M.

CHRISTOPHER WHITE SCHOOL OF DIVINITY

THE SILENT CHOICE

SUBMITTED TO DR. DONALD BERRY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

RELI660 WORLD RELIGIONS SEMINAR

BY

THOMAS J. WHITLEY

24 APRIL 2008

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………….1

LITERARY SILENCE…..…………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………….4

THE SILENCE OF GOD…………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………….14

NIGHT AND POST-HOLOCAUST THEOLOGY………………………………………………

………………………………21

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………25

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………27
 INTRODUCTION

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania in 1928 to Shlomo and

Sarah Wiesel.1 The small town of Sighet was a close Jewish community. This

community nurtured Elie and allowed him to begin studies in classical

Hebrew very early in life. His mother belonged to the Hassidic sect of

Judaism. Elie was drawn to their mystical tradition and folk tales. Life was

going well for the Wiesel family, even through the first few years of World

War II. This security, though, was a false one. The scene changed

immediately when Nazis arrived in Sighet in 1944. The Jews living there were

deported to concentration camps in Poland. Elie was 15. Elie was instantly

separated from his mother and his sister, Tzipora, upon arriving at

Auschwitz. He would never see them again. He was, however, able to stay

with his father for the next year. They lived the life of concentration camp

inmates; working to near death, being starved, and beaten.

Wiesel was eventually liberated from Buchenwald by the Americans

and moved to France. He began to study the French language and became a

professional journalist. He wrote for newspapers in France and Israel. He

wrote nothing of the Holocaust for ten years. Wiesel finally wrote Un die welt

hot geshvign (And the world kept silent) in 1955. It was 900 pages of his

memories in Yiddish. Wiesel then condensed that work into 127 pages in

1
“Elie Wiesel Biography.” No Pages. Cited 21 April 2008. Online:
http://www.achievement.org/ autodoc/page/wie0bio-1. Wiesel’s biographical information is
taken from the Academy of Achievement online.
French. It was called La Nuit (Night). Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for

Peace in 1986. Elie Wiesel is

indeed “not an ordinary writer. We cannot read him without the desire to

change, to lead better lives. His books are of the kind that save souls…No

living writer knows our predicament better than Elie Wiesel, and his novels

touch us to the quick, bearing directly upon our deepest problems.”2

“Something happened a generation ago, to the world, to man.

Something happened to God. Certainly something happened to the relations

between man and God, man and man, man and himself. Rather than explore

the story in abstract terms, I try to tell the real story. But this story we tell by

not telling.”3 Silence; it seems so benign, yet it has the power to be

deafening. Thus is the case in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Wiesel uses silence to draw

the reader into his work and causes them to feel what he feels. Some have

called silence Wiesel’s “art”4 and Marie Cedars even calls it the “language

of…Night.”5 These strong words are not out of line at all, for indeed it is

2
Terrence Des Pres, Forward to Ellen S. Fine, Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of
Elie Wiesel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), xiv quoted in Marie M. Cedars,
“Speaking Through Silence: The Art of Elie Wiesel” (PhD diss., The University of Texas at
Arlington, 1984).
3

Elie Wiesel quoted in Harry James Cargas, Harry James Cargas in Conversation with
Elie Wiesel quoted in Marie M. Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence: The Art of Elie Wiesel”
(PhD diss., The University of Texas at Arlington, 1984), iv.
4

See Terrence Des Pres, “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art” and Marie M.
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence: The Art of Elie Wiesel.”
5

Marie M. Cedars, “Silence and Against Silence: The Two Voices of Elie Wiesel” (review
of Irving Abrahamson, ed., Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel), Cross
Currents (1986): 258-9.
silence that makes Wiesel’s Night so real, believable, heart-rending – so

poignant.

The silence in Night, though, is multifaceted. For, Wiesel uses silence in

Night literarily. By this I mean that Wiesel employs silence as a literary

technique to take away words, but add presence. Wiesel also addresses

another facet of silence in Night, which is spoken of directly and indirectly –

the silence of God; a silence which destroyed Wiesel’s faith “forever.”6 This

paper will explore these two uses of silence by Elie Wiesel in Night.

