Elie Wiesel, the voice from the wilderness, is no longer. His heckling of Divine Providence is now a memory like those who were silenced before him. A couple of days ago, I read the account of a teacher of mine at JTS, who explained that it was my friend Levi Weiman-Kelman’s father who brought Wiesel out of the shadows in the early 1960s. As the head of the Conservative Movement, Wolfe Kelman arranged for this yet unknown European fledgling journalist to speak to a group of rabbis, and he spun the story of Buchenwald. They had never heard anything told the way he told it. Later on, my friend would report to me in the early 1970s that “Elie was at the table on Shabbes.” Like an uncle, he spoke of him – but an uncle from a distant planet, because who can say that a survivor breathes the same air we do or can even chuckle at an offhand joke? Still, he was in his own strange way a comforting presence in the household.

Where had Wiesel been? He lived on the Upper Westside, I saw him strolling in front of Zabar’s once. But he was also a presence in Jerusalem, in Paris, in Sighet, his Romanian birthplace. He was in Auschwitz. He is indelibly in a snowstorm, and whenever I am close to a forest as the light vanishes, he is there too. In the winter when the clouds are heavy, how can I forget the forced march in the snow, his father unable to continue, the son’s numbness and even his relief? How can I pretend to live as a Jew contentedly, while recalling the crazed laughter in Gates of the Forest? After all, these are my places too – the ethereal places where Jews reside in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.

I was fifteen, at a religious summer camp in New Hampshire, when I encountered him the first time. What did I know? I was an American teenager, obsessed with speed and my own unlimited power. I was already vexed by this camp, this environment in which people celebrated the seventh day, when I would be forced to sit still and listen to prayers and walk hand in hand with others on their way to study. And in the middle of the summer there was suddenly this holiday called Tisha B’Av, the fast day that secularists pay no attention to, because it takes place in late July or early August, when it’s best to be at the beach. Well, there I was with elder teachers and their families who were either first generation immigrants from Europe or themselves survivors. They appeared out of place in the New England greenery by the lake. They strolled the grounds equivocally, not altogether happy like the American kids they were there to work with.    

On Tisha B’Av, there was a triptych mural by an Israeli artist with panels that were displayed only once a year. It opened up, depicting a grim heap of skeletons, and the room was full of Orthodox davenners, one or two banging their heads on the wall and whaling. The surreal chanting of Eycha (the book of Lamentations) carried me away to another place and time, and each of us was handed a paperback to read, as we left the ramshackle Bet Knesset. I wasn’t ready for it, grasping only gradually that Tisha B’Av, the holiday on which Jews relive the cyclical catastrophes, the destruction of two temples, the Inquisition, the pogroms, was now drenched in an unnamable hideous fog. There was not yet a special day on the calendar for it nor was there a nomenclature to describe it.

I scarcely knew the term Holocaust, or what it meant, but the other campers my age knew what to do. They had come to camp before and seemed to understand how to sit on the floor in candlelight  and pray in low voices, and when the service was over each one went silently off to a quiet field with a flashlight. They all picked out a tree to sit under, reading his or her copy. I wasn’t much of a reader and, even though it was a slim book, I wondered if I could make headway, or at least enter the thicket. In the shadows I began to read Night. Even the name of the book conjures a season out of time as we know it. Everyone was restrained in a way I had never experienced. There wasn’t a hint of adolescent jocularity, not a moment of banter. All eyes looked away – as if seeing another person’s face was a desecration. There was hushed crying, but nothing sentimental about it, as if suddenly everyone was much older, privy to an event that called for our total attention. I knew, at least theoretically, that such events occurred and that they could overtake us the way a flood leaves nothing in its wake. 

I met Elie Wiesel once or twice over the years, and I heard him a number of times, but it was when I read Night that first time that I heard his searing warnings. He implored us all – to be human, to redeem humanity, to do something in the face of a callous evil that could unravel the best things in life. I confess to feeling frustrated at times by the sensationalism, it seemed to me, of Wiesel, as if his message were something we could put behind us. And I expected more from him, as I listened to his words from the lectern being invoked by politicians I did not always admire. It is true that he was an eloquent Nobel spokesperson for human rights; he epitomized the witness. His harsh words for genocidal regimes around the world came from a place that was prophetic. 

