Elie Wiesel’s “Wounded Faith”
“The world is not learning anything,” Elie Wiesel told fellow Holocaust survivor, biologist Georg Klein, in an interview after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. “You and I went through certain experiences,” he continued, “If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we would have to fight again, we wouldn’t have believed it: Racism, antisemitism, starvation of children. I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn’t. The victims died, but the haters are still here. New ones.”
Americans of all political persuasions hold dearly to a steadfast belief in progress. Perhaps, it goes beyond American borders and implicates all of human nature. Still, even as the elderly wax nostalgic about the “good old days” and the young confront the world’s problems as if they are novel, people prefer to believe that the world advances toward a triumphant apex. While Martin Luther King Jr. often contradicted the idea of a continual climb, his most hopeful moment of cosmology has become his most oft-quoted: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Elie Wiesel, the brilliant author, teacher, and Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to combating hatred and fanaticism, did not believe that the arc of the moral universe would bend toward justice. After witnessing the destruction of his neighborhood in Hungary, breathing the ashes of his mother and sister in the sky of Auschwitz, and seeing his father starve to death in Buchenwald, he lost faith in humanity. During a conversation with Primo Levi that he recalls in his memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, the atheist Holocaust survivor challenged the Jewish faith of Wiesel. “How could you believe in God?” Levi asked while positing that the crucible of their own experience acts as the ultimate verification of the problem of evil. Wiesel replied by asking, “How could I believe in man?” Wiesel asserted that Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and all the scenes of death and torture of the Holocaust—which he referred to as the capital ‘E’, “Event,”—vanquish the ability to have faith in humanity. All that remained was faith in God, but not a normal faith. Wiesel called it a “wounded faith.” Despite his adherence to the rituals of Judaism, he explained that if he asked God to answer for Auschwitz, and God granted his request, he would reject the answer. “I believe in God, in spite of God,” he said.
In the past year, I’ve turned to books by and about Elie Wiesel for answers. Observing the victories and encroachments of the “new haters” has initiated a psychic process of suffocating the voices of hope that live within my head. The new haters offer nothing original. Their malevolence, prejudices, and paranoia are outdated, obsolete, and even ancient, but in an evolutionary stage of predation, they’ve adapted to modern terrain. The political adaptation is a consequence of their ability to deliver their decrepit ideologies in the shiny, exciting new packages of digital media. As Christian Piccolini, a former neo-Nazi turned anti-racist leader, told me when I interviewed him in 2021, if someone wanted to join the hate movement in the 1980s or ‘90s, when he was proselytizing, they would have to physically meet someone, which, given the taboos over overt expressions of racism and antisemitism, was a challenge. Now, all one has to do is pull a smartphone out of their pocket and tap the screen a few times.
The cancer of hate reaches every corner. One of the most despairing developments of recent years is the reemergence of antisemitism as a mainstream toxin. The most popular podcast hosts interview intellectual crackpots and neo-Nazis; the president of the United States gives his approval. On the left, protest against the actions of the Israeli government, which, if they were solely about disagreement with policy, would be legitimate, often morphs into blood libels, hateful tropes, and brazenly antisemitic language. Throughout 2024, America’s best universities tolerated open hostility toward Jewish students. Hassaan Chaudhary, the political director on the transition team for New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, has called Israel a “cancer which will be eliminated soon.” Mamdani himself refused to vote for Holocaust remembrance legislation as an assemblyman, posted videos mocking Hanukkah celebrations, and recorded rap songs in tribute to financiers of Hamas. Hamas, of course, was responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a provocation of war that was all but forgotten in the ongoing debate over Israel’s responsive conduct.
The political rhetoric, spread on social media and all around the podcast sphere, is hardly inconsequential. According to the Anti-Defamation League and other organizations, antisemitic hate crimes have increased to unprecedented levels since the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel. In the past month, so-called “pro-Palestine” protestors have harassed worshippers outside of synagogues in New York and Los Angeles, calling Jews “Zionist pigs.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration uses state power to terrorize, assault, and disrupt the lives of millions of Latinos, most of whom do not have criminal records, through mass deportation, neighborhood raids, and systemic harassment.
