet an anti-social misfit, a madman, in the eyes of his contemporaries. Thus,
prophecy has long been considered a species of madness. [28] Like Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, the prophetic
madman is a lonely figure, separated from the world by the witness he bears and yet
compelled to live in the world as a man among men.
There is still another type of madness: moral madness. Thomas Merton has written that
"the whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their
meaning is itself meaningless." [29] When hate
and indifference are the norm in society, one must become morally mad to protest against
society's inhumanity. In the Germany of 1943, one had to choose moral madness to avoid
being swallowed up by the prevailing "sanity." In such a context, moral
indifference is the type of insanity against which moral madness must protest. This moral
madness, a voluntary, deliberate thing, [30] is no
easy "out" or surrender. It is a courageous identification with the sufferers, a
true loving and caring. It is the willing assumption of moral responsibility in a society
whose conscience is asleep. Not to accept moral madness is to opt for true insanity.
Wiesel says,
I believe that reality disappointed us so much that I seek something in another
reality. So what is the other reality? Madness. I believe that anyone who was in the camps
came out deranged. There is the basis of madness in every person who survived. When you
have seen what they have seen, how can you not keep some madness? This in itself would be
mad to remain normal. [31]
It is as Kahlil Gibran has put it.
The human heart cries out for help; the human soul implores us for deliverance; but we
do not heed their cries, for we neither hear nor understand. But the man who hears and
understands we call mad, and flee from him. [32]
In his books, Elie Wiesel attempts to hear and understand, and to diminish the
suffering.
Following the destruction of the second Temple, the Jewish people
were faced with two options: to end their suffering by denying their faith and
assimilating into society, or to go on and rebuild on the ashes. Wiesel suggests that the
Talmud was the "temple" constructed when the Jewish people chose the second
option. He says that "the Talmud was conceived and written as an act of
defiance." [33] It was as if the Sages wished
to tell God they refused to concede and quit believing. This defiance of theirs
confirmed the ancient message of Judaism that, while man cannot begin (only God can do
that), it is man's duty not to accept an imposed end. "To begin is not in the realm
of possibilities; only to begin again, over and over again and therein lies [man's]
strength. And his glory, too." [34]
Defiance as a means of transcending despair, and even as a means of survival, is
characteristic of the Jewish tradition. Wiesel stands in that tradition when he argues
that the Jew can only retain his humanity if he boldly takes issue with God and his
apparent indifference to the Jews' suffering, and insists on believing no matter what.
Man, Wiesel says, must not give in too quickly and allow himself to be crushed spiritually
by the grinding forces of inhumanity. One of his Hasidic stories illustrates this dogged
determination to believe:
A story is narrated in Shevet Yehuda about Jews who fled their village, their country.
They boarded a ship which eventually they had to abandon. They landed on a desert. Hunger,
thirst, disease befell them; many died. Amongst them was a pious man whose wife had died
of hunger. He continued his march, hoping to reach a Jewish settlement. His two children
were too weak, so he carried them. They, too, died and he went on carrying them. When he
finally realized that he was the last survivor, the pain was so sharp he fainted. When he
came to, he looked around first, and then he looked up to the sky and addressed God:
"Master of the Universe, I know what you want; you want me to stop believing in you
but you won't succeed, you hear me, you won't succeed!" [35]
Man thus defies God and becomes his accuser.
Man taking issue with the Master does not seem such an outrage when the concept is
viewed against its Hasidic background. Hasidism traces the tradition of "Jewish
protestantism" to the Book of Genesis, where Abraham asked, "Shall the Judge of
all the earth not do justice?" (Gen. 18:25), and to the prophets, such as Habakkuk,
who accused God of indifference to the suffering of the righteous (Hab. 1:1-3). In this
tradition, man struggles with God and asserts his moral equality with him. But the protest
is not a disbelieving blasphemy. It is rather a loving plea. If it is anything negative,
it is an expression of concerned disappointment that the Master of the Universe has
apparently not lived up to his own standards of justice. [36]
Wiesel has, along with other survivors, chosen this as a response to the Holocaust.
