Exactly 10 years ago, on July 2, 2016, Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust survivor and eternal witness, died in Manhattan. I had the honor of hearing him in person a number of times, but usually in large crowds at conventions and rallies. On a fall evening in 2008, however, I was able to bring about 75 congregants to a much more intimate gathering. We attended his lecture on Job at the 92nd St Y. In addition to the lecture, our group had the privilege of meeting privately with Mr. Wiesel beforehand for a Q and A.
It was most moving to hear this great prophet of our time speak especially to the several children who were there, including 7th grader Andrew Schwartz (see photo above), whose mitzvah project supported the Nobel laureate’s foundation. When I asked Wiesel what advice he might give me in charging Andrew at his upcoming Bar Mitzvah, given the fact that students of this generation will have so few opportunities to meet with survivors, Wiesel said that anyone who hears the stories of a survivor himself becomes a witness.
That night, all who heard him became witnesses.
The lecture on Job was most moving, even for those not familiar with this very complex biblical book, because it was as if it were being given a talk on Job by Job himself. Job, after all, was a survivor, and Wiesel stated, “Whenever [Holocaust survivors] attempt to tell our own story, we transmit Job’s.”
At one point, he quoted a midrash from the Talmud (Sotah 11a) where the rabbis attempted to explain why Job, a supposedly upright man, could have deserved such a horrible fate (even though I believe the book’s very point is that he didn’t deserve it).1 In that story, as Wiesel told it:
Job was in fact one of three advisers that Pharaoh consulted, prior to taking action against the increasingly multiplying Children of Israel. Balaam gives evil advice urging Pharaoh to kill the Hebrew male new-born babies. Jethro opposes Pharaoh and tells him not to harm the Hebrews at all, and Job keeps silent and does not reveal his mind even though he was personally opposed to Pharaoh’s destructive plans. It is for his silence that God subsequently punishes him with his bitter afflictions.
Wiesel, seated at a large, ornate desk, recounted this tale and then looked up from his notes and stated, unequivocally, what is perhaps the most significant message of his life’s work: Silence in the face of evil always helps the oppressors. Such silence, in fact, can itself be seen as a form of evil. Silence is not to be confused with apathy, although the perpetrator may lack empathy. Silence is, in fact, sin.
In Night, the author could not comprehend how the world remained silent in the face of Nazi atrocities. In 1985 (as he recounted in our private session), he could not remain silent and “spoke truth to power” (a phrase he proudly said he originated there), pleading with President Reagan not to go to the S.S cemetery at Bitburg.
But although Job’s silence was evil when failing to respond to Pharaoh, Wiesel differentiated between the silence of an apathetic onlooker and that of a dumbfounded victim. Wiesel, who knew the victim’s paralysis all too well, was sympathetic to Job’s post-traumatic voicelessness, as he once stated in an interview regarding his own muteness in the decade following the Holocaust:
You can be a silent witness, which means silence itself can become a way of communication. There is so much in silence. There is an archeology of silence. There is a geography of silence. There is a theology of silence. There is a history of silence. Silence is universal and you can work within it, within its own parameters and its own context, and make that silence into a testimony. Job was silent after he lost his children and everything, his fortune and his health. Job, for seven days and seven nights he was silent, and his three friends who came to visit him were also silent. That must have been a powerful silence, a brilliant silence. You see, silence itself can be testimony and I was waiting for ten years, really, but it wasn’t the intention. My intention simply was to be sure that the words I would use are the proper words. I was afraid of language.
In discussing the end of Job, Wiesel spoke of the fine line separating faith from insanity, suggesting that a little madness might be required in order to maintain a posture of faith in the face of an unjust world. He postulated that Job did not fear an unjust God so much as an apathetic one.
He also made the point that Job’s friends just don’t “get it” in trying to figure out what Job or his children did to deserve their fate. Wiesel was appalled at their unsympathetic approach. While the rabbis in the midrash regard Job’s silence before Pharaoh as sinful, Wiesel sees his temporary speechlessness in the face of his own personal tragedy as perfectly natural. Remember that ultimately Job in the book does speak up, especially toward the end, when God finally responds out of the Whirlwind.
Wiesel commented on the absurdity of Job’s life going back to normal - or even better - at the end, and of the sudden appearance of Job’s siblings, long after they were really needed, and the strange disappearance of his wife. He wondered why no book was ever written about her, since she seems to have been afflicted every bit as much (and is the one who calls upon her husband to “Curse God and die!”).2
In the end, Job is a very Jewish book, as Wiesel said, because it answers questions with more questions, though Wiesel speculated as to how Jewish the main character was, for not questioning the validity of all the bad news he was being told. So many questions remain, about God’s role, about morality, and about the reason to go on.
But go on we must. And that was the most powerful message of all, that the Jewish experience has been such that the Book of Job has not only been read from generation to generation, it has been lived. And every generation of Jews has gotten up from the dung heap and chosen life.
And that is precisely what we are being called upon to do right now.
As Wiesel put it, in recalling Deuteronomy’s call to “Choose Life,” the word Hayyim also means “the living.” For him, and for all survivors since Job, the only real choice has been to choose the living - as illogical as it that choice might at times appear. It may seem like madness to move on, but it is also the secret of Jewish survival.
The act of choosing life requires speaking out in the face of evil. It requires activism. it requires standing up for the weak and powerless and, especially, though not exclusively, for the embattled Jewish people. That is Wiesel’s legacy.
Job, like Wiesel himself, needed some time to absorb the shock, organize his thoughts and clear his throat. But then both of them spoke out. For Wiesel it took a decade. For most of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, it took longer, some say until May 1967, when it looked it might happen again, this time in Israel.
One wonders how long it will take following October 7 for an articulate, life-affirming message to emerge. But the need to pause and take a collective deep breath does not absolve us from speaking out when injustice occurs. Whether or not we curse God is not particularly relevant. But we can’t allow ourselves to Curse God and die - to suffer a death of the moral conscience. And whether or not we opt to curse God at all, we are obligated to call out Pharaoh, relentlessly and at every turn, after every plague, again and again, until that Pharaoh is defeated.
We left the lecture at the 92nd St Y - only about an hour and a quarter long - and entered the mist of the Manhattan night, as witnesses.
As Wiesel often has said:
“Because I remember, I despair.
Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”
Read the book of Job online here. See a background essay here
See explorations of theodicy (explaining injustice in God’s world) here and here.
In my opinion, this book exists to drive home the point that Job did NOTHING to deserve such a fate. It’s the classic case of bad things happening to good people.
The literal translation, “Bless God and die” lends itself to all manner of interpretation. Is too much trust in a God who has done all this to you itself blasphemous? Is it naive, as with Abraham, who believed in a God who had just commanded him to kill his son,
