Elie Wiesel: A Messenger to Mankind
Inspiration for the Jewish High Holidays And Beyond — From My Conversation With The Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Before I get to Elie Wiesel, I’d like to share a story I read this week during High Holiday services.
[A rabbi] once spent the night at a shoemaker’s home. Late at night, he saw the shoemaker working by the light of a flickering candle. “Look how late it is,” the rabbi said. “Your candle is about to go out. Why are you still working?” The shoemaker replied, “As long as the candle is burning, it is still possible to mend.” For weeks afterward, the rabbi was heard repeating the shoemaker’s words to himself: “as long as the candle is burning, it is still possible to mend.”
That story captures a theme central to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — and which also applies to humanity more broadly: as long as we have a flicker of life within us, we can renew the work of improving ourselves, of mending our relationships, of repairing our world.
After surviving the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, Elie Wiesel devoted his life to repairing our world, through his writing and his efforts to prevent future genocides and alleviate human suffering. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel said:
. . . I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.
Elie Wiesel and I recorded our conversation in 2013 for the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. You can watch by clicking his picture above, or listen by clicking the Spotify link below.
Our wide-ranging discussion includes memories of his childhood village in Hungary, his experience in the Nazi death camps, and his reflections on humor and friendship.
Near the end of our conversation, we looked closely at a photo of Wiesel taken by an American soldier who had just helped liberate Buchenwald. Wiesel was only 16 years old at the time. I asked him what he would now say to that boy in the picture.
“Here I am with you. What have I done with your life and mine?"
The Nobel Committee had an answer.
Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author. Wiesel’s commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races.
The forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious.
As long our candles are burning.