Ritzen, retired from teaching college English, collects quotations by Holocaust survivor, author, and Nobel laureate Wiesel that he personally has found most inspiring. They are arranged in sections on three tales, wounded faith, four stages of mending faith, and God's inner circle. He concludes with "The Madman's Prayer." There is no index. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
GOD'S INNER CIRCLE
The Radical Devotion of Elie Wiesel to FaithBy MICHAEL RITZENKTAV PUBLISHING HOUSE, INC.
Copyright © 2012 Michael Ritzen
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-60280-211-7Contents
Introduction.............................................xiiiPrologue.................................................1Night....................................................3Three Tales..............................................91) "The Just Man of Sodom"...............................92) "Sisyphus"............................................103) "The Fatman"..........................................12Wounded Faith............................................19Mending Faith: Stage I...................................23God's Tears and Prison...................................23God's Guilt..............................................32Holy Madness.............................................34Mending Faith: Stage II..................................39Better to Blaspheme......................................39Mending Faith: Stage III.................................45Radical Devotion.........................................45Paradox..................................................47Facing Divorce...........................................49The Man That I Am........................................52Mending Faith: Stage IV..................................57Nevertheless I Celebrate You.............................57"The Decisive Link"......................................59One Place "God Is to Be Found"...........................60God's Inner Circle.......................................67Three Declarations and One Interlude.....................671) To Be A Jew...........................................682) Prayer................................................74Midstream Interlude......................................853) "What About My Faith?"................................87Coda.....................................................93For the Beginning Seeker.................................93Conclusion...............................................99"The Madman's Prayer"....................................99Addenda..................................................117Works Cited..............................................121
Chapter One
Three Tales
I. The Just Man of Sodom
Stated simply, God's absence when his children face torture and death invalidates for many the ancient covenant of loyalty and obedience in exchange for divine protection and freedom. It need not, however, cancel personal morality. In One Generation After, Wiesel tells of the "Just Man of Sodom" who stood on street corners day and night preaching against sin and debauchery. No one listened. After observing him many times on his way to school, a child pulled at his robe and asked, "Why do you go on and on every day when not even one person listens to you?" He replied, "In the beginning, I thought I could change man. Today I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me" (72). The Just Man has many brothers. One, the subject of this monograph, has stated in an interview, "I write because I must, and if I still scream, it is to prevent the others from changing me."
II. Sisyphus
A much earlier cousin is from Greek legend. Sources for the myth of Sisyphus can be found in Homer, where the heavens were busy with gods, spelled with a small "g". They were a lively group, capricious, jealous, vengeful, and their celestial and earthly playgrounds would appear to a monotheistic culture as Godless. Sisyphus was King of Corinth. Zeus, Ruler of the Heavens, felt betrayed by Sisyphus and sentenced him to Hades, where he must push a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to see it roll back down, and then repeat the task—for eternity. Sinai it was not. Albert Camus saw in this myth a metaphor for modern man in his struggle with a Godless Absurd universe. The Just Man's kinship with Sisyphus is dubious, but instructive. God or no God in Sodom, the Just Man rebels against lawlessness. No monotheistic God atop the Sisyphus mountain, yet the hero rebels against an absurd fate. Though both rebels are joined by a fierce sense of honesty to oneself, Sisyphus was doomed to a solitary fate. His passion was fed, not by the debaucheries of Sodom, but rather by the absurdities of what he saw as a meaningless universe. The tale, as interpreted by Camus, offers a useful contrast to the "vision" of Wiesel, who nevertheless honors Camus as a crucial influence. Sisyphus, sans covenant, sans God, sans hope, in an "absurd" universe devoid of inherent meaning, does find, through his punishment, however, rebellion and thus passion and joy. In this universe, as Camus states it, "without a Master" Sisyphus eventually grows to understand "that all is well" and the essay ends: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (91). Wiesel, bound inextricably, for better or worse, to his "Master" (thus for him an intrinsically meaningful universe) is also well acquainted with "passion and joy." He is not, although, the model one seeks for reassurance "that all is well" nor as an exponent for a secular version of existential happiness.
Earlier in the essay, Camus asks:
IS ONE ... GOING TO TAKE UP THE HEART RENDING AND MARVELOUS WAGER OF THE ABSURD? ... AT LAST MAN WILL AGAIN FIND THERE THE WINE OF THE ABSURD AND THE BREAD OF INDIFFERENCE ON WHICH HE FEEDS HIS GREATNESS (39).
