Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, Andrew Mellow Professor of Humanities at Boston University, died July 2 at age 87. Had the Nazis had their way, he would never have survived past age 16, when the Allied troops liberated Buchenwald death camp. In his seminal work, Night, Wiesel identified the evil that fell on him and his family in their Romanian town, transporting them first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, obliterating his parents and one of this three sisters amid six million other human beings. In Night and some 39 other books, Wiesel was a ceaseless witness to the strength of the human spirit, sustaining faith in God who is both exalted and chastened for action and inaction in the world.
Wiesel, like the Psalmist, is an imprecatory Jewish witness, demanding justice from the God who, throughout the Holocaust, both endured with and deserted a supposedly chosen people. Facing the furnaces, Wiesel cried out: “The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?” Moments later, facing the end, Wiesel mumbles — “in spite of myself” — the ancient Jewish confession: Yitgadal veyitkadach shme raba, “may God’s name be blessed and magnified.”
For a decade after the war he refused to recount Holocaust experiences; the pain was too intense. Ultimately, he encountered the renowned French Catholic writer Francois Mauriac who “spoke only of Jesus” during their lengthy conversation. Wiesel wrote, “When he said Jesus again I couldn’t take it, and for the only time in my life I was … discourteous, which I regret to this day.” Wiesel declared, “I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.’”
Immediately embarrassed by that outburst, Wiesel ran for the elevator, but Mauriac followed, pulled him into the office, and began to weep. When that ended, the man said simply: “You know, maybe you … should talk about it.” Wiesel continues: “He took me to the elevator and embraced me. And that year, the tenth year, I began writing my narrative.” Thus came Night; Mauriac wrote the forward.
Never again silent, Wiesel became one of the great witnesses to peace and justice in the post-World War II generation. In “Words from a Witness” (1967), he told of a rabbi whose conscience compelled him to declare: “’Please do not be murderers, do not be thieves. Do not be silent and do not be indifferent.’” He continued preaching, but no one listened. “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.’”
Wiesel began teaching at Boston University in 1976. In a 2012 interview in BU Today, he was asked what would happen when the last living witnesses to the Holocaust were gone. He replied, “Anyone who listens to a witness becomes one. So, therefore, my students are witnesses. Those who read my books have become witnesses. It’s so painful, and I wish they didn’t have to read this, to become the witnesses to the witnesses. It’s not easy.”
My friend Roger Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, known for works on Judaism, spirituality and the environment, reflects on Wiesel’s life accordingly: “Wiesel uniquely combined a deep commitment to the value of human life, an appreciation of the particular gifts of the Jewish tradition, and an understanding of the essential moral complexity and ambiguity we all share. His writings were both brilliant and simple, direct and ethically challenging. A great soul who faced the truth and still dared us to face life with love, his death leaves a haunting absence.”
Several years ago Bostonian magazine included a photo of Wiesel in the commencement procession at BU, clad in academic regalia that included BU’s bright red robe with black front piece emblazoned with two crosses, drawn from the university’s 19th-century Methodist-inspired seal. On Wiesel’s robe, however, the two crosses were missing, ghostly evidence of a symbol snipped away. As a Jew, he could not carry the cross and be faithful to who he was. He cut it out.
I think often of that photo, particularly when I “suit up” in such regalia — BU is my Ph.D. alma mater — and wonder if Wiesel’s vaguely imperceptible but singularly significant act is a symbol of who he was and what he asked of those who heard, read or were otherwise touched by his stories of the Holocaust and beyond.
“What do we cut and what do we keep?” When life inevitably overpowers us, what must we retain or relinquish to be faithful to our true selves? He compels us to consider cutting and keeping, not just in dramatic moments or great ideas, but every day of our lives.