His hair was thinner and grayer, his body was frailer than many years ago when I heard him speak in Milwaukee; but Elie Wiesel’s message to the group assembled at Viterbo University in La Crosse on Sept. 26 was as strong as ever.
“Thou shall not stand idly by,” he beseeched, when people are persecuted and no one cares for them, when people live destitute and in poverty, when children are starving, when terror plays out on the world stage, and when an AIDS patient is all alone and in despair.
His words underlined the fact that we must be responsible for our fellow human beings, and that the principle in the Torah that says “love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) is the basis of a moral society.
Wiesel, of course, is the author of 47 books, including the internationally acclaimed Holocaust memoir “Night,” the recipient of 116 honorary degrees and the United States Congressional Gold Medal, one of the world’s most respected voices on the Holocaust, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
He gave the keynote address at this small Catholic university in western Wisconsin as part of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership lecture series.
He spoke to a capacity crowd. Over 1,400 people packed into the small auditorium and three additional overflow sites on the campus to hear his address in person or via closed circuit television.
A moral society
Wiesel began his lecture on the make-up of a moral society by discussing Adam and Eve and their children, Cain and Abel, the first family in the Bible, noting that as a model society they did not do so well.
Why then, did the history of the human family begin with such a moral story? It was in order to teach us that whoever kills another person kills his brother.
The importance of life is that it gives birth to more life in order to help history move forward. Therefore, depriving someone of the right to live is the cardinal sin.
Wiesel explained that in Judaism, the relationship of two human beings determines the humanity of both of them. It is our loyalty to our fellow human beings that brings us closer to God.
It is also important that in a moral society we know the difference between goodness and evil. Our Creator gave us the ability to choose one from the other.
In an immoral society, the other person does not matter. Each person is not imbued with value in this environment.
Wiesel emphasized that life is not made up in years, but it is made up of moments. Each moment has the potential to mark the destiny of mankind. In an immoral society, moments do not count. It is therefore foreseeable that millions of moments can be taken and destroyed.
Wiesel addressed the Holocaust as the “greatest tragedy in recorded history.” Its perpetrators created a society in which some were there to kill and some were there to die.
Wiesel admits that he will never know what it all meant. However, he explained that perhaps its meaning was simply in the fact that it could happen, that it was possible for morality to be gone.
He stated that the Holocaust occurred because the enemy had more imagination than the victim. The victims could not have imagined in their wildest dreams the atrocities that were invented by the enemy. Therefore, so many were trapped and so many died.
While he was here Wiesel met with 25 educators, mostly secular teachers who teach Holocaust studies to their students ranging from middle school to college levels in an informal chat session.
I had been invited to attend this session as director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center (a program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning) by Darryle Clott, Viterbo University’s Holocaust instructor and the woman whose letter brought Wiesel to La Crosse.
Both Wiesel and Clott felt that talking to teachers was extremely important. When asked about what he felt was the most important lesson he would want the teachers to teach their students about the Holocaust, Wiesel did not miss a beat to say that the students must remember the testimony of Holocaust survivors.
He emphasized to the teachers that they must invite Holocaust survivors to their classrooms. “The world has not learned the lessons,” he said. “Therefore we must teach them again and again.”
It was interesting, though, that he does not support state-mandated obligatory curriculum on the Holocaust. He feels that no teacher should be forced to teach the Holocaust, since boring history teachers would also be boring when teaching the Holocaust.
He impressed upon the group that if a teacher enters Auschwitz and does not feel a trembling in his or her soul, that teacher should not then teach the Holocaust. Each teacher who deals with this subject must accept the fear and trembling that comes with it.
Before he left, I had the opportunity to introduce myself to Wiesel. Feeling the importance of representing the Milwaukee Jewish community and our community of Holocaust survivors, I thanked him for all that he has done and continues to do.
To my surprise, his arms embraced me in a tight hug. I will carry the feeling of his strong arms each and every day with the strengthened resolve that our community and the world must embrace our survivors of the Holocaust and continue to listen to their histories.
Bonnie Shafrin is director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
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