Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage

14 · I AM NOT GOD’S POLICEMAN

1 6 0 14 · Elie Wiesel I AM NOT GOD’S POLICEMAN Elie Wiesel is the voice of the Holocaust, the ghostly whisper of the Six Million. He survived, and they didn’t, and his task, his fate, his duty is to speak their tale and tell of their death and recount their pain, a pain which we can never come close to understanding. A storm of ashes whirled about these millions: the ashes of aunts and uncles and cousins and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, of rabbis and wise men and tailors and lawyers and doctors who healed and musicians who played like angels. All these gentle people were singled out at the selektion—“To the right. To the left,” they were told, as if they were newcomers in town getting driving directions. “Turn here. Turn there. Go straight, straight into the flames.” Just about everyone else was worked to their deaths, falling into mud, piss, and shit, falling into history, falling into oblivion. Falling. Forever lost. Wiesel’s job is to resurrect these lives by saving their memories. “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it,” Wiesel has written. Wiesel is not a betrayer. Elie Wiesel entered the death camps in the spring of 1944. He was fifteen. His parents and a younger sister died there. In 1945 the camps were liberated, Wiesel was liberated, and he was at a loss. “My only experience in the secular world,” he later said, “was Auschwitz.” He’d been raised a religious Jew—a very religious Jew—in the Romanian town of Sighet, studying Talmud and, against his father’s wishes, often Kabala. In Sighet, the boundaries of Wiesel’s life were heaven above, holy words in holy books, and the worries of his Orthodox but pragmatic father that Kabala would make him unstable, crazy, mad. He wasn’t alone: parents in Sighet warned their children that anyone who studied Kabala was “hurtling to their own destruction. Keep away from them.”1 For ten years after liberation, Wiesel silenced himself. “All I know is what I have words for,” Wittgenstein had said, and Wiesel also knew the limits of words. Indeed, no one had the words. There were no letters , no syllables, no sounds for what he’d seen, for where he’d been. Vocabularies and alphabets failed before this abyss. Silence was the only speech. And then, while working as a journalist in Paris for an Israeli newspaper , he interviewed the French writer François Mauriac, who started talking about the suffering of Christ. Wiesel exploded: “Ten years ago, I knew hundreds of Jewish children who suffered more than Christ, and no one talks about it.” With that, Wiesel wept, and the decade-old dam inside him started crumbling. Wiesel began writing. Incessantly. First came an eight-hundredpage memoir. Wiesel winnowed that down to the one hundred twentyseven pages of Night, which contains the most widely quoted passage in Holocaust literature: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. An avalanche of books followed Night, forty-four at last count. With that prolificacy and the sobering warnings he cast at the universality of pain (Rwanda, Cambodia, Kosovo, Soviet Jewry, and more), he became a walking conscience for the world, a role institutionalized, as it were, when he received the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. “I have tried to keep memory alive,” Wiesel said in his Nobel address. “If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. . . . We must always takes sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the tormented.” ELIE WIESEL 1 6 1 As sobering and grim as all this is, when you meet Wiesel, there’s a surprise: he’s not all doom and gloom, not stooped by the burdens of Auschwitz and its various permutations that have visited the world since 1945. He does smile. His eyes do have a twinkle. He can take a joke, and he can tell a joke. He can even take some gentle teasing. He has a wife and a son and a life and is not stuck forever in the death camps, a grim visage, relentlessly scouring the world...