It is a wager heroic rebels (especially the hungry and thirsty) must find hard to resist. Enter Sinai. Enter Jews. Enter the Covenant. Enter the Covenant shattered into more pieces than the Ten Commandments in a painting by Samuel Bak. Does Camus's "wager of the absurd" now live? With two crucial Wieselian updates. For Jews, the "Bread of Indifference" becomes the "Bread of Affliction" for those who died because they were Jews and who, tragically, absurdly, will never know if or how their lives are honored in the ensuing generations. As for "Wine of the Absurd," it is drunk at the birth of children, some of whom might one day fatally be discovered by racial purists as having even a trace of "impure Jewish blood." "Absurd" defiance. "Absurd" hope. "Absurd" beliefs in the influence of Survivor-Witness. Perhaps even "Absurd" delusions of God. It is this bitter wine and sour bread on which Jews feed their greatness. Sisyphus, at least, was free of ancient loyalty to an absent God. A luxury, Wiesel might say, that Jews cannot afford. Although Camus claims, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Wiesel would likely wish him well, but, due to his own non-negotionable belief in God, part company.
Meanwhile, meet the Fatman: a Chassid who, like Sisyphus, was a virtuoso in the craft of protest, a savant in the art of the Absurd. Like Sisyphus, he was cursed with a daunting weight, but the similarity may or may not end there. One can read his travail as a variation on the Sisyphian curse: heroic and futile. Believers, as we shall see, may contest the assertion of "futile...."
III. The Fatman
The Fatman lived alone in a small forest hut. One day, a rare knock at his door. It was the BESHT (Hebrew acronym for "Master of the Good Name"), a great eighteenth century religious leader and, some claim, founder of the Chassidic movement. When the door finally opened, the Besht was taken aback. His host was obese, over 300 pounds, with food in his long beard, not to mention a manner so rude there was not even an unfriendly greeting. Silence. Leaving the door open, he shuffled back to his table and commenced eating. Gorging, to be more precise. The tiny room looked like the aftermath of a banquet, wine spilled, food everywhere, but none offered to the guest. The Besht entered, found a chair, and in silent astonishment, watched as the ravenous mouth devoured food. No talk, no recognition, no sharing, just the sound of one man frantically eating. This continued until dark. No stretching. No washing. No evening prayers. As if on cue, the Fatman simply fell asleep at the table, and, in less than ten minutes, began to snore. His guest began to doubt if he had knocked at the right door. Nevertheless, he decided to wait, say his prayers and practice patience. Luckily, the Besht was both hard of hearing and used to sleeping sitting up.
Next day was no different. By nightfall, he could take no more, felt ill and rose to leave. The Fatman, still wordless, waved farewell from his table.
"Before I go, sir," said the Besht, "allow me to ask you just one question. Why do you eat so much?"
"About time you asked," responded the host. He continued, "Because of my beloved father, blessed be his name. He was a thin, tiny man. When ! was nine, we were walking in the snow-covered forests and were accosted by some Cossack soldiers.
They were drunk. They ordered my father to kiss the cross on the handle of a sword. He refused. [Deep breath]. They, they simply set him on fire, his beard first, and my father burned to death. Yes. In front of my two eyes. So fast. Two minutes ... ashes in the snow. They laughed and let me go. I vowed that night never ever to die so fast, so helplessly. And so, my holy friend, I eat and I eat. This way, when they come for me, I will not disappear as did my father. Two minutes? No, I will be large, so large that" ... as Wiesel tells it, "I would show them that a Jew does not go out like a miserable skinny candle ... that is why .. all my passion is devoted to eating. Not that I am hungry, you understand....." (Souls on Fire 27).
The story has an alternative ending. Sisyphus may indeed have his mountain, boulder and muscles with which to defy fate; the Fatman had only his weight, and it was enough.
In Version II, the Fatman explains: "I will be so large, so fat that even the smoke rising from my corpse will not simply 'pool,' disappear. No, it will ascend, ascend all the way to Heaven. That way, God can no longer deny. He will have to look down at last and observe what truly transpires—the hatred and fury his creatures suffer only to sanctify His name." After a long silence, the Besht whispered, "I wish you a good Sabbath," then turned and, rather slowly, walked back to the edge of the forest.
Protests honed to an exquisite art—performed by Madmen. Vintage Wiesel.