These survivors
...had every reason in the world to deny God, to deny anything sacred, to oppose all
promises and abort all signs of hope; they had every reason in the world to become
ferocious nihilists, anarchists, carriers of fear and nightmare. [37]
But what, in fact, did the Jewish survivors of the death camps do as soon as they were
liberated?
Believe it or not; they held services. To give thanks to God? No, to defy him! To tell
him, listen, as mere mortals, as members of the human society, we know we should seize
weapons and use them in every place and in every way and never stop because it is
our right. But we are Jews and as such we renounce that right; we choose yes,
choose to remain human. And generous. [38]
To remain human even in the face of absurd inhumanity: this, Wiesel suggests, is the
real message of Jewish tradition.
Man's defiance of God, in Wiesel's work, is met only by God's silence. Certainly this
silence often bears a sinister aspect, as in Night, when the other Jews in the
camps are fasting on Yom Kippur and Wiesel says,
I did not fast...I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I
saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him. [39]
Of all the major motifs Wiesel uses, the concept of silence is the most intimately
involved with the notion of transcendence in his work. And his denouncement of God's
silence is most often cited as evidence for a lack of any true faith in the transcendent
on Wiesel's part. But this is not to do justice to Wiesel. For him, silence is often not
only not opposed to the transcendent, but is the most radical expression of it.
Mystic that he is, Wiesel believes in the profound importance of silence. What is not
said is frequently as weighty as what is said. For example, God not only gave the
words of the Torah, he left spaces between the words, the silence of which is pregnant
with meaning. Wiesel so respects the significance of silence that he fears the overuse of
words. Asked what are his feelings when he completes a book, he responds, "Naturally
the anguish comes: whether I have not said too much it's never too little but too
much." [40] His books tend to be short and his
sentences clipped. His subject, the horror of the Holocaust, can only be vulgarized if one
attempts to say too much about it. For this reason, he actually writes around the
Holocaust, not directly about it. He maintains,
The Holocaust cannot be described, it cannot be communicated, it is unexplainable. To
me it is a mystical event. I have the feeling almost of sin when I speak about it. [41]
And again,
I say certain things not to say other things, I write a page and the absence of the
Holocaust in it is so strong that the absence becomes a presence. [42]
So it is with God, as well. God's silence is a more powerful presence than his words.
Ideally, one should not speak about God, but only to him, and this, again,
in silence.
If I could communicate what I have to say through not publishing, I would do it. If I
could, to use a poetic image, communicate a Silence through silence I would do so. But I
cannot. Perhaps I am not strong enough or wise enough. [43]
Silence, far from calling into question the existence of one or both parties to a
dialogue, is in reality the most significant level at which the dialogue may occur.
Between author and reader there must be a dialogue. When man speaks to God there is a
dialogue. The creative process is a strange one: it comes from solitude, it goes to
solitude and yet it's a meeting between two solitudes. It is just like man's solitude
faced with God's solitude. Once you have this confrontation, you have art and religion and
more. [44]
Too many words may interfere with art and religion. Man is ill-advised to speak too
profusely about God; and God's own silence is the most revealing communication he may make
of himself to man. If the silence with which God responds to man's suffering seems to be
an invitation for man to give in to the suffering, Wiesel would say that a refusal to accept
God's silence as an excuse for unbelief is the only responsible way out of the dilemma. To
affirm and preserve the human (by eating the bowl of soup on Yom Kippur, for example?) in
the face of inhumanity often requires that man argue with the divine silence, and affirm
the transcendent in the universe by taking issue with its apparent absence. In a
roundabout way, man's indignant protest against God's silence would be deprived of meaning
if there were no Presence back of the Silence.