6
Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang,2006), 34.
 LITERARY SILENCE

Wiesel uses silence literarily in more than one way. It is true that

the pages of Night are full of the very word “silence,” but that is not the only

silence that is present. For, as will be shown, Wiesel also uses silence in such

a way as to transform a space between two paragraphs, and even between

two words, into more than blank space on a page. Wiesel transforms that

blank space into silence. The blank space is given presence. Marie Cedars

recognizes this aspect of Wiesel’s use of silence when she defines silence as

“what is not said but is a presence, is intentional, and is expressed by words

and the spaces around them.”7

There has been much commentary on Wiesel’s use of silence in his

works, and especially in Night, and Wiesel has even spoken on the issue. It is

important to see the intentionality in Wiesel’s use of silence and also the

reasoning behind it. For, just as one cannot divorce Wiesel’s work from the

fact that he is a Holocaust survivor, one must not see Wiesel’s silence apart

from its impetus. Elie Wiesel understood the power of silence on many

different levels. He knew that if his story was going to offer something

positive and necessary to humanity that it must employ this linguistic

phenomenon. Wiesel had lived silence and thus had to share through silence.

The experience he shared, though, was not just his own. No, for Wiesel

7
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,”vii.
involves his reader with every turn of page. Wiesel “makes the reader feel

what he feels”.8

Wiesel accomplishes this partly through saying as little as possible.

This seems to contradict logic that says in order to make someone feel what

we feel we must give them as much information as possible. Wiesel resists

because he understands the futility of this approach. Because of this, much

of Night seems disconnected and lacks emotion. A strange find when one

comes to Wiesel’s only work that actually talks about the Holocaust.9 So,

unlike other Holocaust survivors who have recorded their experiences with

much verbosity and great detail, Wiesel chose the approach of minimalism.

Wiesel “states facts and relates happenings, avoiding reaction, explanation,

and interpretation.”10 Wiesel tells what happened. The reader, then, is left to

fill in her reaction. The reader must supply her own judgment when the text

is so blatantly void of one. In doing so, the reader interprets the “silences he

leaves between his words.”11 One of the most stunning examples presents

itself when Wiesel is just arriving in Auschwitz.

Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch.
Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded
its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this with my own eyes…
children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then,
sleep tends to elude me?)
8
Ibid., 26-27.
9

The rest of Wiesel’s works will reference the Holocaust, but no other work speaks
directly of the Holocaust. This, of course, is dealing with his written works, not speeches or
conversations that have been recorded.
10

Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 70.

11

Ibid., 72.
 So that was where we were going. A little father on, there was another,
larger pit for adults.12

Cedars says it well: “Babies being used as targets? And no comment?”13 Of

course, Wiesel does offer to the reader that he really did see this with his

own eyes, implying, at least, the absurdity of the words that have just been

read. Wiesel does also offer a brief parenthetical statement that mentions his

sleeping troubles, but that is it. The next words are of his group marching

toward another pit. The reader is struck by the sheer fact that anyone could

move past this event with nothing else to say. Brief relief is offered shortly at

the beginning of the next paragraph:

I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible
that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world
kept silent?14

This comment, however, is already a shift in focus, for now the children are

lumped in with everyone. To be sure, that men and women were being

burned is a surreal thought and one that should move our hearts. However,

that babies were loaded onto trucks like trash and were disposed of in a

burning pit is unbearable. One can only imagine the stench that must have

filled the air. Other Holocaust survivors have written about it. Cedars offers

us an account from Leon Wells:

Mothers undress their children, and the naked mother carries her child
in her arms to the fire. However, sometimes a mother will undress
herself but will fail to undress the child, or the child refuses to let itself
be undressed out of panic. When this happens, we can hear the voices
12
Wiesel, Night, 32.

13
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 96.
14

Wiesel, Night, 32.

 of the children. “What for?” or “Mother, mother, I’m scared! No! No!” In
these cases, one of the German SD’s takes the child by its small feet,
swings it, crushing its head against the nearest tree, then carries it
over to the fire and tosses it in. This is all done in front of the mother.
When the mother reacts to this, which happens a few times, even if
only by saying something, she is beaten and afterwards hung by her
feet from a tree with her head down until she dies.15

Wiesel makes no mention of children being thrashed against trees or women

being beaten and hung by their feet from trees. Rather, Wiesel offers the

simple statement, “A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children.

