Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives

24. Conscience

24 Conscience Irwin Cotler Elie Wie­ sel has come to embody conscience, not only for Jews but for humanity as a whole. Indeed, when the Nobel Committee awarded Wie­ sel the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the choice was greeted with international acclaim, for it is difficult to imagine any citizen in the world who has so commanded the respect and attention of po­ liti­ cal leaders and the people themselves. One suspects that, if the Nobel Committee had awarded Wie­ sel the Nobel Prize for literature, the acclaim would have been no less. Wie­ sel writes, as the title of one of his books suggests, as a “Soul on Fire.” That flame not only has animated the literary imagination, it has ignited the struggle for peace and human rights worldwide. His eloquence is all the more remarkable because, as he puts it, the Holocaust is beyond vocabulary. In matters such as these, language mocks reality. Yet the man who argues that Auschwitz and Birkenau are beyond communication and comprehension has conveyed not only the particularity of the horror but also the universality of its lessons. “Author, Teacher, Witness—­ a Messenger for Humanity”—­ these are the words inscribed on the Congressional Gold Medal presented in 1985 to Wie­ sel “in recognition of his humanitarian efforts and outstanding contribution to world literature and human rights.” The same words were repeated by the Nobel Committee in citing Wie­ sel as one of the foremost moral and intellectual leaders in the global struggle for human rights. Yet his most significant accolade is that of “conscience of humanity.” His life’s work has been underpinned by the biblical injunction tsedek tsedek tirdof (“justice justice shall you pursue”), an injunction equal to all the other commandments combined. This, as my father used to say, is that which should be taught unto one’s children, and Wie­ sel has been the teacher, witness, messenger—­ and conscience. It is as appropriate that we look to Wie­ sel’s life and work to elaborate nine lessons of conscience. Lesson 1: The Right of Memory and the Duty of Remembrance The first lesson is the importance of Zachor, of remembrance. This means the right to remember things in Jewish history too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to 277 278 | Irwin Cotler have happened; of the Holocaust, as Wie­ sel has put it so well, as “While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims.”1 This establishes the right to memory as a fundamental human right. Indeed, Wie­ sel has singularly patented this right. This right to memory instructs us, as we recall the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah, that human beings defamed, demonized, and dehumanized serves as a prologue and justification for genocide. What must be understood is that the mass murder of six million Jews—­of one and a half million Jewish children—­ and of millions of non-­ Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics. Indeed, we convey by the ritual reading of victims’ names at Holocaust Remembrance gatherings all over the world (gatherings in part inspired by Wie­ sel) that unto each person, there is a name, unto each person, there is an identity, each person is a universe. As our sages of the Talmud tell us: “whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.”2 Just as whoever kills a single person, it is as if they have killed an entire universe. And so the abiding imperative is that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny. Lesson 2: The Danger of State-­ Sanctioned Incitement to Hatred and Genocide: The Responsibility to Prevent The enduring lesson of the Holocaust—­ and the genocides that followed in Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur—­ is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-­ sanctioned ideology of hate. This teaching of contempt is where it all began. As the Canadian courts affirmed in upholding the constitutionality of anti-­ hate legislation, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words.” These, as the courts put it, “are the chilling facts of history, the catastrophic effects of racism.”3 Forty years later, in the 1990s, not only did these lessons remain unlearned, but the tragedy was repeated. For we have witnessed yet again a growing trafficking in state-­ sanctioned hate and incitement, which in the Balkans...