(2 of 2) Warranted Intimacy: The Speech of the Chosen

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Series 1 of 1 "Warranted Intimacy: The Speech of the Chosen" can be found at https://lnkd.in/gRNC_QsT and https://lnkd.in/gnwXzDwk

Introduction

Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate, articulated a profound stance on faith, justice, and divine silence:

"I have never renounced my faith in G_d. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it. I admit that this is hardly an original position. It is part of Jewish tradition (read: fear of God's people)."

It has always been this way—the way I pray to my G_d. Not in quiet submission, but in raw defiance, in trembling dialogue, in the aching tension between belief and protest.

Especially after we lost our baby in the womb.

I never fully realized it until?3 November 2024, when I stood before a congregation, the weight of the moment pressing against my ribs. I had just delivered a sermon, and without planning, without calculation, I prayed—not the gentle, measured kind, but the prayer of the forsaken, the betrayed, the desperate. It startled them. My voice, my stance, my very presence in that moment—what I now call my?"parrhesia", my?"irony and antiphrasis,"?my?"pathos"—held them still.

It was not until later, when I returned to Wiesel’s?Night, Dawn, and Day memoir, that I saw myself in Wiesel's words. It was as if I had unknowingly traced his steps, echoing his reckoning, his outrage, his ultimate surrender—not to silence, but to faith in spite of it.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, said:

"A Jew can prosecute God for Auschwitz, but to do so, we must believe that God is there and that God is inherently benevolent.

Faith does not preclude anger; rather, it demands that even in fury, one acknowledges the presence of the divine".

For Wiesel, this perspective did not resolve his protest but placed it within the long tradition of Jewish wrestling with God. He further emphasized the historical and spiritual legitimacy of questioning God within the bounds of faith:

"Abraham and Moses, Jeremiah and Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev teach us that it is permissible for a man to accuse G_d, provided it be done in the name of faith in G_d. If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it."

Faith in the Midst of Darkness

From?Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, 
that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
 
Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. 

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. 

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. 

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.        

I visited Auschwitz?and?Buchenwald in 2017. I have stood where they stood. I have placed my hands on the cold remnants of unspeakable horror. I have wept where millions were silenced. And yet, in that place of death, I prayed—not out of obligation, but out of something inexplicable, something beyond myself.

The souls of the persecuted spoke to me. They welcomed me, thanked me somehow, and entrusted me with a mission—to spread ‘Never Again.’

I met an angel there.

Not the kind sculpted in marble or adorned in light, but a presence beyond words, a moment outside of time. An encounter I cannot share with those who are too proud of their intellect to grasp it. But it happened.

As an autoethnographer wannabe, I write this not as mere reflection but as truth, as lived experience. My subjectivity is my objectivity. And so I carry this paradox, this impossible tension of faith and fury, knowing that the question itself is sacred. Knowing that belief, at its rawest, is forged not in certainty, but in struggle.

Childhood and Early Influence

From?The Perils of Indifference:

Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.        

Elie Wiesel reflected on his early years, stating,?

"I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people. He was my partner, my friend, my teacher, my King, my sovereign, and I was so crazily religious that nothing else mattered."

In the small Romanian town of?Sighet, life was simple. Young?Eliezer?spent his days immersed in?Talmudic study, mystical exploration, and prayer. His mother,?Sarah, filled his soul with?Hasidic tales, weaving stories of faith and devotion. On?Shabbat evenings, he and his father joined throngs of?devout Jews in the synagogue, embracing the rhythm of sacred tradition.

His father,?Shlomo Wiesel, instilled in him a deep appreciation for?humanism, encouraging the study of?Hebrew and literature, while his mother,?Sarah, nurtured his faith, urging him to study the?Torah. Wiesel often remarked that?his father represented reason and his mother, faith.

These early influences shaped Wiesel's?spiritual and intellectual development, grounding him in?Jewish tradition and learning.

Elie Wiesel once reflected on a pivotal moment of recognition and reconciliation:

"I saw the Rebbe at work, and that was enough—I saw him and realized that all the suffering in the world, all the Jewish suffering in the world, all the pain in the world, were on his face. I came back as often as possible, as I could."

This moment marked a turning point in Wiesel’s spiritual journey. While much of his earlier writing expressed profound anguish over God's silence, here he encountered suffering mirrored in another’s face—an embodiment of collective pain that drew him back, suggesting the beginning of a reconciliation with faith.

Wrestling with Faith: Dialogue with the Rebbe

Elie Wiesel recounted a profound exchange with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, that marked a turning point in his writing:

"How can you believe in G?d after Auschwitz?"

The Rebbe looked at him in silence for a long moment,

his hands resting on the table.

Then he replied in a soft,

barely audible voice,

"How can you not believe in G?d after Auschwitz?"

"Hadn't man abdicated privileges and duties? Apart from G?d, what was there in a world darkened by Auschwitz?"

Wiesel tried to smile but failed.

"That was a turning point in my writing, that simple dialogue."

Elie Wiesel received a letter from the Rebbe, in?April 1965, in which the Rebbe articulated his perspective on faith, justice, and the limits of human understanding in the face of divine mystery:

The complaint 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?'

can be authentic and can have its proper force only when it breaks forth from the pain-filled heart of a deep believer... 

So long as the question is asked with integrity, it is logical that such a deep feeling can come only from the conviction that true justice ... stems from ... something higher than both human intellect and human feeling ...

But after the initial tempestuous assail
he has to realize that the entire approach on which the question is based 
and of wishing to understand with the intellect that 
which is higher than the intellect,
is something that cannot take place.

Moreover, he must - after a rattling outrage and a thorough grieving - ultimately come to the conclusion:        

"Nevertheless, I believe (ani mammin)!"

"On the contrary - even more strongly."

This letter captures the Rebbe's insistence that questioning divine justice is not a contradiction to faith but an affirmation of it.

Genesis 18:25 asks, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"—Abraham’s bold challenge before the impending destruction of Sodom. It is the cry of a man who dares to demand justice from the divine, who, despite his indignation, still believes.

True faith, he suggested, includes protest and grief but ultimately leads to an even stronger belief. Wiesel, who had spent years wrestling with God's silence, would later acknowledge this moment as one of deep confrontation with his own faith.

Aftermath: The Resurrection of Faith

Yet, Wiesel's resurrection of faith was astonishing. He had once vowed in fury to?

"never forget those flames that consumed my faith forever, those moments that murdered my G_d."?

And yet, with sensitivity and persistence, the Rebbe taught him how to believe again and how to begin again.

In letters and in person, the Rebbe gently encouraged Wiesel to settle down, marry, and start a family.?

"There could be no greater refutation of Hitler,"?the Rebbe wrote.

And in 1969, Wiesel fulfilled the Rebbe’s blessing—literally.

Reflecting on this moment, Wiesel later said,?

"The most beautiful bouquet of flowers I received in my life, probably, was the Rebbe's."

For me, and for those who endure suffering, injustice, and the depths of real darkness—the kind buried under the evil tunnels—there is only one question that remains:

"How can you not believe in G?d after Auschwitz?"

(Credit: "How This Man Rediscovered Faith in God," produced by The Rohr JLI, written by Rabbi Eli Block, and narrated by Ross Huguet.)