Elie Wiesel has passed away. He was a survivor of the Holocaust and, ten years after his liberation, he wrote about it in an amazing book, "Night." He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
You can read another essay he wrote on "A God Who Remembers" here.
A Prayer for the Days of
Awe
By Elie Wiesel
Published: October 2, 1997 New York Times
BOSTON— Master of the Universe, let
us make up. It is time. How long can we go on being angry?
More than
50 years have passed since the nightmare was lifted. Many things, good and less
good, have since happened to those who survived it. They learned to build on
ruins. Family life was re-created. Children were born, friendships struck. They
learned to have faith in their surroundings, even in their fellow men and
women. Gratitude has replaced bitterness in their hearts. No one is as capable
of thankfulness as they are. Thankful to anyone willing to hear their tales and
become their ally in the battle against apathy and forgetfulness. For them
every moment is grace.
Oh, they
do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should
you, Master of the Universe. But they no longer look at every passer-by with
suspicion. Nor do they see a dagger in every hand.
Does this
mean that the wounds in their soul have healed? They will never heal. As long
as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so
long will my joy be incomplete.
 |
Wiesel is on the far right of the top bunk in this photograph of the Buchenwald barracks taken just after the liberation of the camp in April, 1945.
Courtesy of the National Archives/Newsmakers |
What
about my faith in you, Master of the Universe?
I now
realize I never lost it, not even over there, during the darkest hours of my
life. I don't know why I kept on whispering my daily prayers, and those one
reserves for the Sabbath, and for the holidays, but I did recite them, often
with my father and, on Rosh ha-Shanah eve, with hundreds of inmates at
Auschwitz. Was it because the prayers remained a link to the vanished world of
my childhood?
But my
faith was no longer pure. How could it be? It was filled with anguish rather
than fervor, with perplexity more than piety. In the kingdom of eternal night,
on the Days of Awe, which are the Days of Judgment, my traditional prayers were
directed to you as well as against you, Master of the Universe. What hurt me
more: your absence or your silence?
In my
testimony I have written harsh words, burning words about your role in our
tragedy. I would not repeat them today. But I felt them then. I felt them in
every cell of my being. Why did you allow if not enable the killer day after
day, night after night to torment, kill and annihilate tens of thousands of Jewish
children? Why were they abandoned by your Creation? These thoughts were in no
way destined to diminish the guilt of the guilty. Their established culpability
is irrelevant to my ''problem'' with you, Master of the Universe. In my
childhood I did not expect much from human beings. But I expected everything
from you.
Where
were you, God of kindness, in Auschwitz? What was going on in heaven, at the
celestial tribunal, while your children were marked for humiliation, isolation
and death only because they were Jewish?
These
questions have been haunting me for more than five decades. You have vocal
defenders, you know. Many theological answers were given me, such as: ''God is
God. He alone knows what He is doing. One has no right to question Him or His
ways.'' Or: ''Auschwitz was a punishment for European Jewry's sins of
assimilation and/or Zionism.'' And: ''Isn't Israel the solution? Without
Auschwitz, there would have been no Israel.''
I reject
all these answers. Auschwitz must and will forever remain a question mark only:
it can be conceived neither with God nor without God. At one point, I began
wondering whether I was not unfair with you. After all, Auschwitz was not
something that came down ready-made from heaven. It was conceived by men,
implemented by men, staffed by men. And their aim was to destroy not only us
but you as well. Ought we not to think of your pain, too? Watching your
children suffer at the hands of your other children, haven't you also suffered?
As we
Jews now enter the High Holidays again, preparing ourselves to pray for a year
of peace and happiness for our people and all people, let us make up, Master of
the Universe. In spite of everything that happened? Yes, in spite. Let us make
up: for the child in me, it is unbearable to be divorced from you so long.
Elie
Wiesel, a professor in the humanities at Boston University, was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/02/opinion/a-prayer-for-the-days-of-awe.html