Elie Wiesel lived through the apotheosis of antisemitism. Given what he endured and observed—man’s capacity for cruelty and torture at its worst and most frenzied—he could have resigned from public life, forever rejecting any notion of solidarity. He said, “I’ve had the right, for almost my entire life, to say ‘goodbye’ to society—‘goodbye’ to humanity—and I choose not to.”
His choice is profound, disquieting, and instructive. If he rejected apathy, where does that leave us who have not suffered even a scintilla of his experience? One must proceed with humility, but it is not presumptuous to assert that, in Wiesel’s absence, it leaves us with an obligation to amplify nonviolence, solidarity, universal human rights, and even love. One of Wiesel’s most famous maxims was, “Anyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness.”
Elie Wiesel wrote 65 books and spent a lifetime in the classroom and the lecture hall. Those of us who read and listened have transformed into witnesses. In my review of his work, I’ve learned an ethos applicable to our troubled times.
It is essential to begin with the foundation that stories possess a value transcendent of ideology and argument. Wiesel is best known for his international bestseller, Night, a bare-bones account, in Hemingway-esque prose, of his Holocaust experience. The book’s length is under 100 pages, down from an astonishing 1,000. Wiesel’s initial intention was to surround his story with political, philosophical, and theological speculation as to how such barbarity and bloodlust were possible. The original title was “And the World Remained Silent.” Eventually, he understood the horror and profundity of his story should speak for itself.
“What does it mean to remember?” Wiesel asks in his memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, when reflecting on his decision to begin writing, “It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it.” He also warns himself and his readers, “words must never be uttered lightly.”
The purpose of Wiesel’s words was to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. He wrote that “the truth must be stated and restated: The suffering of the survivors did not end with the war; society wanted no part of them, either during or after.”
Wiesel believed that the Holocaust deniers would prevail—not the psychotic neo-Nazis who simultaneously claim that six million Jews did not die at the hands of Hitler and that the genocide was necessary—but those who forget and those who, because they never learned, come to believe that it was a mere historic, small-‘e’ event like any other that fills the pages of boring textbooks in high school classrooms. It would lose its power to silence and shame. It would no longer function as an ultimate mystery of man’s capacity for evil, nor would the slogan, “never again,” act as a bodyguard against the march of hate.
In 2018, an extensive survey discovered that two-thirds of millennials “don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Ignorance breeds cruelty and apathy. It is a prevalent belief among the progressive left that Israel is a “colonial state,” hardly any different than a white supremacist, settler project. According to the misperception, its goal is the displacement and execution of the Palestinian people. The genesis of Israel, as a sanctuary for a people always on the run and under threat of death, has faded. It’s not that Israel is without sin, but its birth, like the dozens of new nations that emerged after World War II, was a mix of the noble and profane. It ended up enshrining rights for its Arab minority that vote, pray, and serve on the Supreme Court and the IDF in a way that would be unthinkable for a non-Muslim minority in, say, Saudi Arabia. And yet it did, through defensive wars, become an occupying power over Palestinians who lack the franchise. Efforts to create a state for Palestine’s Arabs have been rejected for decades by everyone from Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti to Yasser Arafat.
All prejudice is ugly, but antisemitism, it’s often said, becomes a conspiracist worldview where Jews are simultaneously behind capitalism and Bolshevism; simultaneously parasitic and all-powerful. History is dotted with secret codicils and paranoid theories from the bubonic plague to the fall of the Kaiser’s army. A contemporary iteration posits that the “Israel Lobby” dictates US foreign policy, and that, as Mamdani implied to a grinning Trump in the Oval Office, the reason that American streets are full of homeless people is due to the relatively small amount of money that the federal government spends on aid to Israel.
Meanwhile, some on the right, such as Rod Dreher and Ted Cruz, have raised alarm over a large number of their fellow travelers on the right who have turned brazen antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Candice Owens into heroes, even as they recast Winston Churchill as the villain of the Second World War and decry the supposed “Jewish influence” over Western institutions.