Babies!”16

Following this account Elie and his father continued to march in their

group toward the larger pit. As they stepped closer and closer to the pit, Elie

found himself whispering the words his father had just whispered:

“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…May His name be exalted and

sanctified”17

Elie seemed to be facing certain death when their group was “ordered to turn

left and herded into the barracks.”18 Elie’s father then asked him if he

remembered Mrs. Schächter from the train. Mrs. Schächter was the lady from

the train that incessantly shouted about the fire and the flames. No one

believed Mrs. Schächter. Elie believed her now. Elie remembered her now. It

15
Leon Wells, The Janowska Road, 206 as quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through
Silence,” 130-131.
16

Wiesel, Night, 32.

17
Wiesel, Night, 34
18

Ibid.
is after his father asked him if he remembered Mrs. Schächter that Elie pens

some of the most memorable words in all of Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my
life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw
transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all
eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul
and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as

long as God Himself.

Never.19

Not only does Wiesel explicitly mention the “nocturnal silence” that took over

his life and changed it forever, but he also inserts it after this section. The

silence that is present immediately after this section is palpable. The reader

is stunned for a moment at what is said and what is not said. Questioning

ensues. Interpretation ensues.

Another sobering example of Wiesel’s use of silence both by using the

word “silence” in the text and by injecting the presence of silence into the

story is seen when he recounts the hanging of the young pipel.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a

child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The
head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was
pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in the shadow
of the gallows.

19
Ibid.
 This time, the Lagerkapo refused to act as an executioner. Three SS
took his place.

The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In

unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.

‘Long live liberty!’ shouted the two men.

But the boy was silent.

‘Where is merciful God, where is He?’ someone behind me was asking.

At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.

Total silence in the camp…

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“For God’s sake, where is God?”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

“Where He is? This is where – hanging here from the gallows…”20

Wiesel tells the reader that the whole camp was silent; rightfully so. The

chapter is concluded with a single sentence:

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.21

Then, silence. There is nothing left to say, yet there is a multitude left to be

said. Harry James Cargas captures this in his letter nominating Wiesel for the

Nobel Prize: “This mystical silence, this awe before God and the actions of

men, is the substance of every line Wiesel has ever written.”22

The conclusion of the book, though brief in actuality, seems to last into

eternity. The final page is once again filled with silence. The silence that fills
20
Ibid., 64-65.
21

Ibid., 65.
22

Harry James Cargas quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 8.

this final page is of the sort of Wiesel’s choice to leave out details and his

choice to leave Night with as little emotion and judgment as possible.

Wiesel’s brevity is especially noticeable when he relays Buchenwald being

liberated by the Americans. A time that the reader expects to be joyous,

new, exciting is dispassionate and stated as if one has merely noted the

occurrence of the event, but not been affected by it at all. The American

liberation is summed up by Wiesel in one single sentence:

At six o’clock that afternoon, the first American tank stood at the gates

of Buchenwald.23

Is that really all that needs to be said about the American liberation of

Buchenwald? One feels obligated to say that it is not. No, much more can be

said, perhaps should be said. Wiesel, however desired his story to be closest

to the truth, without embellishment or feelings. Wiesel entire experience is

“stripped to the essence.”24

What of the end of Wiesel’s account? He concisely mentions a sickness

that he suffered. He spent weeks in a hospital near death. When he was well

enough to get out of bed, though, he decided to look at himself in a mirror,

for he had not seen himself since he was in the ghetto. The final two

sentences then follow. Each stands alone.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.

The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.25

23
Wiesel, Night, 115.
24

Cedars, “Silence and Against Silence: The Two Voices of Elie Wiesel,” 258.
25

Wiesel, Night, 115.

Silence extends into perpetuity after each period. Each chapter ends with

thick silence, but that which concludes the book is even more substantial,

even more present, even more real, even more silent. The close of the book

leaves the reader thinking, wondering, hoping, hurting, longing. The silence

is deafening.