That said, to the best of my understanding, he never held the Jewish state accountable for a decades-long occupation. He could speak out on behalf of victims in Rwanda or in Bosnia, but seemed blind to what was happening to the Palestinians.

Why?

I cannot say for sure, but I surmise that it has something to do with the role he understood for himself. Like a rebbe, he admonished us to tell the story on behalf of the six million who could not speak for themselves, and in so doing be with them, at the same time that he was with us. Like an angel from that other world, he upbraided God for letting it happen and he seethed that people could allow themselves to be bystanders. In biblical terms, while he sued God for breaking the terms of the covenant, he believed that his mission would be a failure if the heirs of those who went up in smoke did not fathom their privilege to be alive, to create something memorable and good.   

The establishment of the Jewish state was such a project – one he dedicated himself to. In so doing, he sanctified the sof pasuk (the term for the end of a sentence in Torah trope) that otherwise leaves the rest of us momentarily indecisive about what comes next. Wiesel would have nothing of it, circling back in every conversation to how the obliteration of a culture requires us to live fully and resolutely in the present. An angel comes to us and then returns to where he came from. 

Many of us look for a diversion from the burdensome responsibility and we are uncomfortable with the exceptionality that is concomitant with the Final Solution. It’s a different world: we have had enough, we say, with the Holocaust industry – the research, the museums, the lugubrious ceremonies. We fear, what’s more, that by focusing on what happened to us, we exempt ourselves from the kind of self-scrutiny that Jews in power need to cultivate like everyone else. 

I notice over the past few days how progressive Jews, the people I myself align with, who dedicate themselves to ending the oppression in Palestine, have been quiet. They have written almost nothing reflecting a remembrance of Wiesel’s place in the sacred narrative. While I have been disappointed that he took a hard conservative line on Israel, I am struck by this silence among my compatriots in the struggle for our soul and for truthful Jewish ethics. 

Could it be that we don’t yet understand the meaning of history? That we have not yet realized that the past is not just past, but it can speak to us from the grave? 

A confession: I was so distressed as a young person, trammeled by the observance of Tisha B’Av, that I resisted it. Comically, up to when I was twenty, I made it a point at that same summer camp to take a day-off on that holiday, after that first observance. I could not let myself feel it as viscerally as I did during that initial experience reading Night – and yet I never forgot Elie Wiesel’s vivid testimony. When I saw him live or on TV and listened to his tale, whether about Buchenwald or Soviet Jews or the early Hasidic masters, I came face to face with those who are no longer, those who otherwise entered oblivion.

I wondered what kind of Jew would they want me to be? What kind of conversation would they want me to conduct with other human beings? Where should I encounter holiness in the world, and how should I hold God to account?

For Elie Wiesel, Israel’s presence in the world was a testimony unto itself. That the Jewish state came into being reflected not so much a vindication of sorts – what could possibly justify the depravity, the annihilation – but a rejoinder to those who quit chanting Torah in the middle of the story.  For him, Israel served as a reminder to the rest of humanity that no one should obliterate people on the basis of who they are, what they believe, how they look, or the books they treasure. Still, he chose to live in New York, which was controversial to some in Israel who thought that his place should be there. It may have been too much for us to expect that he would become one of Israel’s vocal critics in the same breath that he would utter his remembrances of the six million. 

It was enough that he came back from the dead, taught us to be human. It was good that he voiced his outrage at the Holy One who was silent. In the Bible, an angel has a singular assignment and returns to where he comes from. Now it’s for us to imagine what it means to not be silent, and to go on living in a manner that hallows both the ones who died and the ones who insist on carrying on the mission to make the world safe for the future. Wiesel bore the burden of the witness, the story-teller. As the generation that listened to his message, it’s up to us to transcribe his testimony and convey it in a manner that speaks to the heart right now. May Elie Wiesel’s memory inspire us to live justly, with the knowledge that it’s what our ancestors would have demanded of us. His words resonate in our actions today. 

-Rabbi Joey

Top photo of Elie Wiesel was taken by Serge Picard, Agence VU/Redux. Middle photo of prisoners marching away from Buchenwald after liberation was taken by Byron H Rollins, AP. Elie Wiesel is the tall boy in the left column, fourth from the front. The last photo, of Elie Wiesel receiving the Nobel Prize, was taken by Bjoem Sigurdsoen, NTB/AP.