Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives

18. Wiesel’s Testament

18 Wie­sel’s Testament Oren Baruch Stier Iwould like to begin on a personal note: when I was graduating from college every­ one had the opportunity to insert a quotation or two into a space next to our yearbook photographs. One of the quotations I chose was from the epigraph to Elie Wie­ sel’s novel, The Gates of the Forest, which, as already cited by several contributors to this volume, recounts the tale of a Jewish mystical technique utilized by a succession of hasidic leaders for averting a divine decree of harsh judgment against the Jewish community , despite the progressively fading memory of the actual technique: in the end, the story alone is enough. The parable concludes, we will recall, “God made man because He loves stories.”1 That last sentence is the passage I chose for my yearbook statement ; I selected it because I was enamored of the redemptive vision of the tale, and for the implication of a lonely and bereft divine universe had humans either never existed or, perhaps worse, existed without the ability to tell tales. Now, in revisiting that epigraph , I am struck both by the threat of divine judgment hovering in the background and by the testimonial aspect of the story—­ and the story within the story—­ told not just to entertain God, but to defend Jews—­ always, as it were, in a cosmic courtroom. The title of this chapter, “Wie­ sel’s Testament,” is meant to play off the etymological connection between the words “testimony” and “testament.” I would like to highlight this connection in three intersecting ways: 1. In a specifically legal sense, paying particular attention to the formal meaning of the word “testimony.” 2. In the sense of a “last will and testament,” especially in the context of Wie­ sel’s book The Testament. 3. In a religious sense, which also could allude to a biblical (and even “new”) testament , that is, looking at not only a literary corpus and/or canon as a whole, but also, and perhaps especially, the echoes and associations in that body of output that most engage the broader, Christian, world. One might suggest that we live in an age of testimony. This is not only due to the mass of personal accounts available as never before through contemporary tech211 212 | Oren Baruch Stier nological means, but also due to modern society’s apparent need for and reliance on witnesses and witnessing to an endless range of twentieth-­and twenty-­ first-­ century horrors. “Testimony,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, from the Latin testi­ monium, itself derived from the Latin noun testis or “witness,” is (1) a formal statement, especially one given in a court of law and (2) evidence or proof of something. “Witness,” also according to the OED, is (1) a person who sees an event take place and (2) a person giving sworn testimony to a court of law or the police (to cite just two meanings of the word). But much of what contemporary popu­ lar culture calls “testimony” emerges from a fairly liberal reading of witnessing (i.e., many of our modern-­ day “witnesses” have never, in fact, seen the events to which they testify, nor of course do they testify in formal courts—­ unless we count courts of pub­ lic opinion). Furthermore, as Nancy Harrowitz reminds us, in some cases, the witness to an event does not bear testimony, because the act of witnessing itself leads to death and hence the inability to testify, as in the biblical case of Lot’s wife.2 Wie­ sel’s particular brand of testimony hews, on one hand, more closely to the classic model, owing to his personal experiences during the Shoah (he has written, of the dead, “I simply look at them. I see them and I write”);3 on the other hand, his kind of testimony escapes and exceeds the conservative constraints of the genre’s judicial aspects by virtue of the fact that it is largely literary. Indeed, one can safely argue that Wie­ sel has participated in the creation of the genre of literary testimony. If we consider his most famous work within the genre, Night, and especially its publishing history, we have opportunity to reflect on just how far the genre of Holocaust testimony has come in the last fifty years, and how instrumental Wie­ sel was in the explosion of the genre. In an essay published in Janu­ ary 2008 in the New York...