It is clear, then, that Wiesel chose to limit what he said, especially

about many camp experiences.26 The question, though, is why? While many

possible reasons may be offered, it seems that the nature of language

pushed Wiesel toward silence.27 Wiesel says that he “knew the story had to

be hold” for “not to transmit an experience is to betray it.”28 What he

struggled with, though, was “how to do this.”29 Harry James Cargas relays

that Wiesel “voluntarily went for weeks and weeks without saying a single

word, ‘to see what one does with silence.’”30 Of this Wiesel says, “It was by

seeking, by probing silence that I began to discover the perils and power of

the word.”31 Wiesel had begun to understand that a Holocaust author ought

26
See Gerda Weissmann Klein, All But My Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957).

27
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 70.
28

Elie Wiesel, “Why I Write” trans. Rossette C. Lamont, in Confronting the Holocaust:
The Impact of Elie Wiesel, (ed. Alvin Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg; Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978), 201.
29

Ibid.
30

Harry James Cargas, Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist Press, 1976), 90 quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 63.

31
Wiesel, “Why I Write,” 200.
to take responsibility “not only for what he says, but also for what he does

not say.”32

More than ever, Wiesel understood the nature of language, complete

with its possibilities and its shortcomings. For Wiesel, “the Holocaust proved

that eloquent words can be used to cover the basest deeds, that ‘logical’

reasons can be given for destroying a people.”33 Wiesel was only going to say

what could be said.

We all knew that we could never, never say what had to be said, that
we could never express in words, coherent, intelligible words, our
experience of madness on an absolute scale. The walk through flaming
night, the silence before and after the selection, the monotonous
praying of the condemned, the Kaddish of the dying, the fear and
hunger of the sick, the shame and suffering, the haunted eyes, the
demented stares.34

Wiesel wanted language and words to be intense. Instead, “all words seemed

inadequate, worn, foolish, lifeless.”35

Words alone simply could not complete the task at hand. Walter

Kaufmann spoke to this when he said, “If I have words for it, adequate words,

the feeling is not deep and intense.”36 What Wiesel felt during and after the

Holocaust was certainly deep and intense. That was just the problem. How

32

Elie Wiesel in Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The
Holocaust and its Legacy (rev. ed. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 320.
33
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 106.
34

Wiesel, “Why I Write,” 201.

35

Ibid. See also Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The
Holocaust and its Legacy (rev. ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 320.
36

Walter Kauffman, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1958), 79.
does one convey that which words cannot convey? Wiesel’s solution: “to

mobilize silence…to render silence in ways that make it – and therefore what

it embodies – present and meaningful to us.”37 Wiesel overcame the

restrictions of language by employing silence. Des Pres asserts that Wiesel’s

job, as a writer and a witness, was “to make silence speak.”38 It is a paradox

indeed that Wiesel had to “use words to express and delineate these

silences.”39 However, as aforementioned, Wiesel chose to use as few words

as possible. For, as Wiesel himself put it, “the reader feels the density of a

page if there are in that page many others which were cut out.”40

37

Terrence Des Pres, “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art,” in Confronting the
Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (ed. Alvin Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg;
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 53.
38
Ibid.
39

Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 93.

40

Harry James Cargas, Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist Press, 1976), 94 quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 28.
 SILENCE OF GOD

There seems to be no more appropriate way to start a section on the

silence of God in Night than with Elie Wiesel’s own words during his first

night in Birkenau:

For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify
His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the
Universe, chose to be silent.41

The silence of humanity as it stood by and watched certainly perplexed

Wiesel. The silence of the prisoners in the face of their annihilation came to

be logical to Wiesel. The silence of God, however, has never made sense to

Wiesel. How could God abandon his very people and leave them to be

slaughtered? How could God stand by and watch their destruction and not

intervene? To Wiesel, “silence was God’s response to His people’s

annihilation.”42 These questions began to perplex Wiesel during his very first

night in Birkenau and remain with him even until today. They were more than

questions though, for the silence of God that Wiesel encountered in Birkenau

and Auschwitz “destroyed the unquestioning faith of his childhood and has

left him seeking answers to that silence ever since.”43

41
Wiesel, Night, 33.
42

Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 36.

