When they read Elie Wiesel’s Night, my Bible-belt students are regularly caught up short. They are flummoxed by the events about which Wiesel wrote; by the very fact that the Holocaust took place. But they are just as flummoxed by how Wiesel narrated his experiences, and especially about Wiesel’s account of the gradual attenuation of his faith in God while in Auschwitz. They think they know how religion works; but when they read of Wiesel’s offering “a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed,” they must face their own ignorance. At that moment, they learn that not even God can be exempt from critique.
Wiesel never wrote that God answered his prayer, or that God revised God’s ways as my students have to revise theirs. His complex relationship with Israel stemmed from an all-encompassing attachment to the story of the Jewish people that he could not see morphing into any other form. As he stated in a 1980 International Herald Tribune interview: “Do not ask me, a traumatized Jew, to be pro-Palestinian. I totally identify with Israel and cannot go along with leftist intellectuals who reject it. Perhaps another generation will be free enough to criticize Israel; I cannot.”
From the very beginning of his writing career, Wiesel was worried that his testimony would somehow go wrong. To search for a pure Wiesel is to search for a world in which humans do not err, in which they are politically consistent and correct in every way. If we were to truly defer redemption, as Wiesel did, we would not cease to call one another to task. But we would expect all of us to betray our better selves on a regular basis. Perhaps that pain can be minimized over time, but the magnitude of the labor needed is far more immense than we might suspect. It was at times too immense for Wiesel. Yet if we read him again, perhaps it will not be too immense for us.