Consequently, Elie Wiesel's defiance of God, his refusal to accept God's indifference
to man's suffering, and his denial of God are in essence an affirmation of the
transcendent, just because they take the form of an affirmation of the human in the face
of inhumanity. The most human protest against the apparent meaninglessness of existence is
not via the absurd, but via the transcendent. The armchair atheist can afford to allow
suffering to continue Wiesel cannot. He believes suffering must be diminished, and
that every act of protest, against God or man, in which suffering is even minutely
alleviated is a redemptive act.
Because he holds onto the transcendent, and is prepared to wrestle with it if need be
(just as Jacob wrestled with the angel), he can say that
...to flee to a sort of Nirvana is to oppose humanity in the most absurd, useless and
comfortable manner possible. A man is a man only when he is among men. It's harder to
remain human than to try to leap beyond humanity. [45]
And he can even ask for the strength to defy God in this way!
Oh God, give me the strength to sin against you, to oppose your will! Give me the
strength to deny you, reject you, imprison you, ridicule you! [46]
Man denies God by affirming humanity and this he must do. But in
affirming humanity, man makes an affirmation of God which transcends his denial of God.
This circular process is illuminated by the way Wiesel identifies God with man. He
sometimes seems to say that God is man, but what he means is that God may be
approached only through man. In The Town Beyond the Wall, he has Pedro say,
The way is no less important than the goal. He who thinks about God, forgetting man,
runs the risk of mistaking his goal: God may be your next-door neighbor. [47]
Man, God, and self are so closely identified that what man does to his fellow, he does
to God and to himself. In Dawn, when Elisha pulls the trigger to kill the British
hostage, he cries, "It's done. I've killed. I've killed Elisha." [48] And in Night, when the child is hung,
Wiesel can say that it is God who hangs on the gallows. But it is not God himself who
dies, any more than a man really dies himself when he kills another man. It is, perhaps
Wiesel would say, the image of God upon man that is destroyed when man inflicts
suffering on his fellow man. In this sense, the incident of God "dying" on the
gallows with the executed child bears a striking resemblance to a parable in the Talmud.
Rabbi Meir said: A parable was stated: To what is the matter comparable? To two twin
brothers who lived in one city. One was appointed king and the other took to highway
robbery. At the king's command they hanged him. But all who saw him explained: The king is
hanged! [49]
Because of his intimate identification of God with man, Wiesel can retain the
transcendent even while he defies God. His protest is against the inhumanity which
constitutes an eradication of the transcendent. In this protest, both God and man are
indicted for the same thing: indifference to suffering.
When the suffering and injustice of the Holocaust is met with apathy, indifference, and
unconcern, man has relinquished his humanity, and in doing so has murdered his God.
To be indifferent for whatever reason is to deny not only the validity of
existence, but also its beauty. Betray, and you are a man; torture your neighbor, you're
still a man. Evil is human, weakness is human; indifference is not. [50]
The injustice perpetrated in an unknown land concerns me; I am responsible. He who is
not among the victims is with the executioners. This was the meaning of the holocaust; it
implicated not only Abraham or his son, but their God as well. [5l]
The work of Elie Wiesel is a courageous, sustained protest against indifference. It has
overcome the Holocaust by defying it, by refusing to give up the human and the
transcendent. His witness to the Holocaust, by its very defiance, has broken the
stranglehold of despair on him. And, whatever may be its impact on mankind, it has allowed
Elie Wiesel himself to remain human.
One day a Tzadik came to Sodom; He knew what Sodom was, so he came to save it from sin,
from destruction. He preached to the people. "Please do not be murderers, do not be
thieves. Do not be silent and do not be indifferent." He went on preaching day after
day, maybe even picketing. But no one listened. He was not discouraged. He went on
preaching for years. Finally someone asked him, "Rabbi, why do you do that? Don't you
see it is no use?" He said, "I know it is of no use, but I must. And I will tell
you why: in the beginning I thought I had to protest and to shout in order to change them.
I have given up this hope. Now I know I must picket and scream and shout so that they
should not change me." [52]
Notes | Appendix