43

Ibid., 7.
 That Wiesel’s faith is being shaken one need only look at the time of

Yom Kippur that Wiesel records in Night. The question of whether to fast was

being debated by just about everyone. There were those who said they

should not fast, as that would lead to an even more sure and a quicker

death. Others, however, said that the Jews should fast to show God that even

where they were, “locked in hell” as Wiesel puts it, that they were able to

praise God.44 The reader then sees Wiesel’s choice of action and the results:

I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to
do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no
longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I
turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.

And I nibbled on my crust of bread.

Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.45

Wiesel no longer accepted God’s silence. What exactly Wiesel means by this

is not clear, but one is certainly drawn toward the covenant that God had

made with his people. Wiesel no longer accepted God’s silence because he

believe that “during the Holocaust the covenant was broken.”46

A lofty claim indeed, but one that Wiesel makes with every bit of

confidence. How could he say this though? How could he believe that the

covenant between man and God was broken? It is quite simple actually:

“when those who followed the Commandments were being killed by those

44
Wiesel, Night, 69.
45

Ibid.

46
Harry James Cargas, Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist Press, 1976), 56 quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 107.
who continually defied them.”47 This same concern that God has not been

faithful to his end of the covenant is echoed by another, anonymous

character in Night. Wiesel was in the infirmary when he caught wind of a

rumor that said the battlefront was extremely near Buna and that only be a

few more hours. Wiesel had certainly heard numerous rumors of this sort

during his days in the camps; however, this time he could hear the cannons

in the distance. His faceless neighbor assured Elie that Hitler had made it

clear he would obliterate the Jews that very night. Elie exploded back, asking

if the Jews should consider Hitler a prophet.

His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily:

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his
promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”48

That was all that needed to be said. Wiesel understood that God had broken

the covenant. It is significant too that Wiesel’s neighbor is anonymous and

portrayed as “faceless,” for he seems to be sharing the thoughts of many of

the Jews. Wiesel was not the only one that had begun to question not only

God’s goodness, but also his existence. What happened? Melissa Raphael

offers that “the Nazi’s assumed God’s power and he was impotent in the face

of it.”49

47

Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 145.

48
Wiesel, Night, 80-81.
49

Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of
the Holocaust
(London: Routledge, 2003), 35.
 The view that the covenant between God and his people had been

broken becomes even more poignantly when the Holocaust is juxtaposed

with the Akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis. The Akedah has

perplexed Jews, Christians and Muslims for centuries and its meaning or

purpose is still not agreed upon today. Moreover, other authors have

compared Wiesel’s Night with the Akedah; for in both, “a father and a son go

to the sacrifice.”50 The Biblical account is as follows:

After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”
And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac,
whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a
burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So
Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of
his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the
burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told
him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place
afar off. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the ass;
I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” And
Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his
son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both
of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!”
And he said, “Here am I, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the
wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God
will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”So they
went both of them together. When they came to the place of which
God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in
order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the
wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his
son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said,
“Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Do not lay
your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you
fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from
me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind
him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went
and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his

50
Andre Neher, The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of
Auschwitz, 216 quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 49.
 son. So Abraham called the name of that place The LORD will provide;
as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be
provided.”51

Just as in Night, there is much left unsaid. How exactly did Abraham convince

Isaac to go along with him? Did Isaac really believe that God would provide

the sacrifice or did he begin to catch on? What happened when Abraham

bound Isaac, laid him on the altar and raised the knife above him? Was Isaac

laying their willingly accepting what his father was about to do? Was he

scared, trying to get away? Did Abraham have faith that God would provide a

sacrifice? Did he really plan on going through with slaughtering his own son?

Questions remain to this day about the Akedah, just as they remain about

the Holocaust. There is a great reversal, however, in the Holocaust. God did

not intervene. Marie Cedars captures how incomprehensible this is: “Wiesel

knew that God had provided the ram for the sacrifice in time to save Isaac,

but in the camps, He did not intervene and He let His children go to the

slaughter. Mad and unbelievable as was this sacrifice, the witness who writes

was there. He knows the Holocaust happened.”52 How could God have

intervened to save Isaac, one boy, and not intervene to save six million of his

people? It is not that no one called out to God, for they cried out incessantly.