Some may protest the sobriquet "madmen." How "mad" is it after all to give one's life in the heroic quest of awakening the conscience of one's assumed maker? For believers, the quest can be both heroic, since the Maker is at least possibly real, and futile—only if the Maker refuses to respond in an intelligible way or not at all. For those among us attracted by the clean, theology-free, bare-bones beauty and drama of the Sisyphus legend, the Fatman tale should end with "so I will not disappear in two minutes as did my father...." Forget the superfluous, accusatory smoke rising upward. Keep the sky a God-free zone. The story's power remains intact. Many are those inclined to more fat on the bones and more mystery in the sky, drama rich in human complexity and messy contradictions inherent in common experience (let alone uncommon tragedy). For them, that essential smoke, directed to a real or imaginary God, must rise. Wiesel addressed this issue tangentially at a Holocaust conference where both he and a colleague, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, were featured speakers. Rubenstein had just completed his lecture on post-Holocaust faith in which he outlined the existential trauma of and rationale for remaining a Jew in a Godless universe.
In the middle of Wiesel's extemporaneous response, referring to Rubenstein's admiring description of camp prisoners who secretly derived strength from their belief in God, Wiesel said, "And here I will tell you, Dick, that you don't understand them when you say it is more difficult to live today in a world without God. No! If you want difficulties, choose to live with God. Can you compare today the tragedy of the believer to that of the nonbeliever? The real tragedy, the real drama, is the drama of the believer" (Roth and Berenbaum 367).
That drama was unforgettably captured by the previously quoted hanging scene in Night. For a portrait of the believer in crisis one need only turn to the two Wiesel quotations from that scene chosen by the French author and Christian theologian, Frangois Mauriac for his own introduction to Wiesel's testimony.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which had turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall ! forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
This identical passage is referred to by the Wiesel scholar Dr. Joseph Lowin in his belief "that one day that's going to become part of Jewish liturgy" (Lowin 6).
Mauriac's second example was the young Wiesel's reaction to observing fellow prisoners cry a New Year's prayer.
"That day, I had ceased to plead, I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, and God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger." (NIGHT xx-xxi).
Wounded Faith
The following 5 quotations, rich in their own ways, belong together and speak for themselves. The first two are taken from ALL RIVERS RUN TO THE SEA, written some thirty-five years after NIGHT.
Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it. And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the non-believer, so be it (Rivers 84).
I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it (Rivers 84).
Jewish tradition allows man to say anything to God, provided it be on behalf of man. Man's inner liberation is God's justification. It all depends on where the rebel chooses to stand. From inside his community, he may say everything. Let him step out of it, and he will be denied this right. The revolt of the believer is not that of the renegade; the two do not speak in the name of the same anguish (Souls on Fire 111).
In a video-taped interview with the religion correspondent for the New York Times, Wiesel was asked about this claim in his Nobel Peace Prize speech: "Action is impossible without faith." He replied:
Once we realized the world turned against us we had all the reasons in the world to give up faith—but we didn't. I would lie to you if I told you that my faith today is the same as it was before the war. It is a wounded faith.... The Chassidic Master, Nachman of Bratzlav, said, "No heart is as whole as a broken heart." And that goes for faith as well. No faith is as whole as a broken, wounded faith. My faith is a wounded faith, but nevertheless, it's there ... But I don't know what else to do" (WFPL Louisville, KY NPR station 2000).
We must pass through a period of anguish and then a period of respite in order that in the end we may find or regain the faith of our Masters.
Because without faith, we could not survive. Without faith, our world would be empty" (Dubois 67).
It's safe to speculate that these last two sentences would not sit well with Secular Humanists and perhaps seem irrelevant even to the Just Man of Sodom, the Fatman of the Forest and most certainly, Sisyphus, the Muscle Man of the Mountains. To use Wiesel's word, although a total loss of faith is certainly "understandable," for him, as we will see again and again, it is not an option.
To that, we must add one more "non-option." In The 6 Days of Destruction Wiesel states it thus: "The opposite of faith is not arrogance but indifference" (8). Indifference: the word perhaps most antithetical to his own nature. For that matter, antithetical, he argues, also to the nature of God. In Michael de Saint Cheron's book of interviews with Wiesel (Evil and Exile), the question arises of not man's but God's indifference. Wiesel responds: "Deep down, I feel a certain—and this is a Jewish certitude drawn from the sources of tradition—that an indifferent God is incomprehensible and inconceivable. An unjust God, yes ... But an indifferent God is impossible" (Cheron 19). And if man's indifference (rather than arrogance) is indeed the true opposite of faith, what then the value, if any, of arrogance? "Occasionally useful," he might suggest. As for "ambivalence"? Inevitable. "Wounded Faith?" A tentative call for some measure of healing if possible, and only, if begun at all, gradually. "Was I later reconciled to Him? Let us say I was reconciled to some of His interpreters and to some of my prayers" (Rivers 84).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from GOD'S INNER CIRCLEby MICHAEL RITZEN Copyright © 2012 by Michael Ritzen. Excerpted by permission of KTAV PUBLISHING HOUSE, INC.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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