Search results
25 sty 2020 · Chapter. Elie Wiesel’s literary, religious, and existential universe revolve around the deity. “As a Jew,” he writes, “sooner or later you will encounter the enigma of God’s action in history.” 1 In other words, what is God’s role in the Jewish historical experience?
Wiesel’s quarrel with God assumes an unexpected dimen-sion when he speaks about the deity as a suffering God. Citing the Sefer Ha Zohar (Book of Splendor) a central text of Jewish mysticism, Wiesel writes “God is everywhere, even in suffering and in the very heart of punish-ment.”.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, it bears saying that Wiesel’s assertion – God is “hanging from this gallows” – cannot be reduced to Nietzsche’s “God is dead,” cited by atheists. Rather, Wiesel’s faith is rooted in Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s dictum: “There is no whole faith except broken faith.”
We can note two perspectives on the relation between religion, ethics, and memory. On the one hand, and especially in the post-Holocaust situation, I believe that a key aspect of Wiesel's works is that memory is the means by which man and God confirm each other into existence.
In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps.
In the transcript below, students discussed whether or not Elie in the memoir lost his faith because of his traumatic experiences ("Elie" is used to denote the boy in the memoir while "Wiesel" is used to denote the author).
Elie Wiesel: One of the central tenets of my life is the teaching in Numbers (19:16): "Lo ta'amod al dam reakha, Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed inflicted on your fellow man." Also in the Bible, Moses rediscovers himself as a Jew and as a man when he defends a Hebrew beaten by an Egyptian and then one beaten by another Hebrew.