Elie and others call out for God. Their response? Silence. The moral of the

Akedah seems to be that God demands sacrifice but is ultimately

compassionate. During the Holocaust, however, Elie feels that God’s silence

51

Genesis 22:1-14. This and any future Biblical quotations from the New Revised
Standard Version.
52
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 51.
demonstrates the absence of divine compassion; as a result, he ultimately

questions the very existence of God.

In “God’s Suffering: A Commentary,” Wiesel notes the dilemma that

the Jewish believe has now, in a post-Holocaust world: “by allowing [the

Holocaust] to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don’t

know what it was.”53 Wiesel asks if God was trying to tell humanity that God

suffered. To that Wiesel responds: “He could have – should have – interrupted

His own suffering by calling a halt to the martyrdom of innocents. I don’t

know why He did not do so and I think I never shall.”54 That Jews have to live

in the shadow of the Akedah story is painful. Simon Sibelman depicts this

when he says, “the rewriting and reversals of the Akedah in La Nuit

underscore how radically the original has been transformed, how much more

painful is God’s silence, and how the miracle that saved Isaac’s life cannot

transpire in this particular story where death reigns supreme.”55

How, then, does Wiesel deal with this silence? He meets it with his own

silence. As was seen previously, Wiesel incorporates silence into Night by

speaking of it specifically and by giving it real presence within each page.

Terrence Des Pres states that Wiesel has succeeded in making silence

53

Elie Wiesel, “God’s Suffering: A Commentary,” in Wrestling with God: Jewish

Theological
Responses during and after the Holocaust ed. Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and
Gershon Greenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 683.

54
Ibid.
55

Simon Sibelman, Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1995), 42.
“meaningful.”56 I, however, think that Wiesel reminded us of the meaning of

silence. He did not make it meaningful, for silence has always been

meaningful. Wiesel’s own religious tradition understands how meaningful

silence is when they are desperate to hear a word from God, while God

remains silent.This can be seen in the book of Amos when God threatens to

remain silent: “‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord GOD, ‘when I will

send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but

of hearing the words of the LORD.’”57 The silence that God threatened during

Amos’ day was experienced during the Holocaust. It was a devastating time

indeed.

“Silence remains…because unanswered questions about God’s and

man’s silences continue to perplex Wiesel.”58 Wiesel understands that silence

is the only appropriate response he can have to the Holocaust. For, “there

are no answers, no meanings to be discerned, only the intolerable weight of

the event itself, to be faced in the quiet of an endless sorrow.”59 There are no

explanations, no justifications. Wiesel even says, “Nothing justifies

Auschwitz. Were the Lord Himself to offer me a justification, I think I would

reject it.”60 In the same text Wiesel makes an attempt at hope and yet

remains without answers.

56

Terrence Des Pres, “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art,” 53.
57

Amos 8:11.
58
Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 11.
59

Terrence Des Pres, “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art,” 57.
60

Elie Wiesel, “God’s Suffering: A Commentary,” 683.

 A Midrash recounts: When God sees the suffering of His children
scattered among the nations, He sheds two tears in the ocean. When
they fall, they make a noise so loud it is heard round the world. It is a
legend I enjoy rereading. And I tell myself: Perhaps God she more than
two tears during His people’s recent tragedy. But men, cowards that
they are, refused to hear them.

Is that, at least, an answer?

No. It is a question. Yet another question.61

Searching for answers for a lifetime has still left Elie Wiesel void of them and

full of questions. How does one respond to that. Des Pres holds that “the

contradictory but nonetheless authentic response that Wiesel expressed

through Night” is that “there is no God, and I hate him.”62

NIGHT AND POST-HOLOCAUST THEOLOGY

Richard Rubenstein notes in After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and

Contemporary Judaism that the twentieth century brought about more

significant changes to the Jewish community than did any other time in

Judaism’s long and rich history.63 Obviously, the Holocaust was one of the

events that worked to create so many problems and such chaos in Jewish

life. Some attempted to bring back an “irretrievable past, yearning for a

61

Ibid., 684.
62

Terrence Des Pres, “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art,” 56.
63
Richard L. Rubenstein, preface to After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and
Contemporary Judaism. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), ix.
restoration of its virtues.”64 This of course is futile. Others, Rubenstein

included, attempted to recognize “the irretrievability of the past and to

explore the potentialities inherent in the present.”65 Jews, by necessity, had

to respond to the Holocaust. Rubenstein puts it thus:

