Elie Wiesel’s Night: Losing Hope in Theo-logy
John C. McDowell
It is significant that some of the terrors, even before transportation to the death-camp, are prefaced by the statement, stark in its brevity, that "Night fell" [see, e.g., Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. François Mauriac (Penguin Books, 1981), 23]. This growing fear of the dark as a fear of all that can destroy, is all the more destructive in its effects since, as Wiesel admits later, "Sleep had fled from my eyes." [43] There was no respite from this "unimaginable nightmare" of "an endless night." [43, 37] Indeed, later he announces
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night. [45]
A second horror is introduced by the theme of darkness when Wiesel recollects the day of expulsion. When imprisoned,
Since no one could go out, people were relieving themselves in a corner.
The use of this observation plays an important role in its immediate, and then in the general, context. The day of the expulsion is Saturday, and the place of the imprisonment is the synagogue. Worship was not what the Jews had come for on this day of Shabbat rest. On the contrary, they had been hounded and rounded up by Hungarian police whom Wiesel describes as being "the first of the faces of hell and death." [30] It was this demonic religiosity that is continually on display. The Jews, one could argue, became the very burnt-offering, the holocaust, to the Nazi god. Indeed, in a moment of what seems to the outsider as a perverse logic, one camp victim later admitted to Wiesel that although there had been too many false prophets, with their illusory glad tidings of Russian liberations, Hitler was a prophet:
I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He’s the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people. [92]
What of the Jewish faith, the fruit of God’s covenant choosing? The celebrated movement of exodus and promise of a home becomes subverted, not for the first time in Jewish history, by expulsion and destruction in a way that accentuates the sense of George Steiner’s description of the Jew as homeless, thrust out of doors:
The synagogue was like a huge station: luggage and tears. The altar was broken, the hangings torn down, the walls bare. There were so many of us that we could scarcely breathe. We spent a horrible twenty-four hours there. There were men downstairs: women on the first floor. It was Saturday; it was as though we had come to attend the service.
It is then that Wiesel announces the display of the reduction of the civilisation of the Jews. The persecuted were reduced to what would normally be considered uncivilised behaviour of public defecation, and that as the very defacing of their own local spiritual home. And not only their home, but also comes the beginning of the gradual deflation of many religious hopes: "Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly." [32]
A third way in which Wiesel uses the image of darkness accentuates this gradually growing sense of dehumanisation and de-civilisation. On the transport wagons, itself an image of this Nazi dehumanisation of the Jewish peoples,
Free from all social constraint, the young people gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst, without caring about anyone else, as though they were lone in the world. The rest pretended not to notice anything.
When treated like beasts (herded into cattle trucks, names stolen) ["‘You … you … you and you …’ They pointed a finger, as though choosing cattle or merchandise", 60] most of the characters in Wiesel’s recollections are reduced to bestial behaviour. This quietism and isolation induced by breaking communities under persecution is reiterated later when Wiesel is being spoken to by the head of his camp block:
‘Listen to me, boy. Don’t forget that you’re in a concentration camp. Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father. Here, there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.’[121f.]
What does the theme of the survival of the fittest have to do with human socialities? If Wiesel’s portrayal is accorded significance here, it would seem to come into its own with sociality’s pressured dissolution. Evolution may be seen, then, less in terms of any easy progressivisms that could give rise to optimisms about the future of the human race, but rather as a process of waste that may be no respecter of persons.
The question is, where is God? And at this point, Wiesel’s Shoah remembrance takes its darkest turn since enduring such nights is made even darker by the growing sense that the divine may have no healing light to shine on the terrors of the night. Wiesel’s description of the genesis of his play, The Trial of God, provides a certain illustration in this regard:
Inside the Kingdom of Night [the Shoah] I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis – all erudite and pious men – decided one winter evening to indict God for allowing his children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.
