Elie Wiesel

Humanist Messenger for Peace

Alan L. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780415738231
• eBook ISBN: 9781317813972
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Elie Wiesel: Humanist Messenger for Peace is part biography and part moral history of the intellectual and spiritual journey of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, human rights activist, author, university professor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In this concise text, Alan L. Berger portrays Wiesel's transformation from a pre-Holocaust, deeply God-fearing youth to a survivor of the Shoah who was left with questions for both God and man. An advisor to American presidents of both political parties, his nearly 60 books voiced an activism on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. The book illuminates Wiesel's contributions in the areas of religion, human rights, literature, and Jewish thought to show the impact that he has had on American life. Supported by primary documents about and from Wiesel, the volume gives students a gateway to explore Wiesel's incredible life.

This book will make a great addition to courses on American religious or intellectual thought.

PART I

Elie Wiesel

CHAPTER 1
Shattering the Sacred Canopy

Judaism was birthed in the notion of a covenant which, broadly speaking, is an agreement between two parties of vastly unequal power, in this case God and the Jewish people. In general terms, the mission of the Jews, as a chosen people, was to bear witness to monotheism or the oneness of God. The deity, in turn, was to intervene to protect His chosen people in times of great historical danger. Elie Wiesel, like Sighet’s other 10,500 Jews on the eve of World War II, was raised to believe in this mythic covenantal framework, which provided a sacred canopy for its adherents. In the words of sociologist of religion Peter Berger, “Religion is the ‘sacred canopy’ which every human society builds over its world to give it meaning.”¹ Living under this canopy meant living under a protective shield which the Jews believed safeguarded them. Symbolically, this canopy is a “shield against terror.” It yields order and meaning for believers. Life outside this canopy, however, leads to existential, physical, psychological, and theological chaos. The sacred canopy is what sociologists of religion call a plausibility structure that grants purpose to an adherent’s life and a transcendent meaning to their death.

Elie Wiesel’s story is that of a witness trapped in the kingdom of night. The foundational tenants of his pre-Holocaust Jewish world were radically challenged, Judaism’s sacred canopy mercilessly shredded by the Holocaust. In Berger’s words, “when the plausibility structure is destroyed, the reality of the world based on it begins to disintegrate (rapidly).”² Applying this to Wiesel’s situation, it is clear that two antithetical universes confronted one another. Judaism’s plausibility structure admonished its adherents to choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). In stark contrast, Nazism dedicated itself to the death world; murder and the Lord of Death supplanted the sanctity of human life and divine revelation. Mythically, the issue became one of two revelations, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, which yielded a moral and ethical order or nomos, and the Holocaust, which Wiesel termed the anti-Sinai, or a world of anomie. The tension between the believing youth he had been and the survivor he became marked his post-Holocaust life and work as both a writer and activist on behalf of the oppressed. His experience became paradigmatic for that of Europe’s Jews during World War II. Furthermore, Wiesel was a tireless advocate for the importance of Holocaust memory and the multifaceted questions it generates. His influence on American Judaism and the Western world was enormous. Professor Maurice Friedman accurately describes Wiesel’s role in American culture:

For most people, Job is associated with suffering, patience and piety. For Wiesel—Job is associated with trust and contending, with wrestling with God within the dialogue with God.³ Furthermore, this ambivalence toward the deity’s role in history resonated with the American, non-orthodox temperament.

This chapter places Wiesel in context of his Jewish identity both prior to the Holocaust, during the Shoah, and following his arrival in America. Consequently, several themes are addressed: Wiesel’s pre-war God-intoxication and how his image of God was radically assaulted by his Auschwitz and Buchenwald experience; his immersion in Hasidism, which guided everything that he believed; the normative Jewish Arguing with God tradition; his utilization of the din Torah (interrogation of God); and his paradoxical “death of God” position in comparison with other major Jewish-American thinkers such as Richard L. Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum. I distinguished the chapter distinguishes Wiesel’s death of God position from that of other Jewish thinkers and discuss his understanding of post-Shoah faith.