Although Jewish history is replete with disaster, none has been so

radical in its total import as the holocaust. Our images of God, man,
and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish
theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to
contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death
camps. That is the question for Jewish theology in our times.66

This work is indeed extremely difficult and has resulted in a variety of

theologies. The one that will be discussed here is the death of God theology. I

have chosen to briefly look at the death of God theology as representative of

post-Holocaust Jewish theology because it has many ties to the work of Elie

Wiesel and especially Night. As Michael Morgan points our Wiesel’s account

in Night of the young pipel being hung “is probably the most recalled and

cited episode in all Holocaust literature.”67 This is because this account raises

“the idea that the death camps were a radical break in life and thought, not

for the victims alone but for all of us, and that to go on requires going on in a

different way.”68 Moreover, I believe there is no more important question of

64

Ibid.
65

Ibid.
66

Ibid., x.
67
Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 33.

68
Ibid.
the Holocaust than the one that Wiesel asks in Night, namely, “For God’s

sake, where is God?”69

This was a very real question for Wiesel as well as for many other Jews

in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In light of the Holocaust, Jews are faced

with having to either retreat to “fideistic dogmatism which ignores modern

scholarship,” or seek a new rationale for their theological commitments. “For

many, the problem of finding a new rationale has been aggravated by the

death of their personal God. After Auschwitz many Jews did not need

Nietzsche to tell them that the old God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism was

dead beyond all hope of resurrection.”70 Rubenstein holds very surely that we

are now in the time of the death of God;71 we must be. “Though many still

believe in [transcendent, theistic God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism],

they do so ignoring the questions of God and human freedom and God and

human evil. For those who face these issues, the Father-God is a dead God.

Even the existentialist leap of faith cannot resurrect this dead God after

Auschwitz.”72 How can one be so sure?

For Rubenstein the death of God movement has thrived for a very

simple reason: “The vitality of death of God theology is rooted in the fact

that it has faced more openly than any other contemporary theological
69

Wiesel, Night, 65.

70

Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 227.

71

Ibid., 246. Rubenstein chooses to use this phrase instead of “God is dead.” His
reasoning: “It is more precise to assert that we live in the time of the death of God than to
declare “God is dead.” The death of God is a cultural fact. We shall never know whether it is
more than that.”
72
Ibid., 238.
movement the truth of the divine-human encounter in our times. The truth is

that it is totally nonexistent.”73 These are heavy words that are not spoken

lightly. It is with intensity and sadness that Rubenstein arrives at these

words, but they exhibit his integrity in light of the Holocaust. His theology,

like that of many other post-Holocaust Jews, has experienced a paradigm

shift and is largely anthropological.74 This because of the inherent subjective

nature of all theologies. Doubtless, theology’s “significance rests on what it

reveals about the theologian and his culture.”75 Post-Holocaust theology has

no significance if it is not cognizant of the culture in which it is purporting

truths about God, humanity and creation.

Thus, it is under the assumption that we are living in a time of the

death of God that Rubenstein is able to make positive affirmations about

God. He suggests that “God can be understood meaningfully not only as

ground of being but also as the focus of ultimate concern.”76 It is through this

Kierkegaardian language that Rubenstein is able to find at least some solace.

Moreover, in this view God is “the infinite measure against which we can see

our own limited lives in proper perspective.”77

Not only is it important to see ourselves in proper perspective, but also

to have integrity and remain authentic, even when it is the most unbearable
73

Ibid., 245.
74

Ibid., 246.
75

Ibid.
76

Ibid., 238.
77
Ibid.
task we have ever attempted in our lives. In talking about the work of Emil

Fackenheim Morgan tells how Fackenheim sees Elie Wiesel as a model of

authentic Jewish existence. “[Fackenheim] notes that Night is not a

speculation or fiction but an ‘eye-witness account of the most terrible actual

darkness.’” Morgan then goes on to assert that Fackenheim moves beyond

appropriating Martin Buber: “the lineaments of an authentic post-Holocaust

Judaism arise out of the complex response to Auschwitz, out of the mystery,

the paradox, and the silence.”78

CONCLUSION

Contemporary musician/theologian Tracy Chapman asks us a piercing

question: “If you knew that you would find a truth/That brings up pain that

can't be soothed/Would you change?”79 The Holocaust is indeed a truth that

78

Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America, 70.