As the drama moves on, only a single party is to be found who will agree to serve as defence attorney for God. That party turns out to be none other than the devil. [Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649 in Shamgorod), a play in three acts, translated by Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1979)] Perhaps the most overwhelming fact about Wiesel’s Trial is that the play is set on the Feast of Purim, a day when, as the prosecutor himself observes, "Everything goes." Purim is a time, not alone for children and beggars, but also for fools. In the act of poking fun at everyone, the fool is making merry. And how could God ever be excluded from the party? Irving Greenberg points up the rationale of Purim:
One can only respond with laughter and mockery and put-on, satirizing God and the bitter joke this world threatens to become. But as the hilarity reaches its climax, Jews move beyond bitterness to humor. Through the humor, Jews project themselves into future redeemed reality that transcends the moment. Thus, hope is kept alive and the Messiah remains possible. [Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 254]
Eckardt reflects on the nature of this divine foolishness.
God would have to go and make Godself a world. Now God is stuck with it, and with us, and God is left with little choice but to keep on undergoing the agony of it.... And by revealing and demanding certain absolute requirements, God has only opened the way to being held unmercifully to account before the very same requirements-and, of all things, at the hands of that upstart humankind. The Creator of all the universes made radically assaultable, and under God's very own sponsorship! If this is not the essence of klutzhood, then I don’t know what the concept means. [A. Roy Eckardt, For Righteousness’ Sake (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 10, 324]
Certainly, Jewish theological reflections are by no means uniform. [see Isabel Wollaston] Emil L. Fackenheim, for example, ends his 1987 study by referring to a Talmudic ambiguity upon the hiding of God:
[It is in weeping that God hides.] He hides His weeping in the inner chamber, for just as God is infinite so His pain is infinite, and this, were it to touch the world, would destroy it.... God so loved the world that He hid the infinity of His pain from it lest it be destroyed…. [Emil L. Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? (New York: Summit Books, 1987), 291]
The chasm may be crossed from either direction, but this is possible only upon the foundation of the love of God. It is in the hiding that the love of God is revealed, and it is in the revealing that the love of God is hidden. Were the infinity of God’s pain to touch the world, the world would indeed be destroyed. And so God must act to control God’s self, as in the very same moment God does not cease to weep within the inner chamber. In the meanwhile the comedians are sent to stand in God’s place. All this suggests that, however guilty God may appear to be, God is innocent. God does not willfully sin.
At one moment, George Steiner’s expresses an almost unutterable horror over a God who "suffers the gusts of murderous exasperation at the Jews". [Steiner, 1969, 121, based on a rereading of Exodus 4:24] At another, he quickly changes this image, somewhat, as if this thought is too shocking to even entertain. While the dark mood remains, the divine exasperation at human self-mutilation becomes equally disturbingly depicted as producing the sigh of lethargy and increasing passivity. In a cited medieval Polish parable God is depicted as being found by a Rabbi sitting in a dark corner in a small synagogue, claiming, "with a small voice: ‘I am tired, Rabbi, I am tired unto death’." So it is "When God’s back parts are towards man, [that] history is Belsen". [1961, 353; 1969, 122]
Early in the narrative Wiesel recounts the hopes and even the revival of his people’s optimisms in the face of early signs of brutality to the Jews of Sighet. This is reflected in the fact that in the night the stars were shining.
The stars were the only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes. [32]
As the brutality became more intense and severe, the narrative seems to lose any sense of this lighting provided by hope, climaxing at one point – the point of the end of the railway journey – by Wiesel’s perceiving the light of the flames of hell, and those flames themselves part of a carefully created and controlled environment, the pillar of flame that was to take the homeless Jews to their destiny:
And as the train stopped, we saw this time that flames were gushing out of a tall chimney into the black sky. … We looked at the flames in the darkness. There was an abominable odour floating in the air. [39]
Wiesel continues by recalling that the prisoners departing the train left their cherished objects behind, "and with them, at last, our illusions." [40] A Polish lad in the camp, Zalman, was mocked because of his praying from the Talmud. "It was his way of escaping from reality, of not feeling the blows". [97] Hope, for Wiesel, is now portrayed as an illusion, especially since there could be no hope in God.
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. [45]
The status of Adam, formed from the dust of the earth, before his God was being violently revoked, and to dust he was returning – the dust of the crematorium. On the gallows God was dying to Jewish sensibilities. [76f.] But, so too was humanity, as Wiesel’s father makes clear:
Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today everything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories. [44]
Wiesel himself announces after a little boy’s execution,
My eyes were open and I was alone – terribly alone in a world without God and without man. … I no longer accepted God’s silence. [79f.]