Through Wiesel’s story and the stories he told and created, two truths become inescapable. The first is that it is naïve, if not catastrophic, to underestimate the power of hatred. Before he died in 2016, he spent his life cautioning against “fanaticism,” but fanaticism typically appears in the political realm wearing a brilliant disguise. In Wiesel’s novel, The Time of the Uprooted, the narrator remarks, “The gods of hate hide behind slogans of brotherhood; they fool everybody, including themselves.” Those who wave Hamas and Hezbollah flags in New York and London claim that they are for “peace.” Those who applaud the deportation of law-abiding Latinos to a brutal super prison in El Salvador say they are “making America great again.”
Wiesel implores us to take seriously those who suffer and struggle. The story that haunts Night, and to which Wiesel obsessively returned throughout his life, is how everyone in his Hungarian village dismissed Moishe the Beadle, a “jack of all trades in a Hasidic house of prayer” who was “as awkward as a clown.” One day, he disappeared. Months later, he returned to the village, recalling how Hungarian police transported him and others into Poland, where the Gestapo forced prisoners to work, and regardless of their diligence, often shot them in the head. He escaped by a miracle. Few took him seriously. Even fewer believed him.
It is not only the living who ask us to see impending atrocities, but also the dead. When Wiesel gave Oprah Winfrey a tour of Auschwitz for a broadcast, he said, “Some voices are still here. The souls are here. They listen. They cry. They warn.”
The language of Wiesel dances with mystery, not only the “mystic chords of memory,” to borrow from Abraham Lincoln, but also the inquiries of human experience. Unlike the arrogance that insists that everything can be understood, Wiesel, despite his brilliance, stood in awe of the immensity of evil and the possibility of connection. “The cynics are wrong,” Wiesel wrote in a novel, “David Hume and Nikos Kazantzakis are right: Everything that happens in our human universe is mysteriously linked to everything else.”
Howard Reich, the veteran jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and son of Holocaust survivors, felt the link when the Tribune assigned him to interview Wiesel on Wiesel’s acceptance of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2012. Reich’s plan to keep his own link to the Holocaust private and focus solely on Wiesel crumbled when Wiesel asked multiple questions about why the newspaper would assign a music writer to interview him. That exchange led to a close friendship that lasted until Wiesel died in 2016. Reich writes with insight and deep, but controlled feeling about Wiesel in his rich and enlightening book, The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel.
I asked Reich about Wiesel’s beliefs about writing and education, knowing that many Nazis were cultured and learned men.
Reich told me:
I believe that though Professor Wiesel devoted his life to language and learning, he came to realize that education alone was not enough to save humanity. Many SS leaders, he pointed out, had acquired advanced knowledge. ‘Yes, philosophy was there,’ Professor Wiesel said to me, but ‘ethos was not. They did not study ethics. Therefore, I go around America and the world, really, lobbying in every university: you must include lessons on ethos, ethics, because without it, all the other things are almost meaningless.’ Professor Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors paid a high price for this understanding, and we benefit incalculably from their hard-won wisdom.
Through his devotion to philosophy, ethics, and education that could withstand human corruption, Wiesel developed a profound philosophical temperament and disposition. In his conversations with Reich, he called his motivational worldview “Active pessimism.”
“Active pessimism is pessimism that therefore moves you to action,” Wiesel said. “The other view says, ‘Ach, since it’s so terrible, what can I do?’ The active one says, ‘Oh, therefore I can do something. And even if I can do nothing, I will do it anyway, just to prove that I’m doing it.’”
Reich writes that “active pessimism” provides the means for “finding hope amid sorrow.”
The cumulative effect of bad news is often demoralization. If Wiesel could marshal his “active pessimism” toward striving toward a freer, more intelligent, and more peaceful world, then the rest of us can also “do something,” even if only to prove that we are doing so.
Speaking for myself, reading Wiesel’s work is sad but also a joyful testament to the human capacity for resistance, triumph, and even in the face of horrendous odds, agency to serve the good. It makes me want to do more, including writing, even if, like most writers, I wonder who is reading and what effect it is having.
In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel claims, “To write is an act of faith.” It is a wounded faith. But is there any other kind?
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