Wiesel’s Pre-Holocaust Jewish Identity

Wiesel from an early age exhibited the traits of a homo religious, a religiously committed individual thoroughly immersed in the teachings of Judaism’s sacred texts who fervently believed in the coming of the Messiah. For the teenaged Wiesel and two of his close friends, this meant engaging in rigorous ascetic practices, including recitation of incantations prescribed by practical kabbalah (devotional mysticism) under the guidance of their teacher, Moishe the Beadle. Such practices, intended to hasten the Messiah’s arrival, had disastrous results for two of Wiesel’s companions; Yiddele, the eldest of the three, was rendered mute, while Sruli was also afflicted by physical disability. Wiesel persisted until being deported to Auschwitz. Parenthetically, I note that years later Wiesel traveled to India in the early 1950s. While there he studied Hindu sacred texts such as the Vedas. He also made the acquaintance of a Hindu man to whom he explained Jewish teachings. This man owned a domestic airline that offered free meals on its flights. Wiesel availed himself of this opportunity. More significantly, he rejected asceticism and its attendant suffering. He could stand his own pain, but he could not endorse the pain and suffering of others in the face of so much indifference on the part of so many on the sub-continent.

Wiesel’s Biography

Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania not far from the Ukrainian border. His birth date corresponds to the Jewish holiday Simhat Torah (rejoicing in the Torah), a day celebrating the end of the year’s public reading of the Torah and the beginning of a new cycle. Wiesel was the third of four children, and the only son, born to Shlomo Wiesel and Sarah Feig. His two older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, survived the Holocaust. His parents and younger sister, Tzipora, did not. In addition to his parents and siblings, Wiesel’s paternal grandmother, Nisel, lived very close to the Wiesel home. Two aunts also resided in Sighet.

From an early age Wiesel was deeply observant. “By day,” he writes, “I studied Talmud and by night,” he confides, “I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.”⁴ He became a disciple of Moishe the Beadle, a mystic who aided the 13-year-old youth in his study of kabbalah, especially as it was advanced by the sixteenth-century kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the ARI, Ashkenazic Rabbi Isaac).

Shlomo Wiesel owned a grocery store, many of whose patrons were Christian. He frequently interceded with the authorities on behalf of the Jewish community, and at one point he was jailed for his activities. Although very far from wealthy, he made certain to invite beggars to Friday night dinner, and to tell Maria, the family’s trusted Christian servant who spoke flawless Yiddish, to prepare a weekly pot of soup for those less fortunate. Shlomo was an emancipated Jew who liked cantorial music and insisted his son learn secular subjects such as astronomy and Hebrew literature in addition to his Jewish religious studies. Although he helped the boy with his study of Talmud and granted him permission to study Jewish mysticism, he insisted that his son learn modern Hebrew. In volume one of his memoirs, Wiesel recalled seeing his father only rarely, except on Shabbat (Saturday), when they walked together to services. Later, in the death camps, their relationship deepened and they helped one another survive for a time. His father perished in Buchenwald. In Night there are only very few pages after the death of his father. Wiesel writes in his memoir:

No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep … but I was out of tears.⁵

Sarah Feig Wiesel was a woman of great culture, a follower of the Wizhnitz Rebbe (Rabbi Israel Hager, born 1860); she also read German literary works. Her dream was that Elie would become a rabbi and a PhD. He became neither. To the degree that a rabbi is both a teacher and a spiritual leader, it is possible to view Wiesel as an unofficial rabbi to much of the world. Sarah was a fervent believer in the coming of the Messiah, which she eagerly awaited. No harm would come to Elie, she believed, because the Messiah would protect him. A very different future was foreseen when Elie was eight years old. Sarah took him with her on her customary visit to the Wizhnitz Rebbe, seeking his blessing for the family. After directing Sarah to leave the room, the Rebbe asked Elie questions about his studies. Next, the holy man dismissed the youngster and beckoned Sarah to return. When she subsequently emerged, she was sobbing uncontrollably. She did not respond to her young son, who wanted to know why she was crying. Twenty-five years later in America, a hospitalized relative who had asked for Wiesel’s blessing told him that the Rebbe had said: “Sarah, know that your son will become a gadol b’Israel, a great man in Israel, but neither you nor I will live to see the day. That’s why I am telling you now.”

Sighet assumed near mythic proportion in Wiesel’s career as a writer; he kept a picture of his birth home on the wall by his writing desk. The town itself, after the war when Wiesel had become a naturalized American citizen, continued to symbolize his sacred canopy and the world which was swallowe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Part I Elie Wiesel
• Chapter 1 Shattering the Sacred Canopy
• Chapter 2 Elie Wiesel and Jewish-Christian Relations: A Journey of Hope Against Despair
• Chapter 3 The Second Generation: Memory and Jewish Identity
• Chapter 4 Neo-Hasidism: A Contemporary Message
• Chapter 5 Human Rights
• Chapter 6 Wiesel’s Search for World Peace
• Part II Documents
• Bibliography
• Index