Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom

by Ariel Burger

I had experienced the gifts of the religious world and was reluctant to give up on it.

“I told you in class that you must tell your story. This is because, if even one person learns from it how to be more human, you will have made your memories into a blessing. We must turn our suffering into a bridge so that others might suffer less.”

“Forgetfulness leads to exile, memory to redemption.” Time and again, he reminded his classes that memory is our only protection. “My goal is always the same: to invoke the past as a shield for the future.”

“It is not enough to know the facts,” Professor Wiesel reminds his students. “We must take things—history, current events—personally. We must look in mirrors. And great literature can act as a mirror.” Great books, like mirrors, can serve as tools of self-awareness.

“But the key in all of this is: Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence. Whatever has happened in the past, we must deal with those who are here now.”

“Listening to a witness makes you a witness.” Like propaganda, its evil twin, moral education is contagious. And to be effective, it must be contagious. Unlike propaganda, though, which tells people what they want to hear or feeds their existing fears, moral education tells people what they need to hear, even when it is painful. “Here is how you can tell the difference between false prophets and true ones,” he explained to the class more than once. “The former comfort, while the latter disturb.”

It is the otherness of the other that fascinates me. —Elie Wiesel

“From the beginning, Genesis teaches us how to be human together. One of the first things we notice in the story of man and woman is the reason given for Eve’s creation. The verse tells us that her mission is to be an ezer k’negdo—literally, a helper against him. Ezer means ‘helper,’ k’negdo means ‘against him.’ Why against him? The rabbinic commentators tell us that this teaches us a model of friendly antagonism, one in which, in order to support you, I challenge you. My intentions are for the sake of our friendship, so that your thinking is clarified, your ideas refined within the bounds of our conversation. The first couple are also the first friends, the first strangers, the first to encounter an other. What does it mean to disagree for the sake of the other rather than in order to defeat or silence the other?”

Despite following a long line of mystics, Wiesel taught the very opposite approach. Rather than seeing the other as familiar, see the familiar as other, as if you haven’t seen that person before. He once told me that the highest level of friendship is when you never entirely know each other but instead always see each other anew, with a sense of surprise and an inability to take the other for granted.

“What does Chosen People mean, then?” asks Park. “The word in Hebrew is segulah, which does not really mean ‘chosen.’ It means ‘set aside for a special but not exclusive role.’ In other words, one may be chosen to serve rather than to benefit, to suffer rather than to be rewarded, and to help others realize their destinies.

We all ask questions, and we should. It is more dangerous if we do not. But perhaps you are not looking for answers. You are looking for responses to your questions, to your life, for ways to live rather than ideas to espouse. Answers close things down; responses do not.”

“Kierkegaard wrote that faith must be lost and found again. I replace the word lost with wounded. At one point in our life it must be wounded in order to be true. One Hasidic master said, ‘No heart is as whole as a broken heart.’ I believe that no faith is as whole as a wounded faith.”

“And yet, do not forget that God invited Abraham to play this role. It’s as if God turns to us, the readers of the future, and says, ‘I’m going to tell Abraham what I intend to do to Sodom so that he will argue with Me. I want to lose this argument.’ God is in an argument with humankind, and God wants to lose. We are invited to argue, to disagree publicly and loudly, with fervor. We learn from this that if you have to choose between God and man, you must choose man—God can take care of Himself.”

The biblical God does too but secretly wishes for more than obedience—He wishes for human autonomy, for a partner with which to enter into a relationship.”

In Wiesel’s formulation, the role of a person of faith is to do nothing less than defeat God in a contest of ethics, again and again.

“True, any faith can lead to fanaticism. But the biblical idea has one advantage. God’s name is never pronounced, as if to teach us that true freedom is to be a servant of the ultimate, the ineffable. To serve anything else, anything limited, no matter how lofty, is to become a slave. And slavery leads to fanaticism, and fanaticism leads to heresy, to martyrdom, to death.

Fanatics and heretics both have faith. Except fanatics have no doubts, and they should. To be human is to doubt. The Hebrew word for ‘question,’ shelah, contains the word for ‘God,’ El. God is in the question.”

Believers and challengers to faith together can come to a kind of deeper understanding than either one alone if they listen to one another.”

“There are many types of madness,” he continues. “There is clinical madness, which is destructive and which isolates and separates people. In its collective form, there is political madness, when nations give in to hate and lose their way. And then there is its opposite: mystical madness, which is an obsession with humanity, with redemption, with the union of people, with the messianic element in human life. One must be mad to believe that we can make the world better, that we can save humanity, or even a single life. It is unreasonable, irrational. But I am for that madness.”

When language fails, when there is no communication, the result is violence.

Romeo and Juliet is not a love story. They did not die because they loved each other; they died because their parents hated each other. Why? Because of a feud, the echoes of an injury done generations ago.

Professor Wiesel tells a story. “A student once asked the famed rebbe of Kotzk, ‘Why did it take God six days to create the world? Look at it—it’s filled with corruption, cruelty, inhumanity!’ “The master replied, ‘Can you do better?’ “The disciple said, ‘I think—yes! Yes, I can!’ “The master said, ‘So what are you waiting for? Get started! Go to work—immediately!’

The answer is, a false prophet comforts; a true prophet disturbs.

“As we have seen, to turn away from reality, to pretend that evil is not evil, has one result: to empower evil. And yet, if we always look into the abyss, we will be tempted by despair. Hope is a choice, and it is a gift we give to one another. It can be absurd. It does not rely on facts. It is simply a choice. Once you make that choice, to create hope, then you can look at evil without flinching, without falling. And this is the first step to fighting it, to protesting it.” Dave says, “What should we tell the others, those outside this classroom?” Professor Wiesel opens his hands in a pensive gesture. “Tell them we can do so much more. And since we can, we must.”

“Part of our task is to liberate language, to name things as they really are. Don’t say income inequality when you can say hungry child. Don’t say racial tension when you can describe rocks thrown at a family. This is true in political life, in literature, and in education as well. We cannot liberate reality if we distort language.”

Theater is a lie for the sake of truth, a truth that cannot be expressed in any other way.

it’s hard to save the world when you have mouths to feed.

I think of this story because, like the old master, Professor Wiesel didn’t respond to my struggles with answers. Rather, he saw what I actually needed was someone with whom to share my questions, someone who would be with me without trying to fix things. More than anything, I realize, I need solidarity, the recognition of our shared, fragile humanity.

Being a student of Elie Wiesel means being yourself and cultivating your humanity, your sensitivity to others, in every moment. It means noticing people at risk of invisibility, the ones without power or access, who also have stories to tell. It means always learning, thinking higher and feeling deeper, always challenging yourself to dive into the great texts, stories, and ideas in search of wisdom. It means asking questions and being comfortable not knowing all the answers, avoiding the temptation of premature resolution of complex issues. It means embracing mystery and knowing that we don’t always have to tie everything up neatly. It means knowing that you do not have to choose between your particular identity and your concern for all people, realizing that you can speak up for your tribe as well as for others, that the particular and the universal can be mutually reinforcing. It means celebrating friendship, making friends with others who are searching too. Most of all, it means remembering the past and understanding the link between past and future. It means choosing to care about others’ lives, their suffering and their joy. It means becoming a witness.