79
“Change” by Tracy Chapman. Lyrics obtained from “Tracy Chapman – Change
Lyrics,” http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Change-lyrics-Tracy-
Chapman/5FC3EA772D7A27BF4825706F00110C21 (accessed 22 April 2008).
brings up pain that cannot be soothed. How then does one deal with this

pain? Does one change? Elie Wiesel was changed, indeed. He had no choice

but to change. His faith in the God of his childhood was shattered forever. He

chose to express this change through silence in his Holocaust memoir Night.

Terrence Des Pres said rightly of Wiesel: “we cannot read him without the

desire to change, to lead better lives.”80 Wiesel explored silence literarily and

relived the silence of God. It resulted in a work that is truly affecting.

Likewise, Jewish theology was necessarily changed in the aftermath of

the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein recounts an experience in which he was

asked by a Polish theologian after a lecture at the Catholic University of

Lublin, Poland, “Do you love God?” Rubenstein replied: “I should. We are

enjoined to love God ‘with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy

might.’ But I cannot. I am aware of His holiness. I am struck with wonder and

terror before His Nothingness, but I cannot love Him. I am affrighted before

Him. Perhaps, in the end, all I have is silence.”81 Silence was the only

appropriate response for Richard Rubenstein post-Holocaust. Similarly,

silence invading Elie Wiesel’s life and his works was a must. For, the

Holocaust “demands a retreat to silence.”82 The Holocaust is like God:

80

Des Pres, Forward to Ellen S. Fine, Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie
Wiesel, xiv quoted in Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence.”
81
Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 263-4.
82

Cedars, “Speaking Through Silence,” 86.

ineffable. “Only Silence can transmit its mystery.”83 Hence, to be true to

himself, the Holocaust, survivors, and the world, Elie Wiesel chose silence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cedars, Marie M. “Silence and Against Silence: The Two Voices of Elie Wiesel”
(review of Irving
Abrahamson, ed., Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel).
Cross Currents (1986): 257-266.

----. “Speaking Through Silence: The Art of Elie Wiesel.” PhD diss., The
University of Texas at
Arlington, 1984.

Des Pres, Terrence. “The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel’s Art.” Pages 49-
57 in Confronting
the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. Edited by Alvin Rosenfeld and
Irving Greenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
83

Ibid.
Donadio, Rachel. “The Story of ‘Night’” (review of Elie Wiesel’s Night). New
York Times Book
Review, Jan 20, 2008, 27.

“Elie Wiesel Biography.” No Pages. Cited 21 April 2008. Online:

http://www.achievement.
org/autodoc/page/wie0bio-1.

Katz, Steven T., ed. The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology. New
York: New York
University Press, 2005.

Kaufmann, Walter. Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton

University Press,
1958.

Morgan, Michael L. Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in

America. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.

Patterson, David. Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the

Aftermath of the Holocaust.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.

Raphael, Melissa. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist

Theology of the
Holocaust. London: Routledge, 2003.

Rubenstein, Richard L. and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The

Holocaust and its
Legacy. Rev. ed. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

----. After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism.

Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, Inc., 1966.
 31

Sibelman, Simon P. Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1995.

Stern, Ellen Norman. Elie Wiesel: A Voice for Humanity. Philadelphia: The
Jewish Publication
Society, 1996.

“Tracy Chapman – Change Lyrics.”

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Change-lyrics-
Tracy-Chapman/5FC3EA772D7A27BF4825706F00110C21 (accessed 22
April 2008).

Wardi, Dina. Auschwitz: Contemporary Jewish and Christian Encounters. New

York: Paulist
Press, 2003.

Wiesel, Elie. “God’s Suffering: A Commentary.” In Wrestling with God: Jewish

Theological
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----. Night. New York: Hill and Wang,2006.

----. “Why I Write.” Pages 200-206. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont, in

Confronting the
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Irving Greenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.